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 arise in response to consciousness of the object contemplated, would be firmly entrenched.
2. Aesthetics seems necessary as a strategy of the conscious experience of beauty, or perhaps as a strategy for the experience of beauty in a universe that may not be beautiful. An object with aesthetic content can be seen as an abstraction from direct experience that nevertheless via symbol and form imparts meaning to experience. The object reaches intrinsic meaning as ...