ABSTRACT
This chapter primarily focusses on the nature of aesthetic experience and attitude theory. It suggests that the acceptance or rejection of the attitude theory is more like the expression of an ideological nature about aesthetic experience, which remains outside the bounds of arbitration by argument. These aesthetic ideologies are bodies of beliefs about the nature of aesthetic experience, which draw upon concerns that lie outside the domain of aesthetics proper, the four of which have been discussed at length later in the chapter. These deal with the aesthetic view of aesthetes, bourgeois, critics, and democrats, respectively. The chapter argues that behind every theory purporting to capture the essence of aesthetic experience there lurks an aesthetic ideology which is based on the assumptions which are psychological or value-dependent rather than philosophical. What the ideologies do is to underline one stubborn feature about the aesthetic – namely, different people experience and value the aesthetic in very different ways. Therefore, it should be understood that there are various ways of having an aesthetic experience.
