COLLISON’S  ESSAY – AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

Collinson’s 36,000 word essay is a fine introduction to the subject of the aesthetic experience. Perhaps the unusual length of her treatise reflects the fact that opinions regarding a definition of aesthetics are so numerous and varied that it is difficult to find any clear defining characteristic or any single feature that is shared by all its descriptions.  It is this indefinability of the term *aesthetics* which causes me to reject the eighteenth century German philosopher Baumgarten's description of aesthetics as the *science of perception.*  

Now I am sure that sundry psychologists could provide some unconvincing theories that people’s appreciation of  the paintings by Heironymos Bosch, a concerto by Shostakovich, or a Shakespearean sonnet are a result of  dark, deeply hidden urges or appetites based upon some Jungian or Freudian pseudo-analysis.  But most folk I feel sure are content to enjoy what stimulates their subjective tastes and calls forth their  emotional responses and have no wish that their aesthetic preferences be explained, categorised, scientifically de-humanised, praised, denigrated or incorporated as an instance of the operation of some putative  *behavioural rules* or *principles of artistic or natural beauty.*

As the one-time owner of my own art company I am soon became  aware that  when purchasing art,  buyers’  aesthetic choices are either:

 (A)  Totally natural, instinctive, negative or positive, subjective, spontaneously appreciative or disapproving responses based upon feelings of pleasure or displeasure.

 (B) Calculated, pragmatically adopted attitudes, where selection is planned  to impress others and give an appearance of  an educated,  refined, cultured gentility. Choices are often investment-based and  purchases made with the possibility of monetary appreciation in value in mind.

For Baumgarten a science of aesthetics would be, a deduction of the rules or principles of artistic or natural beauty extrapolated  from individual "taste." Kant declared that Baumgarten's aesthetics could never contain objective rules, laws, or principles of natural or artistic beauty.  Kant said that Baumgarten’s hopes to bring our critical judgement of the beautiful under rational principles, as a science was an  endeavour that was futile. For, as far as their principal sources are concerned, those supposed rules or criteria are merely empirical. Hence they can never serve as determinate  apriori laws to which our JUDGMENT OF TASTE must conform. It is, rather, our JUDGMENT OF TASTE which constitutes the proper test for the correctness of those rules or criteria.

Kant stated that there are only  two alternatives.

Later, in his Critique of Judgment, Kant used the word aesthetic in relation to the judgment of taste or the estimation of the beautiful. For Kant, aesthetic appreciation relates to the internal feeling of pleasure or displeasure in the observer and not to any qualities inherent  in an external object. For Kant  whaat counts as *beauty*  is a subjective,  aesthetic judgment. In other words: 

*beauty is in the eye of the beholder.*

My own view is that Baumgarten’s reinterpretation or replacement of the Greek meaning of the sensorial aesthetic grew out of the burgeoning mercantilism of the time,  with the development of art as a money-making commercial enterprise linked to the rise of a nouveau-riche class across Europe.  The glimpses of the architecture, sculpture and paintings and ceramics of  Venice, Florence and other centres of culture in southern Europe and the near east experienced during  *The Grande Tour*  led the landowners of the southern counties and the northern industrialists to  purchasing  art to decorate their elaborate country houses (now often open to the  public.) Such a burgeoning market for ostentatious display inevitably lead to the question, 'what is good art'. Baumgarten developed aesthetics to mean the study of good and bad "taste," thus good and bad art, linking good taste with beauty.

His terminology was adopted and is still in use today.

Dianne Collison provides an inexhaustible wealth of examples of the historical and contemporary responses by well known philosophers, writers and poets to the aesthetic experience which is variously described as an process that is cathartic,  imparts knowledge, or as the case may be – does not impart knowledge.  It may be  an experience that leaves one disinterested,  active, passive, passionate  or  contemplative.

On the other hand she points out, as indeed Isis did last week, that such emotive responses to the arts are not really unlike other sorts of aesthetic experiences. Such a variety of experiences were described by my fellow students at our last seminar.   Each underwent a type of experience that was uniquely different for each person. The were interesting to hear about, and I was particularly impressed by Nick’s  account of the time he was led blindfolded to a beach in order that he might undergo the sensorial experience of a sightless person.

Collison’s  essay investigates some of the philosophical issues arising from such diverging accounts of aesthetic experience. She examines a range of descriptions of aesthetic experience, and explores differing concepts of an aesthetic  attitude, and the debate between those who uphold such concepts and those who regard them as untenable.

Her   broad conclusion, with which I concur, is that there IS a valid concept of aesthetic experience, which is a valuable constituent of human life, and that whilst it is significantly con­nected to our  experience of the artifacts of human creativity; (and I would add – *often culturally acquired and socially habituated ) – it is not exclusive to the  domain of art galleries, poetry-readings, libraries and philharmonic halls,  but can be equally experienced in the world of the everyday.

On the nature of aesthetic experience Collison aptly quotes from Findlay’s *The Perspicuous and the Poignant:*

I think it [the aesthetic experience] a type of experience uniquely marked out, extraordinary in its delight, and often in its difficulty and pain, but above all an experience that is not always nor readily to be had, that it involves the concentration, the mental undistractedness, even the bodily euphoria and lightness that we too often cannot muster at all.   (Findlay, 1967, p. 4)

Collison  is equally informative  about the nature of contemplation theory, which is an attempt to characterise the notion of the observer, the spectator, the beholder as a traditional common thread characteristic of all aesthetic experience.  Our aesthetic occurrences are often  experienced as part of an audience – in a theatre, a cinema, as part of a crowd, in a nightclub or at home watching TV as a member of a huge viewing public, or even as the reader of a book which thousands of others are reading or have read.

                  In a 3000 word section on Schopenhauer who writes of the world as a whole as 'the objectification of the will'; or *the  will made manifest,* Collison points to Schopenhauer’s belief that we have to assume that the ability to apprehend Ideas, to lose one's individuality, is present to some extent in almost everyone. Anyone lacking the ability, he maintains, must be incapable of aesthetic pleasure. everything one does or is, all human lives and all the multifarious creatures and things comprised by the world, are particular objectifications of the universal and perpetual struggle of the will as a whole. The world conceived of as under natural laws and as containing beings capable of autonomy and choice is the world as we represent it to ourselves in virtue of the capacities of mind possessed by human beings; but the world as will, as a blind force without lucidity or reason, is how it also is. If we understand this, Schopenhauer says, we understand the truth of the human situation.

                  In conclusion it is impossible to touch upon much of the fascinating content of Collinson’s long essay in a mere ten minute talk,  but in reading it – it soon became obvious from the  range of Collinson’s accounts of aesthetic experience  that the phenomena has no single defining feature, but rather focuses upon groups of features or  general characteristics that are broadly similar. The concepts she identifies are those such as stasis, will-lessness, detachment, distance and disinterestedness and others which  have a good deal in common, even though they have differing emphases and differing significances

I agree with the author that the more one explores the topic of aesthetic experience the greater reluctance there is to commit oneself to any one account of it.