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of esthetic experience, even if it's only the knowledge of having had the
experience) .
I don't have to accept Kant's designation of the mental or cognitive
faculties in order to find out that the gist of what he says about the role of
cognitive activity in esthetic experience is confirmed by what I make of
my own es thetic experience. As I see it, as I sense it, as I introspect it, the
pleasure of art-when it does give pleasure-consists in a sensation of
exalted cognitiveness that transcends cognition as such. It's as though for
the time being I could command, by dint of transcendent knowing, every–
thing that could possibly affect my consciousness and, with that, my
existence.
I know,
and yet without having anything specific or definite to
know. Definiteness or specificity in this respect would extinguish the sen–
sation, the feeling, the state. For it's a question of " ness" -ness, not of
what-ness; of a state of consciousness, not of a gain or addition to con–
sciousness. The more diffuse or "general" the state or sensation of
cognitiveness, the more embracing it is, and the more embracing, the more
exalted and exalting.
It
is by its greater "generality" of diffuseness, which
is also its elusiveness, that better art makes itself evident as better.
What is ordinarily meant by emotion or feeling is swallowed up in
esthetic experience. It's as though the state or sensation of cognitiveness
contained emotion, along with sensuousness and knowledge and intellec–
tion, as things transcended-contained and transcended-in a totality of
sentience (to borrow Susanne Langer's term but to change its application
somewhat). Emotion, like immediate sense perception and knowledge and
rules of logic, becomes "known" and "felt" and "sensed" from outside
itself, from a vantage point that commands and controls it for the purpos–
es of sheer consciousness. The "pleasure" of esthetic experience is the
pleasure of consciousness; the pleasure that consciousness takes in possess–
ing itself and its powers and the operation of those powers. In satisfactory
es thetic experience consciousness revels as it were in the sense of itself (as
theologians used to say that God did).
It's in this state of exalted, transcending cognitiveness that esthetic
affect, esthetic quality or value, consists; rather, this state is that affect, that
quality, that value. All three mean the same thing. The more and the less
the degrees of differentiations of esthetic quality or value are the more and
the less the degrees and gradations of this state, of its intensity and scope.
Inferior art or es thetic experience shows itself, preci sely, in failing to bring
about a state that is high enough-or intense enough or extensive enough.
But all art, all esthetic experience, good and bad, superior and inferior,
identifies itself by promising this state of transcending cognitiveness, or by
intimating a promise of it. And it's only taste that can tell to what extent
this promise is kept.
