Aesthetic Experience and the Aesthetic Attitude

Theories of aesthetic experience ask whether there is a distinctive way of experiencing or attending to objects that defines the aesthetic and grounds artistic value.

Definition

Aesthetic experience is the putatively distinctive, intrinsically rewarding experience afforded by attending to an object for its own sake; the aesthetic attitude is the mode of disinterested perceptual attention said to make such experience possible.

Scope

This topic covers accounts of aesthetic experience and the aesthetic attitude: the eighteenth-century idea of disinterested contemplation, Dewey's notion of art as a unified consummatory experience, Beardsley's criterial characterization in terms of attention and coherence, and Dickie's influential argument that the aesthetic attitude is a myth. It does not cover the metaphysics of aesthetic properties or the normativity of taste, treated in sibling topics.

Core questions

• Is there a distinctive kind of experience that is properly called aesthetic?
• Does aesthetic appreciation require a special disinterested attitude?
• What features—unity, intensity, completeness—characterize aesthetic experience?
• Can artistic value be defined by the capacity to afford aesthetic experience?

Key theories

Art as experience (Dewey)

Dewey holds that an aesthetic experience is a heightened, complete, and unified episode of doing and undergoing that carries itself to fulfillment, continuous with ordinary life rather than set apart from it.

Criterial account of aesthetic experience

Beardsley characterizes aesthetic experience by features such as object-directedness, felt freedom, detached affect, active discovery, and wholeness, and uses it to ground a definition of artistic value.

The myth of the aesthetic attitude

Dickie argues that the supposed special attitude of disinterested attention is spurious: there is just attending closely or inattentively, and no distinct psychological state of aesthetic perception.

History

The idea of disinterested aesthetic contemplation descends from Shaftesbury and Kant and was elaborated as an aesthetic attitude by Bullough's notion of psychical distance and Stolnitz's account of disinterested perception. Beardsley and Dewey made aesthetic experience central to defining art and its value. Dickie's 1964 critique that the attitude is a myth shifted much subsequent debate toward whether aesthetic experience can survive without a special attitude, and toward characterizing it by its objects or value rather than its phenomenology.

Debates

Is the aesthetic attitude real?

Attitude theorists hold that disinterested attention is a genuine and definitive mode of perception, while Dickie and others argue it dissolves into ordinary attention plus motive.

Internalist vs. externalist accounts

Whether aesthetic experience is defined by its felt phenomenal character or by its relation to valuable features of its object is a continuing dispute in the wake of Beardsley's account.

Key figures

• John Dewey
• Monroe Beardsley
• George Dickie
• Jerome Stolnitz
• Edward Bullough

Seminal works

• dewey1934
• beardsley1958
• dickie1964

Frequently asked questions

What is disinterested attention?

It is attending to an object for its own sake, apart from practical, moral, or personal interest in it—an idea central to eighteenth-century aesthetics and to aesthetic-attitude theories, though Dickie argued no such special attitude exists.

Why did Dickie call the aesthetic attitude a myth?

Dickie argued that talk of a special disinterested attitude merely repackages the difference between attending and not attending, and that adding 'aesthetically' names no distinct psychological act of perception.