Aesthetic selves as objects of interpersonal understanding

ABSTRACT

This paper raises puzzles concerning our grasp of others’ aesthetic selves. I first articulate a conception of an aesthetic self, understood as an autonomously adopted orientation to objects of aesthetic value, encompassing the embrace of aesthetic reasons and the qualitative appreciative states that follow. This articulation is motivated by the commonplace observation that people’s aesthetic identities are important to them. Given this importance, we might think it salutary to grasp other people’s aesthetic selves, under the general auspices of ‘interpersonal understanding’. Given the conception of aesthetic selves, we might think that empathy is an appropriate way to do so. But, second, I argue that you can’t find out about another’s aesthetic self via empathy. We might instead think that aesthetic conversation is the way to grasp aesthetic selves. However, third, I argue that the aim of finding out about others’ aesthetic selves is at odds with the ostensible aims of aesthetic conversation, which are to do with effacing individuality and creating commonality. So aesthetic selves seem hard to grasp. I finally briefly canvass some ways of solving this problem, without settling on a firm answer, and consider how the thoughts might extend to practical identities more generally.

Aesthetic selves

After a period of polite indifference regarding personal matters that lasted about as long as the twentieth century, Anglophone aestheticians have recently become interested in the relations between such things as aesthetic preference, taste, and practice, and such things as self-identity, self-conception, or personhood. Perhaps this return to the self is made possible by the advances of the last century; with outright subjectivism definitively off the table, we can consider how the aesthetic relates to the individual without any implication that the aesthetic is mere personal preference. Conversely, perhaps some philosophers are tempted over again by subjectivism, on the grounds that universalism has turned out to be unsustainable.¹ Whatever the broader background is, the foreground with which I’m concerned portrays aesthetic selves as relatively substantial entities with deep significance for personal identity.² It’s significance that indicates substance, so we’ll start there.

The significance of aesthetic selves, or aesthetic individuality, is thematic in a good deal of recent work in aesthetics.³ Fingerhut et al. straightforwardly assert it: they use results from four empirical studies to support the claim that ‘our aesthetic engagements are a central component of our identity’ (2021, 1). Changes in a person’s tastes and preferences, they argue, are changes in who that person is. The point is perhaps clearest concerning deliberately adopted practices and preferences. Think of the scenes, subcultures, and social groups around which people often structure parts of their lives: clubbers, punks, LARPers, goths; foodies, opera buffs, wine snobs; swifties, stans, k-pop fans. The point is not just that so many people adopt one or many such practices, and the norms and preferences that go with them; the point is also that people often treat the practices and the preferences as central to who they are, and show this by devoting time and energy to pursuit of the aesthetic values encompassed by the practice.

One might think of this philosophical movement towards acknowledging the significance of aesthetic selves as the complement to ideas that have, one way or another, been aloft in the intellectual atmosphere for some time. For instance, a cartoon version of Pierre Bourdieu holds the view that aesthetic taste functions solely as a marker of class (and even that class is solely a function of aesthetic taste). This is a cartoon version of Bourdieu, because it’s rather stronger than his real views. But it’s a cartoon version that a lot of people find compelling, and which incorporates the idea that aesthetic preference is crucial to selfhood (assuming that class is crucial to selfhood). For another, more recent instance, consider the ‘affective turn’ in literary criticism (Felski 2020). This movement rejects the ‘suspicious’ reading beloved of Theory, and instead centralises attachments to works which are personal and deeply felt. The affective theorists take the relevance of aesthetic preference to conceptions of self as a given in their theorising.

The mention of cartoon-Bourdieu raises the point that some aesthetic practices and preferences are central to our identities without us consciously adopting them. These are often practices into which we are thrust by accident of birth or circumstance. Many (partially) define the major social roles that mark out our identities. While these are not chosen, they can be consciously accepted and embraced, or alternatively rejected. Consider genders. We can fruitfully think of gender self-identity in terms of what gendered aesthetic norms and values one embraces as relevant to oneself: what reasons one immediately appreciates as reasons to aesthetically like oneself.⁴ Aesthetic valuation and preference can be directed towards oneself, as well as beyond, and what one values in oneself is significant to self-identity.

All this fits into a plausible general way of thinking about personal identity. Who a person is, what makes them them, is in large part a matter of the preferences, projects, habits of will that they have: more specifically, those that they have either consciously adopted, or willingly accept as their own. For many people, aesthetic preferences, projects, and habits figure prominently among those chosen or perpetuated. It’s quite possible that for some people, the aesthetic isn’t that important, or is of lesser importance than practical plans, moral commitments, or unwavering pursuit of Truth. But it’s also quite plain that, for a lot of people, the aesthetic self matters. A conception of an aesthetic self ought to explain why this is so. Given this, we can dispense with certain notions of what an aesthetic self might be.

A crude theory of the self has it that we each have some deep, hidden personal essence, to which we ought to be authentic. Some people find this theory of the self in Kierkegaard. But as Anthony Aumann (2019) makes clear, it is both ontologically and practically suspect (and probably not exactly Kierkegaard’s view).⁵ Besides these general problems, the idea that people are somehow endowed with a primitive set of personal preferences that they ought to strive to divine is implausible given the fact that people’s aesthetic tastes change, evolve, deepen and mature over their lives. One could construe this as a gradual process of self-excavation, but it is more plausibly taken as evidence that aesthetic selves are not essences.

Instead of essentialism, we might cleave to the opposite, the allegedly Humean idea that the self just is a bundle of thoughts and desires and occurrent states, with no deep unity beyond their mysterious apparition in temporal continuity. Passions arise unbidden and direct the being towards their satisfaction, by art or ice cream as the case may be. But whatever might be said of this theory of the self in general, it will certainly not do for aesthetic selves. For it is distinctive of aesthetic tastes that they can be chosen, considered, cast aside. We are not slaves to aesthetic passions, and their manifestation is within our control.

The reasons for suspecting both the essentialist theory and the bundle theory both concern choice and control. So they together suggest that a theory of the aesthetic self will have agency as its core. We might thus think of the aesthetic self along the lines of Korsgaard’s conception of a ‘practical identity’, which is ‘a description under which you value yourself, a description under which you find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking’ (Korsgaard 1996, 101). Such identities are contingent, and vary from person to person. But once adopted, they give rise to commitments and obligations whose normative force is derived from one’s will, one’s capacity for autonomous choice. Likewise, we might think of an aesthetic self as an aesthetic identity: an autonomously adopted conception of what is aesthetically valuable, deserving of aesthetic appreciation, in oneself and in the world, under the auspices of which one’s aesthetic actions and engagements are worthwhile. Having such a description as a part of your mental framework provides you with certain aesthetic precepts, disposes you to react appreciatively towards certain qualities, and primes you to engage in certain patterns of aesthetic reasoning.

This conception of an aesthetic self as akin to practical identity suggests that a replete account of it will involve limning the relations among several agential and rational notions: plans, projects, commitments, promises; choice, decision, intention, action. There is a rapidly growing literature on the distinctive aesthetic forms of these normative notions that would help to make good that complete conception.⁶ The full account can’t be given here, but whatever its details, it will likely have three features relevant for present purposes.

First, Korsgaard sees practical identities as ‘relative to the social worlds in which we live’ (1996, 129). They are contingent on the forms and ways of life with which our selves are imbricated. Somewhat similarly, aesthetic selves are likely grounded in aesthetic practices. Aesthetic practices are socially coordinated activities structured around the appreciation of objects bearing aesthetic value. Such practices establish the patterns of norms, reasons, values, and actions that a person may adopt as an aspect of their aesthetic identity.⁷

Second, a commitment to a certain aesthetic practice encapsulates a commitment to adopt the norms of that practice, and in particular to adopt the preferences relevant to it. A replete aesthetic self will likely involve commitments to several practices. Given the essentially rational nature of the aesthetic self, these commitments, preferences, and so forth ought to be rationally constrained and rationally constraining. The structure of commitment, norm and preference can be assessed in terms of its propriety and cogency, perhaps also its consistency with other (aesthetic, practical, moral) commitments and projects (Martínez Marín 2023).

Third, to have certain aesthetic preferences and norms is to be sensitive to certain values, to be primed to recognise those values immediately (that is, not inferentially), and to be primed to respond to them with appropriate qualitative states, which we might characterise as a kind of aesthetic liking. Appreciation involves an immediate qualitative response that is fitting for the object given the preferences one has (Gorodeisky 2019a; 2019b). This means that the assessment of cogency and rationality extends to the coherence of one’s qualitative aesthetic likings with the norms, preferences, and projects that one claims to have.

This is enough of a picture of the aesthetic self to motivate the puzzles that follow. They begin from the point that the aesthetic self is as deeply, fundamentally selfy as any other aspect of one’s identity. Now, it’s a commonplace that people should aspire to know who other people are, in whatever sense of ‘know’ underwrites the injunction to understand one another. Understanding another means grasping whatever is significant and personal about who they are: it means grasping their self. Given the importance of the aesthetic self to identity, this means that part of understanding another is understanding their aesthetic self. The question taken up in the remainder of this paper is how we might do that. One might think that the obvious answer is empathy, but I’ll now argue that this won’t do.

Empathy, understanding, and aesthetic selves

Why might we think that aesthetic selves are an appropriate target of empathy? One answer might be simply because selves are appropriate objects of empathy, and aesthetic selves are aspects of selves. Empathy, of course, is a notoriously messy concept, notwithstanding some heroic attempts at taxonomy.⁸ But a lot of people are pretty sure that there’s a special, significant kind of replicative qualitative mental state through which we can learn about other people’s minds. It’s important that this state is qualitative: this is what sets it apart from dry ratiocination in response to another’s emptions. And it’s important that it is replicative, not just responsive: this is what sets it apart from other qualitative responses, such as sympathy, which need not involve feeling the same thing as the other person.

Empathy so conceived is a route to epistemic achievement. You learns something significant by empathising with someone else, and moreover something significant about that very person (not, for instance, about the world as they see it). It’s a matter of controversy how to characterise the epistemic ends of empathy, and how exactly empathy gets to them. But we can focus the discussion of aesthetic selves by concentrating on one plausible candidate: Olivia Bailey’s notion of ‘humane understanding’ (2022).

Humane understanding is ‘direct apprehension of the intelligibility of others’ emotions’ (2022, 51), where one grasps the emotions’ intelligibility just as the other person does. This is ‘an epistemic good … [that is] non-instrumentally valuable for its recipients’ (51). Bailey argues that humane understanding is one among the possible ends of empathy, whose attainment is an epistemic achievement with respect to the other. Briefly explaining two aspects of humane understanding, the ‘intelligibility’ of an emotion and the requirement of qualitative mirroring, will show why aesthetic selves seemingly ought to be within its ambit.

For Bailey, the ‘intelligibility’ of an emotion has two aspects. First, there’s the propriety of a particular emotion in a given situation (2022, 56); second, there is the cogency of a particular emotion given a particular outlook or set of attitudes (2022, 58). While the first aspect of intelligibility is easiest to grasp from the outside, it’s the second that affords insight into selves.

With respect to situational propriety, an emotion is intelligible if it makes sense for someone to have that emotion given their context. If I’ve broken a mug of yours, your anger at me is intelligible. So far, so easy, but we only get insight into a self once we take account of the cogent relation of emotion to grounds in perspective, outlook, or attitudes. Why are you so very, very angry with me? It’s only a mug. But, it turns out, it was your very favourite mug, an irreplaceable heirloom, infused with sentimental value … Your rage at my clumsiness coheres with these background attitudes, and becomes intelligible in light of them. We might compare Janine Jones’ claim that empathy is only genuine if the mirrored emotion is felt for the right reasons; it’s no good me reproducing your rage if its assumed grounds are quite different (Jones 2004).

So an emotion is intelligible if it coheres with one’s outlooks, values, beliefs, preferences; if it makes sense for you to have that emotion, in this context, given those background attitudes. But why must humane understanding involve the qualitative mirroring distinctive of empathy? Could we not simply grasp the intelligibility of an emotion without all the messy business of actually emoting?

We could not, because humane understanding involves apprehending the intelligibility of emotions as someone does themselves: standing to someone’s emotions and their grounds as they themselves stand to them. This means that the emotions and grounds have to strike one as immediately reasonable (Bailey 2022, 55–57). One’s own emotions are not incorrigible: one can question the appropriateness of one’s own emotional responses. But an occurrent emotion presents itself, phenomenally, as immediately reasonable and justified, not derived mediately from a chain of reasoning. If we are to apprehend the intelligibility of another’s emotions as they themselves apprehend them, it’s not enough to infer that the emotions are justified: their reasonableness, cogency, has to be immediately apprehended. And this immediate apprehension can only be achieved via experiences with direct, unmediated, qualitative phenomenal character.

So much for humane understanding; now back to the aesthetic self. As I emphasised above, the aesthetic self presents a complex of qualitative states and their grounds whose cogency can be assessed. This means that aesthetic selves are, in Bailey’s terms, intelligible. Given this, to stand to someone’s aesthetic self as they themselves do is to grasp their preferences as immediately compelling reasons to appreciate a certain object, and thus actually appreciate that object. So an aesthetic self might be a thing about which one learns by engaging in humane understanding, and thus might well be an object of empathy.⁹ However, I will now suggest that, in fact, aesthetic selves are not amenable to empathising.

The basic idea of empathy is that it’s a means of achieving insight into another’s self through mirroring their qualitative states. In terms of the aesthetic self, with humane understanding as the end, this mirroring involves standing to another’s aesthetic self as they themselves do: that is, grasping their preferences as immediately compelling reasons to appreciate a certain object, and thus to actually appreciate that object in the same immediate manner.

The initial trouble with this little picture is essentially pragmatic. How is one meant to come to grasp the aesthetic reasons and appreciative states that another has? For empathy in general, the idea often seems to be that one can somehow directly perceive and immediately grasp the emotions of another (it’s not for nothing that the reflexive, sub-personal triggering of mirror neurons is often cited as empirical vindication of armchair claims about empathy). Set aside the question of how plausible that is for emotions, let alone for grasp of their grounds. How plausible is it for aesthetic appreciation?

Well, for one thing, people are often not expressive of their aesthetic appreciation. There are, to be sure, demonstrative aesthetic actions whose expressive content is fairly easily interpreted: dancing, laughing, crying, rioting. But if you see me frowning in front of a painting, you will be hard-pressed to intuit whether I’m dwelling appreciatively on the profundity of its theme, speculating critically if the painter had ever seen a real baby, or wondering vaguely whether it might be time for lunch. If you want to know what I like, you will probably have to ask me.

Further, if you want to know why I like what I like, you will probably have to ask me that, too. Unless our aesthetic tastes are already closely aligned, it’s probable that the reasons that lead me to my aesthetic appreciations are not at all transparent or obvious to you. The whole edifice of art criticism is sustained by the fact that the grounds of aesthetic appreciation are subtle, complicated, and often require expert explanation to be fully grasped. Furthermore, grasping the explanations offered requires one to actually engage in the aesthetic practices from which the reasons arise. To get yourself in a position to fully, immediately grasp my appreciation of fifteenth-century Flemish depictions of the Nativity, you will need to spend a lot of time in dim Belgian churches peering at altarpieces.

These simple observations suggest that your qualitative grasp of my appreciation is the by-product of learning, not the means of it. If you ever get yourself in a position where my reasons for appreciating Flemish paintings just strike you as immediately compelling reasons to appreciate a particular painting, and if you thereby immediately appreciate that painting, and if you thereby replicate my aesthetic liking: all this is consequent on the work you’ve put in beforehand. You have learnt about my aesthetic self and thus come to share my appreciation: you have not intuited my appreciation and thus learnt about me.

An instructive comparison can be drawn with the ongoing debate in aesthetics over the acquaintance principle. As introduced by Richard Wollheim (1980, 233), the principle says something like: you can’t appreciate or draw conclusions about the aesthetic value of a work unless you have first-hand experience of it yourself. There is something infelicitous about statements that assert value while denying acquaintance: ‘the Adoration of the Lamb is a transcendent masterpiece with lambent colouration and exquisite composition. What? No, I’ve never seen it. One day.’

A good deal of ink has been spilt over the question of why the principle has the ring of truth about it, how exactly it ought to be formulated, and what its truth tells us about the nature of aesthetic appreciation. By and large, the focus has been on finding out why it is that we have to see the painting in order to claim to know about its value.¹⁰ But recently, James Shelley (2023) has argued that this is back to front. Acquaintance, he argues, is ‘the end to which judgments of aesthetic value are the means and not the other way around’ (2023, 393). That is, ‘When you know that a work has aesthetic value, what you know is that it is such as to merit acquaintance’ (2023, 402). The point of the acquaintance principle is not that the aesthetic value of a work is something that you can only learn about through appreciative acquaintance: the point is that learning about the aesthetic value of a work puts you in a position to appreciatively acquaint yourself with that value.

As with acquaintance, so, I suggest, with aesthetic selves and humane understanding. You can (perhaps you ought) to seek humane understanding of my aesthetic self; you can aim to share my aesthetic likings, and to stand to the reasons for those likings just as I do. But if you ever get there, you get there because you have done your homework beforehand. Something like understanding is the regulative aim of the process, and its achievement is indication of the fulfilment of the process. It is not the means by which insight is achieved.¹¹

This suggests that empathy, the replication of qualitative states, is not how one comes to grasp another’s aesthetic self. This is somewhat surprising, since the aesthetic self seems prima facie an obvious candidate for empathic identification. Later, I’ll consider briefly how far this point generalises to other aspects of the self, but for now I want to ask how else one might grasp its aesthetic aspect, if not through empathy.

Aesthetic conversation and aesthetic community

It might seem that we have already a better, if blander, suggestion available for how we grasp aesthetic selves. I just suggested that finding out about another’s aesthetic self involves talking to them, asking them what they like and why they like it, adopting the practices and reasons they recommend, and thereby coming to share their appreciative states and structures. So here is our answer: we grasp another’s aesthetic self by asking them about it and (perhaps temporarily) doing what they do. However, this inquisitive model is unsatisfactory. Exploring why this is so will land us in a state of mild aporia, from which I won’t provide relief.

The starting point of exploration is a nagging point of puzzlement about the inquisitive account. In the course of talking with you, and adopting your preferences, I come to appreciate the same art as you. How, then, am I really learning about you and yourself? Am I not, rather, learning about the art?

The answer should be easy: I am learning about you indirectly. By learning to appreciate the art you like, I am finding out what preferences and practices you have chosen to adopt. I am thus finding out about you, or perhaps the aesthetic aspects of your practical identity. But a closer look at the nature of aesthetic conversation frustrates this simple answer.

The trouble is that, if we think of personal interactions rather than reading books of art criticism, aesthetic conversation is essentially dialogical. Conversation about aesthetic matters often changes not only the preferences and reasons of the inquirer, but also those of the subject. It is as much about making one’s reasons legible to oneself as it is about making them legible to others, and while doing so, one will often refine them as they become more apparent. This suggests that the regulative ideal of aesthetic conversation is agreement on grounds of appreciation through a process akin to negotiation. And this in turn suggests that aesthetic conversation is inimical to inquisition; its dialogical nature blurs the distinction between the preferences of the inquirer and the subject. The very process of being understood changes the object of understanding.

This is not a novel way of thinking about aesthetic conversation. For example, Arnold Isenberg (1949) says that the point of aesthetic communication is to build ‘communities of feeling’. Others have argued that aesthetic conversation is governed by norms of ‘convergence’: the ostensible aim of talking is to reach an agreement on what is good and why it is so.¹² Each of these expressions of the basic idea brings its own commitments, but we don’t need to take on any here. We just need to take on the point that conversations about aesthetic objects are plausibly directed towards shared appreciative understanding.

But then, how could such conversation reveal a self, understood as an autonomous agent’s own individual tastes? It seems that the aim of aesthetic conversation is precisely to efface distinctions between individuals’ preferences, not to reveal and reify them. We can’t talk about art with trying to be more like each other. If the aesthetic self simply is the reasons, preferences, and such that people have chosen, and if those preferences and so forth are modified in the direction of universality in the course of conversation, a person’s aesthetic self will become less individual the more they talk to others. So the more they talk, the less there will be anything individual to be discovered in the talking.

Matters become more puzzling when we consider putative relations among discourse, practice, community, and self. I emphasised above that, like practical identities, aesthetic selves are grounded in aesthetic social practices. We should want to know how such practices are constituted and maintained, and how one’s aesthetic self can be grounded in them. The answers to both questions surely involve aesthetic discourse. An aesthetic practice entails an aesthetic community, and an aesthetic community comes into being when people come to share norms of appreciation relative to particular objects. An aesthetic practice can ground an aesthetic self when it incorporates sufficiently developed reasons and preferences and norms to constitute an aesthetic identity, and developing those sufficiently surely involves talking about them. But if this is right, to engage in an aesthetic social practice is to contribute to the discourse that grounds the very material out of which an aesthetic self is made. There is a tight circle encompassing discourse, practice, community and self. Insofar as selves are built on communities and practices, it further seems as if discourse can only efface difference, not reveal it.

You may not buy that last argument, premised as it is on several substantial ideas about the aesthetic domain. But even if you don’t, the one before should be enough to cast doubt on the efficacy of aesthetic conversation for revealing aesthetic selves. This leaves us in a puzzling position: there are aesthetic selves; we ought to grasp other people’s; there is no clear way in which we might actually do so. How should we move forward from this position?

What is to be done?

I can’t answer that question. I can only survey some ways one could do so and express a cautious preference for one of them. These aren’t the only possible solutions, but they are salient given the discussion so far. Each involves giving up one or another plausible claim that has been assumed, implicitly or explicitly, in the discussion.

Most obviously, we could give up the notion of the aesthetic self. Perhaps there isn’t really any special aesthetic aspect to identity. That would certainly solve the problem, since there would no longer be anything to find out about. The difficulty for this solution is accommodating the intuitions and evidence that aesthetic preference and taste matter to people’s sense of self-identity.

We could instead give up the idea that the aesthetic self is grounded in aesthetic communities. Perhaps, one might think, we have a social aesthetic identity that is indeed developed, modified, and expressed in company. But perhaps we also have our own private aesthetic self, which may (somehow) be revealed in conversation without undergoing modification. This suggestion might come uncomfortably close to recapitulating the unattractive essentialist view of the aesthetic self discussed above, and would also face the difficulty of cleanly separating private and social aesthetic identities in a way that isn’t ad hoc.

Somewhat similarly, we could give up the idea that aesthetic discourse aims at creating aesthetic communities of shared feeling and hence is ill-suited to the purpose of revealing individual selves. Recently, Riggle (2021) has argued that making communities in this sense is not the aim of aesthetic discourse. Rather, the aim is to create what he calls a ‘harmony of individuality’, in which each person uses aesthetic discourse to express and explore their own individuality, while offering mutually supportive respect for the individuality of the others with whom they converse. So perhaps there is no conflict between engaging in aesthetic communities and conversation and preserving one’s individuality. Against this suggestion, one might again worry about recapitulating an essentialist view of the aesthetic self, and one might also worry that the view fails to capture what is really significant about communities: that they involve sharing, not just supporting.

A final possibility, the one I cautiously prefer, is to give up the idea that the importance of the aesthetic self is related to individuality. The puzzle arises because it seems as though engagement in community effaces individuality. But is individuality, uniqueness, the thing that is valuable about our aesthetic selves? Perhaps, instead, what is valuable is how that self inhabits and contributes to a community. And perhaps we can explicate that in a way that separates thoughts about the importance of agency from thoughts about the importance of individuality, and keep the former while discarding the latter. The evident problem here is the sketchiness of the suggestion, and perhaps also the counter-intuitive notion that individuality is not what’s important about the self. But whichever solution we adopt will involve something counter-intuitive, and this is the counter-intuition I would be minded to examine most critically.

Conclusion

The conclusion of this discussion, such as it is, is that aesthetic selves are elusive objects of knowledge. Contrary to what we might expect, they aren’t amenable to empathic identification, and the obvious alternative route to discovery appears blocked given a certain conception of the nature of aesthetic discourse. Something intuitively plausible will have to be abandoned if we are to account for how knowledge of another’s aesthetic self is attained.

Now, since I said that the aesthetic self is akin to a practical identity, we might wonder how far these thoughts generalise to practical identities. I’m inclined to think they generalise quite easily, at least if we think that practical identities are important aspects of personal identity. The arguments about the inadequacies of empathy carry across (assuming that practical identities issue in qualitative states such as emotions; if they don’t, empathy isn’t even in the picture). And, given that practical identities are grounded in social practices, the arguments about the tension between individuality and community should also have bite.¹³

If one were to take these generalisations seriously, one might wonder anew about what the fundamental mode of interpersonal understanding is. Rather than thinking in terms of inquisition or empathy, where a sharp separation is maintained between who is understanding and who is understood, one might take seriously the idea that coming to appreciate another’s self as they themselves do will typically involve a good deal of dialogic back and forth, progressively coming to grasp their plans, projects, commitments, and values. This would mean considering the further idea that this process involves dynamic evolution of both selves involved, not just progressive uncovering of one by the other. It would also mean considering the idea that whatever is going on here is best conceptualised as a relation obtaining between two people, not an achievement of one person with respect to the other. And it would mean thinking of alignment of qualitative mental states as an indication that learning has happened, not the means through which learning happens. For now, this potential line of puzzling and thinking can only be added to the others that I hope to have raised here.¹⁴

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Nicholas Wiltsher

Nick Wiltsher is a senior lecturer in philosophy at Uppsala University. He works on imagination and aesthetics, jointly and severally.

Notes

1 See King (2023) for discussion of universalism in relation to recent work with subjectivist flavour.

2 ‘Relatively substantial entities’: I don’t suppose that anyone means that every mind contains a distinct entity corresponding to an aesthetic self, engaging in traffic with various other selves – moral, practical, theoretical – though if someone were to think this, and were to write up their account of this entertainingly divided mind, perhaps with some kind of uniformed super-ego directing the traffic, I would definitely read that paper. The thought is more: whatever a self-identity is, it has aesthetic aspects, which are as important to selfhood as any other.

3 See e.g. Nehamas (2007); Riggle (2015; 2016); Ransom (2019); Doran (n.d.).

4 This is a natural extension of the view of gender identity as experience of norm-relevance given by Katharine Jenkins (2018). The extension is developed by Wiltsher (n.d.).

5 Something like this view is perhaps assumed by Bräuer (2023).

6 Overview of the literature: King (2022). Argument that aesthetic rationality is distinctive: Gorodeisky and Marcus (2018). Good work on aesthetic commitment, obligation, and promise: Kubala (2018); Dyck (2021); Cross (2021); Martínez Marín (2023).

7 Aesthetic communities or ‘networks’ are the subject of another rapidly growing literature. See Lopes (2018); Kubala (2021); Riggle (2022).

8 See e.g. Stueber (2006; 2013); Coplan (2011); Read (2019); Schmetkamp and Vendrell Ferran (2020); Maibom (2020).

9 One might cavil: is the epistemic value of humane understanding really to do with learning about another’s self, rather than just learning about their emotions and their grounds? Perhaps, but since there is a tight relation between the grounds of aesthetic preference and aesthetic identity, to grasp qualitative likings and their grounds as another does is ipso facto to grasp (part of) their aesthetic self. The same might not hold for other qualitative states in relation to other aspects of selfhood.

10 Some overview: Robson (2012); one origin of contemporary discussion: Hopkins (2011); an example of more recent discussion: Nguyen (2017).

11 This argument somewhat resembles Shaun Gallagher’s arguments in favour of a ‘narrative’ account of empathy, on which a narrative grasp of another’s situation is a necessary precursor to the formulation of empathic feelings, which (on his view) need not qualitatively match those of the other (Gallagher 2012).

12 Riggle (2021) criticises this view, and in so doing handily surveys its profuse proponents. Hansen and Adams (2023) argue that Stanley Cavell’s version of the convergence norm evades Riggle’s criticisms.

13 Not a new thought, insofar as others have asked about the relation between Korsgaard’s practical identities and social practice, e.g. Gowans (2002); González (2018).

14 I presented versions of this paper at a workshop on interpersonal understanding in Essen (June 2022), a colloquium at the University of San Diego, a graduate seminar at UC Berkeley (November 2022), and a workshop at Auburn University (April 2023). Thanks to the organisers of all those events for making them happen, and to the participants for a great deal of constructive feedback. Thanks also to the editors of this special issue and to two anonymous referees for this journal.