IB Philosophy 2.3.1 Aesthetic Experience Notes

The Nature of Aesthetic Experience

1. The sub-theme of Aesthetic Experience and Judgement (2.3) shifts Unit 2’s focus from the creation of art (explored in 2.1 and 2.2) to its reception. How do audiences experience art?
   1. What makes an experience aesthetic rather than ordinary? And can something be art if no one ever sees it?
   2. These questions place the spectator at the centre of aesthetic philosophy.
2. The IB syllabus identifies several dimensions of aesthetic experience: pleasure, disgust, perfection, the sublime, spontaneity, and provocation. This list reveals that aesthetic experience is not limited to the enjoyment of beauty; it encompasses a wide range of responses, including negative emotions (horror, revulsion) that may nevertheless be valued as aesthetically significant.
3. Pleasure is the most commonly associated response to art. Aristotle argued in the Poetics that humans take natural pleasure in imitation, even when the objects imitated are unpleasant.
4. This paradox, that we enjoy representations of things we would not enjoy in reality, is central to understanding aesthetic experience. We take pleasure in tragedy because of the artistic skill involved, not in spite of the painful content.
5. Disgust and provocation represent the opposite end of the aesthetic spectrum. Much contemporary art deliberately aims to disturb the viewer: Damien Hirst's preserved animals, Andres Serrano's controversial Piss Christ, and performance artists who push physical and social boundaries all produce experiences that are intensely unpleasant yet undeniably aesthetic.
6. Can disgust have genuine aesthetic value? Carolyn Korsmeyer argues in Savoring Disgust that it can: disgust in art forces confrontation with bodily vulnerability and mortality, producing a distinctive form of aesthetic engagement that pure beauty cannot achieve.
7. What begins as mere shock becomes something deeper: a question about what it means to exist as a bodily creature who bleeds, decays, and dies.

Formal Qualities and the Kantian Tradition

1. Perfection as an aesthetic quality refers to the sense that a work achieves complete formal harmony: every element is in its right place, and nothing could be added or removed without diminishing the whole. Classical Greek sculpture, Renaissance painting, and the music of Bach are often cited as examples.
2. This sense of perfection connects to broader philosophical ideas about order and proportion in nature and art.
3. Spontaneity captures a different aesthetic quality: the sense that a work is alive, fresh, and unforced. Jazz improvisation, action painting, and the spontaneous wit of great comedy all produce an aesthetic experience rooted in the feeling of creative energy unfolding in real time, and spontaneity is valued precisely because it cannot be planned or repeated.
4. Immanuel Kant, in the Critique of Judgement, offered the most influential philosophical analysis of aesthetic experience. Kant argued that the aesthetic response is characterised by disinterested pleasure: pleasure taken in an object for its own sake, without any practical desire to possess, use, or consume it.
5. A sunset is experienced aesthetically when we appreciate its beauty without wanting to own or exploit it.
6. Kant’s concept of disinterestedness has been both influential and controversial. Critics argue that no experience is truly disinterested: our responses to art are always shaped by our social position, cultural background, and personal history.
7. Pierre Bourdieu (discussed in 2.1.3) argued that the claim to disinterested aesthetic experience is itself a form of class privilege, available only to those with the education and leisure to cultivate it.
8. The question “Can something be art if no one ever sees it?” directly challenges the role of experience in defining art.
9. If aesthetic experience is essential to art, then an unseen painting locked in a vault is not functioning as art. If art is defined by its intrinsic properties (as formalists argue), then the painting remains art regardless of whether anyone experiences it.
10. Aesthetic experience thus connects the objective properties of artworks with the subjective responses of audiences. The key philosophical question: does the experience arise from the object, the subject, or their interaction?

The Sublime and Natural Aesthetic Experience

1. The sublime is one of the most philosophically rich categories of aesthetic experience. Unlike beauty, which produces harmonious pleasure, the sublime involves a sense of being overwhelmed by something vast, powerful, or infinite: a towering mountain, a violent storm, the starry sky, or a work of art that pushes beyond the limits of comprehension.
2. Edmund Burke, in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), argued that the sublime is rooted in terror.
   1. Whatever is fitted to excite ideas of pain and danger produces the strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling.