## 1. Focus of aesthetic experience



Any aesthetic experience has intentionality: it is an experience (as)
*of* some object. Typically, that object will be a work of
art--such as a sculpture, a symphony, a painting, a performance,
or a movie--or some aspect of nature, such as a bird's
plumage, a cliff, or a bright winter morning. An aesthetic experience
of an object with sensible features is commonly thought to be a
perceptual experience of those sensible features. In the case of
poems, novels, and certain pieces of conceptual art, the experience
might be understood as an imagined sensory experience; in the case of
abstract or intelligible objects like theorems, it might be neither
sensory nor imaginative in nature.



It is common to individuate *aesthetic* experience
partly--but typically not only--in terms of the types of
properties on which this experience focuses. In perceiving a
sculpture, for instance, you might experience its shape, its color,
its resemblance to a real person, its placement in a gallery, its
authorship, or its representational style. Most think that aesthetic
experience as such focuses on only some of these properties, and
perhaps even excludes focus on others.



This section analyzes the broad categories of properties of objects on
which aesthetic experience has been said to focus: formal properties
like shape or composition; the powers things have to give us pleasure;
properties of meriting or deserving certain subjective responses;
expressive properties, especially those that express emotions; and
fundamental metaphysical properties like essences or the nature of
humanity. It is consistent to individuate aesthetic experience by its
focus on more than one of these types of properties. The views
presented under each subsection below are not mutually exclusive,
except where explicitly stated.



This discussion largely treats these types of properties without
discriminating between their presence in manufactured artworks vs.
aspects of nature. It will leave aside discussion of the comparative
fundamentality of art and nature (cf. Hegel 1820-29 [1920];
Croce 1938 [2007] p. 277; Adorno 1970 [1997] pp. 61-2; Wollheim
1990 SS42-3; Savile 1982 Ch.8). It will also leave aside
discussions of aesthetic experience that are solely focused on
aesthetic experience of nature (cf. Bullough 1912, Hepburn 1966,
Carlson 1979, 2005, Budd 1996, Rolston 1998) or solely focused on
aesthetic experience of abstracta like theorems or proofs (cf.
Baumgarten 1735 [1954], Hutcheson 1726 [2004], Schellekens 2022).


### 1.1 Form and Function



Long before the 18th-century development of special theories of
aesthetic experience, neo-Platonic medieval philosophers developed a
concept of beauty as rationally intelligible formal structure as it
could be appreciated in experience. In his fourth-century work *De
Musica*, Augustine took beauty in music to be partly a matter of
proportionality of parts, and later argued that visual beauty is
formal harmony combined in the right way with color (Haldane 2013).
Nine centuries later, Thomas Aquinas (*Summa Theologica*)
echoed this hylomorphic conception: the beautiful is material
structured in proper form, the kind "of which apprehension in
itself pleases" ("Pulchrum dicatur id cujus apprehensio
ipsa placet," SS Ia, IIae, q.27, a.1 *ad* 3; as
translated by Mothersill 1988, p. 323). In the Italian Renaissance,
Leon Battista Alberti (1443-1452 [1988]) called beauty
"reasoned harmony of all the parts within a body" (Book 6,
SS2 at p.156).



In the eighteenth century, attention to aesthetic experience per se,
rather than beauty, grew out of a more general inquiry into
perception. Alexander Baumgarten (1735 [1954]) first defined
"aesthetics" much more broadly as we do now--as the
science of cognizing objects by sensory perception (from the Greek
"aisthesis" for sensory perception).
Baumgarten's work on the topic was heavily influenced by that of
Leibniz (1684 [1969]) and Wolff (1719 [2003]). All three took pleasure
more generally to be sensory perception of an object's
perfection; Wolff treated this as the coherence of the aspects of an
object either in themselves or as they work together to accomplish a
purpose.



These early claims that experience of beauty is experience of form
were thoroughly integrated into the general theistic metaphysics and
epistemology of these thinkers. Baumgarten, for instance, claimed that
we take pleasure not only in the perfection of an object, he wrote,
but also in being conscious of our own "perfection of sensible
cognition as such," in how we are suited to sense the world
(1750 [2007] SS14; cf. Meier 1999 and Mendelssohn 1785 [1979]).
The contemporary English philosopher Anthony Ashbury Cooper, the Third
Earl of Shaftesbury (1711 [2007]), took pleasurable admiration of
well-formed objects really to be admiration of the form-imposing
minds, including those of the artist but ultimately that of the
divine. "The beautifying, not the beautified, is the really
beautiful," he wrote (Cahn and Meskin 2007, p. 80).



Immanuel Kant's immensely influential *Critique of
Judgment* (1789 [1987]) peeled aesthetic experience away from
apprehension of the divine, and cleaved the apprehension of form away
from function. He claimed you make a pure judgment of
("free") beauty when you take pleasure just in perceiving
the form of an object without even conceptualizing its function.



Kant clearly contradicts his German predecessors in his claim that
"neither does perfection gain by beauty, nor beauty by
perfection" (SS16 at p. 78). Nonetheless, Kant does make two
kinds of theoretical concessions to this tradition. First, he allows
that his German predecessors like Baumgarten may have confused
perfection for a purpose with a subjective kind of purposiveness
without reference to any specific purpose. This latter
"purposiveness" is difficult to understand, but Kant
suggests that it consists in the harmony of an object's parts,
as presented in experience, that allows you to unite them in your
imagination into a structured unity (SS15, p. 74; see Section
2.3). Secondly, Kant concedes that we sometimes speak of
"beauty," e.g. the beauty of a building, when we highlight
how something is perfect for its function. Kant calls this
"accessory beauty" (or "adherent beauty,"
another translation of "*pulchritude adhaerens*")
(SS16 at p. 76).



Kant is often cited as a "formalist"--someone who
claims that aesthetic experience focuses exclusively on formal
properties of objects--but this is a matter of interpretive
dispute. What is clear is that Kant offered a way into understanding
aesthetic experience's focus on form independently from its
association with the divine or with any function that form might
fulfill.



Most German work on aesthetics in the nineteenth century moved away
from focus on mere form to discuss the special knowledge that
aesthetic experience might afford (see Section 1.5). Interest in form
without function saw resurgence in the final decades of the nineteenth
century.



In *The Birth of Tragedy* (1872 [1992]), Friedrich Nietzsche
argued that the artistic form of a tragedy--its rhythm, its
musical shapes, its overarching structure--could transfigure the
fundamental facts of human suffering that would otherwise overwhelm
and paralyze us. In such transfiguration by form, we come to take
"aesthetic pleasure" (SS24 at pp. 140-1,) in
what would otherwise be horrible (cf. Bullough 1912 [2007]). Formal
structure produces a necessary, salutary illusion in our perception of
terrible and otherwise unmanageable truths.



The influential Austrian music critic Eduard Hanslick argued in 1891
[2007] that only pure form in music could be beautiful, and its lack
of any "subject" was no discredit to it. In a partial
return to Kant, George Santayana (1896) gave form a particularly
important role to play in grounding beauty in all art forms. He said
that you can take self-conscious pleasure in synthesizing various
distinct perceptions of elements of an object to come to perceive it
as a structured whole.



In response to the late 19th- and early
20th-century development of abstract and
non-representational styles in the visual arts, a greater resurgence
in formalism took place (Stolnitz 1960; Carroll 2013). The visual art
critic Clive Bell (1914 [2007]) took aesthetic experience to be a
response to what he called "Significant Form" in a piece
of visual art, i.e. "arrangements and combinations that move us
in a particular way" to "austere and thrilling
raptures" distinct from those feelings we encounter otherwise
(p.264, 268). In contrast, the "representative element" is
always "irrelevant" to such aesthetic experience
(p.27).



A significant twist in the history of formalism came with John
Dewey's landmark 1934 [1980] book *Art as Experience*. In
it, Dewey emphasized primarily that aesthetic experience was an
experience which *itself* had a unified, consummatory form with
meaningful development. Understood in this way, an aesthetic
experience can be an experience of any event or object which offers
such a "single quality that pervades the entire experience in
spite of the variation of its constituent parts" (pp.
305-6 as reprinted in Cahn and Meskin 2007). What it is for some
experience to be "esthetic" is not for it to be an
experience *of* some form, but rather for it to be an
experience that has an internal phenomenological structure that
constitutes its *own* form. You might have this kind of
experience at an exciting baseball game, watching a sunset, or writing
a paper.



Dewey's methodology had an outsized impact on aesthetics in
analytic philosophy. This impact even survived the influence of
Wittgenstein's later work (see 1953 [2009]), which many took to
threaten the possibility of phenomenological inquiry in general.
Dewey's turn towards the primacy of the form *of*
aesthetic experience--rather than the form of an *object*
of aesthetic experience--can be found most notably in the work of
Monroe Beardsley (1958 [1981], 1970 [1982]). Beardsley is known partly
as a hedonist, because he thought that aesthetic experiences were
necessarily pleasurable or "gratifying." But it is not
just any gratification that counts towards an experience's being
aesthetic. Aesthetic experiences tend to gratifying *because*
they are intense, unified, complete experiences focused on single
objects whose features reward curiosity and active attention. It is
true that only a certain kind of object of attention could offer such
a perceptual encounter--but it is the form of the experience so
offered that is explanatorily prior, rather than the form of the
object.



Formalism has now fallen out of favor, and is generally regarded as an
extreme view about aesthetic experience. There are a few common
objections to formalism as the view that aesthetic experience focuses
exclusively on the formal properties of objects.



Some try to undercut a central motivation for formalism: the
motivation to find a "common denominator" in all types of
aesthetic objects, both artefactual and natural (Carroll 2012).
Especially after Wittgenstein (1953 [2009]) challenged the possibility
of providing necessary and sufficient conditions for the application
of certain concepts, many philosophers of aesthetics thought that
trying to define "art" was a lost cause--perhaps a
cause antithetical to the radical "openness" (Weitz 1956)
or "essentially contested" (Gallie 1956) nature of the
concept of art.



Formalism crucially relies on the distinction between form and other
features of artworks, notably the *content* of artworks. But
it's not clear how to draw a clean line between form and
content, especially when it comes to art forms like instrumental music
(Isenberg 1973). According to prolific Victorian critic Walter Pater
(1873 [1986]), in music "the end is not distinct from the means,
the form from the matter, the subject from the expression; they inhere
in and completely saturate each other," and it is the
"constant effort of art to obliterate" this distinction
(p.86).



A more specific version of this objection targets Bell's (1914
[2007]) version of formalism. His theory relied not only on a
distinction between form and content, but also on an obscure
distinction between significant and insignificant form (Stolnitz 1960,
p.144).



A third powerful line of criticism originated in work on the social
structures of aesthetic appreciation. Arthur Danto (1964) famously
argued, with special reference to Andy Warhol's *Brillo
Boxes* installation, that art can be formally indistinguishable
from things that aren't art, and so whether something
*counts* as art cannot be a matter of its form, but must partly
be a matter of a certain kind of theory we apply. George Dickie (1974,
1984) extended this idea to cover the claim that aesthetic
appreciation per se is only available in the context of certain social
institutions with their own patterns of value (see Guyer 2014c, p.
479, for further criticism). Kendall Walton (1970) likewise argued
that the pleasure we take in an artwork's formal features
depends crucially on the category in which we perceive it.



While a purely formalist approach to aesthetic experience might
effectively mark what is distinctive about aesthetic experience, it
does not readily explain what is valuable about aesthetic experience.
Especially when form is taken independently of function or
apprehension of the divine, it's not clear why it would even be
pleasant, let alone important, to have experiences that focus only on
form. Dewey's (1934 [1980]) turn doesn't help here: is it
all that valuable to have experiences with internal growth and a
feeling of consummation? Is this value great enough to justify all the
time and money we spend pursuing aesthetic experience?



Although formalism has fallen from grace, even its critics accept the
importance of appreciating form among other features in aesthetic
experience (Carroll 2006, p. 78).


### 1.2 Power to Please



Influential medieval philosophers like Augustine (*De Musica*)
and Aquinas (*Summa Theologica*) conceived of beauty as a real
and objective property inhering in objects themselves--the kind
of property whose nature does not depend on our capacity to experience
it. In the eighteenth century, philosophers started to challenge this
conception of beauty. Many posited a deeper metaphysical dependence
between our capacity to have certain feelings and the properties on
which those very experiences are focused: they took these properties
just to be powers to produce certain pleasurable responses in us (cf.
Shelley 2010 on "empiricism" and de Clercq 2013 on
"experiential accounts").



As James Shelley ("18th Century British
Aesthetics") has pointed out, these views treat beauty as a
Lockean (1689) secondary quality ("nothing in the objects
themselves, but powers to produce various sensations in us by their
primary qualities," Book I, Ch.VIII, SS10). Accordingly, the
British empiricists tended to endorse such views of beauty and
sublimity. Addison (1712 [1879]) drew the connection with "Mr.
Lock" directly (letter no.413). Hutcheson (1726 [2004]) said
beauty was a capacity to "excite" a certain type of
pleasure. Edmund Burke (1756 [2007]) called beauty "some quality
in bodies, acting mechanically upon the human mind by the intervention
of the senses" (in Cahn and Meskin 2007, p. 119). In his
*Treatise* (1739-40 [1987]), David Hume called beauty as
"nothing but a form, which produces pleasure"
(II.1.8.2).



The empiricists and those they influenced gave similar treatments of
the sublime, another kind of feature typically introduced as a focus
of aesthetic experience (contrast Kant 1789 [1987]; see following
section). Here the emphasis is less on a power to produce a certain
frisson of feeling, and more on the power to inspire a certain kind of
mental activity, especially of the imagination. Joseph Addison (1712
[1879]) treated "Greatness" as a "rude kind of
Magnificence" that offers our faculty of imagination the
pleasure of grasping at something it cannot capture in full (letter
no.412). Burke (1756 [2007]), often cited as the originator of the
idea of the sublime in Anglophone philosophy, considered the sublime
to be that which would otherwise be painful and terrifying to behold,
but which is so distanced as to modify these feelings "as not to
be actually noxious ... [but] capable of producing delight"
(SSVII). Influenced by reading Burke, Mendelssohn (1758 [1997])
defined the sublime as something that "captures our attention
... [and] arouses a sweet shudder that rushes through every fiber
of our being... giving wings to the imagination to press further
and further without stopping" (pp. 196-7).



Since these philosophers took aesthetic experience to focus on beauty
and sublimity, and took these features to be powers to produce certain
kinds of pleasurable mental responses, they thereby took aesthetic
experience to be experience of such powers to please. There need be
nothing particularly troubling about the idea that you can experience
an object's power to please in perception; this power can be
experienced precisely by being so pleased in such perception.



The view of beauty or sublimity as powers sometimes led the
empiricists to deny that beauty or sublimity was really a feature of
objects themselves (Hutcheson 1726 [2004], Hume 1739-40 [1987]).
This was a substantive confusion, and was effectively called out as
such by Thomas Reid. Reid (1785 [1969]) charged Hutcheson with
"an abuse of words" (p.782): it cannot be right to say
that beauty "property denotes the Perception of some
Mind," since we talk of *objects* as having the property
of beauty (Hutcheson 1726 [2004], p. 27). Contemporary commentators
agree that there isn't anything suspect about an object's
genuinely having a property that is a power to produce certain mental
responses (Moran 2012; Sibley 1968). This worry has fallen away from
contemporary views that take beauty, sublimity, or aesthetic value to
be a matter of having a power to please--and aesthetic experience
to be experience of that power (e.g. Matthen 2017a, 2017b, 2018).



There are two serious issues for those views which take aesthetic
experience to be solely focused in on its object's powers to
produce certain responses in us.



Here's the first issue. If the beauty, sublimity, or other
aesthetic value of an object *O* is just a power to produce
certain responses in us, and aesthetic experience is just a certain
appreciation of such a power--even one that involves actually
having such a response--then anything that has the power to
produce such a response in us should have the same beauty, sublimity,
or other aesthetic value as *O*. But we do not typically take
beauty, sublimity, or aesthetic value to be so cleanly separable from
its bearer. Many think that an aesthetic experience of
*O*'s properties is one that captures something utterly
individual in *O*, undetachable from the object it is (cf.
Sections 1.4.4 and 2.6). But any characterization of the kind of
mental response which *O* has a power to produce, and which
constitutes *O*'s beauty, sublimity, or aesthetic value,
will simply offer an (in principle) way to get the same aesthetic
experience elsewhere--e.g. by appreciating a perfect forgery, or
a hallucinated object. This might seem unacceptable.



There are a couple of possible responses to this issue. Some (Budd
1985; Davies 1994; Levinson 1996) simply deny that you really could
have the relevant type of experience in the absence of the relevant
special object (cf. Shelley 2010). Another response is simply to
accept that the relevant aesthetic experience and aesthetic value can
be had elsewhere, and to explain away intuitions that this should not
be possible (Peacocke 2021).



The second problem is harder to dismiss, and it calls for a more
fundamental reorientation towards the focus of aesthetic experience.
It takes very little for an object to have a mere *power* to
please, even a power to please via perception of its features. If all
it took for an object to be beautiful or sublime was for it to have
some such power, we should take individual experiences of such
powers--individual instances of being so pleased--to be
demonstrative of such aesthetic value in objects. But we typically do
not take reports of such experience to be so demonstrative. Instead,
the pleasure an individual takes in an object is usually taken to be
contestably relevant to its aesthetic value. Whether that pleasure
attests to an object's power to please is beyond dispute, but
whether it attests to an object's beauty, sublimity, or
aesthetic value is often disputed.



This fact troubled Hume in his later writing on aesthetics. In his
seminal essay "Of the standard of taste," Hume (1757
[1987a]) subtly amended his *Treatise*'s (1739-40
[1987]) view of beauty (cf. Nehamas 1981, Cavell 1965 [2007]). What is
"fitted by nature to produce those particular feelings" of
pleasurable liking, and thus is in a sense genuinely beautiful, is
that which draws univocal and lasting approval from "true
judges"--ideally sensitive, practiced, and unprejudiced
critics of the arts. This view of beauty still entangles it
constitutively with experience, but with a crucially idealized
restriction (cf. De Clercq 2013 on "response dependent
properties" at p. 305). This restriction anticipates, but does
not itself yet reach, a more fundamental shift in approach to the
focus of aesthetic value brought about by Kant: an approach that takes
aesthetic experience to involve an attribution of a *merited*
response.


### 1.3 Merit



At the end of the eighteenth century, philosophers turned away from
views that took aesthetic experience to focus only on objects'
powers to produce pleasure. This seems to have taken place largely due
to the influence of Kant's 1789 [1987] *Critique of
Judgment*. There he distinguished the merely
agreeable--things which we simply like, e.g. because they satisfy
our appetites--from the beautiful. In doing so, he took it that
an aesthetic experience of an object's free or pure beauty
involves pleasure felt to be *merited* by the object so
perceived (SS9). To have that response is to feel as though the
object deserves that very response you give it.



This is meant to make better sense of the way we discuss aesthetic
experiences and what we take to be authoritative on the matter of
beauty. To take pleasure in an *aesthetic* way in an object,
Kant thought, is just to engage your mental faculties of imagination
and understanding in a pleasant free play with the form of the object
you perceive, unconstrained by thought of any real purpose that the
object might serve or any appetite it might satisfy (see Sections 2.3
and 2.5). But any perceiver has these mental faculties, and must see
the same form in the object, and so (claimed Kant) aesthetic
experience involves a further thought that *everyone* ought to
take such pleasure in this object.



On this view of aesthetic experience, what you take to be merited is
not (just) a *judgment* about the aesthetic quality of an
object presented in perception. Kant is emphatic that what seems
merited to you, in having an aesthetic experience, is a
*feeling*, a form of pleasure. This is so in the case of beauty
but also in the case of the sublime (contrast the empiricists from the
previous section). The "mathematically sublime" is that
which cannot be captured in full in our imagination, but about which
we can nonetheless reason, like infinitude itself. The
"dynamically sublime" is that which looks to have total
power over us--like a massive storm or other monstrous aspects of
nature--but which we can nonetheless resist with the power of our
own practical reason. In each, we feel pleased that our minds can
overcome limitations.



This is not a return to those thinkers (Augustine *De Musica*,
Aquinas *Summa Theologica*) who thought that aesthetic
experience was a direct apprehension of some inherent property of an
object, like its being well-formed for its function, or symmetrical in
a way that reflects the divine. According to Kant, beauty isn't
strictly speaking a property of objects (even though we speak as
though it is), and we aren't even tempted to attribute sublimity
itself to objects. The focus here is pleasure in the powers of
universal mental capacities themselves. Part of Kant's
innovation in aesthetics consists in the suggestion that objects might
*deserve* certain subjective responses.



This idea is not easy to understand, and many have done significant
interpretive and substantive philosophical work attempting to explain
how an object could deserve a subjective feeling (see e.g. Mothersill
1988; Eaton 2001; Hamawaki 2006; Moran 2012; Cavell 1965 [2007];
Ginsborg 2015; Gorodeisky 2019, 2021). One approach here is to
interpret the pleasure in question as not just a phenomenal tone (see
Labukt 2012, Bramble 2013) but rather as a kind of liking or
pro-attitude which, like other attitudes, could be suited or
'fitted' to its intentional object (Gorodeisky 2019, 2021;
Kriegel forthcoming; compare Hume 1757 [1987a]).



Despite this difficulty, the idea that aesthetic experience involves a
focus on how an object merits a certain response has pervaded recent
discussion. There's an important distinction to be made here
between what it is to take aesthetic experience to involve (what feels
like) merited pleasure or admiration per se (Scruton 1974, Sibley
1974, Walton 1993), and what it is to feel pleasure in or simply to
like some object when you have an otherwise merited kind of
*experience* of it (Beardsley 1970; Matthen 2017a, 2017b,
2018). The challenge of making sense of what it is to merit a certain
subjective feeling of pleasure does not face this latter claim in the
same way, as we can make sense of how an artwork merits a general
experience in terms of that experience's accuracy, its
contextualization, or even how it matches the intentions of the artist
who created an object (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1949; Wollheim 1990).



One line of research pulls the idea of a merited response apart from
Kant's claim that the beautiful and the sublime universally
merit the same feelings across people. In his magnum opus *In
Search of Lost Time* (originally published 1913-1927),
Marcel Proust (1913-1927 [2003]) suggested that an individual
like his narrator Marcel might feel an individualized, personal demand
for a feeling or an emotion from a certain scene or piece of artwork.
Partly in response to Proust, and in resistance to Kant, Richard Moran
(2012) and Nick Riggle (2016) have given substantive characterizations
of the personal demands that artworks and natural scenes can make upon
us (cf. Nussbaum 1990, Ch.13; Landy 2004, Chs. 1 and 3; Nehamas
2007).



There is a challenge facing any theory that takes aesthetic experience
to focus exclusively on objects' meriting certain pleasurable
subjective responses. It is possible to see that Michelangelo's
statue of David merits admiration, or that the view over Waimea Canyon
merits awe, without yourself feeling admiration or wonder in that
moment (cf. Moran 2012 on Proust 1913-1927 [2003]). Assuming
that other substantive restrictions can be met here (e.g. the demand
for disinterested attention; see Section 2.5), would this count as an
aesthetic experience? If so, it's not clear entirely what would
be valuable about it, even if it does involve a positive evaluation of
its object. Some might say that you have gotten something right: you
are correct in thinking that the statue merits admiration and the view
merits awe. It's not clear that this correctness would be enough
to make sense of the great value of aesthetic experience.



It seems best to say here that this would not count as an aesthetic
experience *because* it does not bear the value of actually
involving a subjective response that is itself of value. But this
could lead to trouble with dissociation in the other direction, which
is also clearly possible: you could have a pleasurable experience
*as of* some object's meriting that very kind of
pleasurable experience, while also being incorrect that it merits
that. If the value of aesthetic experience rests exclusively or
primarily on the value of the pleasure itself, then it seems that this
inappropriate experience should share almost all the value that a
merited aesthetic experience would have. That, to some, is
inconceivable (Budd 1985; see Shelley 2010, Peacocke 2021 for further
discussion).



The view that aesthetic experience focuses primarily on object's
*meriting* certain positive responses can also clash with other
intuitions about the nature of aesthetic experience. Some think that
an experience should be counted as aesthetic even if it involves a
negative evaluation of its object: "an abominable performance of
the *London Symphony* is as aesthetic as a superb one ...
The symptoms of the aesthetic are not marks of merit," wrote
Nelson Goodman (1968 [1976], p. 255).


### 1.4 (Emotional) expression



A third view takes aesthetic experience to be focused on expressive
properties of objects. An expressive property of an object is a
property by which it expresses something--usually an emotion or
other affect, but more rarely an attitude, a movement, a personality,
or a way of experiencing the world as a whole.



Consider how this kind of view differs from those discussed in the
last three subsections. Although certain forms can be expressive,
expressive properties in general are not just the same as formal
properties: something might have a deeply expressive coloration with
very simple, unexpressive form, like Rothko's famous color field
paintings. It is a matter of substantive dispute (to be described
below) whether expressive properties are the same as *powers*
to make perceivers feel certain ways, or properties that
*merit* certain mental responses in perceivers.



Regardless of the answers to these questions, two positions need to be
distinguished. One is the position that having an aesthetic experience
essentially or necessarily involves some emotion. The other is the
position that aesthetic experience is essentially, primarily, or
paradigmatically experience *of* expressive properties of its
object. These claims do not necessarily come together. This section
discusses the latter claim (see Section 2.4 for discussion of the
former).



There are roughly four kinds of views of expression endorsed by those
who take the primary focus of aesthetic experience to be expressive
properties of an artwork (or, more rarely, of nature; see Croce 1902
[1992], 1938 [2007]; Wollheim 1968 [1980]). These differ according to
their conceptions of how expression takes place, and what it means for
the experience both of the creator and of the appreciator of an
artwork. These are transfer views, projection views, correspondence
views, and transformation views (for alternative taxonomies, see
Matravers 2013 and Levinson 2006).



Debates about the nature of expression and its importance to aesthetic
experience are still lively (Matravers 1998, Robinson 2005, 2011, Gaut
2007, Kivy 1989, 2002, Boghossian 2002, 2010, 2020, Nussbaum 2007,
Montero 2006a-b, Cochrane 2010, Wiltsher 2016; for overviews see Kania
2013 and Matravers 2007, 2013).


#### 1.4.1 Transfer



The first kind of view is the simplest, but it offers the least
explanation of expression. A simple transfer view of expression takes
it that some inner state or event of the creator is simply shared via
experience of the artwork to the observer--i.e. the spectator,
percipient, or reader. What is expressed on this kind of view is
usually an emotion or feeling, but it is sometimes a whole perceptual
experience or an entire way of seeing the world.



In the 1802 [1984] preface to his *Lyrical Ballads*, the poet
William Wordsworth identified poetry (which, on his view, could
include prose) as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings
... emotions recollected in tranquillity" after having been
felt in all their heat previously by the poet (p.611; cf. Dewey 1934
[2007], p. 312). The reader of a poem shares this feeling, learns
about this feeling, and thereby feels a pleasant communal feeling with
the author. Perhaps the greatest champion of this view was the Russian
novelist Leo Tolstoy, who in 1897 [2007] defined art as that
"human activity" by which "one man consciously, by
means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has
lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings
and also experience them" (in Cahn and Meskin 2007 at p. 237).
Someone who undergoes an aesthetic experience of art, then, will feel
a "joy and spiritual union" not only with its creator, but
also with those others who experience it (p.239).



The transfer theory of emotional expression often associates this
transfer with an intermediate clarificatory step, and offers as part
of a theory of the value of aesthetic experience that it offers not
just emotional experience but a certain organized knowledge of what
emotions feel like from the inside. In his lectures on aesthetics in
1819-33 [1984], Friedrich Schleiermacher argued that artists
conceive of works that both communicate their own emotions to the
audience and clarify them in so doing (p.11). The painter and curator
Roger Fry moved away from his friend Clive Bell's formalism as
he endorsed it in his early work ("Art and Life," 1917
[1981]) to claim that art rouses emotion in us in a specifically clear
way, cut off as they are from motivating us to specific action in our
own lives ("Essay in Aesthetics" 1909 [1981],
"Retrospect" 1920 [1981]).



The transfer theory of expression of emotions is not particularly
popular, largely because it seems that an artist need not feel those
emotions she expresses in a work, and that the audience need not
themselves feel those emotions expressed in a work (cf. Langer 1953;
Stolnitz 1960; Matravers 2013). Moreover, different spectators tend to
feel quite different emotions in response to an artwork, so it's
not clear that art should be understood fundamentally in terms of
transferring just those emotions the creator had (Stolnitz 1960 p.
186; Wimsatt and Beardsley 1949). Others take the focus on the emotion
that an artist felt to distract from the artwork itself (Stolnitz
1960, p. 164).



Another kind of transfer theory focuses on transfer not of emotion but
of sensory experience from creator to consumer. The critic John Ruskin
(1843-60 [2004]) claimed that the true artist (e.g. the painter
J.M.W. Turner) could communicate precisely what it is like to have a
certain perceptual experience the artist had, by "producing on
the far-away beholder's mind precisely the impression which the
reality would have produced" (pp. 86-8). The French
novelist Marcel Proust--who was a deep admirer of
Ruskin--added that not only could aesthetic experience involve
the appreciation of one episode of subjective experience, but it could
also involve the appreciation of the artist's total and unique
way of experiencing the world, as a kind of subjective personality
(for discussion, see Landy 2004; compare Veron 1879, Stolnitz
1960 p.161ff.). One's act of writing, then, can be understood as
a "secretion of one's innermost life ... that one
gives to the world" (1895-1900 [1984], p. 79). The
denouement of his great novel *In Search of Lost Time* involves
the recognition on the narrator's part that



> 
> art, if it means awareness of our own life, means also awareness of
> the lives of other people ... it is the revelation, which by
> direct and conscious methods would be impossible, of the qualitative
> difference, the uniqueness of the fashion in which the world appears
> to each one of us, a difference which, if there were no art, would
> remain for ever the secret of every individual (*Time Regained*
> in 1913-1927 [2003], p. 299).
> 



Arthur Danto (1981) echoes this idea in his claim that
"externalization of the artist's consciousness, as if we
could see his way of seeing and not merely what he saw," is an
essential part of expressiveness in art (p.164). This, too, is a way
of making available to an appreciator a subjective state--but a
more general subjective stance on the world, a way of experiencing it
as a whole, rather than just an individual emotion.


#### 1.4.2 Projection



Projection views derive largely from mid-19th century to
early 20th century psychological thought about
"empathy," which was originally called
"Einfuhlung" in the German (Lipps 1903-6,
translated to "empathy" by Titchener 1909 [1926]). Empathy
theorists took it that aesthetic experience involves mentally (or
perhaps even mystically; Vischer 1873 [1994], p. 104) projecting
ourselves into the physical shape of an item to have an emotional or
dynamic experience of the kind that a human subject would have if she
took on that physical shape. In the 1850s, Hermann Lotze (*1885
[1899]*) claimed that a shape can "transport" us
inside of it "and make us share its life" (quoted by Lee
& Anstruther-Thomson 1912, pp. 17-18). As Robert Vischer (1873
[1994]) wrote, "I can think my way into [an object], mediate its
size with my own, stretch and expand, bend and confine myself to
it" (pp. 104-5). The Swiss art historian Heinrich
Wolfflin (1886) agreed that "we submit all objects to
soulification" in this projective way, and suggested that such
projection involved actual workings of the "motor nerve
system."



This view takes it that aesthetic perceivers attribute feeling to
*objects*, but partly by relating them closely to oneself. The
philosopher Theodor Lipps (1935) insisted that the "inner
imitation" involved in empathy involved feeling that the emotion
in question is felt as belonging to the object perceived--but
since you feel "entirely and wholly identical" with the
object in this context, you feel that emotion as belonging to yourself
too. The English novelist Vernon Lee (real name Violet Paget) co-wrote
a work with her lover and fellow author Clementina Anstruther-Thomson
(1912) in which they claimed that we attribute "to lines and
surfaces, to the spatial forms, those dynamic experiences which we
should have were we to put our bodies into similar conditions"
(pp. 20-1).



Later on, the psychologist Herbert Sidney Langfeld offered an analysis
of *The Aesthetic Attitude* (1920) in terms of empathy, and
made several innovations to the theory as it stood: he noted that the
capacity for empathy varies across people (p.133), and that sometimes
we project motion onto a shape not by feeling as a human in that shape
would feel, but rather by feeling how one who produced that gestural
trace would feel (p.122).



These theorists disagreed on some points, for example: whether such
projection was voluntary (Vischer, Langfeld) or involuntary
(Wolfflin, Lipps 1935); whether the emphasis of one's
experience is on feeling *oneself* as identical to the object
(Lipps 1935 p. 298, Puffer 1905 pp. 12-13) or on the
*object* as it might feel were it human (Vischer p. 92,
Wolfflin p. 4, Lee & Anstruther-Thomson p. 17); whether the
emotions in question literally involved any physical bodily activation
of the perceiver's nervous system (Wolfflin, Puffer 1905,
Langfeld) or not (Lipps 1935); and whether such projection needed to
be based on actual remembered emotion or motion of the body (Lee &
Anstruther-Thomson, Langfeld) or not (Vischer, Wolfflin, Lipps
1935, Puffer 1905). But these disagreements pale in the face of the
broad consistency of these theories.



First: none placed any particular emphasis on the mental, bodily, or
emotional states of the creator of an object--just on the
features of an object that made it amenable to the projective
identification involved in empathy. Beautiful things, they tended to
agree, were those things most amenable to this identification that
would then offer pleasure (in this way, some of these theories also
have ancestors in those who took beauty to be a power to please; see
Section 1.2). The pleasure to be had in these contexts is thought by
these theorists to be universally accessible (Vischer), as a joy taken
in the "liveliness" (Lipps 1903-6 p. 102) of
objects, the lessening of loneliness (Vischer), or in particular in
the naturally harmonious (Puffer 1905) or intrinsically salutary (Lee
& Anstruther-Thomson) condition into which such empathic
identification puts an observer's body. In the psychological
context in which they wrote, they were not all exclusively concerned
with aesthetic experience per se, although they applied it to
architecture and the visual arts (Lipps 1903-6, 1935, Puffer
1905, Lee & Anstruther-Thomson, Langfeld).



Remarkably, these theorists are generally content to make claims about
identification and attribution of emotion that sound paradoxical to
the 21st-century ear (Goodman 1968 [1976], p. 243; Wollheim
1968 [1980]). Partly due to the oddity in literally attributing
emotions to objects or identifying with them, newer descendants of
this view focus instead on engagement from the imagination. Levinson
(2006b) has claimed that you imagine a fictional "persona"
in music who is expressing the emotions she really has, and Walton
(1988, 1994) says you imagine *of* your own actual experience
of a work of art that it's an experiencing of real emotions (see
Matravers 2013, p. 410, for objections).


#### 1.4.3 Correspondence



There is a difference between (i) experiencing certain feelings
suggested by a shape's affinity with a bodily position and (ii)
experiencing that very affinity itself. The former simply exploits a
resemblance in eliciting a feeling experienced as being
'in' the object, whereas the latter kind of experience
takes as its focus that very resemblance relation. Those who endorse
correspondence theories of expression, and take expressive properties
to be the focus of aesthetic experience, understand aesthetic
experience as belonging to the latter kind. These correspondence
theories tend to treat aesthetic experience as fundamentally a matter
of understanding a meaning that certain artworks already have in
virtue of their manifest correspondence with certain aspects of human
subjective experience--which correspondence is *experienced as
such*.



After the resurgence of formalism in the early twentieth century,
several philosophers started to think about form as having
significance not just in itself but in the way it manifestly resembled
or corresponded to emotion (e.g. Fry 1981). The philosopher to develop
this view most significantly was Susanne Langer, whose two influential
books *Philosophy in a New Key* (1942) and *Feeling and
Form* (1953) focused on music, poetry, and dance (for commentary
see Danto 1984). Music itself, she claimed, bears a "close
logical similarity to the forms of human feeling - forms of
growth and attenuation, flowing and stowing, conflict and resolution,
speed, arrest, terrific excitement, calm, or subtle activation and
dreamy lapses" (1953, p. 27). This is a "pattern of
sentience," the form which lived phenomenal subjectivity of
feeling shares with music. Since music itself has this form, it has
"import" or significance as well: it "expresses life
- feeling, growth, movement, emotion and everything that
characterizes vital existence" (1953, p. 82).



According to Langer, this is not just a matter of conventional
symbolization, nor a matter of transmission of the life or feelings of
a creator. What the artist felt in making something, and indeed what
you yourself feel when you see it, is mostly beside the point. To the
extent that there is a phenomenological feeling that pervades
aesthetic experience generally, it should be understood as a
"pervasive feeling of *exhilaration*" (p.395). In
aesthetic experience a feeling is "not
'communicated,' but revealed; the created form
'has' it, so that perception of the virtual
object--say, the famous frieze from the Parthenon--is at
once the perception of its amazingly integrated and intense
feeling" (1953, p. 394). Far from erasing the comparison,
aesthetic experience (or 'intuition') makes plain to us,
in an intellectually satisfying way, how space can mirror sentiment:
"What it does to us is to formulate our conceptions of feeling
and our conceptions of visual, factual, and audible reality together.
It gives us *forms of imagination* and *forms of
feeling*, inseparably" (p.397).



Richard Wollheim is well known for formulating this subtle aspect of
'expressive perception' in several books and essays
(notably 1968 [1980], 1990, 1994). He treated art objects as
meaningful pieces of the physical world to be understood by spectators
as physical objects which artists themselves intended to be perceived
in a certain way. These are, and indeed are intended to be, expressive
of the actual internal life of the artist. But an internal mental
condition can only be expressed by an art object via that
object's correspondence to the relevant condition, i.e. that
property of "seem[ing] to us to match, or correspond with, what
we experience inwardly" (p.21) in that condition. In an
aesthetic experience of such an art object, the object is seen (or
heard, or felt) *as* corresponding in this way to a certain
feeling, in a way that involves a spectator's feeling the
relevant feeling herself (cf. Wollheim 1994; see Budd 2008, Noordhof
2008, Galgut 2010). This is not a matter of "reading off"
the feeling from the artwork as you might decode an unfamiliar diagram
(1980 SS29, p. 39ff), but rather participating in a certain
practice of meaning-making and meaning-interpretation which he labels
a "form of life" (after Wittgenstein 1953 [2009]), and
which allows us to literally experience emotion and inner life
*in* artworks.



Other views exploit correspondence, and our experience of
correspondence as such, in different ways. Roger Scruton (1974)
notably analyzed aesthetic experience in terms of *seeing as*
(cf. Wittgenstein 1953 [2009], 1958 [1965]), and stressed in a way
similar to Wollheim that both a perceptual aspect and an aspect of
'thought' that can attribute emotion to what is seen are
inseparable aspects of one and the same experience (p.117ff.). At
base, such 'seeing as' is only available when we notice a
certain resemblance which we exploit via an act of the imagination to
hear something like a falling melody *as* sad (Chs.8-9).
In contrast with Wollheim, though, Scruton claimed the relevant
resemblance was between the *experience* of an artwork and the
experience of the emotion, not the artwork itself and the experience
of the emotion (p.127; for amendments to his view, see his 1999, pp.
140-170).



By definition, all correspondence views of expression will claim that
an experience of an expressive property (aesthetic or not) involves
experiencing the correspondence relation *itself*. In this
regard correspondence views are distinct from nearby theories.
Christopher Peacocke's (2009) view of expression, for instance,
is a view on which you can hear music *metaphorically* as sad
by exploiting, but not by consciously representing or experiencing, an
isomorphism between music and sadness. This isomorphism might make a
difference to subpersonal representational processes, and thereby come
to causally affect the phenomenology of the experience of sadness in
the music, but the relation itself is not experienced, on this
view.



Despite their differences, the correspondence views of Langer,
Wollheim, and Scruton all agree on one crucial point: the relevant
experience of correspondence is not one that can be decomposed into
strictly separable aspects, one of what is 'strictly'
perceived and another added element of what is expressed via what is
seen. According to all, an experience can be one of correspondence,
but in a particularly integrated and indecomposable way.



Correspondence views of expression--which, by definition, take it
that you understand an expression partly by experiencing or noticing
the correspondence relation *itself*--are still popular
(Budd 1995, Kivy 1989, Davies 1994), and still vigorously debated
(Peacocke 2009, Matravers 2013, Davies 2006, Levinson 2006b).


#### 1.4.4 Transformation



Transfer, projection, and correspondence views of expression all share
(at least) one key commitment--the commitment to the idea that
the kinds of emotions or mental states expressed in art are one and
the same as the kinds of emotions or mental states experienced in
ordinary life. But those philosophers most closely associated with the
view that aesthetic experience is focused on expressive properties did
not make this commitment. Instead, they took expression to transform
the nature of a feeling, and took the art-making process to be
inextricably bound up with the nature of this transformation
(Bosanquet 1892 [1904]; Ducasse 1929, p. 111; Dewey 1934 [1980];
Cassirer 1944, pp. 142-5).



The British philosopher Bernard Bosanquet propounded an early version
of this view in his 1892 [1904] *History of Aesthetic*. He
claimed that expression of content through form--and especially
of emotion--is the ultimate aim of any artwork. That content or
emotion is fundamentally bound up with its "embodiment" in
the artwork, "attached, annexed, to the quality of some object
- to all its detail" (p.4). The process of expression
"creates the feeling in creating its embodiment, and the feeling
so created not merely cannot be otherwise expressed, but cannot
otherwise exist, than in and through the embodiment which imagination
has found for it" (p.34). While John Dewey (1934 [1980]) thought
that aesthetic experience could be enjoyed in various ordinary life
circumstances, he considered art intrinsically expressive as the
"very operation of creating, by means of new objects, new modes
of experience ... It enables us to share vividly and deeply in
meanings to which we had been dumb" (p.248).



The philosopher who most systematically developed the view of
expression as transformation was R.G. Collingwood, whose
*Principles of Art* (1938 [1958]) drew deeply from Benedetto
Croce's work (1902 [1992], 1938 [2007]). Croce considered
expression fundamental to aesthetic experience, and considered
aesthetic experience to be one of the most fundamental modes of
cognitive interaction with the world (compare Baumgarten 1735 [1954]).
Expression, for Croce, was not a matter of communication; it was a
matter of organizing fleeting impressions into a clarified, meaningful
whole, and as such it can happen purely in the mind of an individual
(e.g. a single artist). A work of art, then, is not to be considered
any public manifestation, but rather a mental item, a
"theoretical form" to be "convert[ed] into words,
song, and outward shape" (1938, in Cahn and Meskin 2007,
p.272).



Collingwood (1938 [1958]) left aside Croce's unusual metaphysics
and philosophy of mind, but retained and elaborated much of what he
said about the nature of expression. Real art just is a matter of
expression, and expression is an internal process directed at your own
feelings. It involves clarifying those feelings in a way that releases
you from their dominating influence on your thought and action (pp.
109-10). To express a feeling is to attend wholly to a
particular affect-laden fleeting impression, to "stabilize and
perpetuate it as an idea" in a Humean sense (p.218). In
attending in this way, you come to consciousness of your feeling, but
you thereby also transform it: though "There is emotion there
before we express it ... as we express it, we confer upon it a
different kind of emotional colouring; in one way, therefore,
expression creates what it expresses" (p.152). Collingwood gives
the somewhat unusual label "Imagination" to "the new
form which feeling takes when transformed by the activity of
consciousness" (p.218). Insofar as art simply is expression, it
is the production not of some object in the physical world, nor even
"a 'form', understood as a pattern or a system of
relations between the various noises we hear or the various colours we
see," but an episode of "total imaginative
activity," which asserts the mastery of the self over feeling
(p.142).



Importantly for Collingwood, a consumer-side experience of an
artist's expression is not to be understood as the reception of
a transferred feeling, or as the interpretation of a meaningful symbol
or sign. Instead, it is a repetition of what the artist herself has
already done:



> 
> If a poet expresses, for example, a certain kind of fear, the only
> hearers who can understand him are those who are capable of
> experiencing that kind of fear themselves. Hence, when some one reads
> and understands a poem, he is not merely understanding the
> poet's expression of his, the poet's, emotions, he is
> expressing emotions of his own in the poet's words, which have
> thus become his own words. As Coleridge puts it, we know a man for a
> poet by the fact that he makes us poets. We know that he is expressing
> his emotions by the fact that he is enabling us to express ours.
> (p.118)
> 



This conception puts certain limitations on what aesthetic production
and spectator-side aesthetic experience can do. Expression cannot be
intended at the level of the individual feeling, as it isn't
clear before expression *what* feeling is affecting you
(p.111). What's more, a feeling when expressed is not purged
from the mind, only recognized for what it is, and controlled
(p.110).



Collingwood's view is complicated and often obscure, but
secondary literature has elucidated it somewhat. Hopkins (2017) claims
that the clarification and freedom that expression offers comes from
placing a raw feeling imaginatively into a modal profile, thereby
projecting how it would shift with changes in objective circumstances.
This can affect the feeling itself in the moment, just as
understanding the square projective shape in front of you as the face
of a cube can affect the phenomenology of your visual experience of
that shape.



There is an elusive quality to the expression views of Croce,
Collingwood, and their contemporaries: it is not easy to understand
the kinds of transformation, embodiments, or objectifications of
feelings that they take expression to involve. But the basic idea that
a feeling expressed in an artwork is thereby transformed in a way
inextricable from the work itself has proven enduringly popular
(Stolnitz 1960, p. 169; Sircello 1972, 1975; compare Budd 1985, Davies
1994, Levinson 1996c, and Shelley 2010; see Wollheim 1980, p. 76ff.,
Matravers 2013, and Tormey 1971 [1987] for criticism).


### 1.5 Fundamental Nature



The idea that aesthetic experience offers acquaintance with aspects of
nature has a deep history. Medieval philosophers treated it as a means
of knowing the divine. Several of those eighteenth-century
philosophers who focused on appreciation of form (see Section 1.1)
thought form was itself a reflection of God's creative
power.



The association between the arts and truth has an even longer history,
tracing at least back to Aristotle's claim in the
*Poetics* that (good) drama represents possibilities for human
life. Many philosophers have argued that the arts offer acquaintance
with emotions by expressing emotions (Section 1.4.), and many have
argued that they offer acquaintance with moral truths (Ruskin
1843-60 [2004]; Cousin 1854 [1873]; Nussbaum 1990; McMahon 2018;
see Landy 2012 for criticism). A significant new trend in
philosophical aesthetics also incorporates more cognitive content
generally into the focus of aesthetic experience (see Carroll 2002,
2006, 2015, Goldman 2013, Peacocke 2021). This section will not cover
all such views, but only those that treat aesthetic experience as a
means to acquaintance with or knowledge of fundamental facts about the
structure of the world and our place in it.



This claim is systematically defended in three historical contexts:
Romanticism, post-Kantian German Idealism, and the
20th-century intersection of existentialism and
phenomenology.


#### 1.5.1 Romanticism



The English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his critical and
philosophical essays published together as *Biographia
Literaria* (1817 [1907]), treated imagination as essential to
artistic creation and aesthetic experience--but fundamentally as
a source of knowledge rather than an empiricist faculty of association
or a way of entertaining fantasies. In a proto-Idealist vein, he
claimed that such knowledge was knowledge of the spirit that grounds
reality itself, and to which we ourselves belong as individual loci of
spirit (cf. Guyer 2014b, p. 65). In Germany, the poet-philosopher
Johann Christian Friedrich Holderlin (1795 [1963]) wrote that
aesthetic experience could lead the mind to construct a unity out of a
messy space of intuition, which unity mirrored the unity of spirit
inherent in the metaphysical fabric of the world itself.



A retrospective reverence for the ancient Greek arts was a touchstone
of the Romantics, who thought its pursuit of beauty precisely allowed
it to attain "objectivity." The English poet John Keats
concluded his famous *Ode on a Grecian Urn* (1820) with these
lines (46-50):



> 
> When old age shall this generation waste,
>   
> 
>   Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
>   
> 
> Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
>   
> 
>   "Beauty is truth, truth beauty--that is all
>   
> 
>     Ye know on earth, and all ye need to
> know."
> 



(For criticism of Keats on this point, see Ruskin 1843-60
[2004]). The German philosopher Friedrich Schlegel made this claim
explicitly in his essay "On the Study of Greek Poetry"
(1795). He thought Sophocles composed terrific tragedy effortlessly,
just by letting the harmonious structure of nature flow through him
into his drama.



The Romantics thought that aesthetic experience offered acquaintance
with a concrete individual sometimes called "the
Absolute"--either the infinite itself, or some particular
concrete individual within nature that somehow reflected the whole
unified spirit of the universe. As Schlegel (1798-1800 [1991])
put it, "one might believe [Romantic poetry] exists only to
characterize poetical individuals of all sorts; and yet there is still
no form so fit for expressing the entire spirit of an author ...
It alone can become, like the epic, a mirror of the whole
circumambient world, an image of the age" (SS116, pp.
31-2). This acquaintance with a concrete individual was
contrasted with conceptualized or descriptive understanding.



Although these various Romantic poets and philosophers thought
aesthetic experience was the best way to achieve acquaintance with the
true fundamental nature of the universe, they also took on a certain
pessimism or "irony" about the extent to which this could
really be achieved. The thematization of limitations on our knowledge
in the context of aesthetic attempts to know the harmonious unity of
the world is a common feature of Romantic writing.


#### 1.5.2 German Idealism



The systematic theories of German Idealism and the proposals of
Romanticism permeated one another, especially in the work of Friedrich
Schelling. His *System of Transcendental Idealism* (1800
[1978]) claimed that both the beautiful and the sublime gave us
awareness of a fundamental conflict between unconscious (but
nonetheless mental or spiritual) nature and the conscious
"infinity" of human freedom. The sublime makes us aware of
this terrible conflict directly, and the beautiful offers the
temporary apparent reprieve from or resolution of this conflict. In
his later *Philosophy of Fine Art* (1802-3 [1989]), he
denied that art offered "sensual stimulation, as recreation, as
relaxation for a spirit fatigued by more serious matters" (in
Cahn and Meskin 2007, p. 170). Instead, "truth and beauty are
merely two different ways of viewing the one absolute," where
the beautiful offers acquaintance with "the essential forms of
things" via concrete particulars, and philosophical theorization
offers knowledge of the same via general principles (pp. 178,
173).



Arthur Schopenhauer's metaphysics in *The World as Will and
Representation* (1818 [1958]) picks up a significant piece of
Schelling's system. He expanded on Schelling's claim that
"Will is primal being" by claiming that all of fundamental
reality is a matter of will. What aesthetic experience offers us is
direct, intimate acquaintance with essences: "what is thus known
is no longer the individual thing as such, but the *Idea*, the
eternal form, the immediate objectivity of the will at this
grade" (SS34 at p. 195).



Schopenhauer sometimes speaks as though we can choose to have an
aesthetic experience by a "conscious and violent tearing away
from the relations of the same object to the will" (SS39,
p.202); the 'genius' artist in particular is good at doing
this. When we "devote the whole power of our mind to
perception" of an object, we can come to forget our own
will--which is itself a pleasant thing, for our will is
constantly either bored with its own satisfaction or pained by its
frustration (SS34, pp. 178-9).



At other points, Schopenhauer presented aesthetic experience as a
passive result of experiencing great art, especially the art of tragic
drama. In tragedy, he wrote,



> 
> the terrible side of life is presented to us... and so that
> aspect of the world is brought before our eyes which directly opposes
> our will ... we become aware that there is still left in us
> something different that we cannot possibly know positively, but only
> negatively, as that which does *not* will life ... it
> raises us above the will and its interest, and puts us in such a mood
> that we find pleasure in the sight of what directly opposes the will.
> (p.433)
> 



Outside of aesthetic experience, we can only know the nature of the
universe by a kind of extrapolation. Schopenhauer thus puts aesthetic
experience in a place of priority with respect to philosophy
itself.



On this last point he was directly opposed by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel, whose system of historical development developed in
*The* *Phenomenology of Spirit* (1807 [1979]) and his
lectures on aesthetics and fine art (1820-29 [1920]) published
posthumously. According to him, the point of art is to come to
understand the fundamental, minded nature of the world--the
"spirit" to which we all belong as self-conscious,
rational, self-determining beings. Hegel considered a mode of
understanding fundamental nature to be more advanced the more that it
abstracts from concrete sensuous presentation and the more that it can
turn contemplation back onto itself. There is a scale within types of
art in this respect; visual art is less advanced than music, which is
itself less advanced than poetry (1807 [1979]). While self-conscious
Romantic poetry allows us to see our rational self-determining nature
as minded beings, it nonetheless remains imperfect as a mode of
knowledge of spirit. Philosophy, in its endless capacity for
self-conscious reflection, "is a higher mode of
presentment" (in Cahn and Meskin 2007, p. 181) and can
ultimately supplant art as a mode of knowing the world's
essential structure.



This Hegelian consequence is not a happy one, and it is a serious
drawback of treating art as revelatory of the structure of the
universe: its pits aesthetic endeavors in competition with scientific
and philosophical ones themselves (Poe 1850 [1984], Gotshalk 1947
p.8).


#### 1.5.3 Existentialism and Phenomenology



Schelling's (1800 [1978]) account of the inherent conflict
between "unconscious" nature and the
"conscious" free human subject had a great influence on
phenomenologists and existentialists who wrote about aesthetic
experience in the early to mid-20th century.



In his influential essay "On the Origin of the Work of
Art" (1935 [1971]), the phenomenologist Martin Heidegger
initially objected to the centrality of the "much-vaunted
aesthetic experience" to point out that the "thingly
aspect" of an artwork is essential to what it does for us (in
Cahn and Meskin 2007, p. 345). But it turns out that he is really only
objecting to a certain abstracted, perhaps Hegelian or neo-Hegelian
conception of aesthetic experience, rather than all experience of art
considered as special. He gives his own account of our experience of
art, one on which art offers acquaintance with the basic, essential
nature of our own human subjectivity. Our primary experience of the
physical objects around us foregrounds their utility to us--what
Heidegger had previously called their "readiness-to-hand"
(*Being and Time*, 1927)--rather than their physicality;
things only stand out as the clumps of matter they are when they fail
in serving us in the way we expect them to, as when a tool breaks. It
is art that allows us to step back from this mode of experiencing
objects to contemplate that very phenomenological mode of
readiness-to-hand itself, and how it struggles against blunt physical
constraints. A work of art, then, sets up a
"world"--roughly, a way of experiencing
things--as it emerges from its physical basis (the
"earth"). Through experiences of art, we come to see this
struggle itself. Heidegger uses the example of a Van Gogh painting of
worn, dirty peasant shoes and a Greek temple to exemplify how these
ways of "being" emerge from physical things in their
"thingliness." Heidegger defines art as "the
becoming and happening of truth" as a form of
"unconcealedness:" it brings to the foreground our ways of
experiencing the world and how they clash with physicality.



The French atheist existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre studied with
Heidegger and with the founding phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. The
view of aesthetic experience that emerges from his novel
*Nausea* (1938 [1965]) is one that draws from both of their
conceptions of the physical world as fundamentally devoid of meaning.
The world and all of "existence" as it is in itself
independently of human agency is absurd enough to inspire a form of
nausea in the narrator, Antoine Roquentin. This absurdity consists in
the facts that: things happen contingently and for no particular
reason; no life has any narrative unity; and there is no patterned
structure to the unfolding of events one after another.



What the experience of art is needed to do is to bring any order,
structure, and meaning to human life. In a series of scenes in which
Roquentin hears the music of a particular jazz vocalist, he comes to
find in music the necessity, purpose, and internal structure the world
had lacked:



> 
> It seems inevitable, the necessity of this music is so strong ...
> If I love that beautiful voice, it is above all because of that: it is
> neither for its fullness nor its sadness, but because it is the event
> which so many notes have prepared so far in advance, dying so that it
> might be born. ... *something has happened*. (38)
> 



From Roquentin's ecstatic listening we can extrapolate a theory
of an experience of art and why it is so essential to us. Art
exercises human freedom to structure the world and give it meaning and
a sense of purpose or necessity; it offers to those who appreciate it
a form of aesthetic experience that makes the world feel whole and
necessary. By extrapolating from Sartre's writing of
*Nausea* itself, we can also see that art can give us
acquaintance with the very absurdity of existence itself, and
challenge us to make something meaningful of ourselves. In *What is
Literature?* (1948 [1967]) Sartre called writing a way of
"imposing the unity of mind on the diversity of things"
that serves our "need of feeling that we are essential in
relationship to the world" (p.27). The creation and appreciation
of art, then, not only offers knowledge of the nauseating fundamental
absurdity in existence, but also offers at least a phenomenological
cure for it.



Not all in Sartre's group were so optimistic (nor all so
pessimistic about the meaning in the world; consider Sartre's
Christian contemporary Marcel 1951 [1960]). Albert Camus (1942), for
instance, thought that absurdity was inescapable, and all you could do
was defy it and go on living anyway (cf. Nagel 1971). Later critical
theorists who were deeply influenced by the existentialists took a
more complicated stance. In *Aesthetic Theory* (1970 [1997]),
Theodor Adorno claimed that artworks offer fantasies of escape from
the material world by imposing a new form upon its matter, but only in
a way that involves rejecting their material origin. "Aesthetic
experience," then, "is that of something that spirit may
find neither in the world nor in itself; it is possibility promised by
its impossibility" (pp. 135-6).



This concludes the survey of the various different types of properties
on which philosophers have variously claimed aesthetic experience
focuses. Note that it is consistent to claim that aesthetic experience
is focused on more than one of these types of properties. In an
important turn in mid-20th-century aesthetics, Frank Sibley
(1959) argued that there was a heterogeneous class of aesthetic
properties--including beauty, sublimity, elegance, charm, and
various expressive properties--on which aesthetic experience
focused (for discussion see Matravers 1996, Brady and Levinson 2001).
Some contemporary philosophers draw from multiple traditions to
characterize aesthetic experience (Carroll 2002, 2006, 2015, Levinson
1996a-d, 2016b, Stecker 2005, Goldman 2013, Peacocke 2021). Views of
aesthetic experience that diffuse focus onto several different types
of properties of objects are under correspondingly more pressure to
clarify what is special about aesthetic experience in other terms.


## 2. Mental aspects of aesthetic experience


### 2.1 Pleasure



Almost all agree that pleasure is a typical aspect of aesthetic
experience (for exceptions see Carroll 2006, Adorno 1970 [1997]). But
not all agree that it is an essential or even necessary aspect of
aesthetic experience (those who do not include Levinson 1996c, Stecker
2005, and Peacocke 2021).



Is it possible to explain the source of such pleasure in aesthetic
experience? It's not obvious that it should be possible,
especially on the view that art has no function and aesthetic
experience no further purpose (see Section 2.5). One option is simply
to delineate the particular type of pleasure that makes aesthetic
experience what it is--and thereby count on an
interlocutor's recognition of that type of
pleasure--without explaining its source. In the
"aestheticist" or "art for art's sake"
movement amongst Romantic poets and essayists (Gautier 1835-6
[2005], Poe 1850 [1984], Baudelaire 1857 [1965], Pater 1873 [1986];
for overview see Guyer 2014b, Ch.6), many took this particular stance,
especially to rebel against those (like Ruskin 1843-60 [2004])
who took the point of art to be moral in nature.



It is more common, however, to claim that aesthetic experience
involves pleasure taken in some further aspect of aesthetic
experience. There are a few distinct proposed sources of pleasure in
aesthetic experience. First, we might take pleasure in positive
evaluation of an object or its creator. Second, we might enjoy the
activity of our own minds, including the free play of our faculties.
Third, we might feel joyful relief in being liberated, at least
temporarily, from certain practical pressures or domination. Fourth,
we might take pleasure in coming to know or understand something in
aesthetic experience. Fifth, and finally, we might take pleasure in a
special connection to others made available in aesthetic experience in
particular.



Various theories of aesthetic experience combine these claims in
consistent ways; it is possible to think that there are several
grounds for the total pleasure involved here. Note also that
it's consistent to take pleasure to be a necessary aspect of
aesthetic experience without claiming (i) that pleasure makes
aesthetic experience what it is, (ii) that pleasure is the
*point* or *aim* of aesthetic experience, or (iii) that
an object's power to produce pleasure in us is the focus of
aesthetic experience. (For discussion of this last claim, see Section
1.2 above).



Perhaps most popular is the claim that aesthetic experience involves
pleasure because (and insofar as) it involves a positive evaluation of
an object in some respect (see also Sections 1.1 and 1.3). The idea
here is that we take pleasure in an object's intrinsic value,
its suitedness to function, its power to produce a certain kind of
experience, or even in the goodness and skill of its creator
(including, perhaps, the divine).



To compliate matters, pleasure can be understood in at least two ways:
as a phenomenological feeling with a certain positive "hedonic
tone," or as a kind of pro-attitude with positive content (see
Labukt 2012, Bramble 2013). On the former definition, it's not
clear that any positive *evaluation* of an object should
involve a positive frisson of feeling (Peacocke 2021, pp.
173-4). Given that we can begrudgingly, enviously, or otherwise
grumpily attribute genuine value to things in other contexts, why
should positive evaluation in aesthetics necessarily involve a
positive hedonic tone? On the latter definition, it might trivially
follow that aesthetic experience involves pleasure (as a pro-attitude)
if it involves positive evaluation, but this claim has limited
interest. Recent work in aesthetic normativity has done significant
work to make sense of a combination of the two (Gorodeisky 2019, 2021;
Kriegel forthcoming).



A second common claim is that pleasure in aesthetic experience derives
from a biologically natural joy we take in the activity of our own
mental faculties. This position was especially popular in the
eighteenth century among those philosophers who thought of the mind
fundamentally in terms of a limited number of faculties like
sensation, imagination, understanding, and reason (Baumgarten 1735
[1954], Meier 1999, Schlegel 1795 [2001], 1798-1800 [1991]).
This view also has its own contemporary proponents (Levinson 1996b, p.
13).



The claim that we take pleasure in mental activity can be readily
combined with the thought that aesthetic experience involves an
evaluation, especially as it involves a (positive) evaluation of our
own minds (Baumgarten 1735 [1954], Mendelssohn 1758 [1997], Feagin
1983). But this can seem too much focused on the perceiver or
appreciator rather than the object of aesthetic experience itself.



A famous version of this second claim derives largely from Kant (1789
[1987]), who argued that we take pleasure in the *free play* of
our mental faculties. This pleasure has a substantive aspect, but it
also has a privative aspect. In the absence of a concept we apply to
some object of perceptual representation, our imagination and
understanding are liberated from the strictures of rational,
discursive thought about the things we encounter in experience. This
liberation is itself joyful. Some philosophers, notably Friedrich
Schiller (1795 [1989]), thought this mental liberation was the single
fundamental source of pleasure in aesthetic experience (cf. Matherne
and Riggle 2020).



This relates closely to a third proposed source of pleasure in
aesthetic experience: liberation from certain practical thought and
emotion in aesthetic experience. Schopenhauer (1818 [1958]) took it
that the basic condition of human practical life was a painful one: as
willing creatures, we are constantly vacillating between frustration
of our desires and boredom in the satisfaction of them. What aesthetic
experience offers us is a reprieve from such suffering, a way to
become a "*pure* will-less, painless, timeless
*subject of knowledge*" (SS34, p. 179; cf. Schelling
1800 [1978]).



Influential modern theories focused on liberation from the influence
of unexpressed emotions. R.G.C. Collingwood (1938 [1958]) in
particular thought that all experience of "art proper,"
whether as creator or appreciator involves expression of an emotion,
and that all such expression involves clarification and transformation
of a feeling into something whose murky domination you can now resist
in a way you couldn't before (see Section 1.4.4 above).



Collingwood explicitly distinguishes his view from another kind of
view that takes pleasure in aesthetic experience to be a matter of
release. This other view makes a process of "catharsis"
central to some or all aesthetic experience. Catharsis is an
Aristotelian concept; Aristotle himself used it to explain the
pleasurable release from tension we feel after a tragic drama raises
emotions of pity and fear in us (*Poetics*). But it is not
entirely clear what catharsis is.



A fourth proposed source of pleasure in aesthetic experience is the
pleasure of gaining knowledge or understanding. Those who take
aesthetic experience to involve, essentially, a form of acquaintance
with fundamental aspects of nature tend to attribute pleasure in this
way. But any broadly epistemic approach to aesthetic experience can
attribute pleasure to this source, even if the knowledge or
understanding gained by aesthetic experience is not necessarily of
fundamental metaphysics. Nelson Goodman (1968 [1976]), for instance,
took aesthetic experience to be an encounter with a meaningful
symbolic object. He rejects all attempts "to distinguish the
aesthetic in terms of immediate pleasure ... The claim that
aesthetic pleasure is of a different and superior *quality* is
now too transparent a dodge to be taken seriously"
(p.242-3). But he nonetheless notes that "what delights is
discovery," so there's pleasure involved here (p.258).



Finally, some trace pleasure in aesthetic experience to connection
with other people. This claim is particularly associated with those
who treat aesthetic experience as focused on expressive properties
(see Section 1.4. above). The pleasure we take in communing with
others can be a matter of connecting with an artist and her own inner
life (Wordsworth 1802 [1984], Vischer 1873 [1994], Proust
1913-1927 [2003]), or a matter of connecting with others who
would react to an object in the same distinctively aesthetic ways we
do, or both (Tolstoy 1897 [2007]).


### 2.2 Conceptualization



One traditional line of thought in aesthetic theory takes it that
aesthetic experience of an object excludes conceptual thought about
what kind of thing that object is. This was central to Kant's
(1789 [1987]) view; he thought that the imagination and the
understanding could engage in a "free play" in aesthetic
experience precisely because no conceptual binding restricted the way
an object presented itself to us in this context.



The same idea has been central to vastly different theories of
aesthetic experience too. After Croce (1902, 1938), Collingwood (1938
[1958]) denied that an emotion could be conceptualized in the
expression essential to aesthetic experience because conceptual
"description generalizes ... Expression, on the contrary,
individualizes" (112). The idea that conceptualization is
generalization, and so incompatible with the focus on the
*particular* demanded by aesthetic experience, is an enduring
one (see e.g. Sibley 1974, 1983). Theodor Adorno (1970 [1997]) claimed
that artworks offer the promise of escape from worldly
conceptualization, although he also argued that this promise is
inevitably broken, given that artworks are themselves aspects of the
real world.



Even those who take aesthetic experience to be a mode of cognitive
contact with the world often distinguish it from other cognitive modes
in terms of its incompatibility with conceptualization. The Romantics
(see Section 1.5.1. above) thought that the "absolute," or
the total infinite substratum of reality, could be experienced in a
concrete individual, but not by conceptualization. Nelson Goodman
(1968 [1976]) treated aesthetic experience as a matter of
understanding objects that present their subjects in an analog way
(with what he calls "syntactic density, semantic density, and
syntactic repleteness," p. 252), where this contrasts sharply
with the conceptual mode of representation offered by natural
languages.



On the other hand, various philosophers have argued that
conceptualization is positively *necessary* to aesthetic
experience.



Scruton (1974) took a form of "unasserted" conceptual
imagination to be central to the "seeing-as" and
"hearing-as" (etc.) of aesthetic experience. In this
Scruton was influenced by Wollheim, but Wollheim's (1968 [1980],
1990, 1994) reliance on conceptualization in aesthetic experience
plausibly runs deeper than Scruton's. To have an aesthetic
experience of an artwork in particular is, in part, to
*interpret* it, and to interpret an artwork is in part to
attribute certain intentions concerning that very experience to the
artist who made it (1987, p. 8; for a famous criticism of this claim,
see Wimsatt and Beardsley, 1946). This attribution of intentions
surely involves conceptualization, insofar as intention itself
does.



A similar interpenetration of thought and experience undergirds
Walton's (1970) famous argument that an aesthetic experience of
an artwork necessarily involves assigning that work to a category. The
expressive chaos of Picasso's *Guernica* would not seem
chaotic at all if it belonged to a genre of "Guernicas"
which tended to be much more brashly colored and three-dimensional; in
that context, it would seem flat, muted, even gentle. In a rare entry
into aesthetics, p. F. Strawson (1966) once argued that aesthetic
appraisal--itself plausibly a part of aesthetic
experience--must involve conceptualization of a work of art
*as* such, in order to focus attention on just those features
relevant to such appraisal (for critical discussion, see Sibley 1974
and Wollheim 1980).


### 2.3 Imagination



It's an old idea (Addison 1712 [1879], Burke 1756 [2007]) that
imagination is essentially involved in aesthetic experience. But
different philosophers mean vastly different things by
"imagination" here.



In the eighteenth century, the imagination was conceived by both
empiricists and rationalists as one of the few fundamental mental
faculties (alongside others like sensation and reason). As such, it
played various different roles in the mental system. One of those
roles was to take up and combine the raw material offered by sensation
into more sophisticated representations available in the absence of
individual objects there to be sensed.



As Kant put it, the imagination "synthesiz[es] the manifold of
intuition." In ordinary (non-aesthetic) experience, it does so
according to rules or schema provided by the understanding, which
correspond roughly to what we consider concepts today. In an
experience of a beautiful object or scene, however, the imagination is
given no such rules, and engages in a "harmonious" form of
"free play" with the faculty of understanding without
bringing the object presented in experience under any particular
concept whatsoever (see also Section 2.2. above).



Although it is hard to say exactly what such "free play"
is (cf. Ginsborg 1997, Matherne 2016, Kuplen 2015, Savile 2020),
the idea that aesthetic experience crucially involves such free play
of the imagination has been a vastly influential one (see Guyer 2014
for a comprehensive approach to the history of this thought). It is
closely allied with the idea of beauty as a form of unity in variety
(Hutcheson 1726 [2004]), and the idea that we enjoy the activity of
our own mental faculties in aesthetic experience (see Section 2.1.
above). As Benedetto Croce summarized it, it is the idea that
"aesthetic activity fuses impressions into an organic
whole... the synthesis of variety, or multiplicity, into
unity" (1902 [1992], p. 21). Such play is meant to involve the
subject as an agent, and it is meant to be pleasurable in part due to
the freedom it gives to the imagination. This is disputable: as the
novelist-philosophers Vernon Lee and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson
(1912) put it, "we do not take pleasure in playing because
playing makes us feel free; but, on the contrary, we get greater and
more unmixed pleasure while playing, because we are free to ...
accommodate our activity to our pleasure" (pp. 6-7).



This kind of mental play should be carefully distinguished from other
forms of play associated with aesthetic experience that also
constitutively involve imagination (e.g. Spencer 1855 [1895], Groos
1896-9 [1901]). For example, Walton (1990) has influentially
treated our aesthetic engagement with various fictions as a form of
make-believe game involving imagination as constrained by certain
kinds of prescriptions given by the structure of a story or a picture
(cf. Groos 1898 on a "self-conscious illusion," pp.
302-3). This is structured, game-like play; Walton intends us to
understand what we do with such aesthetic objects on the model of what
kids do with toys. It is also often a purely 'internal'
play, one that doesn't manifest in further bodily action. But it
is a form of play undergirded by the imagination not as a synthetic
capacity to structure a mess of impressions, but rather undergirded by
the imagination as a more general creative capacity, one that allows
us to entertain vividly things which are not currently present to our
senses.



This now more common conception of the imagination also informs those
otherwise various and disparate views which take aesthetic experience
to extend beyond what is immediately given in perception. The English
Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1832 [2003]) defined poetry as the
expression of imagination, where the imagination is just "mind
acting upon ... thoughts so as to color them with its own light,
and composing from them as from elements, other thoughts, each
containing within itself the principle of its own integrity"
(p.674). Arthur Schopenhauer (1818 [1958]) thought that the
imagination of the artist was required to go beyond what is literally
perceived to divine the essences of things:



> 
> actual objects are almost always only very imperfect copies of the
> Idea that manifests itself in them. Therefore the man of genius
> requires imagination, in order to see in things not what nature has
> actually formed, but what she endeavoured to form, yet did not bring
> about ... (SS36 p. 198).
> 



Dilman Walter Gotshalk wrote in *Art and the Social Order*
(1947) that aesthetic experience involves the amplification of what is
currently presented in experience by "suggestions of the
object" brought to mind by the imagination (p.19).



Roger Scruton built a theory of aesthetic experience on this creative,
expansive power of the imagination in his book *Art and
Imagination* (1974). A proper experience of art is an imaginative
one, one which "goes beyond what is strictly given"
(p.98). The relevant role of imagination here is to make it possible
for you to engage in a voluntary, willed form of aspectual seeing, or
"seeing as," which makes it possible for you to see a
certain shade of blue *as* sad, for instance, even though it
cannot literally *be* sad. Scruton is quick to emphasize that
this kind of imagination is not perfectly free, but rather
constrained; it "involves thinking of these descriptions [e.g.
of blue as sad] as appropriate in some way to the primary
object," and is subject to certain constraints of rationality
and objectivity (pp. 98, 55, 112).



A final role key role for the imagination in aesthetic experience of
art involves recreating something that was originally in the mind of
the artist. This is, quite often, a matter of an emotion that is
expressed in the artwork (Tolstoy 1897 [2007]; Croce 1912, 1938;
Collingwood 1938 [1958]; see Section 1.4 above). But it can also be
more than that. In *The Imaginary* (1940 [2004]) and his later
essay "What is Literature?" (1948 [1967]) the French
existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre spoke of the imagination as needed to
constitute an object for conscious aesthetic contemplation (cf.
Dufrenne 1953). In the case of literature, "the imagination of
the spectator has not only a regulative function but a constitutive
one. It does not play: it is called upon to recompose the beautiful
object beyond the traces left by the artist" (1948, p. 33). John
Dewey (1934 [1980]) also claimed, in his theory of
'esthetic' and thus particularly unified experience, that
a spectator of art "must *create* his own experience. And
his creation must include relations comparable to those which the
original producer underwent. ... there must be an ordering of the
elements of the whole that is in form, although not in details, the
same as the process of organization the creator of the work
consciously experienced" (p.314).


### 2.4 Emotion



Emotion has been taken to be central to aesthetic experience since
early work on aesthetics as such in the eighteenth century. In France,
the influential Abbe Jean-Baptiste Du Bos (1719 [1748])
emphasized the importance of occurrent, bodily emotion in our
appreciation of drama. This emotion is pleasant in comparison to the
languor of everyday life (cf. discussion in Hume, "Of
tragedy," 1757 [1987b]). In Germany, Georg Friedrich Meier
(1999) treated the passions as essential to the pleasure we take in
aesthetic experience, and Mendelssohn (1785 [1979])--after
Dubos--added that part of why this is pleasurable is that we feel
a certain salutary effect on the body in having emotion in aesthetic
experience. Although Baumgarten (1735 [1954]) wrote more generally
about aesthetics as the science of cognition of objects by sensation,
he also specified in the case of poetry in particular that one central
goal is "to arouse affects" (SSXXV, p. 24).



With the rise of Romanticism and then of empathy theory, artists and
philosophers were particularly concerned to clarify the ways in which
aesthetic experience involved feeling an emotion alongside that
expressed in an artwork (see Section 1.4 above). It is possible to
take aesthetic experience to be singularly focused on emotional
expression without claiming that the appreciator of an aesthetic
object actually needs to feel the emotion that object expresses
(Langer 1953). Nonetheless, many views of expression did indeed think
that an appropriate aesthetic experience involved feeling that
expressed emotion (Bosanquet 1915, Collingwood 1938 [1958], Wollheim
1990). On a view that takes aesthetic experience essentially to
involve appreciating expression of emotion, and which also takes such
appreciation essentially to involve *feeling* that emotion,
feeling some emotion or other is essential to aesthetic experience.
But the emotion in question varies from case to case, depending on
what the aesthetic object expresses.



A distinct influential view has it that there is one consistent
distinctive "aesthetic emotion" felt in all aesthetic
experience of any object whatsoever. A version of this thought G.E.
Moore's brief remarks on aesthetic experience in *Principia
Ethica* (1903 [1993]; cf. Guyer 2014c pp. 112-3): "It
is not sufficient that a man should merely see the beautiful qualities
in a picture and know that they are beautiful, in order that we may
give his state of mind the highest praise. We require that he should
also *appreciate* the beauty of that which he sees ... he
should have an appropriate emotion towards the beautiful qualities
which he cognizes" (SS113). But the idea of a distinctive
aesthetic emotion is perhaps most closely associated with
Moore's friend Clive Bell (1914 [2007]), who took the goodness
of art to be a matter of its ability to rouse us to a "state of
ecstasy" by its "significant form" (cf. Dean 1996).
Bell explicitly called this "peculiar emotion provoked by works
of art" an "aesthetic emotion."



Bell presumed so much agreement on this point that he said little
about what this emotion *is*, leading to much criticism (e.g.
Stolnitz 1960, p. 144). Nelson Goodman (1968 [1976]) claimed that this
oversight meant that Bell had little or no available distinction
between non-aesthetic and aesthetic experience: "The theory of
aesthetic phlogiston explains everything and nothing" (p.247).
More recently, Jesse Prinz (2014) has suggested that we understand the
aesthetic emotion in question as a form of wonder (see Carroll 2019
for objections).



After Bell, Dewey (1934 [1980]) and Collingwood (1938 [1958]) took
more moderate positions on the nature of a specific aesthetic emotion.
Both thought that aesthetic experiences were colored distinctively by
their own variable emotions, but also that there is a distinctive
affect in common across all aesthetic experiences. Dewey claimed that
this affect was a matter of "qualitative unity" of an
experience (1938 [1980], pp. 84-5), and Collingwood that it was
"the specific feeling of having successfully expressed
ourselves" (1938 [1958], p. 117).



All the views discussed in this section thus far share the claim that
some emotion or other is essential to aesthetic experience. There are
other views on which emotion is a common concomitant of aesthetic
experience, but that it does not make aesthetic experience what it is
(e.g. Vivas 1937). Goodman (1968 [1976]) insisted that "in
aesthetic experience the *emotions function cognitively*
... Cognitive use involves discriminating and relating them in
order to gauge and grasp the work and integrate it with the rest of
our experience and the world" (p.248). According to Goodman,
such cognitively purposed emotions need not be present in aesthetic
experience, and they are sometimes present in non-aesthetic experience
too (p.251).



It is somewhat surprising that two of the most important historical
theories of aesthetic experience make the now rare claim that emotion
is positively incompatible with aesthetic experience. Kant (1789), for
instance, claimed that "a pure judgment of
taste"--that which you would make in an aesthetic
experience of pure beauty--"is independent of charm and
emotion" (p.68). Schopenhauer (1818 [1958]) thought of emotion
as wrapped up in motive and will, in its striving or frustration, but
also claimed that aesthetic experience offered complete release from
such striving and frustration. As such, aesthetic experience does not
involve emotion as we ordinarily understand it. Nonetheless,
Schopenhauer did indeed notice the importance of emotional expression
to certain arts, and he conceded that some of those general
"Ideas" we can come to understand in the course of
aesthetic experience are ideas of emotions and "their essential
nature, without any accessories, and so also without the motives for
them" (SS52, p. 260).


### 2.5 Disinterest



The idea that aesthetic experience must be in some way
"disinterested"--roughly speaking, unconcerned with
the way its object could serve further practical purposes--is
central in discussion of aesthetic experience. It is used to
distinguish aesthetic experience from close counterpart experiences of
the same object, and is thought to capture something essential about
the nature of the aesthetic. But philosophers can mean quite different
things by "disinterested" (for a brief history, see
Stolnitz 1961).



Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, is often cited
(e.g. by Guyer 2004) as the originator of the modern idea of
disinterest. However, John Haldane (2013) persuasively traces the idea
right back to Johannes Scotus Erigena, who wrote in his *De
divisione naturae* that "The sense of sight is abused by
those who approach the beauty of visible forms with appetite or
desire" (Haldane 2013, p. 30; Erigena, *De divisione
naturae*, IV-V). Some find an ancient ancestor of the idea
in Aristotle's ethical writings (see entry on
"Aristotle's Aesthetics").



Nonetheless, Shaftesbury (1711) did write of disinterest, and
illustrated the idea by considering two approaches to a coin: one
aesthetic, which delights just in mere contemplation of its form, and
the other practical, which considers what it might purchase. Hutcheson
(1726 [2004]) followed Shaftesbury in claiming that the pleasure we
take in the beautiful is "distinct from that joy which arises
from self-love upon prospect of advantage," and from any
prospect of gaining knowledge (in Cahn and Meskin 2007). Hume
(1739-40 [1987]) is a rare exception amongst eighteenth century
British philosophers in allowing "that a great part of ...
beauty ... is deriv'd from the idea of convenience and
utility" (2.1.8.2; cf. Santayana 1896, Zemach 1997).



Early eighteenth century German philosophy of pleasure in perception
explicitly classified it as pleasure taken in the perfection of
something perfectly suited to its function (Wolff 1719 [2003]; see
Section 1.1. above). Moses Mendelssohn (1785 [1979]) retained the
centrality of perfection to aesthetic experience, but he also claimed
that



> 
> We contemplate the beauty of nature and of art, without the least
> arousal of desire, with gratification and satisfaction. It seems to be
> a particular mark of beauty that ... it pleases, even if we do
> not possess it, and that is remote from the urge to possess it.
> (Lesson VII, p. 70, translated in Guyer 2020, section on Mendelssohn)
> 



In an essay dedicated to Mendelssohn ("Attempt at a Unification
of all the Fine Arts and Sciences under the Concept of *that which
is complete in itself*" 1785 [1993]), the later aesthetician
Karl Moritz extended this idea of disinterest to argue that experience
of the beautiful offers you a way of pleasantly forgetting yourself in
"unselfish gratification" by thinking of the beautiful
object "as something that has been brought forth entirely for
its own sake, so that it could be something complete in itself"
(trans. Guyer, p. 545).



It was Kant's conception in the *Critique of Judgment*
(1789) that cemented the place of disinterestedness in aesthetics, and
shaped the discourse for the centuries to come. When Kant claimed that
pleasure taken in a representation of a beautiful object (as such) is
"disinterested," he meant that this pleasure is
"indifferent ... to the real existence of the object of
this representation" (SS1-5). In his system, this is
tantamount to saying that this pleasure is unmediated by any desire
*for* the object (cf. Zangwill 1992). This disinterest
distinguishes the pleasure that grounds a judgment of the beautiful
from the pleasure that grounds a judgment of something as merely
"agreeable." Under a separate heading (not that of
"disinterest" per se), Kant added that pleasure in a
beautiful object is not based in any attribution of a specific purpose
to it. He thus distanced himself from predecessors like Wolff.



One way of interpreting a lack of concern with the "real
existence" of the object of an aesthetic experience is to
understand that experience as focused on appearances instead. Edward
Bullough (1957) espoused a version of this view in 1907 lectures at
Cambridge. The idea had a wave of popularity in the
mid-20th century (Gotshalk 1947, Urmson 1957, Tomas 1959).
The view survives in the influential contemporary work of Martin Seel
(2005, p. 24): "to perceive something in the process of its
appearing for the sake of its appearing is the focal point of
aesthetic perception, the point at which every exercise of this
perception is directed."



A variation of this approach casts aesthetic experience as that which
is valued or enjoyed "for its own sake," as opposed to
valuing or enjoying it as a means to some further end (cf. Gorodeisky
and Marcus 2018 on "self-containment," p. 118). Gary
Iseminger (2006) denies that any aesthetic experience can be
individuated purely in terms of how it feels, since what really makes
a state of valued experience aesthetic is a matter of its being valued
just for its own sake, and valuing is not just a matter of having a
certain feeling. In revision of his earlier (1996a, 1996b) account of
aesthetic experience, Jerrold Levinson (2016b) agrees with
Iseminger's view, except he claims that the evaluative component
of such appreciation must itself be phenomenological (p.39; cf.
Stecker 2005). Both Iseminger and Levinson treat disinterest in this
sense as part of what makes aesthetic experience (or appreciation)
aesthetic at all (for objections, see Goodman 1968 [1976] p. 242,
Meskin 2001, and Carroll 2006).



Some of these views that take aesthetic experience to be valued
"for its own sake" depart significantly from the Kantian
conception of disinterest. For instance, Roger Scruton's (1974)
conception of the imaginatively inflected perception (e.g.
"seeing-as") essential to aesthetic experience can be
based on a desire for an object "*for no other reason*,
where one's desire is, nonetheless, based on a conception of the
thing one wants" (p.147).



Another dominant conception of disinterest in the 20th
century was a conception of a certain "aesthetic attitude"
one can take voluntary with respect to a natural scene or an
artwork--an attitude which consists in detaching one's
practical self from what is perceived in that object. As Zangwill
(1992) notes, this notion of disinterest is "unKantian" in
its modification of a stance, attitude, or type of *attention*,
rather than pleasure, as disinterested.



In discussion of sublime natural phenomena, Edward Bullough (1912)
seems to have been the first to suggest that we can voluntarily put
our experience "out of gear with our practical, actual
self" as long as we have a certain amount of
"distance" from the threatening aspects of these natural
phenomena (in Cahn and Meskin, 2007, pp. 244). What is important in
the form of an object of such aesthetic attention is that it supports
a "marked degree of artificiality" that allows us to take
this stance on the object (p.249). This artificiality keeps us engaged
in a "personal" but "filtered" way with the
emotions of the object of our experience (p.245).



The idea that a certain "distance" can make it possible to
forget the particularities of one's own practical situation and
thereby allow fuller "participation" in an object of
aesthetic experience has been attractive to theorists in various
distinct research paradigms. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1960 [2005])
emphasized how "aesthetic distance in a true sense ...
makes possible a genuine and comprehensive participation in what is
presented before us" via "self-forgetfulness" (pp.
124-5). John Dewey (1934 [2007]) wrote that in
'esthetic' experience



> 
> There is no severance of self, no holding of it aloof, but fulness of
> participation ... so thoroughgoing ... that the work of art
> is detached or cut off from the kind of specialized desire that
> operates when we are moved to consume or appropriate a thing
> physically. (p.262; cf. Beardsley 1958 [1981], pp. 288-291)
> 



This conception of disinterest takes it to be not just compatible with
but also *supportive* of a specialized activity
("participation"), and even sometimes takes it to be a
product of a personal decision to engage in a certain kind of way with
an object of experience.



In the middle of the 20th century, George Dickie levied a
famous objection to this interpretation of disinterest in his paper
"The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude" (1964). He wrote:



> 
> "disinterestedness" cannot properly be used to refer to a
> special kind of attention ... [it] is a term which is used to
> make clear that an action has certain kinds of motives ...
> Attending to an object, of course, has its motives but the attending
> itself is not interested or disinterested ... although the
> attending may be more or less close. (p.60)
> 



Proposed cases of wrongly motivated attention, he suggests, are really
just cases of (degrees of) inattention. Levinson (2016b) disagrees,
arguing that attending is indeed something that you can do with a
motive, and that the motive you have in attending affects your
phenomenology. Nanay (2015) picks up this general point and proposes
that specifically *aesthetic* attention is distributed among
all the properties of an object (though see Nanay 2016 for
complexities).



Langer's (1953/2007) distinct objection is that the
"aesthetic attitude" is too demanding to be an essential
part of any aesthetic experience whatsoever: "If the groundwork
of all genuine art experience is really such a sophisticated, rare,
and artificial attitude, it is something of a miracle that the world
recognizes works of art as public treasures at all" (p.324).



These are objections to the interpretation of disinterest in terms of
a special attitude or attentive stance one can take on an object. They
are not, as such, objections more generally to the claim that
disinterest is an essential or even just a necessary aspect of
aesthetic experience. That latter claim is still widely popular. But
there are a few reasonable ways to resist it.



One concerns the deep personal importance of aesthetic experience.
Nick Riggle (2016) argues that our phenomenal appreciation of beauty
must be interested in at least a certain sense in order for it to be
able to effect the types of personal transformation that it does (cf.
Proust 1913-1927 [2003], Nehamas 2007). Another way to resist
the emphasis on disinterest is to note the great variety of aesthetic
experiences available to us, especially with the staggering diversity
of contemporary arts (Adorno 1970 [1997], pp. 10-11).


### 2.6 Normativity



At least since Kant's *Critique of Judgment* (1789) many
have thought that aesthetic experience involves a form of
normativity--either that an aesthetic experience is the type one
*should* have of certain natural scenes or art objects, or that
having some such experience entails thinking that others
*should* have the same experience of that object. Kant
certainly made the latter claim. As he put it, an object seems to you
to *merit* a certain subjective response of disinterested
pleasure insofar as it sets your faculties of imagination and
understanding into a form of free play (see Section 1.3 and Section
2.3 above).



Both Kant and Hume before him (1757 [1987]) took it that aesthetics
demanded a reconciliation between two intuitively clashing facts:
first, that the way to appreciate an object aesthetically is to
*feel* some way towards it; and second, that such appreciation
is merited or deserved. Neither Hume nor Kant thought that beauty was
an objective matter, even though we do speak of beauty as though it is
a property that inheres in objects (contrast Edith Landmann-Kalischer;
see Matherne 2020).



Even though normativity is sometimes tied to objectivity--you
*should* feel or think this about that, because it is an
objective matter--this is not so obviously the case in philosophy
of aesthetic experience. Objectivity and normativity have a tortured
relationship in this discussion.



Consider, for instance, George Santayana's (1896) take. He
presented beauty as "pleasure regarded as the quality of a
thing," i.e. "objectified" (pp. 31-2). To have
an aesthetic experience is to feel a form of pleasure not *as*
belonging to one's mind or body, but rather *as if* it
belonged to the object. This need not involve really thinking that the
pleasure really does belong to the object; on the contrary, he
claimed, "beauty ... cannot be conceived as an independent
existence which affects our senses and we consequently perceive"
(p.29). For this reason, phenomenological objectification does not
make sense of demands that others feel as you do. On his view, such
demands are "unmeaning" (p.27). Nelson Goodman (1968
[1976]) later called this "mumbo-jumbo"--"what
can this mean?" (p.243). The only way we could make sense of the
claim that we feel as though pleasure really belongs to objects
themselves is as a claim that objects *express* pleasure, but
not all aesthetic objects do this.



In a certain respect, Santayana's claims of phenomenological
objectification are less mysterious than claims of *actual*
objectification of subjective feeling in other aesthetic systems. The
early empathy theorist Robert Vischer (1873 [1994]) claimed that the
artist "translate[s] the indefinability and instability of
mental life, as well as the chaotic disorder of nature, *into a
magnificent objectivity*, into a clear reflection of a free
humanity," and thus generates an item whose investment with
emotion has a form of universal validity (pp. 116-17, emphasis
added). Around this time, many of those who take aesthetic experience
to focus on emotional expression spoke of emotion
"objectified" in objects, in a way that was then
inseparable from the embodiment of that emotion in the physical form
(Bosanquet 1892 [1904], p. 34; Ducasse 1929, p. 111; Dewey 1934
[1980], p. 248; Cassirer 1944, pp. 142-4). Insofar as feeling
can literally be manifested in these physical forms, it is simply a
matter of appreciating qualities an object really has that you should
appreciate such expression and feel certain emotions in their presence
(see Section 1.4.4).



Newer descendants of this view treat normativity in aesthetic
experience as derived from the *correctness* of seeing-as (or
otherwise perceiving-as). When Kendall Walton (1970) noted that the
assignment of a category to an artwork affects the expressive
properties you experience it as having, he was careful to note that
only some category assignments are correct (p.356ff.). Roger Scruton
(1974) went out on a limb to claim that even though seeing-as (and
other perceiving-as) is a matter of imagination (see Section 2.3),
there are nonetheless right and wrong ways to apply your imagination
to an object of your attention. Such choices in imagination
"involve a sense of their own 'correctness' or
appropriateness to an object" (pp. 138-9).



Kant (1789 [1987]), Vischer (1873 [1994]), and others took aesthetic
normativity to be universal: it's true that *everyone*
ought to feel a certain way about an object, given that the features
that ground that feeling are themselves universal among people.
Others--including Scruton and the empathy theorist Herbert
Langfeld (1920)--are less sanguine about the prospect of
universal agreement; they variously relativize the normative demands
that objects make upon us to feel certain ways (Kennick 1958, Goldman
1995, Levinson 2006a, Matthen 2018). A few personalize the specific
demands that artworks or natural scenes can make on our emotions and
feelings as individuals (Moran 2004; Nehamas 2007; Riggle 2016; cf.
Nietzsche 1882 [1974] SS290-299 and Landy 2004 on Proust
1913-1927 [2003]).



A demand for someone to have a certain subjective experience of an
object only makes sense if they already can have such an experience,
or at least could cultivate their capacity to have such an experience.
This capacity has long been called "taste" (cf. Korsmeyer
2013). The resonance with a form of sensation is no accident. Various
eighteenth-century British philosophers (notably Hutcheson 1726
[2004], Hume 1739-40 [1987], and Reid 1785 [1969]) made sense of
this capacity as a form of "internal sense," whose inputs
were reliant upon the representations provided by sensation. Lively
contemporary discussion amongst French social elites considered the
extent to which taste was innate or acquired (Bouhours 1671 [1705], Du
Bos 1719 [1748], Marquise de Lambert 1748 [1770]; see also
Montesquieu, Voltaire, and d'Alembert's 1757 and
Diderot's 1751 entries into the *Encyclopedie*,
Diderot and d'Alembert, 1751-1765).



Many contrasted this quasi-sensory faculty with that of reason
(Bouhours 1671 [1705], Du Bos 1719 [1748], Marquise de Lambert 1748
[1770], Montesquieu, Voltaire, and d'Alembert 1757), although
others claimed in a post-Cartesian rationalist vein that an
object's beauty was primarily judged through the faculty of
reason (de Crousaz 1714 [2000]; Andre 1741), and even claimed
that it was possible to codify contributors to beauty in general
principles (De Lambert, Voltaire, Diderot 1751). Kant (1789) notably
denied that any such general principles of taste could possibly be
formulated or used to reason to the conclusion that something is
beautiful.



In the 20th century, the debate over principles of taste
saw a resurgence. Those who deny the existence of any general
principles of taste are "particularists," and those who
accept them "generalists." Notable 20th-century
particularists include Croce 1938 [2007], Collingwood 1938 [1958],
Gallie 1956, Isenberg 1949, Sibley 1974, 1983, Mothersill 1988, and
Goldman 2006 (cf. Kant 1789 [1987] SS34-35). Notable
generalists include Beardsley (1958 [1981], 1970 [1982]) and Dickie
2006. While generalists like Beardsley think that we can dispute
matters of taste in reasoned argument particularists generally work to
make sense of more subtle forms of interpersonal communication about
experience (see Isenberg 1949, Hopkins 2004, Mothersill 1988, Sibley
2001, Cavell 1965 [2007], Wollheim 1968 [1980]).



There is a new efflorescence of philosophical research into aesthetic
normativity, much of which profits significantly from cross-comparison
of various normative domains (Eaton 2001; Cross 2017, forthcoming;
Hanson 2018, Lopes 2018, 2021, Gorodeisky and Marcus 2018; Gorodeisky
2019, 2021, Kubala 2021, Dyck 2021, Whiting 2021, forthcoming, Riggle,
forthcoming; see King 2022 for an overview).