Dove e quando

Talk by Pietro Kobau (University of Turin)

ABSTRACT
What is a parasite? According to dictionaries, a parasite is an organism that lives at the expense of another organism (host), from which it derives nourishment or other benefits essential for its existence. In short, in more abstract terms, it is an entity that is both autonomous and dependent on the existence of another entity. On a metaphysical level, this poses a mereological problem; a tumor, for example, this mole of mine, can be described in two ways: as a part not belonging to my organism, or as an entity in itself but dependent on my organism. Are these alternative descriptions or are they compatible?
The question strikes me as intriguing, but I will not address it at this level of abstraction. Instead, I will try to show how it can be addressed in the more specific realm of musical aesthetics and perhaps beyond.
Frank Sibley has devoted his entire philosophical work to the purely epistemic problem of aesthetic judgment. However, the debate it generated has had to slide from the epistemic to the ontological level, leading, for example, later authors to address the problem of the existence of aesthetic properties as real and intrinsic to the object of judgment. Indeed, Sibley himself has not been able to avoid several deviations from his epistemic compass, for example in his late work "Arts or the Aesthetic–Which Comes First?" (1992). On such occasions, when he slips from the terrain of the theory of the judgment of taste to that of the philosophy of art, a perusal of his writings reveals the recurring use of the term "parasitic," referring to non-"normal" artworks. That said, I intend to demonstrate the following:
1) Asking whether, and if so, how, non-aesthetic properties govern aesthetic judgments, Sibley constantly draws examples from objects of "high" and, above all, "normal" art. In doing so, he exposes himself to a strong bias that leads him to privilege the non-aesthetic properties of a perceptual nature.
2) However, beyond a "strictly" aesthetic experience, since it is somehow based on a perceptual experience and characterized by disinterested pleasure (which I would call the "wow" experience), we experience the occurrence, often concurrently with the former, of an intellectual aesthetic experience (what in problem-solving studies is often called the "aha" experience). For a complete account of the phenomenon of aesthetic experience (which, as Nanay observes, precedes and is not necessarily followed by the expression of a judgment of taste), it is necessary, in my opinion, to consider both. This is because the latter is an essential component of our encounter not only with non-normal or "parasitic," artworks but also with entire art forms peacefully recognized as normal, such as music.