Can We Speak of ‘Aesthetic Experience’?

Abstract

A number of philosophers have, during the past two decades, focused attention on the essential nature, or identity, of aesthetic experience: what makes an experience aesthetic, or what kind of experience is the aesthetic experience? Put differently, how can we distinguish an aesthetic experience from a moral, religious, or practical experience? Moreover, is it intelligible, plausible, to speak of ‘aesthetic experience’ at all? If so, what does it mean for such an event, activity, or act to exist and to be aesthetic? I raise this line of questions mainly because some philosophers 1 have questioned a long standing tradition of taking almost for granted that ‘aesthetic experience’ is an integral element — indeed, the ground, basis — of aesthetic enjoyment and evaluation. In a recent article, for example, Kingsley Price has argued that the question, What makes an experience aesthetic?, does not ask, What makes the awareness (the mental state by which we perceive the art work) in an aesthetic experience aesthetic?, but rather, What makes the object in an aesthetic experience an aesthetic object?² And in his latest work, Understanding the Arts, ³ John Hospers has tried to show that the whole concept of aesthetic experience is confused, muddy, and perhaps untenable: it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to speak of aesthetic experience as a unique type of experience, as an experience distinguishable from moral, religious, intellectual, or sexual experience.