Home The Nature and Objective of Aesthetics Art and the Artist The Art Work The Art Work in the Making The Creative Mind Art and the Artist Art and the Layman The Experience of Beauty The Substance of the Experience of Beauty The Service of Art Art As Release The Theories of Beauty Theories of Mental Attitude Theories of Organic State Beauty in Music Painting Poetry	THEORIES OF ORGANIC STATE Aesthetic Repose. This theory concerns itself with the bodily state in the aesthetic experience. Its advocate, Ethel Puffer, defines beauty as a "moment of perfection, of self-complete unity of experience, of favorable stimulation with repose." The aesthetic state is repose in tension, "a combination of favorable stimulation and repose." Ordinarily, repose is a state of muscular relaxation, of mild stimulation. Ordinarily, intense stimulation, muscular tension, means excitement, restlessness, desire to engage in gross behavior. But in the aesthetic state there is muscular tension, intense stimulation, but instead of excitement, restlessness, there is repose. Hence the exhilarating effect of beauty: increased tonicity, and also peace. In this state we have the cake and also eat it. How does this unique state come about? What is its cause? Puffer attributes it to the condition of the art work. The art work is necessarily, by its very nature, a unified object. "The symmetrical picture calls out a set of motor impulses which 'balance,'--a system of energies reacting on one center; the sonnet takes us out on one wave of rhythm and of thought, to bring us back on another to the same point; the sonata does the same in melody. In the 'whirling circle' of the drama, not a word or an act that is not indissolubly linked with before and after. Thus the unity of a work of art makes the system of suggested energies which form the foreground of attention an impregnable, and invulnerable circle . . . all incidents to motor impulse--except those which belong to the indissoluble ring of the object itself--have been shut out by the perfection of unity to which the aesthetic object has been brought." Leonardo da Vinci We may suggest another cause than the unity of the art work for the state of repose, a cause that is not only plausible but which also brings Puffer's theory in harmony with the Theories of Attitude. Tension, that is, incipient movement, as we have seen, is a concomitant of all significant experience. The greater the tension the more significant the experience. In intense emotion, for instance, tension is near its maximum, hence the intense significance of the exciting stimulus. But in all such cases, the tension overflows into overt behavior, and the greater the tension the more violent and gross is the outer activity. In aesthetic experience, however, there is great tension, but no gross manifestation. Why? Simply because tension makes experience significant as experience, while its overflow in gross movements is not concerned with the experience as such but with the doing of something about the experience. In other words, gross movement is interested because aroused by extrinsic considerations, while incipient movement is disinterested, being intrinsic. Thus, if the inner tensions in fear and anger were not to overflow into gross movements both anger and fear would become experiences of beauty, as is the case in the drama. Since in the drama we follow the flow of events as events, without considering the fruits and consequences of the events, the outer manifestations that would be present were we to have these experiences under ordinary conditions, are absent. Now when such outer manifestations are absent there is repose in tension. And that is what happens in beauty, in aesthetic repose; namely, since beauty is an attitude of disinterestedness, intrinsicality, etc., the overt acts of interested, extrinsic experience do not occur. Hence, in the theory of aesthetic repose we have the organic aspect of the Theories of Attitude. Catharsis. The doctrine of catharsis dates to Aristotle and has been subjected to numerous interpretations. More ink has been spilled over the single sentence in the Poetics in which Aristotle states his theory regarding the function of the drama than has been the fate of any other one pronouncement in the history of aesthetics. "Tragedy," says Aristotle, "is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude, in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper katharsis, or purgation, of these emotions." Aristotle nowhere tells us what this purifying process is, how tragedy effects this catharsis. Nor does he limit it to tragedy, for in the Politics he speaks at some length of the purgation effect of music. Now of what is the emotion cleansed, in what way is it altered, and why? To cleanse is to eliminate all those properties of a thing that are not of its essence and substance, and leave only that which constitutes the thing in itself. The essence of emotion is the inner tension, the organic occurrences. The gross activities are an accretion, a consequence, arising from the practical necessity to get rid of the exciting stimulus. In the Rhetoric Aristotle defines fear as "a species of pain or disturbance issuing from an impression of impending evil which is destructive or painful in its nature." That is, the emotion is destructive and disturbing because the individual refers the incident to himself, hence the overt activity to get rid of it, to ward it off. But, as Butcher puts it, "The emotion of fear is profoundly altered when it is transferred from the real to the imaginative world. It is no longer the direct apprehension of misfortune impending over our own life. It is not caused by the actual approach of danger. It is the sympathetic shudder we feel for a hero whose character in its essentials resembles our own." Thus, "The true tragic fear becomes an almost impersonal emotion, attaching itself not so much to this or that particular incident, as to the general course of action which is for us an image of human destiny," so that the emotion becomes disinterested, objectified, distanced, intrinsic, and hence that which would happen in the practical, interested subjective attitude, namely, to run, weep, or any other gross expression of emotion, is not called forth since it has no reason for being. Catharsis, therefore, like aesthetic repose, is the physiological counterpart of the mental attitude in the experience of beauty. And the two theories are aspects one of the other, since the catharsis consists of the repose in tension, and the repose in tension is the catharsis.