Aesthetic Needs: How Art Experiences Bring Us Harmony and Meaning

The beauty, harmony, and meaning we derive from art are needs.

We often interpret art experiences as plain leisure but they do more than entertain us. 

The truth is that they are as important as our need for water, food, or friendships. 

In this post, I want to discuss the importance of our aesthetic needs and how cultivating them improve our psychologies. 

To elaborate on this, I'll refer to Abraham Maslow's famous needs hierarchy.

Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

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Maslow's needs hierarchy presents human motivation as ascending categories. 

The most basic ones sit at the bottom: physiological, safety, belonging, and esteem. Together they're what Maslow calls Deficiency needs. 

After one secures these base needs, the next tier called Growth needs opens up. 

These include cognitive, aesthetic, self-actualization, and transcendence needs. These peak needs are about self-exploration, creativity, and fulfilling one's potential. 

The Aesthetic Need 

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Aesthetic need, as one of the growth needs, gets unlocked once our deficiency and cognitive needs are met. 

It involves our desire for beauty, balance, and harmony. We derive most of these from art but they could also come from nature and other pleasing experiences. 

Maslow observed that aesthetics are required for human flourishing because they add emotional and psychological depth to experience. 

They smoothen our chaotic perceptions and make us see reality as harmonious and full of meaning.

Aesthetic Needs: Fulfilled vs Unfulfilled

A helpful illustration of how aesthetics affect behavior is comparing people with fulfilled and unfulfilled aesthetic needs. 

In his book, Motivation and Personality (1954), Maslow describes people deprived of aesthetic needs as follows:

• Exhibiting behaviors and psychological states indicating dissatisfaction or disconnection.
• Experiencing psychological tension or a sense of emptiness.
• Becoming desensitized or disconnected from life's beauty, diminishing the capacity for appreciation or wonder.

On the other hand, these are the traits of people with fulfilled aesthetic needs:

• Experiencing a sense of wholeness, richness, and meaningfulness in life.
• Often having "peak experiences," moments of intense joy, inspiration, and unity with the world.
• Fosters a sense of completeness, richness, and emotional stability.

These indicate the necessity of aesthetic experiences and why they must be deliberately sought. 

If fulfilled, it gives our lives order, beauty, and harmony. On the other hand, leaving it unmet makes us empty, dissatisfied, and devoid of meaning. 

Conclusion: Aesthetic Needs Improve lives

In Maslow's hierarchy, each need is vital for a good life. This means we must satisfy our aesthetic needs equally as other basic needs. 

We can immerse ourselves in more music, books, films, and other art experiences. We could also be out in nature and appreciate its grandeur from time to time.  

In doing so, I encourage everyone to remember that all these experiences do more than entertain us.

They also give lasting change to our psyches because they bring order and sanity to our otherwise tumultuous world. 

How do your fulfill you aesthetic needs? Share your thoughts in the comments and stay tuned again next week for more art insights!