Aesthetics

Aesthetic Experience

A standard distinction in aesthetics is between aesthetic experiences—enjoying the way things look and sound and feel—and experiences in which we enjoy something because it is associated with something else we value. A rich man might enjoy looking at tall piles of $100 bills on his desk, for example, because they remind him how wealthy he is. But he is not enjoying the color, shape, texture, and other perceptible features of those bills, and so his experience is not aesthetic. In aesthetic experience, our interest in things is not practical; it is not in what those things can help us get or achieve. And our interest is not cognitive: We are not out to gain information. Instead we simply enjoy experiencing things.

While much of aesthetic experience is visual, hearing and touch can also be aesthetic. The sound of rain on the roof can please us, as can music. If we are emotionally struck by a piece of sculpture in a museum, we may want to run our fingers over its surface.

If the arts were limited to painting, drawing, sculpture, music, and dance, then we might think of aesthetic experience as a subset of perception. But there is also literature. In reading a novel or in listening to someone read poetry, much more is involved than the shapes of the letters on the page and the sound of the words being recited. Mostly what we enjoy are the thoughts evoked by those words; so aesthetic experience includes thinking as well as perceiving.

Humor as Aesthetic Experience

Although humor may seem like an obvious case of aesthetic experience, it was widely neglected in traditional aesthetics. Immanuel Kant, one of the first philosophers to analyze aesthetic experience, dismissed the pleasure we take in jokes as a nonaesthetic enjoyment of the physical stimulation of laughter. There is nothing to gratify the mind in jokes, he insisted, and so enjoying them is not aesthetic experience. Starting in the late-20th century, humor received more respect from philosophers, and today many of them hold that humor is often an aesthetic experience.

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