Lipps defines the aesthetic experience as a "thrill of sympathetic
feeling," Groos as "sympathetic imitation," evidently assuming
that pleasure accompanies this. But there are many feelings of
sympathy, and joyful ones, which do not belong to the aesthetic
realm. In the same way, not all "imitation" is accompanied by
pleasure, and not all of that falls within the generally accepted
aesthetic field. If these definitions were accepted as they
stand, all our rejoicings with friends, all our inspiration from
a healthy, magnetic presence must be included in it. It is clear
that further limitation is necessary; but if to this sympathetic
imitation, this living through in sympathy, we add the demand
for repose, the necessary limitation is made. Physical exercise
in general, or the instinctive imitation of energetic, or easy
(in general FAVORABLE) movements, is pleasurable, indeed, but
the experience is not aesthetic,--as is quite clear, indeed, to
common sense,--and it is not aesthetic because it is the
contradiction of repose. A particular case of the transformation
of pleasurable physical exercise into an aesthetic activity is
seen in the experience of symmetrical or balanced form; any
moderate, smooth exercise of the eye is pleasurable, but this
alone induces a state of the whole organism combining repose with
stimulation.
The theories of Kulpe and Santayana, while they definitely mark
out the ground, seem to me in need of addition. "Absorption in
the object in respect to its bare quality and conformation" does
not, of course, give the needed information, for objective beauty,
of the character of this conformation or form. But yet, it might
be said that the content of beauty might conceivably be deduced
from the psychological conditions of absorption. In the same
way, Santayana's "Beauty as objectified pleasure," or pleasure as
the quality of a thing, is neither a determination of objective
beauty nor a sufficient description of the psychological state.
Yet analysis of those qualities in the thing that cause us to
make our pleasure a quality of it would supplement the definition
sufficiently and completely in the sense of our own formula. Why
do we regard pleasure as the quality of a thing? Because there
is something in the thing that makes us spread, as it were, our
pleasure upon it. This is that which fixates us, arrests us,
upon it,--which can be only the elements that make for repose.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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