Card 5.5 · Root V — Aesthetics
Aesthetic Experience
Why is the sadness of a sad song enjoyable?
This node asks what happens in us when a work moves us — whether aesthetic experience is a distinct kind of mental state, and what its structure is.
On this card
Where it sits
Under V. Aesthetics. Borders 1.3.4 Qualia, 5.1, 5.8, 3.5 Value theory.
Major accounts of aesthetic experience
| Position | What aesthetic experience is |
|---|---|
| Disinterestedness | Attention detached from practical concern and desire |
| Psychical distance | Engagement held at a remove from one's own stake |
| Empathy theories | Projection of feeling into the object |
| Cognitive accounts | Not a distinct state; a way of attending and understanding |
| Deflationary | No unified phenomenon; the term groups unlike things |
| Rasa theory | On the developed Kashmiri account, a non-ordinary mode of experience in which emotion is savoured |
Key figures
| Figure | Dates | Tradition | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bharata | text c. 200 BCE–200 CE | Indian | Attributed author of the Natyashastra: the eight rasas and their means of production |
| Bhatta Lollata | c. 9th c. | Indian | Rasa as intensified ordinary emotion |
| Sankuka | c. 9th c. | Indian | Rasa as the emotion inferred in the character, the inference itself relished |
| Bhatta Nayaka | c. 10th c. | Indian | Rasa as generalised emotion, freed of ego |
| Abhinavagupta | fl. c. 1000 | Indian | Rasa as a non-ordinary, blissful mode of aesthetic experience |
| Immanuel Kant | 1724–1804 | European modern | Disinterested satisfaction |
| Edward Bullough | 1880–1934 | European modern | Psychical distance |
Connections
→ 5.2, 5.1 · ↔ 1.3.4, 5.8, 3.5, 6.23 · ◇ disinterestedness, psychical distance, empathy theories, cognitive accounts, deflationary views, rasa theory · ○ Classical; Islamic golden age era; Early modern; Table 10
→ narrower questions · ↔ questions it borders · ◇ the positions, mapped in Part III of the book · ○ the eras and comparison tables (Parts IV and V)
The full card is in the book
In The Coordinates of Thought this card goes on to a worked example that sets the answers against one case, and to where the question touches daily life — page 233.
On Coordinates of Thought
Conversations about this question in Beauty & art:
- Beauty is objective 6 replies
- The institutional theory of art is circular, and it’s the vicious kind 5 replies
- Hume’s ‘true judges’ are the best answer we have to whether taste can be wrong 5 replies
- I make cedar doors. Am I an artist, a craftsman, or is that the wrong question? 5 replies
- Reproduction did not wither the aura of art; it made the aura more valuable 5 replies