Disinterestedness in psychological and neuroscientific aesthetics

The concept of disinterestedness has played a pivotal role in the establishment of philosophical aesthetics. The idea that certain aesthetic object qualities can only be appreciated through the application of a special power of aesthetic appraisal was founded on the claim that such appraisals are without interest in the practical or adaptive use of the object. Similarly, the notion that the “satisfaction” that arises from this type of appraisal is a distinct form of pleasure was grounded on the claim that the function of aesthetic pleasure is to signal the delight of “mere” contemplation, not to promote the possession of the object. We trace how these philosophical ideas gave rise to the psychological and neuroscientific hypothesis that the human brain is endowed with a specialized set of processing routines that allow for the aesthetic evaluation of sensory objects, the result of which is the generation of a pleasure that is devoid of motivational stance. We then review evidence from experiments that have tested this hypothesis. Results from these studies show that tasks and stimuli that are thought to track aesthetic evaluation engage the same neural processes as other types of hedonic evaluation, indicating that they are not fundamentally different, and elicit pleasure states and motivational signals driving behavior that are equally shared with other types of hedonic evaluation, suggesting that there is nothing “disinterested” about aesthetic evaluations. We discuss the implications of these experimental findings.