experience is characterized by“not absence of desire and thought but their
thorough incorporation into perceptual experience.”^71
It is also important to remember that the absorptive pleasure that is
afforded by successful arrangement is not a mere sensory buzz or tingle.
Instead it involves the active use of cognitive powers of imagination and
conceptualization in order to explore the representational and expressive
significance of formal elements and their interrelation. Moreover, this
absorptive pleasure is itself significant within human life, not gratuitous.
We seem to see clearly and to feel the significance of (perhaps very abstractly)
presented actions and objects in relation to human life in time. As Dewey
puts it, both echoing Hegel and anticipating Heidegger,
A work of art elicits and accentuates the quality of being a whole and of
belonging to the larger, all-inclusive whole which is the universe in which we
live. This fact, I think, is the explanation of that feeling of exquisite
intelligibility and clarity we have in the presence of an object that is
experienced with esthetic intensity. It explains also the religious feeling that
accompanies aesthetic perception. We are, as it were, introduced into a world
beyond this world which is nonetheless the deeper reality of the world in
which we live in our ordinary experience.^72Beauty in nature can induce this feeling of being in the presence of a world
beyond this world, a world which is nonetheless the deeper reality of our
world. A successful work of art can seem to embody and exemplify full action
and full meaningfulness as such–a meaning wholly fused to material
elements in arrangement–and so to anticipate and promise a human world
suffused with meaningful action, rather than emptiness and coercion. In
both cases, the object of absorptive pleasure is something considerably more
significant than an occasion for idle sensory delectation. We are pleased in
and through actively exploring the beautiful natural scene or object and the
formal arrangement of the successful work. This active exploration discloses
in continuous attention dimensions of meaning and presence.
But this difference between genuine aesthetic pleasure and mere delect-
ation also makes it clear that success in formal arrangement is not at all
(^71) Dewey,Art as Experience, p. 254.
(^72) Ibid., p. 195. Martin Seel echoes this thought in remarking that the work of art presents
“a choreography of real processes of appearing [that] establishes contact to situations of
extended or unreachable existence”(Aesthetics of Appearing, p. 78).
Beauty and form 73