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

Arguing that a genuine aesthetic experience is a perceptual state of consciousness, free of thought, author Ha Poong Kim characterizes the nature of an aesthetic experience as subjectless, objectless, timeless, revelatory, and joyous. These seven essays, divided into three parts, begin by exploring the nature of aesthetic experience and attempt 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. They then take a critical look at Kant’s treatment of the judgment of taste in his Critique of Judgment and Eduard Hanslick’s conception of the imagination. Finally, the author shares his thoughts on several topics of the current debate in aesthetics, including the difference between aesthetic and intellectual pleasure and the nature of expressiveness of music. Two appendices—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—are also included.