Aesthetic experience

In plain terms

Most attention is instrumental. You look at a chair to sit on it, at a road to cross it, at a face to read it.

Aesthetic experience is supposed to be different: attending to something for how it is rather than for what it can do for you. Kant's word is disinterested, which does not mean uninterested - it means the pleasure does not depend on wanting to own, eat or use the thing.

That is a plausible description of a real state, and it is also demanding. It requires stopping, staying, and letting something unfold at its own pace, none of which happens by default. Which is why the interesting evidence about aesthetic experience is behavioural, and why it is not flattering.

As a philosopher would put it

Kant's account makes the judgement of taste disinterested, indifferent to the object's existence, and grounded in a free play of imagination and understanding - a harmony that is felt rather than conceptualised, which is why it cannot be secured by rules.

Dewey's Art as Experience rejects the isolation this implies. Aesthetic experience is not a separate faculty exercised in museums but the intensification of ordinary experience when it achieves completeness and rhythm, and the museum's separation of art from life is a historical accident of collecting rather than a truth about art.

Dickie's attack on the aesthetic attitude argues that disinterestedness names no distinct state at all: what is called aesthetic attention is just attention, and the difference lies in what is attended to and why.

Empirical work on museum behaviour has since supplied the awkward data, and the field of empirical aesthetics has largely replaced the search for a distinctive state with the study of what viewers actually do.

What is actually disputed

Whether there is a distinctive aesthetic state.

The traditional view holds that there is: a mode of attention marked by disinterest, absorption and attention to how a thing presents itself. Dickie's argument is that no such state has ever been described in a way that distinguishes it from ordinary attention differently directed, and that the apparatus of the aesthetic attitude is doing no work.

Dewey's objection runs the other way and is more damaging to the tradition. If aesthetic experience is continuous with ordinary experience at its most complete, then confining it to art objects in institutions misdescribes it, and a great deal of aesthetics has been theorising a museum practice rather than a human capacity.

The empirical work does not settle this and does constrain it. Whatever the state is, it is not what typically occurs, which any theory now has to accommodate.