One is actively engaged and conscious of the world's effect on one but at the same time appreciative of one's possibilities for acting on the world. John Dewey (1958), for example, argues that aesthetic experiences are the most complete, the richest, and the highest experiences possible. One feels good (or bad) when one responds aesthetically to a beautiful sunset or elegant poem (or to a messy waste dump or plodding verse).īut it is more than just a feeling of pleasure (or pain) that characterizes aesthetic experiences, according to many theorists. Although several theorists have disagreed with Kant's argument, most theorists agree that aesthetic experiences are identified as such at least partly because of an emotional involvement of the experiencer. Kant makes a sharp distinction between responding positively in this manner and responding positively for moral or scientific reasons. Instead the pleasure arises simply because the form of the object is delightful and could and should be enjoyed by anyone. He asserts that one recognizes that this pleasure does not result from a realization that an object is useful or agreeable to one because of special things about oneself. Immanuel Kant, one of the first philosophers to have addressed these kinds of questions, characterizes aesthetic experiences as those pleasures associated with occasions when one judges something to be beautiful. One area of contention concerns what it feels like to have an aesthetic experience -that is, whether there is some special emotion or attitude or other internal sign that enables one to recognize that what one is having is an aesthetic experience and not some other kind. Nevertheless, the exact nature of aesthetic experience -even the idea that there is such a unique form of experience -remains a matter of controversy.
Although the term aesthetic itself was not introduced until the eighteenth century, it is clear that what are identified in contemporary discussions as "aesthetic experiences" were "felt" by individuals long before this: for example, when Plato worried about excessively emotional reactions to recitations of poetry or when Aristotle described the positive effects of attending the theater. An aesthetic experience arises in response to works of art or other aesthetic objects.
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