Aesthetic Experience

Aesthetic experience is a specific kind of experience. The question is: What makes it different from other kinds of experiences? The concept of aesthetic experience has been extremely influential in the history of aesthetics, but one might wonder why we should focus on aesthetic experiences? Why are the aesthetically special mental states experiences? There is a variety of different kinds of ‘aesthetic’ mental states (Nanay 2018b). Clive Bell talks about aesthetic emotions (Bell 1914), J.O. Urmson talks about aesthetic satisfaction (Urmson 1959), Gary Iseminger talks about the aesthetic state of mind (Iseminger 1981, 2006), Jerome Stolnitz and George Dickie talk about aesthetic attitude (Stolnitz 1960; Dickie 1964).

The logical relation between the concept of aesthetic attitude and the concept of aesthetic experience is a complicated one: aesthetic attitude is generally taken to be logically prior to aesthetic experience – presumably a background state that makes aesthetic experience possible. As it is difficult to give an unproblematic characterisation for how attitudes differ from other mental states, whereas the concept of experience is a well-established one in the philosophy of mind, this entry is about aesthetic experiences. But what I say can be generalised to other ‘aesthetic’ mental states.

Experiences may be perceptual or non-perceptual. Similarly, the concept of aesthetic experience does not itself imply that aesthetic experiences are necessarily perceptual experiences (although many paradigmatic examples thereof are clearly perceptual ones). There has been a fair amount of debate in contemporary aesthetics about the possibility of non-perceptual aesthetic experiences both when engaging with conceptual art and when explaining the aesthetic aspects of scientific and mathematical reasoning (see, e.g., Goldie and Schellekens 2007). It should be noted, however, that even if we grant that the aesthetic experiences involved in these phenomena are not perceptual, they might still be described as quasi-perceptual as they arguably imply the use of mental imagery (Mancosu 2005; Lopes 2016; Nanay 2023, forthcoming b).