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Aesthetic experience (also: esthetic experience) - a term used in philosophy, psychology and cognitive science, describing a group of feelings and emotions derieved from perceiving any object or event of some aesthetic value. It can be explained as 'the way how it feels to experience something'.

Traditionally the term was referred only to objects of special value; what was defined in various ways. Since the beginning of 20th century there has been a continuous deconstruction of the term, mostly on a basis of its extreme subjectivity. Some of modern theories try to distinguish aesthetic from non-aesthetic experiences by a need of performing intentional aesthetic insight, while other put stress on great similarity of the both or even deny the existence of aesthetic notion.

Eastern Philosophical traditions
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Ancient Philosophy
Plato For Plato aesthetic experience is connected with the Theory of Ideas. Ordinary objects participate to different extent in the form of the beauty. The soul knows the beauty but a man with a birth forgets it. By experience of beautiful objects one can recall the ideal beauty to some extent. In this sense an aesthetic experience is experiencing the ideal of beauty by engagement with beautiful objects.

Medieval Philosophy
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Teodor Adorno
Teodor Adorno emphasises the extreme subjectivity of aesthetic experience. Simultaneously he finds it to be a crucial part of as well philosophy of art, aesthetics and our everyday lives.

Nelson Goodman
According to Nelson Goodman it is an interpretation what constitutes the essence of aesthetic experience. He advocates for the demarcation line between aesthetic and non-aesthetic experience. He also points out that the line cannot be drawn on the basis of beauty of the object since we can have bad aesthetic experiences. Goodman's symptoms of aesthetics: a) syntactic density b) semantic density c) relative replentness d) exemplification

John Dewey
For Dewey the aesthetic experience should be directed for looking beauty in everyday life. Both art and life could be improved by their daily integration. The value of art is not in their very objects but in the processes of creating and experiencing. This puts aesthetic experience in the central point of aesthetics and philosophy of art.

George Dickie
George Dickie denies existence of aesthetic experience. In his The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude he claims that aesthetic experience is nothing more than perception understood simply as attention. Every experience can be of some aesthetic value if one's pays attention to it.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Research conducted by neurobilogist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran have shown that objects of perceptions having some property rarely found in everyday life cause activity in a certain region of brain. On the basis of that, Ramachandran has created a peak shift theory of aesthetic experience. According to that, an aesthetic experience differs from an ordinary experience by experiencing of an object that have some extraordinary or exaggerated properties. In this sense aesthetic experience would be nothing more that an experience of awe. Further, he claims, objects of arts are just caricatures of the reality exemplifying its particular propetries.

Some critics point out that this is not an satisfactory explanation, since it does not include any notion of aesthetics. It merely explains why do people have particular sexual preferences and when the peak shift phenomenon happens. We still do not know anything about the very nature of aesthetic experience.

Semir Zeki
Semir Zeki has proved that particular types of art cause activity in different parts of the brain. On the foundation of his research, Zeki claims that satisfactory definition of aesthetic experience must include neurobilogical aspect. Zeki draws a parallel between neurobilogists and artists trying to show that the latter ones are alike the first ones by using particular techniques to influence our emotions, that is to cause ceirtan brain activity.

Another notion introduced is Great Art Ambiguity, which says that great pieces of art are found to be great because they allow for multiple interpretations of which each one would be comparatively good.

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