NOTE: THE NATURE OF ESTHETIC ENJOYMENT
Esthetic pleasure or the enjoyment of the beautiful is generally admitted to be disinterested. Possession and ownership do not enter into the esthetic act. The ownership of Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” is not an object of indifference or of disinterested attention. Thieves scheme for the ownership, thousands covet it, guards protect it. But the enjoyment of “Mona Lisa” is not selfish and exclusive in its nature. Esthetic enjoyment makes abstraction of possession and of selfish good. It follows therefore that esthetic enjoyment is a function of man’s knowledge, not of man’s desires and appetites. The only condition upon which the appetites, whether bodily or spiritual, can operate is that they be energized by personal good. Volition may be free, but it cannot be disinterested. You may enjoy another’s picture; you cannot eat his dinner, nor can you be indifferent to what you know to be for your good.
Some have asserted that esthetic enjoyment belongs to a special power apart from both knowledge and appetite. There is however no need of such power. Certainly beauty must be known to be enjoyed, but is not the knowledge itself adequate to produce the characteristic effect of beauty? Is not Aquinas right in saying, “Pulchrum dicitur id cujus ipsa apprehensio placet” (that is called beautiful which simply by its perception pleases)? Good, being an end, cannot delight solely by being perceived; good must be attained. But for beauty, is not its very perception an enjoyment? The solution of this question will be found in the nature of enjoyment.
Emotions and feelings, pleasure and pain are easy to understand and for that reason difficult to express in satisfactory formulas. By its very nature every faculty of man operating normally has an accompanying pleasure, while if operating abnormally it has pain. The faculty itself is therefore the subject of the feeling just as life is inherent in the organism. Indeed feeling is consciously localized life. The feeling of the toe is felt by the toe; the joy of seeing is felt by the eye. No distinct power is required to carry the feeling. So it is with esthetic emotions. The mind itself feels the delight of beauty. Esthetic enjoyment is a function of perception.
Does esthetic enjoyment belong to the senses and to the imagination? Here again there is difference of opinion. It is probable, however, that sensible perception has no accompanying esthetic pleasure. St. Augustine appealed to experience and declared that esthetic enjoyment of the beauty, say, of the sun, was possible, even when the sight suffered pain. A better reason may be found in the behavior of animals which, though clothed in beauty, give us no certain evidence of esthetic appreciation and enjoyment.
Esthetic enjoyment therefore belongs to intellectual cognition. Now the intellect has many operations. Which one of these carries the esthetic pleasure or esthetic pain, which one is charged with the vital thrill that creates and appreciates the world of art? The mind reasons, the mind judges, the mind apprehends. Esthetic enjoyment belongs to the last. Judgments and inferences may be objects of esthetic enjoyment; to reason, to judge may precede or follow or may be even necessary conditions, but the esthetic act is most probably one of simple apprehension. There would seem to be general agreement that contemplation is the characteristic attitude of the mind in the presence of beauty. Aquinas excludes distinctly the idea of end from beauty. Beauty is a form which we contemplate. Croce calls the esthetic perception intuition. Theodore Watts-Duntonseems to be describing the same act when he calls poetry “the renascence of wonder.” The efforts of reasoning and of judging appear to be alien to the mental attitude in the presence of beauty.
The simple apprehension is concerned with what is termed ontological truth, whereas reasoning and judging result in logical truth. Now, just as esthetic enjoyment abstracts from possession or good, so does it abstract from the affirmations belonging to the logical truth of judgment and of rational inference. There is esthetic enjoyment of fiction as well as of fact. Aristotle long ago saw that although the substance of art must be the persons, actions and feelings of man, the pleasure found in the work of art does not arise from its correspondence with reality. The correspondence with reality gives the satisfaction of logical truth, of scientific truth, of historical fact. The truth which is the object of esthetic pleasure in art is the truth of consistency, of realization of ideal, the truth of reasonable congruity, of plot in a wide sense of the term. This vision, this dream of the artist, scholastic philosophers callcausa exemplarisor ideal. If we are right in our understanding of Croce, his intuition is nothing else but the simple apprehension of the ideal. Esthetic enjoyment comes also, as is clear, from the simple apprehension of beauty in natural realities where there is no fiction of art.
To localize the esthetic enjoyment in this way does not determine the constituent elements of beauty, but clear definitions help to exclude many false notions of beauty. The ideal of the artist is embodied in his imagination before it is expressed in its proper medium. The art of man always must have a medium which can be perceived by the senses. That is why a vigorous imagination, which stores up and dispenses to its owner quickly and abundantly of its riches, is so useful to the artist. Through his imagination the artist is original and personal. The pure thought of science is abstract and alike in all minds; the artisticvision formed from individual experience will be different in every one. Therefore no two artists expressing themselves in the concrete can be alike as no two scenes of nature are alike in beauty.
Aristotle put the pleasure of art in perception. Art for him is amimesis, which does not mean an imitation, in the sense of mirroring or copying. That was Plato’s notion, which Aristotle combated. Art is, in Aristotle, a power analogous to nature, working like nature in another and limited world, of sound, of color, of human thoughts. Art is fiction, a dramatizing, a staging of life, to be judged, not by correspondence with fact, but by its own plausible and convincing rationalization. No one has done more for art than Aristotle in his insistence upon the necessity of cause and effect, of a motivation, sufficient at least for the artist’s public. Intrinsic unity, the fruit of perfect motivation, was another necessary requisite in Aristotle’s analysis of art. It is only when the varied elements of the artist’s imaginative experience have fused themselves into a unity by having a well-motivated beginning, middle and end that the mind feels the beauty of its vision.
Universality in art is another fruitful idea of Aristotle. While confined to his sensible medium, the artist must link up the separate elements of his vision more closely than in the realm of fact. He will by that very reason be general and universal because his motivation must approve itself to all. A moving picture of the death of Cæsar as it really occurred would be valuable history. It would, however, be individual. Shakespeare’s death of Cæsar has a beginning, middle and end, and the spectators see in it the working out of a plot in which every word and act has been carefully planned and fitted into the design. The individuating notes are left out, and the death of a Cæsar has universal appeal.
Artistic creation, motivation, unity, universality, these are great principles of art formulated by Aristotle and not likelyever to be superseded. The cognitive idea of beauty and those principles of Aristotle have been followed in the chapters of this book.
For further discussion of the nature of esthetic pleasure, see author’s “Art of Interesting,” Chap. V, Interest from Emotions; Chap. XVII, Is Esthetic Emotion a Spinal Thrill?