1 Gaining perspectives on our lives: Moods and aesthetic experience 1 Susanne Schmetkamp (University of Basel / University of Siegen) Abstract: This article examines the role of moods in aesthetic experience by focussing on film. It considers specifically the function of moods in relation to narrative and aesthetic perspectives which a film provides and which recipients are invited to adopt. I distinguish superficial transitory moods from profound enduring ones. This differentiation is important with regard to the question why moods in film matter and why they are different from emotions. I will focus on Lars von Trier`s film "Melancholia" and claim that the moods of the leading characters can at one and the same time count as moods and perspectives on the world. Their moods are strongly connected to how they perceive their world, evaluate it, and "are" in the world. By being put into a mood that assails human beings holistically, viewers get acquainted with a perspective of a fictional character in an encompassing manner that includes mind and body. However, it will be discussed whether the viewers feel profound or superficial moods when engaging in the moods of the film and the characters and whether they are infatuated or can remain aesthetic distance. Keywords Moods, Emotions, Aesthetic Experience, Film, Perspectivity, Empathy, Melancholia, Lars von Trier 0. Introduction: The role of moods in aesthetics As David E. Wellbery has shown in his influential article about the German term Stimmung (English attunement, mood, or atmosphere) as an aesthetic concept, its history goes back to the 18th century (Wellbery 2003). Notwithstanding its rather short history, the term has undergone considerable conceptual change. Whereas it metaphorically always refers to musical attunement, its use and meaning in aesthetics has turned from a mere formal condition of aesthetic experience as such – the “proportionate accord of the faculties”, capable of being universally communicated, as Kant described it (Kant 1914, § 19) – into a more subjective concept referring to a particular affective personal state, or more precisely to the affective impact of an aesthetic object, its producers, or its recipients. 2 This paper focuses on the meaning of Stimmung as a subjective affective state within an aesthetic experience, rather than the broader one of aesthetic unity. 3 “Stimmungen” or moods in aesthetics, have been ascribed to human beings as well as non-human entities, above all to landscapes. Compared to acute complex emotions like anger 1 This article is the penultimate preprint version of a paper published in Philosophia (Schmetkamp, S. Philosophia (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9843-y. It is a revised and expanded version of a paper presented at the EPSSE-Workshop on „The Meaning of Moods“ 2016 at the University of Basel and (. I am very thankful for all the questions and comments of the participants. Furthermore I am grateful for the helpful comments of two anonymous reviewers of Philosophia. 2 If we say that an aesthetic object has an emotion or a mood it is meant metaphorically: The object does not have the affect itself but represents and expresses it. 3 These two implications are, however, not seperate. When an artwork succeeds in inducing a mood in a viewer that is crucial for aesthetic appreciation, it might also lead to an “aesthetic resonance” with the work as a whole.