ABSTRACT
This chapter develops a claim for the thesis that the experience of beauty and other aesthetic qualities can be influenced by features other than those given in perception. That is, the experience of beauty is not modular or informationally encapsulated. Aesthetic perception can be penetrated by other mental states. It begins with a general, empirically based case against modularity outside of the aesthetic domain. Then a theory of beauty and related construct is introduced. According to this theory, experiences of beauty combine visual and emotional qualities, so beauty is already a hybrid state, not a pure visual state. Aesthetic penetration will occur whenever either the visual or emotional components are influenced by anything other than the visual inputs. Two kinds of penetration are identified: lateral, involving emotions or other senses, and vertical, involving cognition. Cases of both are presented. A number of the key cases are drawn from art history, including the study of non-Western art, rather than empirical psychology. Given the empirical evidence against modularity, these examples may be plausibly interpreted as cases of penetration. If so, they also help to establish that the experience of aesthetic qualities is both historical and cultural. The way perceive depends on our location in time and space.
