Autor: Melchin, R. Kenneth

Buch: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Titel: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Stichwort: Ästhetisches Erfahrungsmuster; "erhöhte" Erfahrung um ihrer selbst willen (Befreiung); Gefühle als intentionale Antwort auf Werte; Kunst: vor-wissenschaftlich u. vor-philosophisch

Kurzinhalt: The aesthetic pattern is characterized by Lonergan as a liberation 'from the drag of biological purposiveness.' ... Thus the aesthetic experiences can be characterized as flexible schemes ... intentionally ordered towards heightened experience ...

Textausschnitt: 37/5 The aesthetic pattern is characterized by Lonergan as a liberation 'from the drag of biological purposiveness.'1 And the essential, fulfilling condition for this liberation is the organism's capacity for focussed attention upon the objects of experience in 'conscious' life.2 The aesthetic pattern may involve nothing more than a child taking pleasure in the wiggling of fingers and toes. But it is the control over the intentionally-oriented operations of sense that fulfills the conditions for the child's focussed gaze and attention on the subjective experience of such movements. Once some control over the imaginative and intelligent operations of the basic pattern has been achieved through the mediation of sensorimotor skills, the human subject need not await the occasion for aesthetic experience but he or she can fulfill the conditions for its occurrence in himself or herself or in others. (139; Fs)

38/5 What distinguishes the aesthetic pattern in Lonergan's account is its orientation towards heightened subjective experience and the feelings which flow from such attention. And as with the biological pattern the structure of the elements of aesthetic experience usually includes mediating operations of imagination and intelligence. Thus the aesthetic experiences can be characterized as flexible schemes and series of schemes intentionally ordered towards heightened experience for its own sake. Lonergan describes the biological pattern as ordered towards a term or goal. But the successful realization of this goal fulfills the conditions for a conscious subject's emancipation from the constraints of biological purpose. Thus the stable recurrence of the schemes and series of the biological pattern (with some time remaining during waking hours) constitutes the fulfilling conditions for the emergence of the events and schemes of the aesthetic pattern. The heightened experience in the aesthetic pattern is spontaneously sought as preferable (more joyous, more delightful) to the constraints of the biological pattern. (139f; Fs) (notabene)

39/5 The aesthetic pattern involves not only the controlled attention to experiences and the heightened feelings that follow, but also the creative exploration and combination of patterns of images and the feelings that they evoke.3 The effect of this capacity to control images and feelings of the aesthetic pattern is not an enslavement of feelings and image but their liberation both from biological purpose and from the constraints of the questions and anticipations of the intellectual pattern.4 The aesthetic pattern includes some straining for truth and some drive towards value, but what results is not knowledge of truth or value but, I would argue, what Lonergan comes to call in Method the feeling as intentional response to value.5 (140; Fs) (notabene)

The aesthetic and artistic are symbolic. Free experience and free creation are prone to justify themselves by an ulterior purpose or significance. Art, then, becomes symbolic, but what is symbolized is obscure. It is an expression of the human subject outside the limits of adequate intellectual formulation or appraisal. It seeks to mean, to convey, to impart something that is to be reached, not through science or philosophy, but through a participation and, in some fashion, a re-enactment of the artist's inspiration and intention. Pre-scientific and pre-philosophic, it may strain for truth and value without defining them. Post-biological, it may reflect the psychological depths yet, by that very fact, it will go beyond them.6

40/5 Man is oriented towards being, towards truth, towards value. Being is approached and pointed towards in emotions, symbols, images. And such affective and imaginative thrusts toward truth and value are profoundly significant and essential dimensions of human life. The schemes or routines of cognition, the controlled and mediated skills described by Lonergan in terms of Piaget's analysis, are involved in the aesthetic pattern. But their object is not theoretical knowledge, judgment and decision, but the liberation and heightening of feelings that strain toward what is fundamentally of worth in human life. (140; Fs)

41/5 As the successful performance of the routines of biological life fulfills the conditions for the events and schemes of the aesthetic pattern, so too the liberation of sensations and images in the aesthetic pattern fulfills the conditions for their integration in acts of insight in the intellectual pattern. (140; Fs)

Kommentar (vom 26.02.2009): Es gibt ein "aesthetic pattern" gleichsam vor und nach dem "intellectual pattern". Was wirklich Kunst ist, hat seinen Raum im "aesthetic pattern" nach dem intellektuellen Muster.

The aesthetic liberation and the free artistic control of the flow of sensations and images, of emotions and bodily movements, [do] not merely break the bonds of biological drive but also generate in experience a flexibility that makes it a ready tool for the spirit of inquiry.7

42/5 While the biological pattern presents the objects of experience simply as the means for securing the life of the organism and its species, it is the aesthetic pattern that liberates the subject from this narrow orientation. The aesthetic pattern shifts the subject's attention to the object for its own sake; for the sake of its heightened experience. This shift away from a biologically utilitarian preoccupation with the object of experience permits the subject's recurrent and focused attention on experience for its own sake. And this fulfills the conditions for the emergence and recurrence of the schemes of the intellectual pattern. For only a focused preoccupation with the question and the data on their own terms can yield the insights that answer questions.8 While the aesthetic and intellectual patterns are distinct the former constitutes a condition for the occurrence and controlled recurrence of the latter. It would seem that Lonergan's presentation of the relation between these two patterns necessarily implies that the competent performance of the schemes of operations in the intellectual pattern requires a regular return to experience in the aesthetic pattern. (141; Fs)