Aesthetic emotions

Aesthetic emotions are emotions that are felt during

aesthetic activity or appreciation. These emotions may
be of the everyday variety (such as fear, wonder or
sympathy) or may be specic to aesthetic contexts. Examples of the latter include the sublime, the beautiful, and
the kitsch. In each of these respects, the emotion usually
constitutes only a part of the overall aesthetic experience,
but may play a more or less denitive role for that state.

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Despite the assertions of philosophers advocating the absolute music argument, the typical symphony-goer does
interpret the notes and chords of the orchestra emotionally; the opening of a Romantic-era symphony, in which
minor chords thunder over low bass notes is often interpreted by layperson listeners as an expression of sadness
in music.
Also called abstract music, absolute music is music that
is not explicitly about anything, non-representational or
non-objective. Absolute music has no references to stories or images or any other kind of extramusical idea.
The aesthetic ideas underlying the absolute music debate
relate to Kant's aesthetic disinterestedness from his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, and has led to numerous arguments, including a war of words between Brahms and
Wagner. In the 19th century, a group of early Romantics including Johann Wolfgang Goethe and E.T.A. Homann gave rise to the idea of what can be labeled as spiritual absolutism. Formalism is the concept of music
for musics sake and refers only to instrumental music
without words. The 19th century music critic Eduard
Hanslick argued that music could be enjoyed as pure
sound and form, that it needed no connotation of extramusical elements to warrant its existence.

Types
Visual arts and lm

The relation between aesthetic emotions and other emotions is traditionally said to rely on the disinterestedness
of the aesthetic experience (see Kant especially). Aesthetic emotions do not motivate practical behaviours in
the way that other emotions do (such as fear motivating
avoidance behaviours).
The capacity of artworks to arouse emotions such as
fear is a subject of philosophical and psychological
research.[1] It raises problems such as the paradox of ction in which one responds with sometimes quite intense
emotions to art, even whilst knowing that the scenario
presented is ctional (see for instance the work of Kendall
Walton). Another issue is the problem of imaginative
resistance, which considers why we are able to imagine
many far-fetched ctional truths but experience comparative diculty imagining that dierent moral standards
hold in a ctional world. This problem was rst raised
by David Hume, and was revived in current discussion
by Richard Moran, Kendall Walton and Tamar Gendler
(who introduced the term in its current usage in a 2000 article by the same name).[2] Some forms of artwork seem
to be dedicated to the arousal of particular emotions. For
instance horror lms seek to arouse feelings of fear or
disgust; comedies seek to arouse amusement or happiness, tragedies seek to arouse sympathy or sadness, and
melodramas try to arouse pity and empathy.

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2 References
[1] Aesthetic emotions | Swiss Center for Aective Sciences
Archived January 13, 2009, at the Wayback Machine.
[2] Tamar Szab Gendler (2000). The Puzzle of Imaginative
Resistance. Journal of Philosophy 97 (2):55-81

3 Further reading
Chua, Daniel. Absolute Music and the Construction
of Meaning (Cambridge University Press, 1999)
Clay, Felix. 'The Origin of the Aesthetic Emotion'.
Sammelbnde der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft,
9. Jahrg., H. 2. (Jan. - Mar., 1908), pp. 282290.
JSTOR 929289

Music

Pouivet, Roger. 'On the Cognitive Functioning of

Aesthetic Emotions. Leonardo, Vol. 33, No. 1.
(2000), pp. 4953. JSTOR 1576761

In the philosophy of music, scholars have argued whether

instrumental music such as symphonies are simply abstract arrangements and patterns of musical pitches
("absolute music"), or whether instrumental music depicts emotional tableaux and moods ("program music").
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