Esthetische normativiteit. Tegen empirische en evolutionaire “verklaringen”

In this article I argue that neither an evolutionary aesthetics – understood as the effort to explain the aesthetic dimension of human life from the evo- lution of our species – nor even an empirical aesthetics – which merely tries to describe and categorise our aesthetic judgements on the basis of extended observations or experiments – are capable to answer the most nagging issues in philosophical aesthetics. In philosophical aesthetic theories from Hume and Kant to Wittgenstein and Wollheim the starting point is the assump- tion that the judgement of aesthetic values is a normative and perceptual process – the principle of acquaintance: one has to experience something for oneself to judge it aesthetically. Both empirical and evolutionary aes- thetic theories ignore the normativity of the actual aesthetic judgement. Empirical aesthetics ignores normativity by treating people’s judgements as a given, i.e. as mere input for quantification; evolutionary aesthetics ignores it by removing our concrete judgements from the macro-scope of evolution.