tailieunhanh - FREEDOM AND RECEPTIVITY IN AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

Aesthetic Realism class Mr. Siegel explained what I and many people have gone for: “You get a value out of thinking you are secret and immune. The question is: How much do you want to be in relation to things not yourself and to the world?” This is a question for every person, whether on a frozen tundra, a Brooklyn street, or a university classroom. One of the most moving aspects of the mask are the two curved hands which reach out from the sides, as though from the depths within. The gracefully curved fingers give the hands a yearning quality, a desire to embrace what. | Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics Vol. 3 No. 1 April 2006 Freedom and Receptivity in Aesthetic Experience Ronald Hepburn No-one can read far into our subject without finding an author linking aesthetic experience and freedom in one sense or another Kant notably of course but also Schopenhauer Schiller and many more. In this article I want first A to remind you in a sentence or two of those by now classic ways of connecting concepts of freedom and aesthetic experience and then B to outline some thoughts of my own. Section C opens up in more detail a less frequented and less well-charted topic basically the manylayered nature of much aesthetic experience and how that can involve freedom in an improvisatory contribution by the appreciator. Each layer can be thought of as containing a given the product of earlier syntheses plus a new component in its turn to be synthesized whether historical scientific religious or other. This probably occurs most of all in the aesthetic appreciation of nature since art offers some controlling mastering of the appreciator s response. Even so art works leave room often enough for differences of interpretation different ways of seeing and grasping the aesthetic object. D But aesthetic freedom i shall argue is far from unlimitedly accessible available and untrammelled. As with freedom in other modes and other contexts we can meet significant limits to aesthetic freedom. E Quite demanding problems can arise in the attempt to assimilate integrate an improvised complement in an aesthetic experience-in-the-making. And we may win and appropriate aesthetic freedom only to lose it again to new inflexibility of vision itself sometimes of aesthetic origin. 1 Ronald Hepburn A For Kant to experience the aesthetic is essentially to experience freedom since aesthetic experience is the free play of imagination and understanding in which we are freed enjoyably from the tasks of cognitive grasp and the demands of practical life. Not that the practical .