Share the ideas that persist – this one has been with me for over thirty years, and I still rest upon it.
In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce speaks through Stephen of his theory of aesthetics rooted in Aristotle and Aquinas. He defines art into two categories: “proper” (static) and “improper” (kinetic). Joyce writes, “The feelings excited by improper art,” Stephen says, “are kinetic – desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts.”
Whereas, “This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony in the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state…”
The American philosopher Joseph Campbell explains it in this way: “Joyce’s formula for the aesthetic experience is that it does not move you to want to possess the object. A work of art that moves you to possess the object depicted, he calls pornography. Nor does the aesthetic experience move you to criticize and reject the object – such art he calls didactic, or social criticism in art. The aesthetic experience is a simple beholding of the object. Joyce says that you put a frame around it and see it first as one thing, and that, in seeing it as one thing, you become aware of the relationship of part to part, each part to the whole, the whole to each of its part. This the essential aesthetic factor – rhythm, the harmonious rhythm of relationships. And when a fortunate rhythm has been struck by the artist, you experience a radiance. You are held in aesthetic arrest. This is the epiphany.”
Amen.