ABSTRACT
Probably no one would dispute that aesthetic experience is a beautiful
thing, even if some of those who would not dispute it would dispute that
it is always a thing of beauty. But beauty is not the issue here. I will attempt
to say something about the meaning and value of aesthetic experience
without going into detail about the various forms this value assumes. Rather,
I will reflect on the place of aesthetic experience in the context of human
practices, and thus also on the scope attributed to this type of experience in
relation to other types of experience. After all, even among those who agree that we are concerned here with a beautiful thing, it is anything but clear
how we are to locate aesthetic experience within the sphere of human
orientations. To many who clearly do not want to do without aesthetic
experience, its process appears to be only a kind of supplement or enrich-
ment of acts-be it of contemplation, production, or reproduction-that
can be executed independently of it, though somewhat less gracefully. I will
not, however, embrace this aesthetic defeatism because I believe that aes-
thetic experience can provide subjects with a type of consciousness that no other mode of experience can provide.I develop my reflections in five steps,
beginning with a thesis on the concept of aesthetic perception, from which I
demarcate, in a second step, a concept of aesthetic experience. Then I turn to
the distinctiveness of art experience, about which I claim in a fourth step
that it has to be understood as an interaction of art forms. I conclude with a
thesis on the scope of aesthetic experience, an experience which is restricted
neither to the arts nor to any of the other traditional domains of aesthetic
experience.
