Distinctiveness of the emotional experience of art

The argument has now reached a pivot. The two previous chapters provided an account of the varieties of emotional experience and the following chapter will address the value of art. If the previous descriptive material is to form a basis for a claim about the value of art, it will have to be because there is something valuable about the emotional experience of art. In this chapter, we shall ask whether the emotional experience of art is distinctive in a way that justifies us in speaking of a variety of emotional experience that occurs only in our perception of works of art. If we conclude that it is, we can then consider the value of this distinctive experience in the following chapter.

To understand what is distinctive about the emotional experience of a work of art is to understand how it differs from the other varieties of emotional experience. This requires us to place our investigation of the emotional experience of art in the broader context of all our experiences of emotion in the world, and to determine whether there is a sense in which the artistic experience is different from these other varieties of emotional experience. In this way, the previous chapter's discussion of the varieties of emotional experience provides a spectrum of emotional experiences relative to which we can assess what, if anything, is distinctive about the emotional experience of art.