Aesthetic Experience

1. Aesthetic opinions are held so firmly because the aesthetic experience is direct and intensely subjective psychological and sometimes psychophysical. Langer says that the aesthetic object has a "virtual character," i.e., that although it exists in reality as itself, it is also a semblance of palpable experience. The concept of semblance "liberates perception--and with it, the power of conception--from all practical purposes, and lets the mind dwell on the sheer appearance of things" (Langer, 1953, pp. 48-9).

The subjective feature of aesthetics penetrates this concept because of the myriad meanings that arise on account of perceptions of myriad individuals: "Even so non-sensuous a thing as a fact or a possibility appears this way to one person and that way to another" (Langer, 1953, p. 49). Whitehead makes a similar point: "The individual immediacy of an occasion [e.g., experience of an aesthetic object] is the final unity of subjective form, which is the occasion as an absolute reality" (Whitehead, 1965, p. 321). Whitehead suggests a paradox between "sheer individuality" and "essential relativity" that is complicated by the "decisive moment of absolute self-attainment as emotional unity" (Whitehead, 1965, p. 322). The fact that psychology, emotion, and phenomenal experience of the art object are inextricably bound suggests that highly individuated subjective experience is embedded into human consciousness. Accordingly, it would be expected that aesthetic opinions, which

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ments "to modify each other's characters in combination, as words do, by all serving each as a context" (Langer, 1976, p. 228; emphasis in original). Music's logical form imparts a "connotative relationship" between itself and subjective experience (p. 228). Music does not impart specific content, but presence of content may be suggested by music as in no other artistic medium. Langer quotes Wagner's statement that music expresses "just what is unspeakable in verbal language" (Langer, 1976, p. 235). Clark, who remarks that the power and prestige of opera derive from its irrationality, is in fact asserting that it is driven by a conscientiously organized aesthetic: "'What is too silly to be said may be sung'--well, yes; but what is too subtle to be said, or too deeply felt, or too revealing or too mysterious--these things can also be sung and only be sung" (Clark, 1969, p. 243; emphasis added). Langer generalizes from the import of music to the import of art in whole: Artistic expression . . . is broadly the same in all arts as it is in music--the verbally ineffable, yet not inexpressible law of vital experience, the pattern of affective and sentient being. This is the "content" of what we perceive as "beautiful form"; and this fo

Category: Arts - A