I think that the aesthetic experience one feels from art objects or from nature, are one's own experience of pleasure or displeasure, reflected back from the objects and nature. Anyway the has been my assumption for a long time.
Armando baeza ________________________________ From: William Conger <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2012 5:53 PM Subject: Re: Psychedelic art Michael; I think Kant said that the aesthetic experience was involuntary. He didn't say how strong it was. So many conditions affect the strength of a feeling and what those are or why they are may not have anything directly to do with the seeming occasion of the experience, like the snow-capped mountain. There's nothing that can be predicted by inductive or deductive reasoning as the cause of the aesthetic experience and there's nothing that can be measured as independently strong or weak aesthetic experience. Something does cause it, I suppose and it might be involuntary but there's nothing else to say except to describe it by some means. I wonder why you insist on inherent meaning or aesthetic quality as if they are embedded in things? Why do you, for example, say that some aesthetic experiences are categorically different from others because they are intrinsic to different things, such as things un-designed and things designed? Everything has configuration and thus design; or, configuration is not design. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: Michael Brady <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tue, March 13, 2012 1:33:59 PM Subject: Re: Psychedelic art On Mar 12, 2012, at 6:34 PM, William Conlin wrote: > Do I determine the quality of my experience by allowing myself > to be in the moment, or does the work have to be powerful enough to pull > me into a peak experience without my consent. Why qualify it as a "powerful" and "peak" experience? Can't you have a "mundane" or "prosaic" aesthetic experience? This reminds me of the quip, "My, we've had a lot of weather this year." I've actually heard this said, and the speaker seemed to mean that we've had a lot of strong or powerful or dramatic weather--thunderstorms and tornados and the like--not the boring everyday stuff, which is, nonetheless, still weather. Often members of this list assert that some images rise to the level of art as distinct from mere illustrations or pictures. I believe this is an erroneous qualitative delineation between two items that are categorically the same. It's equivalent to focusing on the snow cap of Kilimanjaro, which is easy to see and acclaim, and ignoring the moment when the upsloping terrain of the plains changes into the base of the mountain. That's where the "mountainness" of K is to be determined, not the snowy summit. You pass the point of mountainness going up and coming down Kilimanjaro, just as one passes the "aesthetic" point before one reaches the crescendoes of the Ninth or Finlandia or Fingal's Cave. I believe there is a categorical difference in the aesthetic experience of walking in the snow on a slate-gray day and looking at Breughel's "Hunters in the Snow." That difference is produced by the difference between an actual event whose components happen or occur without design (walking in the snow) and an event that is invented, chosen, and designed ("Hunters in the Snow"). | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
