Gaining Perspectives on our Lives: Moods and Aesthetic Experience

The article examines the role of moods in aesthetic experience. In the last decades emotions have become central to many investigations in philosophy of mind and aesthetics. Scholars and philosophers of film have, however, widely ignored moods in the debate on empathy, emotions, film, and literature. The paper specifically considers the function of moods in relation to narrative and aesthetic perspectives which a film provides and which it invites recipients to adopt. Using Lars von Trier’s moodladen Melancholia as a powerful example, I argue that the moods of the fictional characters are strongly connected to how they attend to the world, how they perceive it, evaluate it, and are embedded in the world.