ABSTRACT
Whatever aesthetic experience might be, it certainly involves emotion. But
recent Western aesthetic discussions of such experience rarely elaborate on
the emotion(s) involved, if they take emotion as a matter of serious concern
at all. Noel Carroll offers a taxonomy of four recent approaches to aesthetic
experience, one of which he terms the affect-oriented approach. But the
affect that he takes to be most emphasized in this approach is pleasure; and
when he refers to other affects, he refers to unspecified feelings, affective tone,
and qualia, rather than full-fledged emotion.1 Perhaps one reason that emotion is little analyzed in connection with aesthetic experience is that most
ordinary emotion names seem insufficient for the range of emotions
undergone within aesthetic experience. The ‘‘garden variety emotions’’ (as
Peter Kivy refers to them) seem much more straightforward and uncompli-
cated than the emotional stream one navigates when in an aesthetic state.
