# Aesthetic Experience  ## Metadata - Author: [[Stanford Report]] - Full Title: Aesthetic Experience - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: Aesthetic experience encompasses various theories in the Western tradition, each with its own perspective on the nature of aesthetic experience. Some philosophers view aesthetic experience as a form of cognitive contact with the world, while others focus on formal properties, expressive properties, or metaphysical properties of objects. There is ongoing debate about the role of pleasure in aesthetic experience, as well as the idea of a distinctive aesthetic emotion. Additionally, some philosophers argue that aesthetic experience involves a certain distance from one's practical situation, allowing for a fuller participation in the object of aesthetic experience. - URL: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetic-experience/#MentAspeAestExpe - Source File: Aesthetic Experience Stanford Encyclopedia.pdf ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hq000v17xw1nfhh3dm7eqbrv)) > 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). ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hq004g8nxza1x07w2mzsfshd)) > 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). ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hq006jpbd6p7d3qhry7rhape))