# Toward a Non-Minimalist Conception of Aesthetic Experience Levinson **Opening (not a real abstract):** What is aesthetic experience? One traditional approach to this question views aesthetic experience as closely tied to an antecedent mental condition or mental set that can be labeled the aesthetic attitude. The aesthetic attitude is often thought to be prior to aesthetic experience, so the latter is what one has if, under the right circumstances, one adopts the former. The aesthetic attitude might be characterized in terms of the ignoring or suppressing of certain other mental attitudes or frames of mind, such as practical, anxious, or desirous ones, such attitudes being understood to preclude, or at least to render difficult, the sustaining of the aesthetic one.1 Alternatively, the aesthetic attitude might perhaps be characterized as a condition of openness, receptivity, and generosity towards an object’s perceivable form and **Authors:** [[Jerrold Levinson]]