-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Íngrid Vendrell Ferran, Empathy in Appreciation: An Axiological Account, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 79, Issue 2, Spring 2021, Pages 233–238, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaac/kpab020
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
I. THE INTELLECTUALIZED AND THE AFFECTIVE VIEWS OF APPRECIATION
Can empathizing with a character contribute to appreciating the aesthetic value of a literary work? Answers to this question have been divided mainly into two camps. On the one hand, for a long and venerable aesthetic tradition, engagement with art must be disinterested and free of emotional concern. According to this “intellectualized view of appreciation”,1 any focus on emotion, feeling, and affect interferes with the appreciation of the work and distracts from what really matters: its features and values. In this view, empathy for the destinies of the characters is incompatible with appreciation of the work’s aesthetic values. On the other hand, a less prominent but, in my view, more promising line of thought attributes a role to affective phenomena in appreciation. For the “affective view”—as I call it—some literary works require our emotional involvement in order to be fully appreciated. Among the affective phenomena which play a role in appreciation, particular attention has been paid to empathy. Against this background, Susan Feagin (1996) and John Gibson (2016) have maintained, each in their own way, that empathy can be necessary for appreciation, and Eileen John has even argued that empathy is “the way” to appreciate certain works (2017, 313).
