Aesthetic contemplation

Aesthetic contemplation is an imaging mode of experience in which a real carrier makes an Irreal object present without turning that object into a real thing. In painting, music, theatre, and literature, the distinction between the material work and what is appreciated through it explains both aesthetic pleasure and the peculiar difficulty of returning from art to everyday concerns. Beauty, on this account, belongs to the imaginary; the work’s physical or performative existence provides the means through which it appears.

Definition and perceptual background

The account begins by distinguishing ordinary perception from image-directed experience. In a schematic drawing, a few lines can first be organized as a pattern on a sheet: eye movements group segments, points, and curves according to their visible relations. The same marks can then be read as a face. That change is not simply a discovery of new lines. The figure is interpreted through a changed intention, and the viewer’s bodily orientation and eye movements help constitute a different whole. The schematic marks become the means for apprehending a face that is not literally drawn in full.

This case clarifies why eye movement alone does not make an image. In the Müller-Lyer illusion, the angles guide contrary movements: closed angles impede the eye, while open ones invite it to continue. These movements are attributed to the segments as a power of extension, so the perceived lines acquire directions or vectors. The result remains a perceptual object with a newly perceived quality. Schematic images work differently: their lines do not impose a necessary rule of movement. Knowledge guides exploratory movement, which is projected onto the figure as a tentative direction; if an image crystallizes, the viewer sees a figure while remaining aware that the movements have been freely projected. The distinction between perception and Imaging consciousness provides a basis for understanding aesthetic experience as an active apprehension, not a passive inspection of a physical object.

Work on perceptual form by Köhler, Wertheimer, and Koffka is also relevant to the difference between what is seen and what is perceived. Persistent structures can help explain why perception includes more than the immediately visible detail. The account does not therefore treat every unperceived aspect as an image: ordinary perception may include unformulated intentions that stay attached to the object and enrich its presence. Aesthetic contemplation instead involves an imaging act that apprehends an object through a carrier.

The artwork and its material carrier

The governing claim is that the work of art, in its aesthetic mode of appearance, is an irreality. In a portrait of Charles VIII, the canvas, frame, and layers of paint are real, but they are not identical to the depicted king as the object of aesthetic appreciation. Looking at the paint as paint does not by itself disclose that aesthetic object. It appears when consciousness turns from the realizing attitude and apprehends Charles VIII as imaged. As with an ambiguous drawing that can be seen as five or six cubes but not both at once, the two apprehensions are each complete and exclusive: the painted king belongs to an imaging act, not to the canvas considered simply as a physical thing.

The painter does not first produce a private mental image and then transfer that image into reality. Brushstrokes, impasto, canvas grain, and varnish are real; the aesthetically appreciated object is not one more real object among them. The painter instead arranges a material Analogon through which an image can be apprehended by a viewer. Each stroke contributes to an Irreal object rather than existing only for itself or as a component of a self-sufficient physical whole. The painting is a material thing that can be visited by its depicted object whenever a spectator takes the imaging attitude; that object remains an image rather than becoming real through its manifestation.

This distinction also separates sensual pleasure from aesthetic appreciation. Certain reds by Matisse may give immediate sensory enjoyment, but a colour grasped in isolation is not yet beautiful in the aesthetic sense. In a painting, the red may be apprehended as the red of a woollen rug near a table: its tactile and material character, and its relation to other colours, belong to the Irreal whole through which the painted scene is appreciated. The green of a wall covering, for example, contributes through its imagined stiffness and shine to its contrast with the rug. Even when cubist painting no longer represents familiar objects, its forms can have density, matter, depth, and relations of perspective. They remain Irreal objects manifested through the canvas, rather than real objects residing in it.

Theatre, music, and the experience of return

The same structure extends beyond painting. A novelist or poet presents Irreal objects through verbal analogons, while an actor uses the whole body as an Analogon for Hamlet. The actor need not believe that he is Hamlet in the sense of taking the character as real. Yet his feelings, strength, and gestures can be wholly mobilized to produce the role. Even real tears are apprehended by actor and audience as Hamlet’s Irreal tears: the character is not made real inside the performer; instead, the performer is irrealized in the character.

Music makes the difference between the work and its performance especially clear. A performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony takes place at a date and in a particular auditorium; the symphony apprehended through it is not experienced as that dated event. At the Châtelet auditorium on 17 November 1938, the performance may be better or worse, but listeners seek the symphony itself. A later performance, such as one conducted by Furtwängler with another orchestra, can present the same work again. Listeners who close their eyes, or who look at the performers without attending to them as people and objects, may apprehend the symphony as an internally ordered succession of themes rather than as sounds unfolding alongside events in the auditorium. The performance is its Analogon: real sounds make the work manifest, but the symphony itself is apprehended as outside real existence, not as a dated occurrence or as an object hidden in another world.

For this reason, ending a play or symphony does not amount to a passage from one world into another. The transition is from the imagining attitude to the realizing attitude. Aesthetic contemplation is described as an induced dream; the abrupt end of a performance releases a consciousness absorbed in the imaginary and restores contact with existence. The resulting discomfort is not limited to works whose content is cruel or unsettling. It can arise from the sudden awakening itself, as the work’s internally sustained experience gives way to ordinary reality.

Beauty, distance, and significance

The theory locates beauty in the imaginary rather than in the real object considered as an existing thing. Aesthetic appreciation therefore does not simply register a pleasing property of the canvas, sound, or event. It apprehends an Irreal object through a real carrier, and aesthetic enjoyment is the manner in which that object is constituted through the carrier. This explains the disinterestedness associated with aesthetic vision: the viewer is not primarily concerned with whether the beautiful object exists as a usable or possessable thing. Kant’s account of disinterested judgment and Schopenhauer’s description of a suspension of the Will to Power are presented as compatible with this structure, rather than as evidence for a mysterious faculty that perceives reality in a special way.

The distinction also prevents aesthetic and moral values from being conflated. The Good concerns conduct in the real world; beauty belongs to the imaginary and involves the nihilation of the world. Real objects can nevertheless become occasions for aesthetic contemplation. When a viewer stands back from an object, it may cease to be apprehended simply in its current practical presence and instead function as an Analogon for an Irreal image of itself. Alternatively, an imperfect mark on a wall may serve as the means through which a painter apprehends a more intense harmony of colours. In either case, the object is held at a distance, as if beyond reach, rather than taken up in ordinary practical engagement.

That distance can conflict with desire. Contemplating a woman as beautiful apprehends an Irreal version of her that cannot at the same time be physically possessed in the realizing attitude. Desire requires a return to her contingent existence; aesthetic admiration holds her apart from it. The account compares this structure with paramnesia, in which a real object functions as its own analogon in the past: both involve a transformation in how the object is apprehended, but aesthetic contemplation nihiliates the present object, whereas paramnesia pastifies it. Their contrast, like that between imagination and memory, marks the boundary between aesthetic distance and ordinary recognition.