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The specific connection between the object and the subject, which is created in an aesthetic situation, requires the spiritual activity of the subject to correspond to the character of the object bearing the aesthetic value. Responding to this requirement, aesthetic perception becomes a particular type of experience. A characteristic feature of aesthetic attitude is its emotional nature. Every aesthetic assessment is more or less accurately understood, and more or less accurately formulated expression of man's experience in perceiving an object of experience - joy, admiration, sympathy, etc. In other areas of value orientation, the emotional basis of assessment is either optional or just impossible. In the aesthetic attitude of man to the world, just the immediate experience, the character and strength of the tested feeling become the only necessary and sufficient basis for judgment. Not the reason, not the logical analysis, but the voice of my own feeling dictates the assessment "beautifully" or "ugly", "tragic" or "comical" The aesthetic attitude towards reality absorbs the individual much deeper and more fully from the cognitive attitude and even from the other directions of the value orientation. Because the experience in which the aesthetic attitude is realized is the most intimate and indivisible form of subjectivity.

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Though the cognizance of truth is a reflection of the objective in the subject's mind, its content is impersonal and emotional. Consequently, the subject of knowledge is the generic social object, not the personality in its entirety and uniqueness. In the utilitarian, political, legal, religious and even moral sphere of value orientation, the subjective also manifests itself at individual levels: here the subject is the representative of one or another social community - class, nation, family and any other social group, and to a certain extent and of all mankind. Therefore, certain value norms binding on all members of a given social group can be developed and formulated here. Accordingly, the utilitarian, ethical and political assessment does not necessarily require the evaluated phenomenon to be included in the life experience of the evaluating person. And aesthetically, such inclusion is absolutely necessary. It is not enough, however, to establish the emotional nature of aesthetic perception because there is a difference from one emotions to another. The experiences that arise in the aesthetic situation differ from all other emotional states in that they arise from the subject's unselfish interest in the object, from the spiritual, not the bio-physiological aspect. The covert interests generate emotions that signal the existence of some biological or social need and the degree of satisfaction. Aesthetic feelings have another origin: they express a spiritual need (and the measure of its fulfillment) of contemplation and experience of an object whose value is not beneficial to it, but in the very fact of its existence. It is this selflessness that distinguishes the sensation of the wonderful from the feeling of pleasure, the feeling of being exalted by the feeling of fear, it transforms laughter in a sense of humor and the horror in a feeling of tragedy.

The spiritual and unselfish character of the aesthetic experience is explained for two reasons. The first is the peculiarities of the subject of perception and evaluation (the content form as a carrier of aesthetic value). Since the form of the object is not a utilitarian, moral or political interest, it can not be owned, can not be used, it does not bring any benefit, and the emotions generated by its contemplation are altruistic, not selfish; they signal the value of the object, but this value is not consumer, but practically useless, purely spiritual. The second reason that determines the variety of the aesthetic emotions - the unselfishly spiritual experience - arises not from the contemplation of the object as such but from the comparison of the object as an ideal. In the attitude of the real and the ideal lies the last key to the secret of the aesthetic.

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