I’ve read James Sully’s entry on “aesthetics” in my 1910 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. Among many things he writes about whether all aesthetic experiences are social by nature. If we were alone, and knew we would always be alone, would we still be interested in beauty? Sully refers to how Kant commented on this sentiment in Critique of Judgment:
A man abandoned by himself on a desert island would adorn neither his hut nor his person; nor would he seek for flowers, still less would he plant them, in order to adorn himself therewith. It is only in society that it occurs to him to be not merely a man, but a refined man after his kind…
I thought this was an interesting idea, so I tried to further probe the theme, tried to write about it … but my exploration led me into thoughts that bummed me out. Perhaps I’m a sloppy philosopher, unable to straighten this thinking out into something that clarifies and elevates my understanding. Perhaps I’m not good enough a writer.
Or perhaps it’s just that I’m a hopeless romantic, and prefer to stay one. I am, after all, a card-carrying member of the International Federation for Romantic Dreamers.
Edgar Allen Poe’s account of the aesthetic experience is more to my liking, because it’s much more — dare I say — beautiful:
I recognized it […] sometimes in the survey of a rapidly growing vine—in the contemplation of a moth, a butterfly, a chrysalis, a stream of running water. I have felt it in the ocean—in the falling of a meteor. I have felt it in the glances of unusually aged people. And there are one or two stars in heaven (one especially, a star of the sixth magnitude, double and changeable, to be found near the large star in Lyra) in a telescopic scrutiny of which I have been made aware of the feeling. I’ve been filled with it by the certain sounds from stringed instruments, and not infrequently by passages from books.
Bibliography
- Encyclopædia Britannica. 11th. ed. 29 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1910-1911.
- Poe, Edgar A, Vincent Starrett, and William Sharp. Tales of Mystery & Imagination. New York: Heritage Press, 1941.