Frances to Cheerskep and Chris and others... In regard to examining those psychical objects called experiences, it might be helpful to consider the positions held by some pragmatists.
Peirce under his theory of consciousness, and with consciousness held as pure feeling, found that any experience might be felt unconsciously or subconsciously or consciously. He also posited that an experience will be immediate as in being directly static, or intermediate as in being dynamically obstinate and energetically remediate, or mediate as in being habitually destinate and customarily culminate and eventually ultimate. Morris under his theory of actions found an experience could be aesthetical or ethical or logical, and then posited each of these to be applicable to either art or tech or science; so that there could for example be an aesthetic experience of artistic or technical and political or scientific objects. Dewey under his theory of acts found an aesthetic experience could be emotional or practical or intellectual, so that a practical aesthetic experience for example might be sensorial or material or technical or utile. If this theory were applied to say watching a game of professional football played in a public stadium, the aesthetic experience given by watching it from the stands live in person might yield an emotional aesthetic experience of intensity, but watching it there simultaneously on a television monitor and to also capture instant replays might alternately yield a practical aesthetic experience of a technical kind, yet watching it much later as broadcasted news in a cinema might yield an intellectual aesthetic experience of rationality. What these diverse venues of the experience would have in common is that they are all aesthetic, and that the feelings are all reasonable. Cheerskep partly wrote... We need a penetrating examination of various kinds of alleged aesthetic experiences. Why do we say the feelings we get from good Beethoven, Shakespeare, and Van Gogh are in some way the "same" experience, that they are all "aesthetic experiences"? Why do I feel that the effects of Pavarotti, Streep, and Montana at their peak share a "same" essential element? One could focus hard on a given aesthetic experience, or on the vast range of experiences that I would claim do share a core element that other experiences, no matter how intense, don't share.
