The word “aesthetics” tells us that the form in which the beautiful is given to us is perception. This is our point of departure. However, it becomes immediately apparent that not any concept of perception at all will be adequate to the task of aesthetics. Therefore, we must attempt to shape the concept in a way that does justice to the phenomenon – specifically with respect to the structure of the aesthetical act, whose foundation in the consciousness of the beholder is formed by perception.
Long enough have we understood perception as though it contained only the elements of the visible, the tangible, the audible, or colors, volumes, sounds, and the like, in short as though reducible to a collection of sensations. Modern psychology has shown not only that perception cannot be so reduced, but also that we know nothing of elements of sensation as such. Such elements may only become subsequently the objects of analytic psychology; but this science has had difficulty in isolating them experimentally in a way that makes them available. To do that requires artificially produced conditions that do not occur in life.
In the content of genuine perception a complex figure is always given, a pictorial whole, a joining of many details of contrasts and transitions, whether merely a single “thing” is perceived or an entire complex of things (in practice, the latter is usually the case), a state of affairs or even something more than that. Along with what is seen belongs that which is grasped in seeing, something which is no longer given directly to the senses, but which is its entirely self-evident completion. For we never see in a purely optical sense everything that is visible upon a thing, but rather we complete the thing immediately, we interconnect and unify it, and do not even notice that we are active in this way. The line between what is optically given and what we supplement it with disappears (43) in perception. For what is achieved synthetically in perception occurs quite this side of all reflection. To be sure, it occurs on the basis of experience, but not by an inference, a comparison, a combining, or similar subsequent mental acts.
That is by no means all. In everyday perception there is contained much that is not at all comprehensible by the senses. We see the tree and the insect, but we see life in the two of them as well, differentiated, of course, as living being of two distinct types. When we enter a room, we see the poverty or wealth, the slovenliness or the good taste of the inhabitants. We see a face or a form in motion, though perhaps only from the rear, and yet just from that glimpse alone we learn something about the inward life of the person, about his character and his destiny.
Now it is precisely this, viz., the genuinely non-visible, that tends to be for us the essential matter of perception, for the sake of which we turn our attention toward an object, or rest our attention for a while upon what we see. The external aspects alone of the object would not be likely to attract our attention, no less hold it. Thus we see people looking at each other’s faces: perception forces its way through the visible forms towards what is fundamentally quite different, towards the inwardness, towards the soul; and that is so true that we normally have difficulty later in remembering the visible forms of the person and in visualizing them – while the non-visible aspects, which we perceived along with the visible, can remain before our minds in all their concrete distinctness. Our consciousness grasped the former immediately, while it hardly noticed the latter, merely grazed them, as it were, and dealt with them as something inessential and transparent as it passed through them.
Let us not object too soon by asking whether this is really a “seeing.” The fact is that as a practical matter we do not know cases of seeing persons without this kind of seeing-through. And the latter is not given subsequent to the former, in reflection or by thinking the matter over; rather it is present with the sensible perception at just the same time as the self-evident and familiar completion of an object. The acts – if they are really two acts connected one behind the other in series – do not appear as temporally separate.
How are we to explain this? How can what is not perceptible be the essential element in perception?
The situation is not as paradoxical as it may appear, once one reflects that our consciousness is not simply perceptual, and that there is a risk in isolating perception theoretically – as if perception ever stood by itself alone. To the contrary, every perception occurs upon the background of a complex of interrelated acts and contents, which are always built up in two stages, as a momentary nexus of the mental act [Erlebnis] and as a nexus of experience [Erfahrung] that is broadly extended in time. (44)
These two stages of the nexus always form a structured unity in which the order of a manifold is already present. And in this unity everything apprehended, anything presenting itself to consciousness in any way is given order: that which has been told us, and that which we have experienced personally; one’s own thoughts or fancies, as well as what one has perceived.
However, within this unity dominates, as a rule, a narrow circle of objective elements upon which the interests of the perceiver depend: persons and their qualities, situations in life, the inner moods, dispositions, and intentions of men, their benevolence, their animosity, their envy, their aversions and approbations, and much more. The remainder is arranged about these elements, in the main, and out of them the external aspect of what is perceived fills itself with the inward aspect, which was not apprehensible by the senses, but which always arises immediately, and appears to be given along with them.
Because this strange phenomenon of “looking through” [Hindurchblicken] the external aspects of a thing is so universal and familiar, we are hardly surprised by it, although the delusions that we often suffer at its expense should be enough to make us thoughtful. And that is the reason why, in the end, we usually experience consciously only the inner elements of perception, while we pass over the external elements, despite their being that which is given to us through the senses directly and serve to mediate the former. In this sense, we may say: I “see” anger, melancholy, or suspicion in the changing expressions on people’s faces. For this reason we are usually far from being able to explain “how” all this is expressed in the play of people’s features.
In the face of such phenomena, it is unimportant how we characterize them as mental acts, that is, whether we should count them as a form of perception, but this becomes nothing more than a play with words. What is important is to understand correctly the facts of the case, and even then not only for all perception, but primarily for those having to do with persons, situations, and relationships that occur in the context of practical life. In these cases, we see that with every perception there is firmly tied the integration of pre-given interconnections of lived experience and of experience in general – so firmly that without these contexts, we do not count them as perceptions; rather we have the impression of not having perceived at all. The essential matter for us is just this looking-through into what has not been grasped by the senses.
Although we have no intention here of bypassing discursive consciousness, it is nevertheless true that a variety of general considerations are involved here. Thus, for example there is the case of the simple elaboration of what is perceived through the senses into the representation of a thing: the pattern of the thing is already present, not, to be sure, in the form of a concept, but also not in any sense in “strict” universality, as the scientific attitude would require. Nonetheless, it is still present in a loose form and not infrequently with compelling power. (45)
This universal element is the simple precipitation of experience, and operates in our understanding of objects as an “empirical analogy,” which as such need not become conscious. One could also say: it is there as a kind of familiar well-worn pathway of representations, which is no longer traced or inspected, and for that reason it is in a certain way indifferent to objective correctness or incorrectness. For if inferences from analogy are questionable, how much more so must be the analogies that we draw without noticing them! Similarly we associate, for example, based on a single past experience, certain kinds of human character (or even just with single character traits, such as kindness, reliability, frivolity, or frailty), with certain facial types; and this picture appears again immediately as a completed pattern when we again meet the same external facial characteristics. Such a phenomenon has been called “association” since the time of Hume; but this phenomenon differs from that described by Hume in that it is always already carried out in perception itself.
However much this kind of generalization may be liable to error, most of what we possess in life of shared knowledge of the inner life of other persons rests upon it. The person who has experienced much of life is one in whom such knowledge possesses a broad foundation. With this broadness of foundation, however, generalizations as such force themselves into consciousness, where they usually take the form of conceptual knowledge and can be examined and surveyed. What is taken in along with the act of perception itself is clearly different from this manifestly higher standpoint, and it is the former alone that we are considering here.
Behind the phenomenon thus described there stands, as we have already noted, an element of practical interest; we are directed towards what appears as urgent in some way. We live, of course, in need to orient ourselves continuously within the conditions of the environment. However, we cannot understand a situation without a certain amount of additional knowledge about the intentions, aspirations, and attitudes of our fellow men. For in life they are our antagonists, and it is precisely their intentions that determine the character of a situation. Understood in this manner, all practical situations are of an inward kind: what is essential about them is the play of unseen powers of the soul. And these powers are precisely the object of acts of perception that have been extended by the element of the universal in experience.
The perception of the invisible along with the visible loses much of its mystery when we realize how it plays a broad role even in relation to far simpler objects. Think, for example, of how our ability to replace the sense of touch by that of sight increases as our consciousness matures. Upon each thing, we are able to see more and more of what is invisible: we “see” the hardness or elasticity of things, or even their weight and the inertia that resists efforts to move them. And similarly mutatis mutandis for the sense of hearing: we hear steps in an adjacent room, (46) but “see” in the mind’s eye a human form in motion, as it goes about some business or other; or we hear the quiet rustle of a wicker chair, but we see inwardly how the person sitting upon it is rocking in some specific way. In these cases also, perception is directed, without any concern for the limits of the sensibly given, toward that which is important to us because of some interest we have in it.
At this point, the insight is immediately apparent that our entire perceptual field is pre-structured by practical interest. Perception itself, and to a great extent experiential events, are both subject to a principle of selection by the prior accents that we ourselves bring into the act of perception by our states of interest. Out of all the things that may be given to us as objects of potential experience, only those that carry these accents appear in the full light of consciousness; the direction of our attention depends upon them. What appears thus as emphasized or as salient is not what is essential in itself, but only what is essential for us.
In a highly developed theoretical consciousness, naturally, what is essential in itself may be approached; but then consciousness makes a sharp distinction between what is given to the senses and what is not, and perception takes on the form of consciously focused observation. At that point, we have quite a different kind of standpoint, one that is quite far from everyday perception.
Finally, also standing behind this process of accentuation and selection in perception are clearly demonstrable value-qualities. All states of interest can be traced back precisely to value-elements, which we bring to experience and then transfer to the circuit of the perceptible. In his day, Max Scheler32 saw this phenomenon and described it for the first time in all generality. The result may be summarized in his own words: the field of perception is subject to a principle of selection that is oriented towards values. Of course in no sense do the higher ethical values play a role here originally, or only on a secondary level; rather, the values of goods (including a variety of values relative to situations) and of vital states are primary. Most prevalent are precisely the standpoints relative to “getting one’s bearings” [Sich-Zurechtfinden] and “asserting oneself” [Sich-Durchsetzen]. Such standpoints, along with the values themselves that stand behind them, are nevertheless elements that are essentially removed from perception.
Let us add here parenthetically a word about knowledge of human nature. It does not normally rest upon genuine knowledge, but rather upon a sharpened intuitive vision, and thus essentially upon a seeing of what is not visible along with what is visible. Such knowledge belongs as such precisely in the circle of perceptual phenomena that has been described here. It is similarly conditioned by thoroughly practical considerations, and is led by value perspectives. The nature of such knowledge is constituted, along with the plasticity of the experience, by apt generalizations from what has been previously experienced, thus again by empirical analogies. For that reason, it possesses some of the liabilities inherent in all thinking by analogy: it limits itself frequently to generalizations; it forms models, and is sound (47) only when these models are appropriate. The eye of the man who knows the ways of men is therefore directed upon the typical, and it fails him when it is faced with authentic personal existence. For what is personal is unique, and requires a more loving gaze to make it visible.
All of this goes far beyond perception itself. And yet it belongs to perception, and is quite closely and intimately related to it, such that we are not familiar with it in any other way. The solution of this puzzle is the one given above, namely that there is no purely perceptual consciousness, not, at least, in human beings, and not at all in spiritually developed ones. All these perceptual phenomena are thus already placed within a very broad context upon which they all are arranged.
These phenomena can also be viewed from the other side, and then they appear as follows: perception “transcends” itself. This expression is to be taken literally: perception goes beyond itself; it passes beyond its own limits, which were imposed upon it by the faculties of sense. On its own, it forces itself toward something different from itself, something that is not given to it directly; it claims it nevertheless for itself, and indeed without any concern for whence it came. So it forces its way towards entities, unities, interrelationships, backgrounds – and in such an elemental and immediate way that we imagine ourselves to be experiencing such things in perception, and we accept them as having been given along with it. Thus it happens that we think we “see” the ulterior motives of a person in his face, and, in a certain sense, we really are able to see them.
This “self-transcendence” of perception thus consists in the fact that it does not remain within itself, but rather expands beyond itself. And for that very reason, the phenomena of perception do not allow themselves to be isolated psychologically. We find them only woven together with an abundance of much higher functions, and, in a strict sense, in perception we are always immediately dealing with the whole of consciousness.
This is in no sense valid only for its entirely objective and material elements; it is valid also for the emotional elements. It is valid in fact primarily and properly only to them, for here their interconnectedness is more intimate, and deeper and more fundamentally rooted.
Purely objective perception, familiar to us in observation, developed as a late product of consciousness in human culture, and even today it is usually found only in rather mature adults. The objects of perception in the consciousness of the child or the primitive man who lives close to nature are still infected with all sorts of affective accents: for example, the unknown is infected with the accents of the fearful or the terrible, and yet these emotions still possess an amazing capacity for being occasionally eclipsed by the element of attractiveness provided by curiosity. A place can take on the qualities of uncanniness or dreadfulness, or the opposite, of the familiar and welcoming – and this happens, of course, at our first glance, purely through (48) perception alone. Things like events can appear as threatening, sinister, or malicious, just as they can also be beneficent, well-meaning, kind, or affectionate. Children often take quite harmless things to be “good” or “evil”; the latter not in the sense of morally evil, but rather hostile or malevolent. The bright sunshine, a babbling brook, the dark forest, the cool of the evening, a gnarled oak tree, in short the entire perceptual world, are permeated with such emotional accents.
Much of this can be traced to the times when men were genuinely threatened by the power of nature; the case is similar to what man finds favorable to himself in the environing world. Such experiences may have remained in him in the form of instinctive visceral responses. We see reflected here also the animistic world-view of primitive cultures; although alien to our thought today, it has yet remained on the perceptual level of our consciousness – modified in different ways in different human types, but still within certain limits apprehensible sympathetically by all of us. And in fact even today man lives, on a certain level of his consciousness, within a complex of ineradicable teleological notions, which announce themselves to him, surprise him, as it were, at moments when his more sober thought is not on the alert. At such times, what is perceived is no longer indifferent to him; everything “makes demands on him,” be it for good or ill, even when he is still far beyond all mythical reminiscences. Primeval elements of dread may play the main role in such events.
Emotional components of this type are not secondary to perception and merely supervene upon it; rather they are the original elements of it, and that objective perception freed itself from their control later. For that reason, they echo at times in the perceptions of minds that have long become sober and tractable. They break out from the dark depths of the subconscious, and attach themselves to perception.
In everyday contemporary human life, affective components still play a contributory role in perception. Certain elements of desire and aversion are also not absent, and they, arising out of perceptions, dominate our moods. We speak of such things as a “joyful sight” or a “disgusting impression,” even when no direct involvement in the matter affects our interest. Our hand glides with obvious pleasure over the soft fur of a cat, but we hate to touch a tortoise or a spider. Vital responses lie unmistakably at the root of such phenomena. It is similar with frightening or piercing noises, with restful, rhythmical sounds, or those that make us drowsy; just the words alone express unambiguously the affective tone in each. Consider also that our sense of smell is infected even more by aversion and delight, and completely so our sense of taste.
Largely, we can say analogous things about the appearance of a person. A man, too, may seem strange when we first glance at him; he may disgust us, or he may attract us and win our confidence. Emotional responses that stand at the gateway of morality are already found here. Yet always they (49) attach themselves to perception immediately and in an entirely spontaneous fashion. Upon them rests the mystery of the phenomenon of “first impression.”
In general, the line between objective and emotional perception is blurry. Originally both may have been one, and perhaps indeed the emotional aspect may have been prevalent. These phenomena also can be characterized as a kind of self-transcendence of perception. Here, however, the transcendence is entirely in the opposite direction: not toward the completion or enrichment of the object, but rather toward greater vibrancy of the impression, of the appearance as such, or, simply, it is transcendence toward its “being-for-us.” From the perspective of the subject, it has the form of a transcendence that reaches back towards the original sense experience, towards the kind of emotional tonality from which objective perception had originally been won. And if one should object that these tonalities do not really belong to the object, we may reply as Democritus once did to a quite different question: even colors and sounds do not belong to the object, but exist only for us. The emotional tonalities, similar to colors and sounds, are to be attributed to the object, such that the attribution itself has the same immediacy in both cases, and is thus not truly an attribution. Rather, what we feel in perception as menacing and attractive is as immediate as redness and greenness as qualities of objects. Only a relatively later reflection teaches us to distinguish between the objective and the subjective in such cases.
The world of things appears, in perception just as in immediate experience, as subject to these tonalities of feeling that are given to us. Strangely, even when we no longer are inclined to ascribe them in earnest to things, and when their “being-for-us” has long ago been correctly understood, they still are able to resonate in our perception, and on occasion are even able to dominate it.
For that reason we must say that they are given to us in the form of properties of the object, and not in the form of subjective additions (which, considered in themselves, they may largely be); not as elements of acts, but rather entirely as elements of the content of objects.
We must not forget in this connection that they are also to a great extent – at least originally – entirely signs of objectively existing relationships, of dangers, threats, opportunities, and the like; and this is especially apparent wherever their origin out of significant vital responses can be clearly sensed sympathetically.
The relatedness of things to us, which is rooted in our dependence upon them, is hence in no wise an illusion, but concrete reality. It remains thus rooted even in those particular cases in which it is only imagined. Ontological relationships no doubt permeate the entire objective field; but a sure criterion of reality and illusion-is not given by providence to man in his cradle. (50)
What is valid for perception in general is valid even more for aesthetic perception. Here what is seen and felt through perception becomes the genuinely essential element.
In the everyday life of the contemporary adult, tonalities of feeling in perception are largely disconnected from conscious awareness, or at least repressed. The modern man is, in general, attuned objectively to his environment, and only existing things have meaning and weight for him. Within certain limits, he has learned to distinguish between what is real and what is imaginary: the former has all his interest and the latter concerns him only on occasion. His consciousness of the world is directed primarily at acquiring knowledge, and, indeed at acquiring practical knowledge of the world.
The superiority of the spiritual over the non-spiritual consciousness consists just in its taking things as they are in themselves, i.e., apart from its comprehension of them. Naturally, it does that only as far as it can, but the tendency to do so is there. And that alone is sufficient to transform radically our view of the environing world, and to give us the attitude basic to objectivity, which signifies a consciousness of the transobjectivity of all objects of knowledge.33 And this consciousness extends itself downwards into perception.
It is quite otherwise with aesthetic perception. In it, the first and most important element is the reversal of this tendency, that is, the return to the original attitude. This is true not in every respect, but certainly with respect to the emotional tonalities that are attached to the object perceived. For those tonalities, e.g., the “coolness” of a blue-green hue or the “warmth” of red or yellow-brownish hues, become once again the essential matter. The secretive and the eerie appearance of the dark forest, the dreadfulness of the howling wind, the loneliness and helplessness we feel when we are surrounded by broad, bare cliffs: all this impresses itself upon us once again, and becomes in certain circumstances our chief concern. The same is true of what appears in the shape of objects as menacing us or as filling us with dread, as cozy and snug, as exhilarating and oppressive, so far as perception makes visible in that shape a proud or a fearful attitude; it is true also for the sense of freedom that a view of vast heights offers, or for the oppressiveness of narrow passageways.
Aesthetic perception does not question the validity of the subjectivity or the anthropomorphism that may be contained in it; it neither questions nor reasons at all. All these phenomena may accompany it unreflectively but essentially, in the cases of both natural objects and works of art; and they lend to what is given by means of aesthetic perception an entire dimension of peculiar qualities: in the landscape, in interior design, in church (51) architecture, most forcefully, perhaps, in music (in timbre and harmony), but also in verbal form, as in works of poetry.
This does not imply a return to non-spiritual consciousness. The latter would without hesitation take to be real the qualities of feeling that are given along with perception; even more, it would relate this dread, terror, or menace to itself, and become really afraid. Aesthetic perception does no such thing: it is not a cognitive perception of the real. It is like the original form of perception only in that it is capable of perceiving such qualities at all, and in that it comes to see and feel a manifold of objects that are thoroughly permeated and richly tinged by them, but is different in that it does not confuse or mix in it even partially the real world of things. Rather, the strict and rigorous separation of the two is the rule. The return to the original attitude of perception is not a return to the primitive conception of the environing world. Once achieved, objectivity remains complete and whole; indeed, it is not even affected, to say nothing of being injured, by the fact that consciousness has discovered joy in the beautiful. Aesthetic perception coexists peacefully with the objective world. It looks in another direction, and its objects are different – even when the same objects offer themselves together, to the one and to the other.
It is not easy to understand these facts in a positive way. What is clear about them at first is only the withdrawal of cognitive awareness, especially of rational thought and its objective mode of apprehension, but also of practical consciousness with its purposive intentions. Rationality and the sober pursuit of ends are what, in the spiritual consciousness, do away so radically with the tonalities of feeling in perception. This clearing away takes place in the name of an objective orientation upon the world. But it is just this orientation that disappears in the aesthetical consciousness. Here we are directed neither upon present realities nor upon facts and matters of fact, but upon an object that has been lifted out of both of these in the act of seeing.
In aesthetical awareness, perception is also not directed upon the objective interconnections of things, but upon another kind of connectedness, one that is found only in relation to the subject and his way of seeing. But in this other interconnection what has been achieved by the spiritual consciousness by no means disappears: objectivity itself remains, and with it the distance from the object that objectivity establishes. Both become strengthened and more accentuated. For in aesthetic perception the opposition of the two, of the observer and his object, cannot be eliminated. However, the disengagement of the tonalities of feeling does disappear; the emotional aspect of perception comes into its own once again; it is in a certain sense released, and freely comes forth.
A vast realm of major and minor tones appears, and the limits of what can be said or even expressed at all (52) are shifted. How could it be otherwise? The most inward elements that an artist reveals in his creative work are of the same kind, have the same inward being, and move on the same level, as these tonalities of perception; and what resonates in perception as fullness, as vitality, as intimacy of feeling, is fed from this deepest inwardness.
On the other hand, this objectifying of the subjective in aesthetic perception is only possible because it does not aim at reality, or, more precisely, because it does not attempt to place its object into the environing real world. It rather takes the object out of the sphere of reality, isolates it, and reveals it in every detail as a world unto itself. At the same time, this other way of seeing embeds its object in a new framework. The connection with the world, reflected in all other contexts of perception, is not at all injured by this act of removal, but it is kept apart from the content of aesthetical vision, and what is seen in such perception stands against the world, neutralized and insular.
If the return of the emotional element in aesthetic perception were conceived of as laying claim to knowledge, such that it pretended to establish the reality of the thing perceived, one could at most speak of a regression to the attitude of nonspiritual consciousness. However, it makes no such claim; indeed, it lays no claim at all to a relationship with knowledge. Rather, it removes itself unambiguously and with full awareness from the arena of knowledge. For that very reason, the animation of inanimate life, or the humanization of the non-human, may reappear without reproach. Malevolence and affection are, in such cases, not attributed to real objects, but rather only to what is seen, and seen as such; the “yearning” that we attribute to the blue skies or even more forcefully to the sunset are not also ascribed to aerial perspectives or to the selective absorption of the rays of the sun. We speak in the same way of a “smiling sun” or of a “lonely meadow,” although we have not forgotten that the former is not smiling and the latter is not lonely.
In these ascriptions, there is nowhere real deception in-the components of feeling in perception, nowhere illusion. And in this way, aesthetic perception is distinguished from the original or primitive kind. Similarly, it abolishes neither aesthetical distance nor objectivity as such. Rather, it establishes next to objective knowledge (and next to practical and immediate knowledge) a new, peculiarly aesthetical distance and objectivity, one unmixed with the former. The mode of being of this world of objects is that it exists only for the person who perceives aesthetically.
Within its restricted sphere, however, aesthetic perception constitutes its own domain of objects, which maintains itself alongside of reality, and indeed, with respect to its vivid fullness, stands perhaps above it. In the aesthetical experience of nature and of things human, it plays a decisive role. A primeval relation to the environing world resonates within it, and extends itself into the very midst of discursive experience of the world, but it does not distort that relation or that experience, and it remains also unaffected by them. A dark sympathetic sense of mysterious unseen regions forces itself among hard facts, but it does not flow (53) into them, it does not deform them and is not deformed by them. In this realm next to the real there is room for free play, without borders and without inhibitions.
This fact is confirmed when we examine the “playtime” of children. In play there is a kind of consciousness at work that is similar to the primeval consciousness; it is a creative consciousness to a large extent, and is closely related to aesthetical consciousness. Playthings have the tonalities of feeling of perception attached to them; they are to a great extent seen anthropomorphically, as possessing attitudes of their own, and as being “good” or “bad.” For that reason a doll, however primitive in aspect, can be a person, one with a character that may be nice or not-so-nice; it possesses its own willfulness, conflicts, guilt, and culpability. In this world, a couple of lines on the floor become a house, and a few rules of the game become the rules of life. But the awareness of reality, out of which the game has been lifted, remains untouched; and even a child is able to return to reality without any confusion of the two spheres when reality calls him back.
Within certain limits, the same is the case in grown-up games, into which a man enters when he seeks to “relax” from the harshness and stress of life. He obeys, as does the child, the rules of the game, once he has learned them; he acts according to them, and thereby enters a realm created by fantasy that has been lifted out of the real world. The difference between him and the child is only that he remains aware of the game as such, and that he is not able to forget the real world around him as he plays. To him, the game remains a fiction.
Still more important in the aesthetical relation is the other aspect of the element of transcendence in perception: objective elements and even entire sides or levels of the object are given along with it. These elements cannot be given as such through the senses because they are not accessible to the senses (not visible, not audible, etc.). We are nonetheless sensible of them as though they had been perceived directly along with the givens of the senses (Cf. Chaps. 1a, b).
What happens without exception in everyday perception, but is rarely noticed because it fits into the context of experience and is familiar to us as a completion of it, rises in aesthetic perception to the level of the essential. For here it is precisely a question of the overlapping of two or more levels of the perceptual object, such that one can “appear” in the other.
Thus, for example, in the leap of a fleeing deer we perceive grace, lightness, the mastery of space, and, with them, though dimly, even the purposefulness of life. These things are not comprehended only subsequently in reflection; we are struck immediately by the grace of the leap, and our being so stricken is a part of aesthetical vision. But at the same time, this vision is tied so intimately to perception that we think we have perceived gracefulness itself directly. (54)
It is the same when we see a bird of prey on the wing, or even the movement of a human body. In an impulsive turn of the body, a slight inclination of the head, or a momentary contraction of the lips, we comprehend directly what is not perceivable in itself, the psychic reaction, the inward state, that which the man felt. The movement is expression, and the expression speaks convincingly to us as we look upon it. An entire inward world appears, either illuminated as if by lightning, or clad in ominous darkness; but always something that had been hidden is revealed. Perception thus transcends itself, it “reveals.” And if the revelation in perception goes beyond that which is humanly knowable or otherwise accessible, and with a stroke breaks beyond the limits of understanding and takes on the character of “appearance” in an unusual sense, then we become sensible of it – not as having enriched our insight, but rather as beauty.
This concept of revelation must be placed at the center of the phenomenon of aesthetic perception.34 This does not define the concept as yet. To do so will be our further task. The task cannot be completed by reference to the phenomenon of perception alone; it is the main concern of the entire field of aesthetics, and will occupy us in all that follows.
What is disclosed is just as much an individual limited thing as that which is given to us directly through the senses. It is tied to the here and now of perception, and shares the uniqueness of the experiential act and the givenness of the object, a givenness that is felt as “contingent.” The examples given demonstrate that very clearly, especially if we note the element of the surprising, which governs them on many levels. But there is much more present in the object disclosed, a general element, even when, in fact, the general element itself – that which is typical about the object, perhaps – does not enter consciousness. At least the consciousness of the general does not have to be clear.
This may be seen in our example. When we look upon the elastic and powerful leaping movement of an animal in the wild we somehow know directly that the grace and the sure mastery of motion are not tied to this one moment, that they belong to the animal essentially, that this is a lasting ability and perfection of the animal, and that it belongs to all members of its species. There is revealed here something of the great secret of organic nature, the purposefulness of all living things.
This realization occurs to us suddenly. It may, afterwards, occupy our thoughts considerably, but at first it is given only momentarily in perception, with a suddenness that can be frightening. We look as it were through a narrow passageway into a realm of wonders that we see only for a moment. Yet our amazement at what we see is already an amazement at what is essential in it, and thus we are stricken (55) by something larger, more wide reaching, and immeasurably meaningful. And our feelings can rise to the level of being genuinely moved, even to our standing reverentially before what we do not know and can only suspect.
But even that remains firmly tied to the pictorial content of perception. The fullness of content of the thing seen is in it and given with it, in the same way as if it had also been perceived. Even when we dwell upon it later, what has been seen remains tied to the picture. It has disappeared, of course, but is still inwardly present. The transient quality of the appearance changes nothing.
We may call this phenomenon the “mediated immediacy” in aesthetic perception. 35 The mediation occurs through the external sense impression; the immediacy is the disappearance of the mediation in the perceiving consciousness. Through it then the element mediated in this consciousness stands unmediated before us, and we become sensible of it as such.
This entire relationship is obviously coincident with that of the two kinds of beholding in the act of aesthetical apprehension, about which we have spoken at the very outset (Introduction, §12). A second act of seeing clings to the first, but in such a way that both are connected in series, and yet both are there simultaneously. The second act is not separated off from the first, and the entire complex is only one act of seeing. What may be most important here is that even the mediated element of the general is given intuitively in complete immediacy, and not discursively or by abstraction.
In this respect, aesthetic perception is similar to everyday practical perception. But the former penetrates further, and it does not limit itself to those present realities that are dictated by interest. It is in this way quite without limits. Even the limits of the real do not exist for it. What appears to be given along with it may as well be something that is unreal, even if it appears only in intuition. This is essential for the arts – for romances, fables, and fantasy. Here is found the basis of aesthetical vision’s freedom from the limitations of the merely experiential, and its escape by force into the realm of the possible.
With this the question appears once again how aesthetic perception differs from everyday perception. From what we have just said, it may appear as though the difference were simply quantitative. That cannot be; there must be a fundamental difference present here. If not, whatever was an object of sober perception in everyday life would be simply “less beautiful.”
We might also express our question as follows: how is the relation of aesthetical appearance constituted? We have already seen that the relation of appearance in general exists in all perception, or at least (56) is attached to it. What constitutes the peculiar nature of this relationship in intuitive aesthetical seeing?
We cannot answer this question all at once. The first thing that can be said about it is this: in aesthetic perception, the relation of appearance as such is accentuated, it is forced into consciousness and, in a certain sense, it is even grasped objectively.
We cannot say that in everyday perception appearance is only a passageway to something else or a means to an end (for it is precisely practical ends that, in life, determine perception) and that the means themselves are simply not noticed. Everyday perception is concerned with comprehending existing things. By contrast, in aesthetic perception the means are the essential thing. Our vision does not glide over and beyond the pictorial content of sense perception, but rather rests awhile with it. And while it is dwelling there, it takes what appears in it as set within a picture. It takes this appearance to be something that can only be grasped in it, and as capable of being sensibly intuited by means of it, but not as identical with it.
Intuitive vision is autonomous here. It is not there to serve, but to be the dominant authority; it is there for its own self alone. For that reason, it is close to perception and set within it, as it were; it does not cast perception off, but keeps its eye upon what is given through the senses, despite its elevation over it. For it does not advance to a conceptual level – not even from its higher standpoint –any more than to the level of insight and judgment. And where we nonetheless find an element of conceptualization in it – for after all, a concept is fundamentally also only a kind of vision – its role is rather a subordinate one, that of a mere means that vanishes when its goal is achieved.
Aesthetical vision itself comes to rest in the act of seeing. For that reason, it clings to that act. That is understandable even in the case of perception. For there does not exist a higher form of vision apart from it, but only with it and integrated in-it. Thus, when the soul is uplifted in aesthetical vision, perception is not abandoned; rather one could say that it is elevated along with it. That role is not granted to everyday perception: there it is utilized, integrated into experience, but then left behind and forgotten.
We can understand why that is so by making a contrast with the relation of knowledge. Aesthetic perception is not concerned with insight and understanding, any more than with the achievement of ends, even those of the highest kind. It does not carry here the burden of obligation, nor does it have the task of discovering truth. It proceeds freely in whatever direction it goes. Aesthetic perception is satisfied by pictorial quality, by the binding of bright fullness, by unity, wholeness, polish, and structure in the whole; and in such a way that this unity includes what is given to the senses and what is therein given along with it. In pictorial quality of this kind, the most remote and most general things, which are seen along with it, also participate in it as the proximate and immediate elements of its givenness. And much that remains incomprehensible in the indirect way of conceptualization can be given in this immediacy of the “picture.” (57)
What once made up the first thesis of the “Analytic of the Beautiful” in the Critique of the Power of Judgment is confirmed here from a somewhat altered standpoint: the detachment of the mind from all interest in the thing at hand. A practical or theoretical desire prescribes, by leading and selecting, a certain direction to our everyday perception. Aesthetic perception aims neither at something desired nor at something real (truth); it also does not aim at knowledge of human nature, however much that may seem to be the case, simply because such knowledge is to a large extent obtained by it. The perceptual field is not in this case subject to a prior orientation towards values. Neither what is important in itself nor for us alone is decisive here. Values of this kind may well play the role of directing our attention; aesthetic perception engages itself, after all, in the very midst of life, and appropriates its object only then – just by engaging itself. Yet in aesthetic perception an orientation towards values is not decisive. It occupies itself in the selection from among what is at hand, or in summoning forth what is not at hand, and does this according to rules of its own: it floats freely about, it is playful, and loves to tear things asunder and reunite them again, to add things together and break links between them. Its connecting threads may run obliquely across those of real life, but it has at the very least a certain indifference to them.
That fact is reflected in the altered position it takes to the pictorial content of sense perception as such, of which we spoke earlier as the first distinctive characteristic of aesthetic perception.
In everyday perception, the “picture” disappears when it has succeeded in making available that which is invisible. The picture itself is unimportant; it is only a means, and is forgotten – and often forgotten in an instant – for the sake of the thing that is the object of its interest. Who remembers the precise shape of a human face at which one is gazing, even a face that fully engrosses one? Surely no one, except possibly a person who is trained and practiced in drawing. But even he no longer perceives in an “everyday” manner, but rather as a draftsman would, that is, aesthetically. What we remember otherwise about a face, what we really apperceive from the very outset, is its inner expressiveness, for example its goodness, its air of suspicion or of suppressed rage. Beyond that, what we remember is at most something of the psychophysical dynamics of the play of features, but even they belong for the most part to the level of the invisible.
On the other hand, in aesthetic perception the picture not only remains essential, but also constitutes an independent unity of form and is present to this perception for its own sake. This is not as though the invisible element that it mediates is overlooked, or not viewed for its own sake; it becomes an object of our vision precisely at this point, but not detached, not made independent. The two levels of vision remain united, and the truth is that the entire picture, in which both the first and the second act of viewing it are only parts, is viewed together. The picture as a whole, with its sensible and non-sensible contents, is present to aesthetical vision.
We see this in painting, that is, in the creation of an artist: we are not indifferent to the color technique or even to the brushstrokes; both (58) belong essentially to what is seen in the work of art, just as much as what is represented by it, viz., the landscape or human figures and the psychic states that they express. And precisely this integration of the two levels of objects seen is the genuine object of aesthetical vision. He who sees only the figures, the scene, or the emotion, does not see artistically; such a person is attuned only to the content and to the human natures represented by the picture. He is looking just as one may look at human figures passing by: his perception is basically of the everyday kind. Likewise, the person who sees only the colors and notes nothing of their vivid reciprocity upon the canvas, sees as one sees only the superficial qualities of things. The one and the other see nothing of the work of art; the peculiar suspended quality of the art object does not exist for them, and they do not experience the phenomenon of appearance as such.
The sensible contact with the subject matter, even the deepest participation in the lives of persons and their destiny (as represented in a dramatic work) does not in itself turn vision into artistic vision. In artistic vision, the act of seeing forces its way through the pictorial element as through a medium that one leaves behind once one has done with it. Only where the picture as a sense object as such is comprehended and held fast as one sees through it, and then only without it interfering with the act of seeing-through, can the relationship of appearance come into its own. Only then are we sensible of it along with all else – we see the sufficiency of the picture for allowing the appearance of the non-sensible and the non-pictorial. And this means that only here does it become an artistic vision, for which alone the artwork exists.
This account of the matter may also be traced to perception – of the aesthetical kind. For if the picture given to the senses is not present in aesthetic perception as an object, then there are no ways and means to bring the non-visible to genuine givenness, not even, for example, by reenacting it subsequently in an act of reflection. Let us just try to represent to ourselves a concrete picture of the psychic life of a person as it is given in perception or in a well-done portrait, in some other way – much as we would like to be able to do when we want to describe to another person the impression someone has made upon us. We arrive quickly at the limits of what words, and even carefully formed concepts, are able to render. It is simply impossible. What the sensible picture can achieve is absolutely irreplaceable.
Many other phenomena can be described in this context. In everyday perception our eyes do not pass over only the “picture” of the perceptual object as a whole, but over its details as well, at least in those cases where they do not stand out because of some particular practical interest on the part of the perceiver. The details that our eyes skim over are quickly forgotten; at most they will be held fast for a while in the pictorial perceptions of the “eidetic” philosophers, so that the one or the other can be specified later on. (59)
Even this matter is different in aesthetic perception. Here the detail rises to the level of the essential; not all details, of course, but still an amazing number of them. The picture that offers itself to aesthetic perception contains a richness that is foreign to the more vulgar form of seeing and hearing. There is no question that this richness depends upon a heightened intensity of perception itself. In aesthetic perception, the power of apprehension possessed by hearing and seeing goes far beyond what it is capable of in everyday life. This is true in a special sense, and not only with respect to heightened acuity. The sailor has sharper eyes than the painter does, and the hunter’s ears are sharper than the musician’s. But both of them see and hear only certain determinate things in the symphony of the perceivable; everything else is suppressed and left unnoticed. Aesthetical seeing and hearing are intensified in another dimension, where they are qualitatively extended: they notice the unnoticed, which the senses normally glide over. In this way, they make us conscious of another form of diversity. One can enter a room and see only the person to whom one wants to speak; one can also see the ray of sun that shines into the room, see the play of darkness and light, or the play of colors and highlights that fill the room.
One wonders again what such phenomena are based upon. And, in wondering, one may come across another basic phenomenon of aesthetic perception: apparently, this form of perception is also subject to a kind of guidance, and this guidance is fundamentally different from what is found in our everyday relationship to objects.
In everyday life, seeing and hearing are guided by practical considerations, and with time they are sharpened more and more in the direction of this guidance. This is not only true in such extreme cases as that of the sailor or the hunter, but also in our informal social contacts. We hear, for example, a word spoken in a whisper emerge from a loud conversational din, because we have an interest in the person who is speaking or a concern to hear what is said.
Aesthetic perception is subject to a different kind of guidance. In a Dutch still life it is the reflections of light, the shading and tinges of color, which otherwise are hardly noticed, that emerge as the essential objective detail – and do so entirely for their own sake. In the landscape, and not only in the painted one, we become conscious of perspective, which, in everyday perception, is absorbed entirely into the objects that are given in it, because perspective is subject to the familiar phenomenon of re-objectification.36 This is true for both geometrical and aerial perspective; both are comprehended together, or, even better, seen together.
The same is true of course in endless numbers of other cases. It is true for the timbre of the sounds uttered in speech, as it is for musical instruments; it is true even for the sound of the human voice and it is true in life as in poetry about the gestures and behavior of human beings. All of these things become essential, important, accentuated; the poet lifts them out of their unnoticed obviousness; as soon as they are (60) brought into the light, they become expressive and revealing. But then, too, the man who sees beauties in the living human being and in nature lifts them in the very act of looking and listening into consciousness and makes them his essential focus.
One may ask: what is it that does the guiding when aesthetic perception is subject to it? Why do the sensible details appear in them in this way and become the central focus? One might first answer: because what is not noticed in everyday life deserves to be noticed. It is itself beautiful, and it only disappears from view only because we usually pass over it quickly; the aesthetical perspective, and especially art, reveals it. Revelation as the standpoint on value is the guiding principle. In this way, aesthetic value, purely as such, would be called upon to answer our question. The aesthetical perceptual field must be pre-selected under the aegis of values of this type – in the same manner as the everyday perceptual field is preselected under the aegis of practical values.
There must be something unchallengeable about this answer. However, it leaps over many components of the problem that are presupposed by it. For aesthetic value is dependent upon the relation of appearance, and yet our reflections are still upon the level of one of the conditions of this relation, namely the act of becoming conscious of sensible details. We must therefore look for another solution.
In the essence of the details, there is a further aspect that offers itself as a guiding power: the small details that are given in sense experience have, once we become conscious of them, a significant mediating power. This is true in two senses. They always draw further details into the light of consciousness, and thus function as points of crystallization for perception; and they allow the appearance of the non-sensible, that is, the background – animation, human states of a psychic and a moral kind, but also the element of the universal as such in the physical world. This means, however, that details are capable of revelation to a greater extent than the sparsely differentiated content of everyday perception.
Where we have a case of a relation of appearance, the power of revelation is the decisive element. And where this power is most forcibly applied, aesthetic perception is drawn in that direction; here we can hence grasp a determining element of guidance, which occurs only in acts of aesthetical vision. What appears by its mediation is quite far from being absorbed by the detail, and even less by individuality and uniqueness. It is quite capable of including the element of the general, and not only generalities about human beings, but also about nature. Thus, a particular play of light upon something that is given through the senses may reveal the miracle of light in general and colors and even of visibility in general, and they become knowable as such. Such disclosure is unpredictable. But aesthetical experience teaches us that such things happen in fact, and that they are not at all unusual – they happen in the viewing of a work of art as well as in the freely roving eye of the person who perceives aesthetically. (61)
On the other hand, the paradox appears here that precisely what we think of as closest to perception and first noticed in it, viz., the purely sensible detail, is rather the thing most remote from it, and is discovered only by the spiritual consciousness when it is at a very advanced stage of maturity. For that reason, aesthetic objectivity is chronologically the last thing to be achieved, and most often it had to be first discovered by the eye of the creative artist.
The secret of this phenomenon of guidance may accordingly be located at the line of demarcation between everyday and aesthetic perception. This line always goes directly through our “perceptual world,” and usually it is blurred; only in the most realized and thoroughly accentuated work of an artist does it become visible to us. The careful observer may find it announced, as it were, in the midst of everyday things: he notices it when something unimportant and superfluous somewhere in his perceptual field captures him, moves him, and holds him fast; when what is ephemeral becomes enduring, when what is trivial becomes important, when the colors and highlights of things begin a play among themselves that has nothing to do with the things upon which they play, or when the most serious events of human life, with all their cares and aggravations, suddenly, as though by nothing more than a simple change of direction, display for us a smiling face, and allow us to smile also.
Then the detail becomes visible and objective; and then we see its peculiar power to change the direction of our focus; indeed, the appropriation of the invisible depends upon it. That which requires the most differentiated power of expression can express itself only in the most differentiated detail, even if what is expressed is an entirely different thing from the detail, and similar to it in no respect. For that reason in aesthetic perception the emphasis lies always in the first instance upon the external, the unimportant, and the secondary. The poet loves to lead his reader along pathways through the merely external features of the behavior, activities, and speech of his characters toward what is most inward and heavy with meaning. We are shown their self-revelation and their efforts to conceal themselves, their eternal self-deception, and the unexpected moment when they get things right. One almost wants to believe that the smaller and more insignificant the detail, the greater the disclosing power that lies within it.
One may accordingly always respond by asking in return how it is possible that the function of mediating and disclosing, which after all presupposes that a given detail is already an object of consciousness, could nevertheless turn perception toward it. Such a question is quite logical. Yet it fails to consider that we do not have here a simple order of temporal succession, that in intuitive consciousness everything is conditioned and influenced reciprocally, and that all exchanges between levels and phases of acts of viewing objects involve a passage back and forth between them. It also fails to consider that every content that arises in consciousness immediately casts its shadow before itself, and that through which it is evoked then draws it after itself, and raises it to the light of full consciousness. Given such modes of psychic interrelatedness, what is temporally posterior may well determine (62) that which is immediately prior, because its origins lie in what was previously imperceptible, and what was imperceptible can only now unfold itself.
Our modern psychology has seen these things only slightly, and has dealt with them even less. They may also be hard to grasp before one has developed the categories of psychic existence. Given the state of inquiry today, and the direction of current academic interests, such an achievement is still quite distant.
What was treated in the first two chapters under the collective title of “perception” does of course not pertain to perception alone. Everywhere elements of a higher form of seeing entered, for example those of dwelling-upon, taking pleasure in, appraisal, and many others. They all remain tied to perception; they have a common point of departure in it, and do not break away from it as they develop further. Even the higher form of looking that now enters the process remains in its character close to perception, indeed related to it.
Perception plays for all of them the role of the primordial phenomenon. But it is already apparent that precisely as a primordial phenomenon it is not yet aesthetic perception. And even the primordial phenomenon in it is not an aesthetical one as such. The main thing about it is not its distance, not the objective relation, not even the passive looking, but the connection to, the integration within, the vital responsiveness of the organism and the psychophysical whole. Thus we have the dominance of the emotions, the elements of excitement, anxiety, and desire. The organism extends itself in an active-reactive manner in the environing world, it exists in exchanging substance and energy with it, and perception is the organ that permits its orientation within it.
Perception is not in itself pure looking; it is not uninvolved. It conveys to human life a sense of things as “effective.” Looking is secondary; it is based initially in the disengagement of the emotional element. Perception is inherently as little theoretical as it is aesthetical. It becomes both only when it is released from actuality.
But while in theoretical “observation” responsiveness is completely disconnected, it appears that something of it is preserved in aesthetical experience. For the tonality of feeling of perception, the pleasant and the unpleasant, is essential to it. The tonality of feeling is, however, conditioned by the attitude of responsiveness. The light and the heavy in the object are felt; the inhibited and the free, the playful and the cumbersome, the fullness and the needful, strength and weakness, are made present to our senses. The decisive dynamic Something is the carrier of these (63) elements. Yet they are given in perception in the form of something felt. In this sense, therefore, – that is, in an entirely objective sense – the emotional element is not yet eliminated here. Correspondingly, the readiness to feel has not yet been replaced in the perceiving subject by the act of looking. The stimulus makes itself felt as it does in children. But it is no longer the dominant factor, a fortiori not the ruling one. The vital earnestness of the threatened creature has been transformed into joy in the unknown, in the attraction of curiosity. Or else even the entire relationship is just simply a play with all those things.
Of course, even that does not quite capture the truth. Rather there occurs here a synthesis of opposed perspectives: in the act of looking, which now begins its work, genuine distance to the material is achieved, but on the other hand, the emotional and dynamical elements of the original perception has not been destroyed, but merely “neutralized.” This neutralization is sublation in the Hegelian sense: it is “no longer” what it was, it is “retained”; it is simultaneously “elevated” into something new. Hegel’s three characteristic elements, i.e., negation, retention, and elevation, are clearly present, and are essential to the new circumstances.
One finds them all still tangibly present in the perception of a beautiful human body. The body is first practically recognized as such (in its performance) and admired or desired (erotically); this relationship to it is neutralized in the perception of form as such and thereby put in brackets, and yet at the same time elevated in an act of pleasure of a higher order. There is absolutely no contradiction that the feeling-tones of the first level are retained while the actuality that arose out of them is lost and in the end entirely disregarded. The warmth of the sensation is not identical to the original reactivity or with the vital urge. The perceiving consciousness has become contemplative; it interrupts the response, and lets it disappear while the spiritual feeling-tone remains attached to the object.
With the isolation of details and the extended graphic quality, we have already passed beyond the range of perception. To specify its exact limits is not possible. But we need not be concerned with that question; barriers do not separate the levels of conscious acts, for they pass imperceptibly into one another.
Nonetheless, a different type of experience now comes into play. And it is what forms, without break or alteration, the continuation of the process of grasping complexity, which began unnoticed in perception itself. This other form of perception is no less concrete, yet it is no longer sensory, that is, its object is not given to the senses; it is directed upon what was “given” in perception “along with” it, which, however, (64) is not a perceptual object in the strict sense. It is directed rather at what “appears” in the perceptual object, and, again with reference to the object, at what is “disclosed” in it. And in that way, it takes on the character of revelation.
In a certain sense all seeing has the character of a revelation, and thus we are saying nothing new here. Language, however, ties “revelation” to the notion of the discovery of something or other in life that has been hidden, especially where the play of fantasy has long cloaked it in mystery. The dark presentiment-laden tie to an unknown object hidden behind a thing is largely already present in perception; in the phenomenon of co-givenness one may find all levels of this relationship. In the higher or cultivated beholding there begins the process in which what was indefinite becomes definite. Then it is directed upon everything that begins to present itself as phenomenal behind what is given to sense: upon the living state, upon the activity of the soul, and upon what is akin to soul in the background, upon the secrets of nature and of the cosmos, to the most general secrets of man and world themselves. No limits are set to it. For that reason, religious objects have been since time immemorial so close by; and thereupon rests the fact that everything that is true for divine revelation demands irresistibly some artistic representation. This is nothing other than the power that self-revelation possesses for everyone, and especially for things that not everyone can bring to concrete givenness by himself or herself. It is not by chance that great art throughout history has grown out of and has taken its themes from religious conviction. One may not, however, conclude that its historical origins set limits to it. Such an origin, from the perspective of art, provides only a temporary preferred direction to its activities.
At this point, we meet already with the first main element of the higher form of seeing, or beholding. It is directed upon what hovers before consciousness as the most meaningful and signifying element, what appears to come from above, laden with meaning and value. It receives its direction not from sensory impressions, but from another sphere. And in this sphere, other forces reign that have seized consciousness in a different way. Even at this point commences, in the last analysis, that mysterious directness of perception in the aesthetical realm about which we spoke earlier, for this one is directed primarily at the detail, unnoticed in everyday perception and present in the sensory material, which are most capable of transmitting what is laden with meaning.
It is clear from this that the higher form of looking is always present in aesthetic perception and not subsequent to it; and it is clear why this is so: perception, appearing as tied to it, is already directed by it. It comes to be as this looking of the first order only with the looking of the second order, which simultaneously takes off from it. And one can assume, in a preliminary way, that only by means of the second order is it made (65) capable of the detailed graphic quality by means of which it distinguishes itself from vulgar perception, which is integral to responsiveness and is directed by it. Quite possibly we can glimpse here the basis of all aesthetical phenomena in which the object stands out from its connectedness with reality and the viewer becomes lost in reverie. But that would anticipate a later inquiry, and we may put the matter off for a while.
The inquiry is closer at hand as to what constitutes the positive content of the higher form of looking, or beholding. Very little can be determined from the perspective of the act of looking. Because the content appears first upon the object, only the analysis of the aesthetic object will be able to inform us about it. An attempt at an anticipatory analysis of the act would be useless labor, at least before the being of the object is clarified. Even more, only from the side of the object is it possible to understand how the higher form of looking works, and in what it essentially consists as an act. Any analysis of the act that is left to its own devices will fail. The real miracle that takes place on the side of the aesthetical act is the firm binding to perception of what is grasped and the interaction between the two kinds of looking, which are superimposed one upon the other and yet appear simultaneously.
Meanwhile, this much may be said in advance: all ideational content of the aesthetic object is relative to the higher act of beholding and is entirely grasped by it; and this, moreover, is indifferent to whether the object presents itself as “realized” in a real object – as in human and in natural beauty – or simply as magically placed before one’s eyes, like the work of an artist. Then there is no question here of knowing something real. All “intuition” simply as such can be cognitive or spontaneously creative. That is true also of the higher levels of aesthetical appreciation. The ideational content of the aesthetic object, and everything that is determined along with it, can also very well be grasped in a synthetic and productive act and thus exist only by virtue of the act – quite indifferent to whether it is a question of the original productive act of the artist or of the act of observation that follows it.
It may be said further that the higher vision need not be simple or without parts. It can itself have levels, such that an entire hierarchy of acts of increasing elevation arises behind and above perception. Perception is here only its first link. The levels of intuition that lie closest to it are still similar to it, and appear therefore to belong to it; the higher levels, which contain ever more elements of thought, distance themselves from it, and the spontaneous and productive element in them increases, and leads to the creation of form. When a certain level is attained, the vision approaches again the level of knowledge, yet comes into conflict with it, and can become tied to it in a confusing way. But its nature and the direction in which it is looking remain different, even though they may share with it a claim to truth. And finally, it distances itself from knowledge, and leads beyond it. Then at the top are located (66) the genuine forms of “intuition” in that pregnant sense of visio, which in all historical epochs were considered superior to the cogitatio.
For that reason, it makes sense that the last forces, working from within outward, down to the level of perception – beyond all forming of the particular substance – which direct, select, and dominate, are feelings of value. For if the values given to value consciousness are grasped as an object, they are grasped intuitively, not in the form of understanding, but in the form of seeing.
This is a connection – or, perhaps better, a kind of lawfulness – that is not peculiar to the organization of the aesthetical act, but to all human consciousness, provided that it is affected with values. This law is most familiar in a practical context, but of course without regard for the kind of values in question. As phenomena of moral consciousness, we know in principle the directive power of values quite exactly; we know also the highly nuanced reaction to them of our feelings of value. Moreover, we have observed the extremely peculiar pathways upon which what can be intuited of the essential content of values comes to be out of forces that are merely felt. These pathways are not those of later analysis, the way taken by the phenomenology of values, but are forced open in the midst of life and under the pressure of real situations, and always in these cases the appearance of content-laden values is itself intuitive in nature.
The foundational schema of the upward march of value consciousness is the same in the aesthetical act. Only the kind of intuition is different, and different too are the occasions that cause it to function. It too extends into various peculiarities that are not available to vision upon the practical standpoint.
However that may be, this much results in any case for the organization of the aesthetical act: the value-elements in it do not separate themselves from it, but are rather completely integrated into it.
Meanwhile, the feeling and seeing of the values themselves that are here in question are in no sense aesthetic values. They are rather all those that reign in practical – and even in theoretical – life. Most basic are the vital and the moral values, but the wide sphere of commodity values are included here; that sphere is simply more concealed as self-evident behind the others. None of these values should be confused with the values that can be felt in aesthetical “appreciation,” in the enjoyment of beauty, and in the elevated reverie of the observer.
Let us begin with the most familiar things. In sculpture and in many cases of natural beauty we are concerned with such values as (67) the strong, the vital, the healthy, the burgeoning, and the fecund, with physical capacity and purposefulness; we are not concerned with grace in movement, or the poverty or the harmony of form. Similarly, we are concerned in poetry and in our observations of the ways of men primarily with kindness, love, and faithfulness; with honesty and justice, the capacity for sacrifice, courage, and chivalry. One must add here that there is of course also a concern with their counterparts, with the negative values: with injustice, thoughtlessness, dishonesty, and underhandedness. For the whole of human life in all its aspects come into play here. Poetic figures can be understood without such components of value and disvalue no more than the other elements of life. The courage to make sacrifices belongs to the hero, and he must be given a feeling for values, for otherwise neither the audience in the theater nor the observer of life could recognize the hero as hero.
The most important feature is that this value-content constitutes for aesthetical appreciation only the presupposition of the aesthetic value and not its content. Vital values are and remain vital ones; moral values are simply moral ones. But they must be felt in a living manner if the quite different aesthetic value is to appear on the object. In this sense, one may say: the aesthetical consciousness of value is conditioned by the capacity of the observer to perceive the non-aesthetic values. And with this point, the highest level of intuition in aesthetical looking becomes unambiguously clear. Intuition shows itself so dominant in the nexus of acts of looking that all the lower acts are conditioned through it, even down to the direction of perception itself. Just this direction is the steering of attention upon that visible detail, which allows what is significant or consequential among such values to appear. We learn how true this is from life itself via the fact that value feeling is enormously strengthened and sharpened by aesthetical looking, and is even in many cases first awakened by it.
“How” in detail aesthetic value superimposes itself upon ethical and vital values – upon one and the same object and in one and the same act of seeing –that belongs to the analysis of aesthetic values and will be examined in its proper place. We must for a time stay with the fact that a conditional relationship exists here, which is determinative throughout, including the act of seeing itself. In the representational arts, this act is always first directed at the content that comes to appearance. The content is the formed material. With respect to the material, there is in turn a law that the entire manifold of Nature and Ethos, including its laws and its value-qualities, constitute its nature. However, the new form must be superior to it – just as the aesthetic values are superior to the practical and vital values. Here we find one of the reasons why all of the representational arts begin with “imitation,” but then, as they progress, grow beyond it. But this again anticipates what is to come. (68)
The place of pleasure is not to be separated from these things in the structure of the aesthetical act. It is the subjective reverse of looking, and indeed on all its levels. Nevertheless, it is merely “subjective” only as a pure tonality of feeling; what we obtain by it and what it shows us is something quite objective – precisely what forms the content of “judgments of taste.” However, a judgment of taste expresses only what the pleasure he takes in looking says to him who judges. Pleasure thus has a central place in the structure of the act.
Despite this fixed relationship, pleasure is in its nature a completely independent element in the aesthetical relationship. It cannot be reduced to anything else, and for that reason it may be subjected to an independent analysis. Among the older thinkers Kant, and among the more recent ones Moritz Geiger, each dedicated penetrating inquiries to it, and the results they obtained belong to the best that has been achieved in the realm of aesthetics. Nonetheless, there is a danger that just this independence of the element of feeling in pleasure leads the analysis into the realm of subjectivity, and in this way, aesthetics became shifted to one of the psychological pathways that by the nineteenth century had been shown to be failures.
The genuinely aesthetical element in pleasure first appears when we examine its relationship to the object. For the peculiarity of aesthetical pleasure is that it is not less “objective,” that is, related to an object, than is the act of looking. It points to values, indeed to the aesthetic values exclusively. True, as such this pleasure is the authoritative announcement of values within the structure of the aesthetical act. There are no others besides it. One could also say: it is the primary or immediate form of aesthetical consciousness.
A broad range of aesthetical consciousness becomes apparent here, and an entire segment of the manifold of values, ones not smaller than the manifolds of objects and acts. But we must note immediately that this consciousness is open only to feeling and not to thought, and that the fullness of the phenomena given through pleasure cannot be captured by means of analysis, and can be translated only via inadequate and approximate verbal expressions in concepts and theories. Here philosophical aesthetics stumbles upon impassible barriers, of which it must be aware and of which it must be respectful.
If upon reflection pleasure and value cannot be separated, even though the first belongs to the subject and the second to the object, then (69) the same is true mediately of pleasure and object. For a value depends exclusively upon the object. For that reason, the element of pleasure in announcing the presence of value becomes apparent only in its relation to the object. A strict order of subordination rules here, and it is just this aspect of the feeling of aesthetical pleasure that is important.
The more objective concepts of “delight” [Wohlgefallen] and “enjoyment” [Genuss] do justice to this order (Kant preferred the first concept, Geiger the second). One can feel delight only “in something,” and one can only enjoy “something” The first expression like the second implies by this relationship not just a cause, whose effect would be the feeling, but an object explicitly intended in delight and in enjoyment. The proposition, “aesthetical pleasure is delight (or is enjoyment)” means primarily that pleasure attributes itself to the object, turns towards it, orients itself upon it, and is determined by it, and in this sense is “objective.”
This may seem obvious to a person with artistic sensibilities. Whoever reflects upon it, however, will soon see something puzzling within the obviousness. The puzzle lies in the character of feeling itself, a character that also belongs to pleasure; one might say it lies in its condition, all the more because one cannot deny to enjoyment and delight the character of a condition.
Yet evidently, it is just this being a condition that is secondary in aesthetical pleasure, while its reference to the object is primary. That is psychologically essential for the special form of this condition itself, and requires its own phenomenological analysis. Considered from the standpoint of aesthetics, what is specific to the structure of the act in the consciousness of the onlooker lies in this displacement of weight. It is a question of the character of feeling as an announcement of values. And this is possible only when the condition of feeling in it has its weight outside of itself, in some other thing that is given to him in that condition. Aesthetical delight is not a feeling turned upon itself, and aesthetical enjoyment is not an enjoyment of itself. To the contrary, where it flows into self-enjoyment (and that happens often enough) there is no longer aesthetical enjoyment, and the artistic feeling of value carried by the object is obscured; the latter may even be drowned out. Now we have no other standard of value, and certainly no other consciousness of the value of the beautiful than the peculiar enjoyment of, or the delight in, the object. Therefore the entire weight of the aesthetical feeling of pleasure lies on its objective side, that is, on the character of feeling as an announcement of value. This side is expressed in the relative depth and the qualitative distinctiveness of the enjoyment that looking upon the object triggers.
In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant taught three things about aesthetical delight. They are contained in both the first principles of his Analytic of the Beautiful, and here we will present them in an arrangement (70) we have freely chosen so as to cohere with the points of the problematic discussed above.
1. Aesthetical delight is “subjectively universal” (intersubjective) and necessary. That does not mean that every person necessarily feels delight when the object is given, but rather that anyone who has met the conditions of understanding the object must feel it. This subjective universality is valid in the case of the complete indivisibility of the object, for it is not a question of transference to other objects.
2. It is delight without a concept, without subsumption under something universal or under a rule that must have been grasped as such. Its own universality (the “subjective”) is least of all a conceptual one. This implies the radical exclusion of intellectualistic aesthetics. Therefore, delight must appear without a concept, because it is felt directly in perception and in the pure act of looking upon its object. One may add to this that just because it possesses no knowledge of a universal element, no cognition, no insight into law, it is not knowledge at all. Thus it possesses no criterion beyond itself or above itself.
3. It is “disinterested delight.” This famous formulation does not imply, of course, that the person feeling pleasure has no interest in the aesthetic object as such. One may very well have an aesthetical interest in it, even to a high degree, without losing the correct disposition. So for example one can have the greatest interest for an artist’s work in progress, just as well as one can for the finished product and its fate of being understood or misunderstood by its contemporaries. None of this is intended here, for such interest is already conditioned by the aesthetical pleasure one receives from the object; it is the consequence of that pleasure. What is intended is solely the interest that, for its part, determines the feeling of pleasure, the practical interest in the object as it occurs when the object serves as a means to something else. Thus interest is excluded from aesthetical pleasure; it is interest for the sake of an extra-aesthetic value. The one who enjoys knows no such values, even where it is a question of values that have the highest moral worth.
The first of these Kantian principles, the intersubjective universality, points clearly toward a rootedness in the object of delight. Whoever is able to look upon the object in an aesthetically adequate way will necessarily feel the same pleasure as anyone else whose acts of observation meet the same conditions. In this respect, what is convincing about aesthetical pleasure is similar to what is convincing in the practical and the theoretical a priori; for the latter too is subject to the same conditions: even the truth of a mathematical theorem can be apparent only to a person who is capable of understanding it.
In contrast, the second principle shows us the difference between a judgment of taste that announces itself in pleasure and apriorism. The latter is tied to an objective universal, thus (according to Kant) to laws and concepts. (71) There is nothing of this kind contained in the phenomenon of aesthetical delight, just as the object of pleasure is always an individual one (thus not objectively universal). Therefore Kant says, “The judgment of taste does not itself postulate the accord of everyone […]; it only ascribes this agreement to everyone.”37
Finally, the third principle is of an entirely different type. “Disinterested delight” means the independence of the judgment of taste, its freedom from determining factors of a non-aesthetical sort, in short, its autonomy. And when it announces itself in pleasure, what is meant is the autonomy of aesthetical pleasure in the object. Here it is already a question of the peculiarity and the irreducibility of value feeling, and indirectly of the aesthetic values themselves.
If one understands these Kantian principles in the way set forth here (which, to be sure, abstracts from the idealistic presuppositions of Kant’s system), we may find in them insight of the greatest consequence. Because of material value-ethics, we are accustomed today to glimpse the chief authority for all values given to consciousness in the feeling of value. Kant, however, connected for the first time the consciousness of value in an aesthetical context (the “judgment of taste”) to delight (or rather pleasure) as its authoritative mode of givenness. Thus here –long before the development of the phenomenological concept of value – we may find the real starting-point of the entire later theory of value. Then pleasure and delight are understood here unambiguously as the kinds of feeling that intend values – and in fact they intend them along with their peculiar objectivity and universality in subjective dress.
On the other hand, in Kant’s expulsion of all extra-aesthetical interests, the freeing of aesthetical consciousness from the contexts of life again receives a clear expression. “Interest,” in the Kantian sense, is to be held captive by the state of current affairs and the situation; an attitude devoid of “interest” means release from both. The soundness of this point is strengthened when one introduces the concept of enjoyment: in enjoyment we grasp more clearly the element of pure devotional appreciation of the object; and where the enjoyment is deep, it becomes a state of transport, in which the observer is released from his real environment and his everyday life. We speak in such cases of being “forgetful of oneself,” but we do not consider that such a state is rather one of forgetfulness of the real contexts of life and of the demands made on us by the present moment.
This state of release, a kind of floating condition, as it were, is experienced as pleasure, and can be enjoyed, but it is attributed to a miraculous power in the object. For as long as the act of looking is genuinely aesthetical, it – the object –and not one’s own state, is enjoyed. That which transports us and not the transport is the “beautiful.” It makes sense, therefore, that to the state in which we are transported out of the real contexts of life corresponds to the transport (72) (or transference) to another set of circumstances – into the world to which the object opens us.
In this way the Kantian principles lead one quite beyond themselves without one having to depart from them. For pure pleasure in the object is, despite its “objectivity,” entirely directed toward the participation of the self; it always takes place as a kind of self-fulfillment. And here we find the limits of disinterestedness. It is experienced in aesthetical enjoyment as being drawn to an object, and can develop to the point of becoming spellbound by it. This participation of the self is at the same time quite far from eliminating the distance from the object. The latter is and remains essential; the object stands ineliminably over against the subject –no less than the relationship in pure cognition, although in a different way.
Aesthetical enjoyment never cancels the attitude of seeing. Seeing, however, presupposes that the object remains over against it. Aesthetical enjoyment is not an “absorption” in the object, not an identification with it, a mystic unity. That does not happen even in music, where the soul’s resonance with the music is an essential form of its appearance. This fact does not contradict the phenomenon of being grasped by the object (in contrast to the mere grasping of it), of being moved, being carried away, and not even being elevated and transported into the world of the music. These notions all express that there is no loss of our sense of standing over-against or of being at an aesthetical distance; they express only an inwardness of strong feeling and the “intimacy” of feeling, which is the peculiar quality of pleasure uniting itself with the pure act of seeing.
In aesthetical pleasure we have to do with a synthesis of aesthetical distance and the most inward state of emotional engagement that bridges this opposition between them. Language has no words for this relationship. No doubt we can talk around it dialectically with the Hegelian notion of sublation. The emphasis in such sublation of aesthetical distance must, however, lie on the second meaning of the word, that is, “remaining contained,” while the third meaning “being uplifted” into a new kind of relationship expresses the synthesis, but is no longer conceptually determinate.
If one grants the validity of this kind of synthesis as not cognizable, then the meaning of the Kantian notion of disinterestedness shows itself once again on a new side. Interest is necessarily conditioned by values. Extra-aesthetic values, we have seen, are represented almost in their entire manifold within the content of the aesthetic object. Yet they do not determine aesthetical pleasure; they merely play the role of conditions. More accurately, the correct feeling for them is a condition of feeling aesthetic value. Aesthetical pleasure is not the pleasure we take in the conditioning value-components, neither in the ethical nor in the vital values, although these are also given to consciousness in the form of feeling pleasure (as positive responses to values).
Thus even here we are dealing with a sublation-relation. Aesthetical enjoyment does not aim at these conditioning values, however high they may be; since, however, they remain contained in it and are its presuppositions, (73) enjoyment also remains tied to them in its object, but it lifts itself beyond them and immediately orients itself toward the aesthetic value that is carried by them. Aesthetical enjoyment is superimposed upon the extra-aesthetic values. The element of pleasure in it forms the synthesis of their being sublated (neutralized) and their continuing containment, and it stands out unmistakably from them.
For aesthetical enjoyment announces the presence of values only in the case of aesthetic values. And this is of central significance in the structure of the aesthetical act, because we cannot experience and sense aesthetic value in any other way. For that reason what is specifically aesthetical about pleasure cannot be broken down into component parts – no more than into specific feelings related to form, although these feelings are certainly present and can be identified roughly, as with the conditioning feelings of pleasure of an extra-aesthetical kind.
If we change the perspective of this discussion a bit and return once again to the general relation between value and pleasure, the entire situation will appear as follows.
All affirmative feeling of value has the character of pleasurable enjoyment: the everyday pleasure taken in things and states of affairs, vital pleasure (especially apparent in sexual matters), and ethical pleasure-taking (in joyful agreement, recognition, promotion, admiration, enthusiasm); similarly negative feelings of value have the character of aversion (rejection, depression, contempt, disgust). All acts that announce values (value-responses) have the form of pleasurable enjoyment and painful aversion, however varied they may be. The characteristic components of pleasure in the structure of the aesthetically receptive act are thus not a single thing.
What is special about aesthetical pleasure first enters through the observational (contemplative) attitude. This attitude is that of looking, in particular the higher kind of beholding, but within certain limits also the kind of looking that is typical of aesthetic perception. If looking at a thing could be separated at this point from pleasure, we would find ourselves dealing with a very loose relationship among acts. That is precisely not the case; looking at an object is essentially pleasurable, and pleasure is essentially the pleasure in looking. The appreciative devotion that occurs just in beholding, the intensified fine sense for imponderable details that are weightless and always overlooked in everyday life, is provoked by pleasure; this, however, is a feeling of value, and in fact of aesthetic value, which overlies all practical value. Aesthetical beholding, with its peculiar indwelling stance on its object, is made capable, by means of its unity with pleasure, of that synthesis of becoming lost in the object and yet maintaining distance from it, which, as we have seen forms the unity of elements in this spiritual stance that otherwise can not be unified.
If the state of appreciation was directed towards the conditioning value-components (the vital and the ethical), it would have to cancel the act of looking, for it would cancel the phenomenon of distance. Then pleasure would be produced by interest. By means of eliminating interest, in which, however, the feeling of value with those value-components is conserved, the relation of beholding (74) to its object may also be conserved, because it has been lifted into union with a value feeling of a higher order.
Finally, we must add there a word about the shifting of aesthetical enjoyment into enjoyment of oneself. The agent is able to enjoy the former as a state (one’s own state). The reasons have already been given why this self-enjoyment is not aesthetical pleasure; similarly why this phenomenon is found with greater frequency among introverted persons, and why it interferes with genuine aesthetical pleasure in the object – and, along with it the relation of looking-at to objects – or suppresses or even falsifies it. If we bring together this shifting into self-enjoyment with the contrary, shifting into taking pleasure on the conditioning values (the ethical, the vital, etc.) we may see how genuine aesthetical pleasure holds itself on a narrow tightrope strung between two neighboring but totally different forms of pleasure, both of which are neither able to extend themselves to the Kantian sense of “disinterested” nor fall under it. For in both cases they lack distance, in both cases the object is not the same, and in both cases the characteristic aesthetical synthesis of pleasure and beholding is not produced.
Seen from these two sides, a high challenge is directed at the observer of the beautiful, a challenge that must be met in his attitude: he must make himself free from taking pleasure in the practical value of the content of the object, and to make himself free from valuing the condition in himself as an agent. Perhaps this double inward freedom is rarely achieved completely. Yet surely we do not often see in life this shift towards one side or the other. So it happens that we are easily deceived by the purity and genuineness of our own aesthetical pleasure.
The challenge remains, however. The work of art demands in all strictness that it be met with by the observer. The created work, even the most masterful, has only limited power to determine how well the challenge is met. The elevating power that emanates from it does not seize everyone. The capacity of devoting oneself to the object, with all its spiritual conditions, must be provided, on his side, by the observer.