BEAUTY AS FEELING

Aestheticians:
No actual objectification of feeling ever occur, only seems so. Aesthetic Experience = Hallucination

Aldrich rejects the notion that colors are apparently at a distance before the eyes

Visual and Auditory Sensations

Theory of Vision

Visual Temperatures
Colors

Visual Feelers

Theory of Visual and Auditory Perception

- expandable ego or self - incorporating parts of the environment into its own corpus

Sound and Color

Symbolizes the behavior of the objects or what can be done with them

Psychic Distance and the Experience of Beauty

Disembodied Status of Aesthetic Emotions

Ones own feelings appear as the aesthetic quality of a thing of beauty.

Objectification = Impossible

Subjectified Emotions
Example: During Embarrassment, we are distressed. Man bumped by a stranger

Aestheticians
- Field of consiousness may actually include not only the native organism of the subject of experience but other existing bodies as well.

Real Objectification of Feeling

- simple perception - response with emotion

Beloved Material Thing

- a body impelling the native organism of the lover towards it

Aesthetic Attitude
- object is not a physical thing it is nowhere - does not move the native body of the observer

BEAUTY
- escape from a going out from the urgencies of place and time - escape from existence

- beautiful - a resting place for disembodied emotional selves

Santayana - "beauty with pleasure" subjective sense of beauty late 19th century take subjective pleasure as a property of the object

One must stop acting to behold beauty.

Platonic Love

Tragic Beauty
- you can objectify a painful feeling or emotion - pleasant feeling converted by objectification into the aesthetic quality of a previously objectified painful feeling both feelings being experienced as qualities of the object.

Catharsis Theory

Layer of Aesthetic Quality

Simple Beauty Tragic Beauty

Ugliness
There are no negative Aesthetic qualities Ugliness Aesthetic attitude is difficult to assume -> and if the Aesthetic attitude is not assumed, there is no Aesthetic quality.

Some organic states are correlated with Aesthetic Experience

- drugs, overt motor tendencies

Theory of Feelings
contains the promise of a more intelligible account of the objectivity of feeling characteristic of Aesthetic experience

 Beauty is not the attribute of an object. It is inherent in the fundamental nature of experience. It is the experience of recognizing that Consciousness and Reality are one.

 A Theory of Feelings was a sequel to On Instinct, a kind of introduction to the former.) What is noteworthy is, first, that Heller provides the reader with a definition of feelings which are "involvements with ourselves and/or with others