The Aesthetic and Aesthetic Experience
This area investigates the concept of the aesthetic: the special properties, experiences, and modes of attention through which objects strike us as beautiful, elegant, graceful, or sublime.
Definition
The aesthetic is the family of properties, experiences, and responses—beauty, gracefulness, the sublime, and the like—that are apprehended through perceptual attention to how things look, sound, or otherwise appear, as distinct from their practical or theoretical interest.
Scope
This area covers what makes a property, experience, attitude, or judgment distinctively aesthetic. It treats aesthetic properties and their dependence on non-aesthetic features, the nature and very existence of a distinctive aesthetic experience, the aesthetic attitude of disinterested attention, the special category of the sublime, and the emotional engagement art elicits. It does not cover the conditions for being art, treated under theories of art, nor the normativity of taste, treated under aesthetic judgment.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- What distinguishes aesthetic properties from ordinary perceptible ones?
- Is there a distinctive kind of aesthetic experience, and what unifies it?
- Does appreciating something aesthetically require a special disinterested attitude?
- How do emotions figure in our engagement with art and nature?
Key theories
- Aesthetic properties and taste
- Sibley argues that aesthetic concepts such as graceful or garish are not condition-governed by non-aesthetic features but require the exercise of taste, a perceptual discrimination not reducible to rules.
- Aesthetic experience as the mark of the aesthetic
- Beardsley and Dewey hold that a unified, intrinsically rewarding experience marked by attention, coherence, and completeness is the defining locus of the aesthetic and grounds artistic value.
History
The concept of the aesthetic crystallized in the eighteenth century with theories of taste and disinterested pleasure in Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Kant, and the term 'aesthetics' was coined by Baumgarten. Twentieth-century analytic aesthetics renewed the debate: Beardsley and Dewey built artistic value on aesthetic experience, Sibley analyzed aesthetic concepts and taste, and Dickie's attack on the aesthetic attitude challenged whether any distinctive mode of perception underlies the aesthetic at all.
Debates
- Does aesthetic experience exist?
- Experience-based accounts hold that a distinctive aesthetic experience unifies the field, while skeptics like Dickie argue that the alleged attitude or experience is a myth that dissolves under scrutiny.
- Are aesthetic properties response-dependent?
- Whether properties like elegance are real features of objects or projections of human responses divides realist from subjectivist accounts of the aesthetic.
Key figures
- Frank Sibley
- Monroe Beardsley
- John Dewey
- Jerome Stolnitz
- George Dickie
Related topics
Seminal works
- sibley1959
- beardsley1958
- dewey1934
Frequently asked questions
- What is an aesthetic property?
- An aesthetic property is a feature such as gracefulness, garishness, or unity that we apprehend through perceptual attention and that depends on, but is not entailed by, an object's non-aesthetic properties like its colors and shapes.
- Is the aesthetic limited to art?
- No. Natural landscapes, everyday objects, and the environment can all be appreciated aesthetically, and much recent work in environmental and everyday aesthetics studies the aesthetic beyond the fine arts.