Christian G. Allesch 
Aesthetic Experience — a topic at the cross-roads 
between philosophy and psychology 
To deal with the topic of aesthetic experience on a congress dedicated 
to »Aesthetics as Philosophy« provokes some critical remarks f rom a psy-
chologist. I think that, due to the subjective nature of experience, it cannot 
be grasped adequately by a mere philosophical explanation. This is the rea-
son why I want to contribute to this congress and in particular to the discus-
sions of this section dealing with aesthetic experience some critical reflec-
tions on the role of philosophy and psychology in investigating aesthetic 
experience. 
At this point I want to stress that this should not be unders tood as an 
attempt to renew the controversy dominating the aesthetic discussion at the 
beginning of our century, namely whether aesthetics should be grounded 
on a philosophy of values or on the base of empirical psychology and whether 
it should be regarded a philosophical or a psychological discipline (cf. 
Allesch 1 9 8 7 ) . Such »questiones iuris« usually remain unsolved, as Richard 
MUELLER -FREIENFELS stated already in 1 9 2 5 , however voluminous volumes 
might be published about them. It is not my intention to declare whether 
aesthetics should be part of philosophy or psychology, however, I want to 
stress some arguments why aesthetics should be conceived as an interdisci-
plinary project, and why I think that aesthetic experience is a distinctive topic 
to exemplify this suggestion. 
Let me start with a question that has been a central topic of aesthetic 
discussion since aesthetics exists as a particular discipline, namely: What 
makes an experience an aesthetic experience? You know that there are two 
types of answers in the history of our discipline: The one, more objectivistic 
answer, points to the particular aesthetic nature of the aesthetic object. This 
means that the psychic or mental processes by which an aesthetic object is 
perceived do not essentially differ from other processes of perception. Thus, 
psychology that tries to explain the nature of these processes would not be 
able to contribute any substantial evidence about the aesthetic aspect of 
aesthetic experience. 
The other, more subjectivistic answer, points to the fact that it depends 
on the intention of the beholder or listener whether a perceived object may 
be experienced as an aesthetic object. In this case, psychology has to be 
Filozofski vestnik, XX (2/1999 - XIVI CA Supplement), pp. 101-130 121 
Christian G. Allesch 
regarded as a key discipline for the understanding and explanation of aes-
thetic experience since it actually refers to these subjective intentions and 
motivations which will enable or impede the realisation of an aesthetic ex-
perience. 
This was the reason why Theodor LIPPS, one of the most engaged par-
tisans of psychological aesthetics at the beginning of our century, claimed 
aesthetics to be a psychological discipline at all since, as he argued, its duty 
was to explain under which circumstances any object might be recognised 
as beautiful and this is actually what a psychological theory of experience 
was to achieve. 
You know that this extreme argumentation in favour of a psychologi-
cal conceptualisation of aesthetics is not held any more in recent theorising, 
no t even in the contemporary psychology of art. On the one hand, also psy-
chology of art accepted that there exists a certain kind of autonomy of aes-
thetic objects which cannot be explained by the particularities of subjective 
experiencing. On the other hand, it was in particular the contribution of 
phenomenological theories in aesthetics - 1 want to stress the work of Moritz 
GEIGER as a paradigm - which revealed the complex structure of aesthetic 
experience and convincingly suggested that what we call an aesthetic object 
is formed by the activity of a subject but constitutes a relation to a reality that 
itself constitutes the possibilities of the subject to face and to experience 
reality. 
However, I think that it is not possible to outline a theory of aesthetic 
experience without regarding some fundamental evidence of psychology on 
the nature of human experience. I concede that it may depend on the kind 
of psychology which is taken into consideration whether this interdiscipli-
nary approach will lead us to a satisfactory result. I think that some mistakes 
and resentments of aestheticians against a psychological interpretation of 
aesthetic phenomena does not result f rom an essential incompatibility of 
psychology and aesthetics but from the fact that they have dealt with a wrong 
or incompatible psychology. 
Thus I concede that a psychological theory which is constructed in the 
classical behavioristic manner or in that more modern way of information 
processing theories will not be able to cover the particularities of aesthetic 
experience. But this is a type of psychology the capability of which to explain 
the nature of human experiencing should be questioned in general, that 
means not only with respect to aesthetic phenomena . I think that experi-
ence as per formed by a human being living in a cultural context and con-
scious of its historic nature, that means being able or even forced to reflect 
on where it comes f rom and where it is to go, is totally different f rom the 
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Aesthetic Experience - a topic at the cross-roads between philosophy and psychology 
kind of experience that can be modelled by those information processing 
activities as performed by a computer, however perfect and complicated it 
may be. 
Modern psychology has become more and more aware of this fact 
during the last two decades but not all theoretical approaches have realised 
this development to the same amount . I want to outline now what kind of 
psychology would be necessary in order to cope with the particularities of 
aesthetic experience and in what manner a psychological theory of experi-
ence could be helpful for investigating this type of aesthetic problems. 
Let me start with the argument that, if you consider aesthetics as the 
science of aisthesis, that means, of sensorial experience and not in the tradi-
tional sense as the science of art and beauty you inevitably will cross the 
border l ine to the central domain of psychology. It points to the crucial 
ambiguity of the discipline denoted by the term »aesthetics« that, in order 
to emancipate from a theory of »experience in general« (as per formed, for 
example, by KANT in his transcendental aesthetics as a part of his Critique of 
Pure Reason) it was to focus, in its historical shaping as a scientific discipline, 
its interest to a certain aspect or type of experience, namely what we refer 
to by the modern wording »aesthetic«. 
I think that aesthetics has to find its proper position between two ex-
tremes: It can neither be conceived as a science of sensorial experience in 
general, nor should it stick to the traditional concepts of beauty and the arts 
as, for example, Wolfgang WELSCH convincingly argued in his plenary lec-
ture on »Aesthetics beyond aesthetics« at our last congress in Lahti. 
It is exactly this focusing on a certain 'aesthetic' type of aisJhsiV that 
leads us back to our central question: what makes an aesthetic experience 
an aesthetic experience, or: how shall we pragmatically define the term 'aes-
thetic' in order to denote a type of experience which meets what we intend 
by the recent understanding of the realm of our discipline? 
Now I would like to change my point of view again to that of a psycholo-
gist and ask for a useful psychological concept such as »experience«. The 
behaviorist doctrine which excluded all mental phenomena which cannot 
objectively be observed from the realm of science was not able to conceive 
and was not even interested in a concept like »experience«. Whatever ex-
perience might be and whatever might happen in our mind was reduced to 
the 'response' as the observable outcome of inner processes. The cognitive 
turn in psychology which started in the early fifties of our century, rejected 
the anti-mentalistic ban and made the mental processing which had been 
excluded by the behaviorists the central subject of psychology. However, until 
the seventies cognitive psychology understood perception as »information 
103 
Christian G. Allesch 
processing«, i. e. in that mechanical sense in which information is processed 
by a technical system, since the booming information technology nur tured 
the expectation that mental processes could be modelled by the same kind 
of information processing which a computer performs. 
It was a Gestalt psychologist who was also very engaged in aesthetic 
investigations, namely Rudolf ARNHEIM, who already in 1 9 6 9 , in his book 
Visual Thinking, stressed his conviction that human experience fundamen-
tally differs f rom computerised data processing since it starts f rom the field 
of conscience, i. e. it proceeds f rom the whole to the parts and not f rom 
single data to a mechanically »computed« result. In the same way, but as early 
as 1935 another scholar of the Gestalt psychology school, namely the psy-
chiatrist Erwin STRAUS in his important book The sense of the senses had sug-
gested that »man thinks and not the brain«. It is exactly this question for 
»the sense of the senses« that leads psychology beyond the limits of a nar-
row-minded mentalism which would not be able to conceptualise »experi-
ence« in other than mechanistic terms. 
In his famous outline of semiotics, La struttura assente, Umber to Eco 
distinguishes between »the world of signals« and »the world of sense«, where 
the world of signals is characterised by that type of information processing 
which can be carried out also by machines while the shift f rom the world of 
signals to the world of sense reflects the progression from the mechanical 
processing of a machine to the subjective world of a human being. This shift 
leads to another type of representation of the perceived outside world or 
even to another type of perception which is much closer to the meaning of 
the term »experience« than to a term such as »mental representation« as 
preferred by the cognitive psychology of the eighties. 
Although we have to assume that what we phenomenologically denote 
with the term 'experience' is based on a certain physical representation as 
pe r fo rmed by biochemical processes in our brain, there is no evidence for 
the existence of phenomena comparable with human experience on the 
level of technical systems. And there are a lot of reasons to assume that this 
is no t a problem of complexity but the result of a fundamental difference 
between biological systems created by evolutionary processes and technical 
systems designed by man. 
You may realise the difference between technical signal-detection and 
human experience also by reflecting the meaning of aesthetic concepts like 
musicality. A sophisticated technical system like a high-tech tape recorder 
may achieve much more precise results in analysing frequencies than hu-
man beings but we would not assess this perfect ion as an outcome of its 
rriusicality. What we expect f rom a perfect tape recorder is not musicality 
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Aesthetic Experience - a topic at the cross-roads between philosophy and psychology 
but high fidelity: it would, in fact, be an awful experience if a tape recorder 
did not represent the acoustical structure of music by a perfectly determined 
representation but, for example, amplify the volume of the cello part accord-
ing to its immanent aesthetic interpretation. 
This is the reason why psychological theorising on human perception 
during the last decades increasingly startrd to abandon the use of technical 
models of information processing for the explanation of the processes of 
human experience. The PDP-model of human percept ion (where 'PDP' 
stands for »parallel distributed processing«) as proposed by RUMELHART & 
MCCLELLAND in 1986, explicitly asked the question: »What makes people 
smarter than machines«, thus starting f rom the difference and not f rom the 
analogy between computer and human mind. 
However, also these most recent branches of cognitive psychology can-
not actually meet the particularity of aesthetic experience since they do not 
differentiate between perception as an objective funct ion of the human 
mind and that subjective becoming aware of our personal existence in a 
meaningful world which may be better designated by the word »experience« 
than by the term »perception«. If we recur to this »humanistic« or »experi-
ential« approach as GIFFORD called it in his outline of Environmental Psychol-
ogy (1987) we have to realise that the cognitive approach widely ignored 
some essential aspects of human existence, namely the impact of emotions, 
the complexity of man-environment relations and man's involvement in cul-
ture. 
It is, to my opinion, in particular the recent development of psychol-
ogy of culture that offers a plausible solution for these deficiencies but, in 
addition to that, leads to a concept of human experience in cultural con-
text that might be regarded as a useful psychological contribution to an in-
terdisciplinary theory of aesthetic experience. I want to oudine two examples 
in order to support this statement. 
The first example is the symbolic action theory as developed by Ernst 
E. BOESCH, the nestor of German cultural psychology. 
Already in 1980, in his book Kultur und Handlung, BOESCH coined the 
formula that culture is »the biotop of man«. In 1991, BOESCH reformulated 
his theoretical concept in an English reader enti t led »Symbolic Action 
Theory and Cultural Psychology«. BOESCH conceives the cultural environ-
ment as a »limiting system« which, on the one hand, stimulates, and, on the 
other hand, impedes a certain type of action. This cultural significance of 
actions is, mainly, mediated by the symbolic meaning of the objects that form 
the action field of a concrete situation. Strictly speaking, BOESCH argues, we 
do not perceive objects as physical objects, but as options for real (BOESCH 
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Christian G. Allesch 
says: praxic) or imagined acting, which may have objective purposes as well 
as subjective-functional meaning (for example the remembering of similar 
personal experiences). The objects of the human »field of action« are, »from 
a psychological point of view, not objects per se but representatives of sys-
tems and processes that go beyond the object itself«. "What we perceive as 
the »form« of an object, is no t ju s t something »formal« like height, volume 
or texture but something that is »formed« by cultural traditions of perceiv-
ing as well as by subjective desires and potentialities of action. In this con-
text, aesthetic objects play an exceptional role. 
It was in a small essay, Zwischen Angst und Triumph (Between anxiety and 
triumph), published in 1975 that Ernst BOESCH for the first time explicitly tried 
to apply his symbolic action theory to the phenomenon of aesthetic experi-
ence. In this essay BOESCH argues that the aesthetic plays an important role 
in the process of the self which, in its lifelong attempt to cope with itself and 
the world, oscillates between encouragement and discouragement. What-
ever makes the world more familiar to us is an encouraging experience. 
Aesthetic experience means, according to BOESCH, recognising our self within 
a world of symbolic forms which is »by no means to be limited to the work 
of art« but »may be stimulated by our fellow-beings, by nature, or even by 
an idea of particularly pregnant potency« (1975, p. 73). 
In order to explain that, BOESCH sets up a rather risky but typical anal-
ogy between listening to music and skiing: Both activities have in common 
the pleasure of following an external structure by adequately reproducing 
and responding to the »figures« perceived. It is the stimulating experience 
to cope with reality, of being able to transform a formal idea into an ad-
equate, harmonised movement of body and mind, that makes both activi-
ties in a comparable manner a possible subject of an aesthetic experience. 
Another interesting suggestion was outlined by BOESCH in his book The 
magic and the beautiful in 1983, where he characterises the magic and the 
beautiful as contrasting cultural attitudes to face reality: While the magic 
attitude towards objects expresses a distancing function, the empathic dis-
position, which has a particular relation to the aesthetic, stresses being in 
harmony with the world. The aesthetic attitude thus tends »to expand the 
validity of the inner images« and »to transform counter-world into I-world«: 
The »beautiful object« perceived by the aesthetic empathy, as a »symbol of 
intended order« refers at the same time to the realisation of this order, func-
tioning thus »as a corroboration of the self in much more pivotal and time-
encompassing a sense than the merely momentary and concrete success of 
action« (1983, p. 316). 
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Aesthetic Experience - a topic at the cross-roads between philosophy and psychology 
In Symbolic Action Theory and Cultural Psychology, BOESCH introduces the 
metaphor of »the trace« as a crucial concept in order to conceptualise the 
essence of aesthetic activity: »The trace extends the impact of owr action into 
the external world, and ... it derives its attraction f rom this ... subjectivizing 
the external reality.« This means that the aesthetic object forms »a 'bridg-
ing object' in the sense of spanning the cleavage between person and mat-
ter, and between individual and group; it will, over time, even bridge the gap 
between present and past« (1991, p. 223). 
I think that the metaphor »tracing reality« is a very good expression in 
order to illustrate how aesthetic experience is conceptualised by the Sym-
bolic Action Theory of BOESCH (cf. Allesch 1 9 9 3 ) , since it connotates that 
this kind of experience - and even human experience in general - is more 
than just »facing reality« and much more than »information processing«. 
If we interpret our capacity to trace the possible ways of changing, trans-
forming and transfiguring reality as an essential prerequisite in order to cope 
with all the more or less important problems of our life, we will unders tand 
then why aesthetic experience is able to excite and to gratify by reinforcing 
our self and, fur thermore, as BOESCH puts it, why men »put up with remark-
able prices beauty fetches either by direct expenses or by time-consuming 
activities like ornament ing or dressing«. 
I will not go into fur ther details but I hope that you can agree with me 
that this concept offers very interesting topics for an interdisciplinary dis-
cussion on aesthetic experience. 
Another interesting concept which I want to outline in a few words is 
the semiotic-ecological perspective as developed by Alfred LANG, a disciple 
of BOESCH who, until recently, held a chair for psychology at the University 
of Berne, Switzerland. LANG (1992) tries to overcome the traditional sepa-
ration of the individual-related theorising of psychology and the object-re-
lated concepts of historical and cultural sciences. For him, culture is »exter-
nal mind« in the same way as mind is an internal reflection of the cultural 
world outside. Therefore he tries to conceptualise a semiotic interpretation 
of the functional circle of the individual and the cultural environment. What 
happens outside the individual part of the world, namely the development 
of culture, may be interpreted as a semiotic process as well as what happens 
in the internal world of the individual, namely building up and restructur-
ing of memory or shaping of habits and attitudes, and the processes of trans-
fer between individual and culture, namely perception and acting. Thus, we 
may differentiate four aspects of sign formation which form the functional 
circle between individual and culture, namely 
107 
Christian G. Allesch 
•IntrOsemiosis or perception which denotes a semiotic relation be-
tween cultural reality and its inner representation shaped by individual per-
ception and cognition, 
•IntrAsemiosis or internal mental organisation which restructures ex-
perience according to previous experiences and builds up the representa-
tion in memory. This may also be interpreted as a semiotic process; 
•ExtrOsemiosis or »action«, which means external formation of struc-
tures by man influencing and forming his cultural environment. This type 
of sign generation also includes creative processes like creating a work of 
art or executing a scenic or musical performance; 
• a n d finally ExtrAsemiosis which denotes the presence of created struc-
tures in and the permanent changing of the cultural environment which are 
not caused by direct influence of individuals. It is what LANG calls the »ex-
ternal soul«, the pe rmanen t traces of human activity and creativity in the 
cultural environment. 
We may derive f rom this model that we will not have to face only what 
has its place in the external culture as a work of art or the beauty of a land-
scape but that we may deal with the aesthetic aspects of perception and of 
creative acting too and even, on part of the internal formation of structures, 
of fantasy in terms of semiotic processes. I think that this model is much closer 
to some theoretical developments within aesthetics than most former and 
traditional concepts of psychology. 
You, as aestheticians, may be best suited to assess these theoretical ideas. 
I hope you will agree with me in the view that these are impressive examples 
in support of my theses that aesthetic experience forms a crucial topic at the 
cross-roads between aesthetics and psychology and that the investigation of 
aesthetic experience should be conceived as an interdisciplinary project. It 
was, also with respect to the limited time, not the aim of this paper to present 
an elaborated interdisciplinary theory of aesthetic experience, but I hope I 
was able to convince you that it is an interesting project to be developed in 
fu ture co-operation. 
References 
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Hogrefe. 
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e n v i r o n m e n t re la t ions , or: Ernst E. Boesch as an Aes the t ic ian . 
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Aesthetic Experience - a topic at the cross-roads between philosophy and psychology 
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