Aesthetic experience

“ It is just this contrast and parallelism of structure as balance, proportion, symmetry, addressed to the mind, with expression as emotional content, that a true view of the aesthetic experience would lead us to challenge. If there is one thing that our study of the general nature of aesthetic experience has shown, it is that aesthetic emotion is unique-- neither a perception nor an intellectual grasp of relations, nor an emotion within the accepted rubric--joy, desire, triumph, etc. ”

“ If we do not know what part of our feeling is aesthetic feeling, how can wee go farther? If the introspecting subject cannot say, This is aesthetic feeling, it is logically impossible to make his state of mind the basis for further advance. It is clear that the great question is of what one has a right to include in the aesthetic experience. ”

“ It is as the repository of deep desires and as the appreciation of values that the aesthetic may be most readily seen to be practical, but it performs other functions. As ecstatic experience it is the source of power in the conscious life, and it was indeed the belief in art as a means of attaining power that has given art its place in the world. The aesthetic experience is the form also in which desires are brought into relation to one another, harmonized and transformed, or transferred to new objects. So the aesthetic is the type of adaptation in the inner life. ”

“ And even when the objects represented have a value in themselves, the superiority of their representation over the mere perception of them in nature comes from this source. Why, for example, does the painting of flowers by a real master afford a richer aesthetic experience than real flowers? Painted flowers have no perfume, rightly called the soul of flowers. ”

“ Thus a thoroughgoing analysis of the nature of the aesthetic experience in its simplest and most sensuous form has given us a principle,--the principle of unity in harmonious functioning,-- which has enabled us to follow the track of beauty into the more complex realms of ideas and of moral attitudes, and to discover that there also the law of internal relation and of fitness for imitative response holds for all embodiments of beauty. ”

“ Granting that the aim of every aesthetics is to determine the Nature of Beauty, and to explain our feelings about it, we may say that the empirical treatments propose to do this either by describing the aesthetic object and extracting the essential elements of Beauty, or by describing the aesthetic experience and extracting the essential elements of aesthetic feeling, thereby indicating the elements of Beauty as those which effect this feeling. ”

“ Yet these interesting speculations have to do rather with the earlier stages of the evolution of the aesthetic faculty than with its functions in the higher stages.Aesthetics and ethics. An idea of a social utility in aesthetic experience which does demand the attention of the theorist is that the culture of beauty and art has a socializing influence, helping to give to our emotional experience new forms of expression whereby our sympathies are deepened and enlarged. ”

“ Such elements as can be shown to have a direct relation to the aesthetic experience are then counted as elements of the beauty of the aesthetic object, and such as are invariable in all art forms would belong to the general formula or concept of Beauty. ”

“ Third, the perfect use of the medium in the effort to fulfill the artistic purpose of sympathetic representation—the power to delight the senses and create sympathy for the object expressed, on the one hand, and the range of the vision of the object, on the other; the depth and the breadth of the aesthetic experience. With reference to the former we ask: how vividly does the work of art force us to see; how completely does it make us enter into the world it has created ”

“ But no one will deny that the direct experience of beauty, the single aesthetic thrill, is measured exactly by the length of this span. It is only genius--hearer or composer--who can operate "a longue haleine." ”

“ They are, moreover, the two senses by the use of which a number of persons may join most perfectly in a common act of aesthetic contemplation. This distinction strengthens their claims to be in a special manner the aesthetic senses, and this for a double reason. (1) It makes them sense-avenues by which each of us obtains the most immediate and most impressive conviction that aesthetic experience is a common possession of the many, and is largely similar in the case of different individuals. ”

“ And this not only because they commonly supply us with new and valuable varieties of experience of the more refined kind, but because the aesthetic judgments on nature and art of men in whom the feeling of beauty has been specially cultivated have a greater value than those of others. ”

“ First, the theory, often called "hedonistic," that the value of art consists in the satisfactions of sense which the media of aesthetic expression afford—the delight in color and sound and rhythmical movement of line and form. ”

“ In this way, the sensuous element in art, and with it almost everything in art that is essentially artistic, is made a matter of indifference; and a clear apprehension of the opposite principle—that the sensuous material of each art brings with it a special phase or quality of beauty, untranslatable into the forms of any other, an order of impressions distinct in kind—is the beginning of all true aesthetic criticism. ”

“ The inspiring lesson of beauty, expressed so simply and intelligently, will sink deep into the minds of the great masses, to be reborn in an endless stream of aesthetic expression in the spiritual and physical improvement of the people. ”

“ And, secondly, it explains how art can fulfil the behests of our changing and discursive interest in things while satisfying the imperious unchanging demands of the contemplated preference for beautiful aspects. And thus we return to my starting-point in dealing with art: that art is conditioned by the desire for beauty while pursuing entirely different aims, and executing any one of a variety of wholly independent non-aesthetic tasks. ”

“ Now and again a new sensation is made by some eccentric genius, as it were, dragging a weird aesthetic red herring across the fashionable artistic scent, and diverting attention to side tracks in artistic development, often mixed with morbidity, or, as a change from the pursuit of superficial and ephemeral types of beauty, debased and revolting types and loathly subjects are drawn under the pictorial limelight and analysed. ”

“ But these occasional, even frequent, lapses must not diminish our belief either in the power of art or in the deeply organised and inevitable nature of aesthetic preference as a whole. What the knowledge of such fluctuations ought to bring home is that beauty of shape is most spontaneously and completely appreciated when the attention, instead of being called upon, as in galleries and concerts, for the mere purpose of aesthetic enjoyment, is on the contrary, directed to the artistic or "natural" beauty of shapes, in consequence of some other already existing interest. ”

“ The feeling for the medium, the sense of what can rightly be done in it only or better than in anything else, and the charm and fascination of doing it so — these, I take it, are the real clue to the fundamental question of aesthetics, which is “how feeling and its body are created adequate to one another.” ”

“ I now take delight in the perception of an object when formerly I took delight only in its use; I now enjoy the expression of purpose for its present perceived perfection, when once I enjoyed it only for its ulterior results. Such intervals of restful contemplation interrupt the activity of every thoughtful maker or user of tools. Thus the practical life may enter into the aesthetic, and that which grows out of exigence may develop into freedom. ”

“ I cannot repeat too often that the differentiating characteristic of art is that it gives its works a value for contemplation independent of their value for fact-transmission, their value as nerve-and-emotion-excitant and of their value for immediate, for practical, utility. This aesthetic value, depending upon the unchanging processes of perception and empathy, asserts itself in answer to every act of contemplative attention, and is as enduring and intrinsic as the other values are apt to be momentary and relative. ”

“ But, first of all, we have to ask how the aesthetic pleasure even in formal beauty is constituted, and to what extent expression belongs to the beauty of pure form. Form is impressive, or directly beautiful, through its harmony with the conditions offered by our senses, primarily of sight and hearing, and through the harmony of its combinations of suggestions and impulses with the entire organism. ”

“ Therefore the satisfaction of the shape-perceptive or aesthetic preferences must not be confused with any of the many and various other aims and activities to which art is due and by which it is carried on. ”

“ And what could this new knowledge be, supplied by art and by the aesthetic activity, appearing when the human spirit has come full circle, after it has imagined, perceived, thought, abstracted, calculated, and constructed the whole world of thought and history? ”

“ Moreover, we shall not concern ourselves with the origin or history of the arts further than is needful for an understanding of their general character. We are investigating the theory, not the history, of taste, and are more interested in the present developed aesthetic consciousness than in its rudimentary forms. ”

“ Such different thinkings away from the shapes are often traceable to previous orientation of the thoughts or to special states of body and feelings. But explicable or not in the particular case, these varieties of one's own aesthetic responsiveness will persuade the Reader who has verified their existence, that contemplative satisfaction in shapes and its specific emotion cannot be given by the greatest artist or the finest tradition, unless the beholder meets their efforts more than half way. ”

“ This emotion is called the aesthetic emotion; and if we can discover some quality common and peculiar to all the objects that provoke it, we shall have solved what I take to be the central problem of aesthetics. We shall have discovered the essential quality in a work of art, the quality that distinguishes works of art from all other classes of objects. ”

“ For given space-perception and empathy and their capacity of being felt as satisfactory or unsatisfactory, the aesthetic imperative is not only intelligible but inevitable. Instead therefore of asking: Why is there a preference for what we call Beauty? we should have to ask: why has perception, feeling, logic, imagination, come to be just what it is? Indeed why are our sense-organs, our bodily structure and chemical composition, what they are; and why do they exist at all in contradistinction to the ways of being of other living or other inanimate things? ”

“ And it allows us to see the workings of that psychological law, already manifest in the elementary relations of line to line and dot to dot, by which whatever can be thought and felt in continuous alternation tends to be turned into a whole by such reiteration of common activities. And this means that Art adds to its processes of selection and exclusion a process of inclusion, safeguarding aesthetic contemplation by drawing whatever is not wholly refractory into that contemplation's orbit. ”

“ CHAPTER XI THE DOMINION OF ART OVER NATURE: PAINTING In literature, as we observed in our last two chapters, nature does not find aesthetic expression on its own account. In the lyric, nature appears only as the reflection of personal moods and thoughts, in the drama and novel and epic only as the theater of human action or the determiner of human fate. In painting and sculpture, on the other hand, the expression of nature is the primary aim. ”

“ The present writer can vouch for the case of at least one real child in whom the possibility of aesthetic emotion, and subsequently of aesthetic appreciation, was extended from music and natural scenery to pictures and statues, by the application of the word Beautiful to each of these different categories. ”

“ These excitements vary constantly in their various renewals, and occasionally take such a form that the soul is surprised by the inward vision of an unexampled beauty. If this inward vision is clear and steady, we have an aesthetic inspiration, a vocation to create; and if we can also command the technique of an appropriate art, we shall hasten to embody that inspiration, and realize an ideal. ”

“ So far as I have myself succeeded in doing so, I think I can assure the Reader that if he will note down, day by day, the amount of pleasure he has been able to take in works of art, he will soon recognise the existence of aesthetic responsiveness and its highly variable nature. ”

“ The visible beauty to be met with in this life of ours, showing glimpses of itself, whether in inanimate objects or in animate organisms in a certain choiceness of colour, can be adequately admired by our power of aesthetic feeling. ”

“ In art, however, there are subtler aspects to the relation between form and content, and these have a unique aesthetic significance. For there, as we know, the elements of the medium, colors and lines and sounds, and the patterns of these, their harmonies and structures and rhythms, are expressive, in a vague way, of feeling; hence, when the artist employs them as embodiments of his ideas, he has to select them, not only as carriers of meaning, but as communications of mood. ”

“ In the balance of true taste one cannot weigh more than the other, considering that both here and there is wanting that which forms the aesthetic value of a work of art, the intimate union of spirit with matter, and the twofold relation of the work with the faculty of perception as well as with the faculty of the ideal. ”