I read this the other day and thought it would help someone else...so i saved it, i guess it came in handy (:

Definition of Aesthetic ExperienceThe concept that all experience is aesthetic experience is based on the perspective that all experience is perception. Our most concentrated perceptions are our quality aesthetic experiences. Aestheticians and others refer to quality aesthetic experience as "the aesthetic experience," or "an aesthetic experience." I will do the same here. I also use "experience with aesthetic quality" to refer to quality aesthetic experience. The aesthetic quality of an experience is the amount of concentration involved in the experience. I will discuss the nature of the concentration I refer to later in this paper.

The aesthetic experience is not characterized by distance, disinterestedness, or beauty, as some aestheticians have supposed, but by a concentration originating in the organism causing it to perceive its environment with a heightened or more vivid perception.

The word "aesthetic" was first used by Alexander Baumgarten in his Reflections on Poetry (first published in 1735) as a reaction to the rational philosophy of Descartes and the mechanistic science of Newton. Baumgarten contended that it is a mistake to exclude sensations and perceptions from knowledge, and that sensations and perceptions provide an equally valid conception of reality as Cartesian logic. Baumgarten believed the aesthetic value of a work of art could be determined by its ability to produce vivid experiences in its audience (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990).

This is one of the most reasonable definitions of aesthetic value. The only criterion is that the work of art produce vivid experience in its audience. This simple, effective definition contrasts greatly with the efforts of those aestheticians who attempt to separate the work of art from the experience of art. I take the position that art does not exist independently of the experience of art. Therefore all questions of a definition of art are secondary to an understanding of the aesthetic experience.

One of the most interesting developments in our understanding of experience is the exploration of the biological basis of the aesthetic experience. Flannery (1990) writes of these efforts,

The results of individuals such as Bullough and Berlyne, though sometimes contradictory, suggest that some attributes are inherently more pleasing than others, that there may indeed be a biological basis to the aesthetic experience. . . If the aesthetic experience is rooted in biology, in the way the brain works, then any object--a piece of art or a scientific specimen--can be a source of aesthetic pleasure. . . (pp. 314-315)

This serves as an appropriate introduction to this concept. However, I would not call an object ("a piece of art or a scientific specimen") a source of aesthetic pleasure. As Flannery suggests, there are characteristics of an organism which allow it to perceive certain stimuli as pleasing. The source of the aesthetic pleasure is always the biological structure of the organism which allows its perception of its environment to be a positive experience. A piece of art or a scientific specimen may be the object of the pleasure, but never the source.

That there is a biological basis for all behavior, including appreciation of art, has been well established, though by no means fully explored, by researchers such as Darwin, Berlyne, Joseph and Dissanayake. It follows that all human experience is created by the human organism; there is no difference in human-madeness between the hiker climbing a mountain and orienting her eyes to view the sunset, and the museum-goer looking at a painting, or the composer striking different keys on a piano. Berlyne (1971) writes, "Animals, and especially higher mammals, spend much of their time performing actions that have no function other than bringing the sense organs into contact with stimuli of particular kinds, so that they can be said to be selecting or creating their own environments to a large extent" (p. 98).

This approach makes it possible for a person to have an aesthetic experience while perceiving anything, whether a daydream, a meditative state, the high of intense physical exercise, or a painting. "Aesthesis" means perception, or, more beautifully, sense-perception. "Aesthetics" means the study of perception. As Baumgarten decided, the aesthetic value of an experience depends on the ability of the experience to produce vivid experiences in the audience. It follows from what was said about perception that the vividness of the experience depends entirely on the motivation and the physical ability of the audience to perceive a set of stimuli as vivid.

Aesthetics, then, is the study of all activity from the perspective that we are orienting ourselves to have certain perceptions (experiences). The aesthetician of visual art should have a good understanding of what combination of form and color will encourage a certain kind of experience in an audience. The aesthetician of physical activity should know what intensity and type of exercise will have certain effects on the exerciser. Moreover, aesthetics can be applied to reason. The aesthetician should know what kind of purely rational (if there is such a thing) exercise should produce a certain feeling in the person who is being rational.

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