The Principles of AestheticsParker, De Witt H. (De Witt Henry)
Philosophy
The Principles of Aesthetics
Parker, De Witt H. (De Witt Henry)
Aesthetics
This effect of artistic expression upon experience has usually been
called "intuition." Because of its connotation of mysterious knowledge,
intuition is not a wholly satisfactory word, yet is probably as good
as any for the purpose of denoting what artists and philosophers of
art have had in mind and what we have been trying to describe. Other
terms might also serve--vision, sympathetic insight (sympathetic,
because it includes the value of experience; insight, because it
involves possessing experience as a whole and ordered, and as an object
for reflection). Intuition is opposed, on the one hand, to crude
unreflecting experience that never observes itself as a whole or attains
to clearness and self-possession; and, on the other hand, to science,
which gives the elements and relations of an experience, the classes
to which it belongs, but loses its uniqueness and its values. Science
elaborates concepts of things, gives us knowledge about things; art
presents us with the experience of things purified for contemplation.
Scientific truth is the fidelity of a description to the external
objects of experience; artistic truth is sympathetic vision--the
organization into clearness of experience itself.
Compare, for illustration, life as we live it from day to day with our
delineation of it as we recall it and tell it to an intimate companion;
and then compare that with the analysis and classification of it which
some psychologist or sociologist might make. Or compare the kind of
knowledge of human nature that we get from Shakespeare or Moliere with
the sort that we get from the sciences. In the one case, knowledge
attends a personal acquaintance with the experience, a bringing of it
home, a feeling for its values, a realization of the inner necessity
of its elements; in the other, it is a mere set of concepts. Or finally,
compare the knowledge of the human figure contained in an anatomist's
manual with a painting of it, where we not only see it, but in the
imagination touch it and move with it, in short live with it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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