# Aesthetic Experience Stanford Encyclopedia **Opening (not a real abstract):** A paradigmatic aesthetic experience is a perceptual experience focused on the beauty of an object like a work of art or an aspect of nature. Some philosophers take it that this is the only kind of aesthetic experience, though many more take it that there are other varieties as well. You might, for instance, have an aesthetic experience by witnessing not a beautiful but a sublime storm. You might have an aesthetic experience not by having a perceptual but rather by having an (imagined) emotional experience of the deep suffering of Sethe expressed in Toni Morrison’s great novel Beloved. Perhaps you might even have an aesthetic experience by appreciating the way in which an elegant theorem reorganizes your thought about a mathematical structure. Philosophical work on art and beauty in the Western tradition extends