The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological AestheticsLee, Vernon
Philosophy
The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics
Lee, Vernon
Aesthetics; Form (Aesthetics); Psychology, Applied
characteristics: the lines will have aims, intentions, desires, moods;
their various little dramas of endeavour, victory, defeat or
peacemaking, will, according to their dominant empathic suggestion,
be lighthearted or languid, serious or futile, gentle or brutal;
inexorable, forgiving, hopeful, despairing, plaintive or proud, vulgar
or dignified; in fact patterns of visible lines will possess all the chief
dynamic modes which determine the expressiveness of music. But
on the other hand there will remain innumerable emphatic
combinations whose poignant significance escapes verbal
classification because, as must be clearly understood, Empathy deals
not directly with mood and emotion, but with dynamic conditions
which enter into moods and emotions and take their names from
them. Be this as it may, and definable or not in terms of human
feeling, these various and variously combined (into coordinate
scenes and acts) dramas enacted by lines and curves and angles, take
place not in the marble or pigment embodying those contemplated
shapes, but solely in ourselves, in what we call our memory,
imagination and feeling. Ours are the energy, the effort, the victory
or the peace and cooperation; and all the manifold modes of
swiftness or gravity, arduousness or ease, with which their every
minutest dynamic detail is fraught. And since we are their only real
actors, these empathic dramas of lines are bound to affect us, either
as corroborating or as thwarting our vital needs and habits; either as
making our felt life easier or more difficult, that is to say as bringing
us peace and joy, or depression and exasperation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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