"When one's environment is arranged with the sole goal of making it beautiful, the results are likely to be dull, just as the search for pleasure and fun turns out to be so pointless and dis appointing. What is at fault in our American environment is not that it is unbeautiful, but that it is so uniform."
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References
1.
See the entry under "aesthetic" in the Oxford English Dictionary. On the uses and misuses of the word see both editions of H. W. Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, 1927 and 1965; and on the need for the distinction between aesthetic and aesthetical, see Bergan and Cornelia Evans, A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage, 1957. Cf. also the entry "aesthetics" in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition.
2.
Some theories of knowledge admit objects that are known to our consciousness immediately but are not sensuous. They call these intuitions proper: e.g. the axioms of Euclid's geometry.
3.
See Gilbert Ryle, "Pleasure" in Dilemmas (Oxford, 1960) and "Feelings" in Aesthetics and Language, ed. by William Elton ( Oxford, 1954).
4.
Cf. Bergson and even Korzybski. Whether thought is possible without the use of symbols and whether the forms are present in the immediately sensuous or are, instead, contributed by the mind are related and difficult questions.
5.
This is the principle theme in the pragmatic philosophers, such as C. S. Peirce and John Dewey.
6.
Cf. C.S. Peirce, Philosophical Writings, ed. by J. Buchler ( New York, 1952), p. 86: he describes the first category of phenomena as "sui generis and indescribable."
7.
Our intellectual activities, too, have a unity, but there the categorization seems less unnatural.
8.
John Wilson, Logic and Sexual Morality (London, 1965), pp. 89ff., 261f., pp. 252-54. See also S. Kierkegaard's "Immediate Stages of the Erotic or the Musical Erotic" in Either/Or.
9.
The terms available are numerous. A response is aesthetic in the language of some philosophers if it is intrinsic, immediate and not attributed to an object (e.g. "aesthetic vision" being this sort of "seeing.") Cf. Vincent Tomas, "Aesthetic Vision," Philosophical Review, vol. LXVIII, no. 1 (1959).
10.
Peirce, op. cit., p. 85.
11.
Cf. Laurence Lerner , The Truest Poetry ( London, 1960), p. 150ff., 195; and also Walter Pater's comments that "all the arts strive for the condition of music."
12.
An empiricist would say everything springs from sentient experience, and a nonempiricist would say much, though not all.
13.
The usual word is "mind" rather than "intellection," but since all the immediately sensuous are content of consciousness and consciousness is (in the usage of this essay) equivalent to mind, intellection must do as the term to cover that special ingredient of consciousness that has been mediated.
14.
For a detailed development of this notion see Collingwood, Principles of Art (London, 1939) wherever he discusses corrupt consciousness. The notion derives ultimately from Hegel.
