Aesthetic Experience: Pleasure and Knowledge

Abstract

From the perspective of philosophy of mind, this paper outlines three approaches to aesthetic experience. In its first part, in light of costly or honest signaling theory, it postulates a structural homology between the behavior of bowerbirds and cognitive and appreciative processes involved in aesthetic experience of human beings. The second part seeks to show that attention in the aesthetic regime is different from ordinary attention in several levels: a) it is driven by attention more than by stimuli; b) it does not respond to upstream attentional processes that are automatic, but rather to downstream processes, which diminish the attention threshold, bringing on the development of finer discriminative capabilities; c) it privileges the divergent cognitive style, while ordinary attention privileges cognitive convergence; d) aesthetic attention cultivates delayed categorization, while ordinary attention favors a rapid elevation towards a generalizing categorization (identification and classification of processed objects). The third part proposes a heuristic characterization of aesthetic experience as an attentional (perceptual, imaginative, intellectual) experience of hedonic valence (regulated by pleasure and displeasure).