Varieties Of Aesthetic Experience

The traditional business of aestheticians has been to supply an answer to the question, “What is art?” A single question is put, and apparently it is assumed—though recently the assumption has been fairly widely challenged—that there is a single answer to be supplied; that there is one definition or one essence of art from which all its properties can be shown to derive. However the problem is also quite frequently reformulated: some theorists prefer to ask, “What is aesthetic experience?” Here we find a second assumption: it seems to be taken for granted that it is appropriate to put either one question or the other, but not both; aesthetic experience having been characterized, art can be denned in terms of it, or vice versa. And it is assumed here, as before, that there is one essential answer to give. It is supposed, that is to say, that all aesthetic experience— the experience of reading War and Peace or Herrick’s two lines Of Julia, Weeping, the experience of looking at York Minster or the pattern on the carpet, if by good fortune the carpet is well designed— has some one distinguishing characteristic in all instances, in virtue of which alone they are to be called aesthetic.