Aesthetic Devaluation as an Ego-Protective Mechanism Against Instrumentalized Human Empathy: A Meta-Critical Inquiry

When analytical readers encounter narrative art depicting human frailty, moral dithering, or unearned tragedy, they frequently dismiss the work as superficial, manipulative, or mere "time-killing entertainment." While literary criticism traditionally attributes such dismissals to the artifact's structural flaws, this paper proposes an alternative meta-critical framework: Defensive Aesthetic Reduction (DAR). We argue that highly analytical observers often evaluate human behavior through systemic, game-theoretic, or mechanical frameworks. Reducing human beings to "systemic drag" or "predictable variables" triggers an acute Kantian moral guilt—the psychological anxiety of violating the moral imperative against human objectification. To resolve this moral dissonance without relinquishing their systemic clarity, the reader retroactively projects the defect onto the artwork. By declaring the narrative intrinsically "bad" or "shallow," the observer's cold detachment is re-rationalized as a legitimate aesthetic judgment rather than a personal moral deficiency. This paper formalizes the DAR model, maps its cognitive architecture, and examines its implications for reader-response theory and meta-aesthetics.