Beyond Words, Things, Thoughts, Feelings: Essays on Aesthetic Experience

What is the nature of aesthetic experience? Ha Poong Kim suggests that a genuine aesthetic experience is a perceptual state of consciousness, free of thought. He characterises it as subjectless, objectless, timeless, revelatory, and joyous. It is a state of mind thus markedly different from our everyday experience where thought processes impinge randomly on our consciousness. The seven essays are divided to three parts. Part I tackles the nature of aesthetic experience, as opposed to everyday perception, and attempts to illuminate the experience of the beautiful by discussing Plato’s famous allegory of the charioteer in Phaedrus and an episode in Proust’s In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, the second section of In Search of Lost Time. Part II takes a critical look at Kant’s treatment of the judgement of taste in his Critique of Judgement and Eduard Hanslick’s conception of the imagination. Part III details Kim’s thoughts on several topics of the current debate in aesthetics – among them, on the difference between aesthetic and intellectual pleasure, and the nature of expressiveness of music. In the first of the two essays in Part III the author discusses critically Christopher Butler’s interpretation of artworks as narrative, and in the second, Peter Kivy’s theory of expressive properties. Two appendices are provided: one on the alienation of aesthetic experience in the common love of artworks as values; and the other on performance art as an art form, especially in view of the recent retrospective of Marina Abramovic (MoMA, New York). In this appendix, the author presents a critique of today’s prevailing conception of art.