ABSTRACT
Is aesthetic experience a distinctive kind of experience, with a set of defining features, and perhaps even a particular phenomenology; and if so, what is its
character? Or is it rather the case that a variety of different sorts of experi-
ence can properly be thought of as aesthetic? These are questions that have
swum in and out of focus in philosophical aesthetics for centuries. My
purpose in what follows is not to attempt to add to the number of answers
that have been offered to them, by producing or defending a particular
account of the nature of aesthetic experience. My interest is rather in the
question of how such accounts are grounded: to what sort(s) of thing will an account of the nature of aesthetic experience have to appeal in order to stand
any chance of success? And in particular, I aim to show that in the aesthetic
theory that he develops in The World as Will and Representation, Scho-
penhauer suggests an answer to that question which is radically different
from the one commonly attributed to him-that is, the one that was domi-
nant in early modern aesthetic theory and that underpins much con-
temporary thought about the nature of aesthetic experience.
