how do you define an aesthetic object? are all of the aesthetic things artistic and aesthetically pleasing?

Question

how do you define an aesthetic object? are all of the aesthetic things artistic and aesthetically pleasing?

In: 3

Answer 1

Everyone, please, don’t just guess if you don’t know the answer; OP isn’t asking about the dictionary definition of “aesthetic,” they’re asking about the philosophical concept of an “aesthetic object” as interrogated by Edmund Burke.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/aesthetics/The-aesthetic-object

An aesthetic object, in the sense I think you mean, is our mental image of an object. It’s what we subjectively think that an object is. In the classical example, if we see a white cloth and believe it is a ghost, the white cloth is an object and the ghost is our aesthetic object.

This concept doesn’t have to literally be aesthetically pleasing, no, but it’s generally only a *useful* concept in the context of aesthetically pleasing things, like art.