The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics E-Book

Vernon Lee

• Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

In "The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics," Vernon Lee embarks on an innovative exploration of aesthetics, interweaving philosophical discourse with psychological insights. Lee's prose, rich in metaphor and intelligence, deftly navigates the intersection of beauty and human emotion, positioning aesthetic experience as a vital component of psychological understanding. With a finely nuanced style, she draws on a diverse intellectual heritage that encompasses romanticism and emerging psychological theories, making her work not only a reflection of her own era but also a precursor to modern aesthetic debates. Vernon Lee, born Violet Paget, was an influential figure in the late 19th century, engaging deeply with the arts, philosophy, and the burgeoning field of psychology. Her extensive travels and friendships with contemporaneous artists and intellectuals, including the likes of Oscar Wilde and Henry James, profoundly shaped her understanding of beauty and aesthetics. Lee's multidisciplinary approach, grounded in her own experiences of the arts, informs her arguments, illustrating her commitment to a psychological dimension in the appreciation of beauty. This book is essential for anyone invested in the study of art, aesthetics, or psychology, offering a compelling framework for understanding beauty's impact on the human psyche. Lee's thought-provoking insights encourage readers to consider how our perceptions of beauty influence both individual experiences and deeper societal values. Explore the intricacies of aesthetic appreciation through Lee's scholarly lens and enrich your understanding of the beautiful.

Leseprobe

Vernon Lee

The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics

Published by Good Press, 2019

[email protected]

EAN 4057664626042

Table of Contents

Cover

Titlepage

Text

We seem thus to have got a good way in our explanation; and indeed the older psychology, for instance of the late Grant Allen, did not get any further. But to explain why a shape difficult to perceive should be disliked and called "ugly," by no means amounts to explaining why some other shape should be liked and called "beautiful," particularly as some ugly shapes happen to be far easier to grasp than some beautiful ones. The Reader will indeed remember that there is a special pleasure attached to all overcoming of difficulty, and to all understanding. But this double pleasure is shared with form-perception by every other successful grasping of meaning; and there is no reason why that pleasure should be repeated in the one case more than in the other; nor why we should repeat looking at (which is what we mean by contemplating) a shape once we have grasped it, any more than we continue to dwell on, to reiterate the mental processes by which we have worked out a geometrical proposition or unravelled a metaphysical crux. The sense of victory ends very soon after the sense of the difficulty overcome; the sense of illumination ends with the acquisition of a piece of information; and we pass on to some new obstacle and some new riddle. But it is different in the case of what we call Beautiful. Beautiful means satisfactory for contemplation, i.e. for reiterated perception; and the very essence of contemplative satisfaction is its desire for such reiteration. The older psychology would perhaps have explained this reiterative tendency by the pleasurableness of the sensory elements, the mere colours and sounds of which the easily perceived shape is made up. But this does not explain why, given that other shapes are made up of equally agreeable sensory elements, we should not pass on from a once perceived shape or combination of shapes to a new one, thus obtaining, in addition to the sensory agreeableness of colour or sound, a constantly new output of that feeling of victory and illumination attendant on every successful intellectual effort. Or, in other words, seeing that painting and music employ sensory elements already selected as agreeable, we ought never to wish to see the same picture twice, or to continue looking at it; we ought never to wish to repeat the same piece of music or its separate phrases; still less to cherish that picture or piece of music in our memory, going over and over again as much of its shape as had become our permanent possession.

We return therefore to the fact that although balked perception is enough to make us reject a shape as ugly, i.e. such that we avoid entering into contemplation of it, easy perception is by no means sufficient to make us cherish a shape as beautiful, i.e. such that the reiteration of our drama of perception becomes desirable. And we shall have to examine whether there may not be some other factor of shape-perception wherewith to account for this preference of reiterated looking at the same to looking at something else.

Meanwhile we may add to our set of formulae: difficulty in shape-perception makes contemplation disagreeable and impossible, and hence earns for aspects the adjective ugly. But facility in perception, like agreeableness of sensation by no means suffices for satisfied contemplation, and hence for the use of the adjective Beautiful.

CHAPTER VIII

SUBJECT AND OBJECT

BUT before proceeding to this additional factor in shape-perception, namely that of Empathic Interpretation, I require to forestall an objection which my Reader has doubtless been making throughout my last chapters; more particularly that in clearing away the ground of this objection I shall be able to lay the foundations of my further edifice of explanation. The objection is this: if the man on the hill was aware of performing any, let alone all, of the various operations described as constituting shape-perception, neither that man nor any other human being would be able to enjoy the shapes thus perceived.

My answer is:

When did I say or imply that he was aware of doing any of it? It is not only possible, but extremely common, to perform processes without being aware of performing them. The man was not aware, for instance, of making eye adjustments and eye movements, unless indeed his sight was out of order. Yet his eye movements could have been cinematographed, and his eye adjustments have been described minutely in a dozen treatises. He was no more aware of doing any measuring or comparing than we are aware of doing our digestion or circulation, except when we do them badly. But just as we are aware of our digestive and circulatory processes in the sense of being aware of the animal spirits resulting from their adequate performance, so he was aware of his measuring and comparing, inasmuch as he was aware that the line A—B was longer than the line C—D, or that the point E was half an inch to the left of the point F. For so long as we are neither examining into ourselves, nor called upon to make a choice between two possible proceedings, nor forced to do or suffer something difficult or distressing, in fact so long as we are attending to whatever absorbs our attention and not to our processes of attending, those processes are replaced in our awareness by the very facts—for instance the proportions and relations of lines—resulting from their activity. That these results should not resemble their cause, that mental elements (as they are called) should appear and disappear, and also combine into unaccountable compounds (Browning's "not a third sound, but a star") according as we attend to them, is indeed the besetting difficulty of a science carried on by the very processes which it studies. But it is so because it is one of Psychology's basic facts. And, so far as we are at present concerned, this difference between mental processes and their results is the fact upon which psychological aesthetics are based. And it is not in order to convert the Man on the Hill to belief in his own acts of shape-perception, nor even to explain why he was not aware of them, that I am insisting upon this point. The principle I have been expounding, let us call it that of the merging of the perceptive activities of the subject in the qualities of the object of perception, explains another and quite as important mental process which was going on in that unsuspecting man.

But before proceeding to that I must make it clearer how that man stood in the matter of awareness of himself. He was, indeed, aware of himself whenever, during his contemplation of that landscape, the thought arose, "well, I must be going away, and perhaps I shan't see this place again"—or some infinitely abbreviated form, perhaps a mere sketched out gesture of turning away, accompanied by a slight feeling of clinging, he couldn't for the life of him say in what part of his body. He was at that moment acutely aware that he did not want to do something which it was optional to do. Or, if he acquiesced passively in the necessity of going away, aware that he wanted to come back, or at all events wanted to carry off as much as possible of what he had seen. In short he was aware of himself either making the effort of tearing himself away, or, if some other person or mere habit, saved him this effort, he was aware of himself making another effort to impress that landscape on his memory, and aware of a future self making an effort to return to it. I call it effort; you may, if you prefer, call it will; at all events the man was aware of himself as nominative of a verb to cling to, (in the future tense) return to, to choose as against some other alternative; as nominative of a verb briefly, to like or love. And the accusative of these verbs would be the landscape. But unless the man's contemplation was thus shot with similar ideas of some action or choice of his own, he would express the situation by saying "this landscape is awfully beautiful."

This IS. I want you to notice the formula, by which the landscape, ceasing to be the accusative of the man's looking and thinking, becomes the nominative of a verb to be so-and-so. That grammatical transformation is the sign of what I have designated, in philosophical language, as the merging of the activities of the subject in the object. It takes place already in the domain of simple sensation whenever, instead of saying "I taste or I smell something nice or nasty" we say—"this thing tastes or smells nice or nasty." And I have now shown you how this tendency to put the cart before the horse increases when we pass to the more complex and active processes called perception; turning "I measure this line"—"I compare these two angles" into "this line extends from A to B"—"these two angles are equal to two right angles."