Louis Dupre responding to the duality of Tomas’s understanding of the aesthetic experience who takes a physicalist view of perception, in 1967 at Fourth Lexington Conference on Pure and Applied Phenomenology Aisthesis and Aesthetics states:
Aesthetic perception is neither ordinary perception nor pure reflection. It combines the detachment of the latter with the intuitive immediacy of the former. (pg 172)
This could be a state of co-existence or a transitional state which Kant claimed as the imagination ‘between sense experience and objectified experience’ (ibid)
Mikael Dufrenne posits that the imagination detaches the object from the live experience by a means of a process of temporalisation.
To imagine is to place things under the concrete universality of time and to detach them from the sensory present.
To withdraw from the game is to take refuge in the past…
To contemplate is to return to the past in order to capture the future;
I only cease to be one with the present object when I detach myself from a present in which I remain immersed in thing. The re- of representation expresses this interiorization, just as the con- of contemplation expresses the possibility of a survey and a simultaneity which evokes space.
(Quoted in Dupre p172 Mikael Dufrenne Phenomenologie de l’experience esthetique Vol 11 Paris 1953 p434)
Dupre suggests the imagination temporalises in two ways – empirically and transcendentally.
- Empirically it connects a perception with all previous experiences and thereby produces a unified picture, an image eg snow ‘looks’ cold even if we don’t toucch it
- The transcendental function – creates a temporal-spatial field in which a perception can appear. According to Dufrenne only this transcendental imagination functions in the aesthetic perception.
It is not in a world; it constitutes a world and this world is within the experience. (Dufrenne op.cit p 449 quoted in Dupre p173)
Dupre argues for a co-existence of the empirical or the everyday and the transcendental.
No work of art then can claim full aesthetic immanence – the intentional reference to the world of ordinary perception is an intrinsic part of all aesthetic experience.
Aesthetic perception is never pure perception but a perception coloured by a subjective disposition. Schleiermacher regarded the aesthetic experience as an awareness of the self with the object, a conscious merging of subject and object, rather than a perception of an object. The merging of the self with its object is usually referred to as a feeling.
Johannes Volkelt Versuch uber Fuhlen and Wollen 1930 p12 “Ein unmittelbares Sichselbsterleben des Ich in seiner Ichheit’*
– certain elements are always present in feelings – an experience of pleasure or displeasure, an experience of corporeality; explicit or implicit representations – all these elements are co-ordinated by a predominant experience of the self as such.*
This self experience is not cognitive; it is a totality experience which i am aware of the self as it is united with the universe as a whole. – it is an immediate presence to oneself distinct from the reflective presence of action and cognition. Yet the immediacy of feelings does not imply that they are superficial: unlike sensation and emotions, feelings presuppose a reflective presence to the world. That is why feelings reveal and emotions react.
The revealing quality of feelings consists in their ability to read appearances as expressions of a subject, and to do so with the immediacy of ordinary sense perception. because they are subjec oriented, feelings do not follow a logical pattern in anticipating the course of future events. The ultimate ground of these noetic characteristics is the total involvement of the self. Only by a direct participation of the slelf can an appearance ever be viewed as the expression of another self. This self-involvemnt of feelings, however is in no way a committment. The self never gives itself in feeling, nor does the object of feeling ever need any giving. For the two are one in an immediate way without the dialectical opposition between giving and wanting that we encounter in love. Through feeling, the aesthetic object ceases to be an object in the strict sense: it becomes interiorized in the subject An object is made aesthetic by the contemplating subject.
…the aesthetic structuring of this feeling. No feeling is fully aesthetic until it is expressed. We may say, then, that the aesthetic feeling is born in its expression.(op.cit p176)
Read on Sunday 22 May 2010 Louis Dupre ‘Aesthetic Perception and its relation to ordinary perception’ p171-177 from Aisthesis and Aesthetics The Fourth Lexington Conference on Pure and Applied Phenomenology 1967
Delivered 9.00am Friday April 71967 Panel: Aesthetic Creation
placetracing | Jacqueline Gothe 