What place do experiences of beauty have in a meaningful life? A marginal one, at best, it would seem, if one looks at the current literature in analytic philosophy. Treatments of beauty within so‐called “analytic existentialism” tend to suffer from four limitations: beauty is neglected, reduced to artistic production, saddled to theology, or taken as a mere application of a broader theoretical framework. These discussions fail to engage with the rich tradition of philosophical aesthetics. In this essay, I begin by responding to the contention that experiences of beauty cannot lend life meaning because they are passive. Drawing on work in philosophical aesthetics, I then argue that encounters with the beautiful count as genuinely meaning‐conferring because they have features commonly taken as marks of meaningfulness.
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Lucas Scripter (2022) studied this question.
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