Seeing vs feeling beauty: a plea for aesthetic ecumenism

Résumé 0

We commonly talk about both feeling and seeing beauty and other aesthetic properties, but why should there be two experiential mechanisms (emotion and sensory perception) to access aesthetic properties? Some philosophers have argued that we cannot have sensory experiences of beauty, which is essentially felt. Others have tried to blur the line between feeling and seeing, suggesting that we can “see with feeling” (sensory perception is “hot” or affect-laden). I assume the traditional view that sensory experiences are affectively neutral or “cold” but argue that we can see at least some aesthetic properties, because our aesthetic affective dispositions silently contribute, at the subpersonal level, to the generation of sensory contents. Emotions come into play to make us feel these properties as values, i.e., as mattering to us, positively or negatively. In an “ecumenical” spirit, I suggest that feeling and seeing beauty play essential and complementary roles in the formation and justification of aesthetic judgments.