Aesthetic Experience: Its Revival and Its Relevance to Aesthetic Education

by Marcia Muelder Eaton and Ronald Moore


Oddly enough, in the last half century the most battered and beaten notion in the lexicon of philosophical aesthetics has been its own central concept, aesthetic experience. On the one hand, there is something simple, obvious, and perfectly familiar about this notion. Any fair poll would surely show that citizens of the Western world in general are confidently familiar with aesthetic experience as a concept and as part of their lives. On the other hand, there is something about the notion that defies easy analysis, a vagueness or looseness in its application that has drawn persistent critical fire. We are likely to be much more confident in identifying paradigmatic instances of aesthetic experience than in marking the borders of what should count as aesthetic experience in general.