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<body> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">Anthropological Aesthetics:</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="4">A "Holothetic" Synthesis</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">by Hugh M. Lewis</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">1994</p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Copyright © 2000 by Hugh M. Lewis, all rights reserved.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Permission is granted to make copies of this document only for fair use in education and research.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">This is another E-publication by:</p> <font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Lewis Micro-Publishing</p> </font><font SIZE="1"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">A division of Lewis-works</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER">All queries should be directed to:</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="mailto:e-publishing@lewismicropublishing.com">e-publishing@lewismicropublishing.com</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><img SRC="line7.gif" WIDTH="542" HEIGHT="18"></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Prolegomenon</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">An anywhere close to complete comprehension of the existential human reality of art is no simple matter, much less easy is devising an appropriate anthropological theory about aesthetics. Such a difficult task is not lessened by the fact that aesthetic anthropology remains to a large extent a somewhat underdeveloped, peripheral and neglected area of participant observation in ethnographic literature, while artists themselves frequently tend to be a comparatively silent bunch, often times non-objective and unempirical in orientation. The area of aesthetics itself also tends to be a somewhat indefinable and cloudy one, if not a notion abstractly obscured by our own reason and rationality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is not my intention to simply string together cliché cultural bromides or to proffer shopworn and trite conceptions concerning aesthetics, nor do I want to merely repeat in third hand fashion information or ethnographic data upon the perspective of comparative aesthetics. On the other hand I am not claiming to construct "scientifically" veridical or falsifiable theory or to necessarily utilize empirically substantiated evidence in support of my broad sweeping generalizations and untenable claims. I paint this picture somewhat intuitively with a big, broad brush, and the details and clarity of focus must necessarily suffer.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Whatever else art is or is not, from the start it is important to state that what this work is concerned with is the prevailing <u>existential human reality</u> of <u>art </u>as a <u>process</u> in and of itself, and of the "aesthetic experience" associated with the aesthetic process in the assessment and rational explanation of the aesthetic phenomenon. I am not concerned with what art is supposed to be. It is at least an honest and "unpre-presuming" effort. It is neither intended necessarily to be pro-art of any particular kind nor against any art. It feigns a guarded and noncommittal neutrality in regard to the generalizable aesthetic experience of humankind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">On the other hand, I am not so much concerned with the day to day reality of art itself, art as praxis per se, but more with the rational, hopefully theoretical, <u>understanding </u>of that reality and its possible relevancies to the general human condition. It is an attempt to provide a system of rational organization for the theoretical comprehension of aesthetic anthropology. There is a philosophy of art, or "aesthetic philosophy". There is an "art for art's sake" world of the working artist. There is a science of art technique, and there are many practicing and competing ideologies and religions of art, but this work is principally concerned with the aesthetic anthropological perspective, which falls under my category of ideology, and only secondly is it concerned with aesthetic philosophy or with the aesthetic paradigm. The aesthetic paradigm, though paradoxically capable of standing alone and of providing a complete self contained view of that reality, is nonetheless alone inadequate for a complete comprehension of metaphysical reality. It is important to speak of the philosophy of art or of the technical applications of the science of art or of the ideology of art, but this is not to say that aesthetics is itself a philosophy, or a science or a religion. The conceptuality of art is a distinct and separable human epiphenomenom, not unrelated to other conceptual realities, but interrelated.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">I feel a need to justify to the critical reader the rationale and strategy of this work, and I cannot honestly distinguish from such a feeling a selfish necessity of self rationalization as a way of convincing myself of the merit of its writing. I feel the area of aesthetics in general, as a field of human experience and endeavor, and not only as a sub-field of philosophy or of art history or of the practice of art itself, is one neglected and poorly understood and yet one which is fully capable of standing on its own merits, independent of other disciplines and yet at the same time comprising in part the valuable insights from other areas of aesthetic involvement. Justice has not been done nor enough attention paid to the subject of aesthetics as a separable and distinctive phenomenon of human reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">By art I am referring to every possible form or mode of expression of art, as it is manifest by any and every culture or human being, as well as the art of any other accomplishment or activity, be it in the art of war, of science, of living, of gardening, cooking, sex or of stealing. By aesthetics I am referring both to a comprehensive understanding of art in both formal conceptual theory as well as the personally meaningful, nonobjective influence of art upon the soul of the individual and the spirit of humanity in general. I regret a total ignorance about the field of ethnomusicology, which by the way comprises a major proportion of the ethnographic literature in aesthetic anthropology, and I fear this omission must inevitably preclude the comprehensive completeness of this work. I hope my failure to incorporate music will not detract too much from the applicability or relevancy of the conclusions I draw. I presume, perhaps erroneously, that the thoughts contained in this work are generally applicable to most if not to all forms of aesthetic experience. My own personally intense interest and involvement with the visual arts will perhaps bias my "aesthetic world view" too much in favor of eyes to the shortcoming of the ears. What few examples I give will be drawn from the realm of visual arts.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This work is a rational exploration, a continuation along the same general lines as the development of my ideas in an earlier study entitled "Philosophy, Irrationality and Ideology: An Anthropological Synthesis". This previous work provides a definitive platform of rationalization upon which many of the seemingly straight forward and unjustifiable presumptions of this work are based. In short this work represents a personal attempt on my own behalf to try to arrive at some consummate comprehension about the transcendent phenomenological human reality of the aesthetic experience and of the "anthropology of art" in keeping with lines of reasoning I pursued earlier.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In the first chapter I seek to fit the understanding of aesthetics into a philosophical framework which I devised previously in the work aforementioned, in order to provide a systematic way of conceptualizing about aesthetics. In the second part I will attempt to elucidate and elaborate upon the many meanings of such a general word as aesthetics, in an effort to divine some sort of structural unity for such meaningful understanding. In the third chapter, after starting from presumption that aesthetics is a near human universal, I seek to access the limitations of frequently occurring labels and conventional stereotypes concerning aesthetics, to show their inadequacies and then to proffer an alternative way of generalizing about aesthetics in lieu of such dispossessed labels. In the final section I will try to bring together the results of the previous three chapters in a formulation of a general anthropological theory concerning the relevancy of aesthetics t humanity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">I wish to reach some general, transcendent, possibly original and hopefully new perspective upon the area of aesthetic anthropology. Even though my aim is a "high" one, I will nevertheless be satisfied with intermediate results. I am not claiming empirical validity or rational truth concerning the human world of aesthetics; rather I am only offering opinionated possibilities and suggesting alternative generalizations in the hope of stimulating new directions of thought, argument, questions and maybe, wishfully, to expand a little bit the aesthetic horizons of the writer if not also the reader. Finally I hope to answer at least partially the question of "Why study aesthetics?"</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">An Aesthetic Philosophical Context</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. In short the aesthetic experience is a relative one. It might seem paradoxical to many to state that art is absolutely so--to the chagrin of those who would like to keep the problem of aesthetics simple and the same for everyone, probably being preferably what they themselves like or dislike. Unlike the quantitative language and Cartesian logic of mathematics, there are no absolute standards or rigid formulas by which to realistically systematize the understanding of the qualitative aspects of aesthetics, beyond the presumed a-priori epistemological experience of the self in time and the metaphysical experience of truth in space. Our after the fact, a-posterior superimposition of such systems or standards, either arbitrarily or culturally derived, leads to the realization of many reinforcing and seemingly validating self fulfilling prophecies on the parts of the adherents to the faith, but such rational designs inevitably result in the gross over simplification of our comprehension of the conceptual reality (conceptuality) of aesthetics. Art is a relative process and as such the aesthetic experience derived from the art process can only be conceptually understood within the relative context within which the art process occurs. Art removed and distanced to any great extent from its original relative context has diminished and perhaps negligible aesthetic content.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The "aesthetic phenomenon" is a phenomenological experience of existential human reality. The problem with understanding this aesthetic reality is that once we draw the line of rational analysis we divide asunder the essentially irreducible synergistic meaning that is achieved through the unity or integrity of the aesthetic experience. The "aesthetic phenomenon" is a human experience which cannot be isolated or separated apart from the human context without destroying its meaningfulness. This line drawing of our conceptual rationality--a fully conscious process--the analytic dissection of the whole into its component parts, is the same process of mental dichotomization which so plagues all of our systems of conceptualization and which precludes theoretical unity of comprehension. Unlike Levi-Strauss's conception of binary opposition, this analytic dichotomization is a fully rational consciousness and is not necessarily an unconsciously based by product of the so called deep structure of the brain. The more natural function of the "natural" mind seems to be more one of functional integration or rather synthetic reintegration rather than one of dialectical dichotomization. Interfunctional cooperation and coordination seems to be the more important aspect of the left brain/right brain rather than only mostly differentiation and dichotomization of function. Perhaps the dialectic of the deep structure of the mind which allows for the dichotomization between thesis and antithesis also allows for the resurrection of reality and meaning as reintegrated synthesis. To be valuable any analysis must therefore followed by a new synthesis between the parts dichotomized. What is important is to recognize that this analytic line drawing of our rationality can be drawn or redrawn in pretty much any manner one chooses. There is a certain degree of human freedom, from nature and from culture, in the development and evolution of our systems of rationalization, unrestricted by any a-priori intrinsic nature or aesthetics in itself.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Reality is a comprehensive conception of the universal which also has an inextricably <u>human meaning.</u> We cannot separate reality from our epistemological knowing of that reality in our definition. This human quality about reality poses a special problem in the definition of reality, one which I call the <u>universal human dilemma</u>.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The universal human dilemma is that in order to define reality, one must draw a line by which reality can be divided into two parts, and these two parts are then contrasted and compared and it is in the primary <u>conscious analytic</u> division and subsequent <u>synthetic</u> relationship between the two parts by which reality gains uniquely human meaning and definition. The dilemma is that once we dissect reality by drawing the line we destroy the synergistic quality and reality by drawing the line we destroy the synergistic quality and ontological character which gives human existence meaning. Our reality thus becomes falsely separated from our existence and we alienate ourselves from our conceptual reality in a pseudo objectivity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Needless to say the temptation and prevailing tendency to systematically substitute the name for the reality and to categorically systematize our rational reality into inflexible, unquestionable, seemingly absolute compartments and components seems almost overwhelming and results inevitably in much sterile and redundantly closed systems of tautologically impeccable rationalization which are not necessarily consistent with empirical reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Aesthetics is one of the four realms of metaphysical conceptuality which also includes philosophy, science and humanism, and as such aesthetics ought to be amenable theoretically to rational scrutinization and conceptual comprehension. Each of these four paradigms are irreducible in the sense that they are not mere composite aggregates of lesser componentical conceptual systems but form in themselves a synergistic theoretical unity representing a comprehensive world view of human conceptual reality. All four paradigms share the same exact fundamental truth criteria of "<u>the willpower to believe in the relative truth of objective intersubjective) criteria for openness and communication</u>". This essential truth criteria, though the same for each paradigm, is expressed differently within each paradigm, and though all paradigms are ideally conceptually independent and comprehensive in conceptuality, defining each in itself a wholly distinct and separable perspective on the conceptual realm of reality, in actuality all four paradigms are simultaneously interrelated and interdependent in human conceptual reality, forming altogether a complete whole conceptuality I prefer to call the universal conceptual egg of metaphysical/epistemological human reality. In terms of art this fundamental truth criterion for objectivity of openness and communication is interpreted as <u>affective self expression and creative conceptual realization</u>. There is a philosophy, a science and a humanism of art, just as there is also at the same time an art to philosophy, science and humanism, there is also an "art for art's sake" which is the artistic paradigm itself.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Like language, art is a <u>culture </u>as well as an individual phenomenon. Even though highly unlikely it is not impossible to imagine an individual born without a human culture, preferentially performing some aesthetic process and participating in a completely privatized aesthetic experience, just as it is possible to imagine the same highly exceptionable individual being born without an inherent language, still capable of thinking meaningful thoughts and emitting a variety of sounds which can become arbitrarily meaningful through a conscious sound association. But alone this completely, absolutely subjective state of affairs can never be objectively demonstrated, and one would have to admit the natural limitations of the individual human being are so severe as to prevent the development of mush aesthetic potential anywhere close to what we know art to be like even among the most so called "primitive" cultures extant in the ethnographic literature. Anyways, without a mate, the lone individual would soon die and with him too would perish forever his aesthetic experience, with no one else remaining to appreciate his silent legacy. And then where did our lone survivor come from, if not from our own imagination!</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In other words art is undeniably and inarguably a <u>process</u> of <u>interhuman communication, </u>not without it’s a-priori, independent, thetical, exclusive individual subjective element, but also dependent upon the a-posteriori, dependent, antithetical, inclusive social context. Art depends upon culture for its transmission and flourishing to any objectively recognizable extent. Art is undeniably, inarguably a culture dependent behavioral phenomenon, just as the individual human being, due to his heterosexual needs for procreation and survival, is inarguably and necessarily a social problem.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The heart of the philosophical conceptual problem of aesthetics is precisely the dichotomization of the conceptual metaphysical reality of aesthetics into two contrasted and opposing systems of rationalization--the so called "art for art's sake" camp of the romanticist and abstract expressionist or preferably the "art as an end in itself" school of reason, and the "art to service the ends of society" or "art as a means to some other end rather than as an end in itself" camp including the traditional art historian, the critic and the state. At the heart of the matter can be reduced a fundamental ends versus means of conflict of interests. The former camp focuses exclusively upon the independent individual agent of the artistic process, while the latter camp forsakes the individual for the sake of socio cultural welfare. It must be reiterated many times that this is in no way a naturally occurring dichotomization of reality but is really a difference arbitrarily and artificially, if somewhat unwittingly contrived upon which to argue endlessly and to reason in little never ending circles. Such a rational conflict is "pseudo scientific" in the obsessive compulsive addiction to the principle of causality for which we have Immanuel Kant to thank. We search for cause and effect relationships due more to a paranoid need for absolute certainty concerning reality rather than for the sake of rational enlightenment, but anyhow the end result of epistemology is again the tautologically impeccable and closed circular systems of rationalization which are self limiting and closed to alternative possibilities, usually a defense system of rationalization for a maladaptive behavior pattern.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">While in the hard sciences we may look to the absolute ideal of cause and effect as in the Kantian notion of innate causality, in the empiricism of the human sciences the best we can hope for is the correlation approach in determining relative degrees of probability along a continuous dimension of affect rather than the strict experimental approach dominant in the physical sciences. How we divide this dimension and determine causality is wholly an arbitrary function. It is a problem of deciding which came first--the hen or the egg--when in reality we must look at the whole relationship as a dynamic process of continuity through time and space--while our attention to the understanding of the relationship is undivided by the necessity of predetermined causality. This is a recurrent theme throughout the understanding of human behavior.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Now I wish to qualify my initial metaphysical premises with an epistemological presupposition the veracity of which I will leave open to proof. It is enough to proclaim my belief in it--that it is essential to this outline. It has to do with the nature of the human mind, and is an <u>innate universal </u>characteristic. It is the need and capacity of the mind to draw such analytical lines by which to conceive the meaning of reality. This is related to theoretical construct of Claude Levi-Strauss--the structural construct of binary opposition and also to the Hegelian conception of the dialectical process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. I will define it simply as the tendency of the mind to analyze reality in terms of dualities and the predisposition to dichotomize reality. It is especially apparent in philosophy, but I find it to be nearly universally recurrent throughout our theoretical conceptual systems. To give a few examples of common dichotomies: mind/body, analytic/synthetic, physical/metaphysical, subjective/objective, material/spiritual, rational/empirical, cognitive/behavioral.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Unlike Levi-Strauss, I do not believe this to be an "unconscious" deep structure of the mind, but rather think it is quite <u>conscious</u> a process, being primarily an incomplete <u>a-posteriori</u> tendency which is an habitual, acquired and learned predisposition. It is incomplete in the sense that there is a secondary process of <u>integration</u> which complements and completes the total conscious process of the mind. The root of this incomplete process is in the epistemological analytic/synthetic dichotomy which in reality must be reviewed as the analytic/synthetic integrity. One consequence of this tendency towards dichotomization is the fundamental philosophical mind/body dichotomy which prevents the necessary unification of philosophy and other dependent fields of understanding. I believe rather there is really a mind/brain integrity (supported by the bulk of empirical evidence split brain research) and one plausible "biological" reductionist explanation for the analytic/synthetic process which I will call the structural dialectic in the lateralization of brain function between left and right hemispheres.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The structural dialectic of the mind is the reason for the hierarchical nature of the organization of knowledge from empirically rooted precepts to more abstract and transcendent levels of conceptuality. This is the source of the causal coherence of the mind expressed in alternative directions of simplification and complication--either simplifying fact and complicating theory or complicating fact and simplifying theory. This hierarchical organization of the mind is the resultant structure of the underlying concept of the epistemological self and is the substructure of reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">I believe this rather simple <u>structural dialectic</u> of the <u>consciousness mind</u> may adequately supplant some of the innate Kantian antinomies of space and time and cause and effect, as realistic expressions of the a-priori fictions of truth and self respectively, given in the sense as relative absolutes, may be effectively reinterpreted within this structural dialectic as being in reality a dynamic continuum of interrelationship between two ideal fictions delineated and defined by our arbitrary line drawing, expressed more realistically within the framework of a <u>dynamic continuum</u> of <u>contextual relativity </u>or <u>relative contextuality</u>. Synthetic continuity of reality is emphasized rather than analytic differentiation and discontinuity. This may reasonably supplant Freud's essentially scientifically unfalsifiable and untestable notion of the unconscious" which is directly untenable in any empirical fashion. The key difference is that within the new framework of contextuality many things subsumed under the vague notion of "unconscious"--in lieu of an adequate yet impossible reductionist biological explanation of brain function determining the form of the mind can instead be directly assailable to empirical and rational investigation and redefined rather than remain hidden beneath a shroud of darkness.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The dynamic continuum of contextual relativity is symbolically interpreted in the structural dialectical sense as being the <u>structural continuum </u>of <u>human reality</u>, with the synthetic meaning of reality as being realized by <u>symbolic interpretation </u>or <u>interpretative symbolism</u>.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Every initial conscious dichotomization must be followed by a subsequent synthetic integration in order to achieve <u>symbolic realism</u>.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Thus it can be seen that the philosophical dichotomy of aesthetics between privatized and social functional art is more of a manufactured chimera than a statement of the human reality of aesthetics, and instead it is possibly to conceive of aesthetics as a dynamic interactional process between the concepts of self and other or the individual and culture. This process composes a continuum of human behavior the extremes of which are the ideal concepts of the psychological self and the sociological other, this implies an emphasis upon the continuity of the aesthetic process rather than the isolation, compartmentalization and differentiation between such concepts as the individual and society. It entails that we are not to be so much concerned with the assessment of the static end products or by products, but that we are more concerned with art as an on going phenomenological process, sequential, and cumulatively expressed, occurring in interrelationship as a series. Just like language, art is a process which, once inaugurated in some now extinct rudimentary dialogue, has sustained itself and evolved into magnitude and dimension by which we know art today. This overall process is one of continuity and not of discontinuity, even though undoubtedly many "species" of art styles have perhaps reached evolutionary cul-de-sacs and have long since become extinct, to be replaced by some more viable species.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Aesthetics is a nearly universal phenomenon, at least culturally so if not individually so, and even though some cultures and many people are aesthetically impoverished, while others seem to have more than their fair share of aesthetic endowment and embellishment, the potential for aesthetic development resides within each and every culture and within all naturally normal human beings. This is another way of saying that all human beings are naturally (but not necessarily genetically) endowed with aesthetic capacities which awaits environmental circumstances and cultural conditions for development and expression. All naturally normal human beings and so therefore also all cultures are capable of expressing, experiencing and evolving the aesthetic phenomenon.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Art is a form of human behavior, not so unlike any other form of behavior, and as such art falls along the exact same <u>universal behavioral continuum</u> which encompasses every possible mode or form of expression of any kind of human behavior, in thought, speech and feeling and action and activity. Art as a human behavior pattern, occupies limited and distinctive portions of this continuum, but in the variety of combinations and individual variations of expression the artistic process has a virtually unlimited number of possibilities from which to draw. Potentially every individual human being is capable of subscribing to virtually any such portion of this continuum. Also cultures, though proscribing a broader range of possible forms still generally restricts its range to yet a narrow limited portion of the entire behavioral continuum. No single individual or culture except the world culture of all humanity, none excluded, is capable of utilizing the complete continuum of possible behavior patterns. The unique portions of the continuum individuals and cultures utilize determine the individual styles and cultural configurations aesthetic expression takes. Sometimes the choices of the individuals conflict with the proscriptions of their parent culture, in deviation from its norms. More often the individual's choices are congruent with the cultural norms. All individuals, and all cultures, exhibit variations and differences to an infinite degree in their aesthetic compositions, stylizations or configurations. While variations and deviations are infinite, with no styles or compositions exactly alike, the same underlying "aesthetic" experience, occurs to all individuals of all cultures engaged in the art process. The aesthetic processes stripped of technical parameters, cultural forms and individual expressive variations, is an amorphous process which is virtually the same for all. The "aesthetic phenomenon" is at least potentially a universal human phenomenon.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">****</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In the preceding section mention was made of a relative context for understanding of the aesthetic experience, with the implied reference that this context was the dynamic universal human behavioral continuum. Before understanding or defining the meaning of the aesthetic phenomenon, it seems necessary first to provide an appropriate conceptual context by which to understand what art is not, by proffering so to speak a "negative definition" of the indirect outlines of the meaning of art, distinguishing art from non-art. While the previous section might be viewed as being about aesthetic philosophy, this second section is rather about the philosophy of the aesthetic paradigm itself, as distinct from the philosophical paradigm.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">What exactly is this aesthetic context? It is probably impossible to answer such a question with any degree of empirical certainty, but a close approximation can be proffered as an alternative possibility. The aesthetic context consists of a "<u>rationality matrix</u>" which provides the structural context for the understanding and conceptualization of the aesthetic phenomenon. This rationality matrix is the reference against which it is possible to theorize about the meaning of aesthetics. The philosophical perspective of the first section presumed the existence of a continuum of a -priori "ideals" of epistemological/metaphysical and self/truth. The rationality matrix can be modeled as a tetrahedron the four ventrices which consists of the elaboration of the a-priori conceptions of epistemological self, metaphysical truth, metaphysical self, and epistemological truth. These four represent what I believe to be the four fundamental modalities of reality, by which we gain human identity (rationality) of existence. Our a-posteriori knowing of the a-priori absolute of metaphysical truth is our relative experience of <u>space</u>. Our a-posteriori knowing of the a-priori absolute of epistemological self is our relative experience of <u>time</u>. Our a-posteriori knowing of the a-priori absolute of epistemological truth is our relative experience of <u>change</u>. Our a-posteriori knowing of the a-priori absolute</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">of metaphysical self is our relative experience of <u>motion.</u> Epistemological self, metaphysical truth, metaphysical self, and epistemological truth, in that order, constitute the four modalities or stages of human rationality. The six possible interrelationships between these four modalities compose the "<u>reality dynamics"</u>.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The implication of this is that our understanding of the meaning of reality, though willfully independent and analytically arbitrary, nevertheless is not fundamentally unconditional, but is rather conditionally defined by the imposition of certain "subjective" human qualities--both metaphysical and epistemological--which in a sense provide a peculiar <u>structure</u> to the interrelationships and enable intersubjective <u>communication by symbolization. </u>This an admission of some analytically indefinable though qualitatively describable <u>prerequisite determination</u> of reality--of at least the possibility of an "absolute character' structure by which <u>objectivity</u> is realized. So will and predetermination, though analytically dichotomized, are synthetically integrated in the understanding of reality. This is the only dichotomization which is a-priori. I will describe this predetermining qualities as <u>metaphysical truth </u>and as <u>epistemological self</u>, and if one is considered thetic, then the other is to be considered antithetic, but their human synthesis is reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The four modalities of epistemological self, metaphysical truth, metaphysical self and epistemological truth provide a rational matrix that can be modeled as a tetrahedron and that serves as a relative context for the conceptual comprehension of aesthetics. I am not promoting R. Buckminster Fuller's notion that the tetrahedron is the basic structural entity of nature. I am only suggesting that from a conceptual theoretical standpoint perhaps such a configuration is simply the most parsimonious possible given the complexity of understanding such complex natural phenomenon as human behavior. Perhaps such a structure is merely demonstrative of the fundamental complexity of rational functioning. Perhaps they are just patterns which are very deeply ingrained in our tradition of cultural rationality. Perhaps they represent the most parsimonious guidelines possible by which our rational metaphysical reality and our empirical physical reality are both interrelated or integrated and made humanly meaningful.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The human being in a sense can be said to be the mediator by which these two realities are brought together and brought into "life" as the meaningful aspects of human existence. It is possibly indicative of perhaps some a-priori structure of rationality by which we are able to understand rationality. I am not proffering the foundations by which to construct a new mathematical structure of the logic of rationality. This a-priori "rationality matrix" is pre-logical.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This rationality matrix is a conceptual context, an "ideal" framework for theory and not a natural or empirically real context. But it does combine the most fundamental aspects of the physical universe, the space time continuum, with the most fundamental aspects of rationality, the epistemological self-metaphysical truth continuum. It might be compared to Levi-Strauss notion of structural analysis of myth, the systematic organization of tables by synchronic columns and diachronic rows, the langue and parole, by which to view the relationships between variations upon the same mythical theme. The synchronic organization can be reinterpreted as the spatial dimension and the diachronic can be thought of as the temporal. This suspiciously resembles the truth table of CR Logic developed by Wittgenstein, in which sentences are arranged diachronically across and the possible true and false variations are arrange synchronically down to reveal the structure of the argument. The point is that given such a "rationality matrix" against which to reference variations of a similar theme or style of an aesthetic phenomenon, it might be possible to model reality conceptually and to symbolically define the contextual structure of the aesthetic experience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There has been a recurrent theme of four foldness of stages and types and a corresponding set of six possible interrelationships between these four fundamental constituents. Perhaps, considered as a model of a tetrahedron, this structure might be considered to be the rational matrix of reality. Division into four parts is a recurrent theme in many creation myths. Carl Jung has spoken of "the nucleus of the psyche normally expresses itself in some kind of fourfold structure". The number four is also connected to his concepts of the female principle and male principle (the anima and animus, respectively) because there are four stages of development. For Jung four as a recurrent archetype symbolizing the unity or totality of the human world. I will summarize the possible correlations of four as I have used them so far in this work.</p> <blockquote> <blockquote> <blockquote> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Oral/stage type: Stage 1 power, achievement, and affiliation motivation. Other source, self object, power deriving from support, causal meta type "non-reciprocal causal models", probabilistic or deterministic causal relations with no causal loops and transitive, epistemological mindscape type H--parts subordinated to whole universal principles apply to all, society consists of a hierarchical organization of categories and structures. Hierarchical relations between homogenistic components representing a classificational process. Philosophical cornerstone and stage 1 of civilization, philosophical metaphysical modality, anima symbol of Eve representing instinctual biological relations, intuitive thought processes, animus symbol of Tarzan representing personification of physical power--Hercules the muscle man. Personality modality of the child--son or daughter. Cultural modality of the pre-educational infant. Ego "being modality" of "unconscious awareness". A-posteriori knowing of the a-priori of epistemological self is our relative experience of time.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Anal stage/type: Stage 2 power, achievement and affiliation motivation. Self source, self object, autonomy, will, self control. Causal meta type "independent event models"--states of random distribution of independent events are more probable and non-random non-independent relations and structures are less probable and tend toward randomness. Epistemological mindscape type 1--empirical and relative--society is composed of different and independent individuals. Individualistic relations between heterogenistic components representing a random process. Artistic cornerstone and stage 2 of civilization, artistic metaphysical modality, anima symbol of Faust's Helen--a romantic and aesthetic level characterized by sexuality, sensitivity, animus symbol of the Ernest Hemingway representing the man of initiative and with a capacity for planned action. Personality modality of the sibling--brother or sister. Cultural modality of the educational childhood. Ego "being modality" of "preconscious intuitive". A-posteriori knowing of the a-priori absolute of metaphysical truth is our relative experience of space.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Phallic stage/type: Stage 3 power, achievement and affiliation motivation. Self source, other object, assertive, competitive. Causal meta type "homeostatic causal loop models"--probabilistic or deterministic causal relations forming loops maintaining patterns or structures of heterogeneity. Epistemological mindscape type S--nonhierarchical interactions between heterogeneous individuals in cycles of mutual advantage; interactive relations between heterogenistic components representing homeostatic processes. Scientific cornerstone and stage 3 of civilization, scientific metaphysical modality. Anima symbol of the Virgin Mary--"love raised to the heights of spiritual devotion" feeling. Animus symbol of Lloyd George, the great political orator, "the animus becomes the word" a professor or a clergyman. Personality modality of the spouse-- husband or wife. Cultural modality of the functional adulthood. Ego "being modality" of "conscious analytic". Our a-posteriori knowing of the a-priori absolute of metaphysical self is our relative experience of motion.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Genital stage/type: stage 4 power, achievement, affiliation motivation. Other source, other object, genital mutuality, it moves me to serve others, generativity, compassion, togetherness. Causal meta type "morphogenetic causal loop models"--probabilistic or deterministic causal loops increasing heterogeneity, generating patterns of mutually beneficial relations among heterogeneous systems increasing the sophistication of the system. Epistemological mindscape type G--nonhierarchical interactions between heterogeneous individuals generating new patterns for mutual benefit. Interactive relations between heterogenistic components in morphogenetic processes. Humanistic cornerstone and stage 4 civilization, humanistic metaphysical modality. Anima symbol of Sapientia--ultimate transcendental wisdom, thinking. Animus symbol of Mahatma Gandhi--'the incarnation of meaning"--a mediator of religious experience whereby life acquires new meaning. Personality modality if the parent--father or mother. Cultural modality if post functional retirement--seniority. Ego "being modality" of "transcendental synthetic". Our a-posteriori knowing of the a-priori absolute of epistemological truth is our relative experience of <u>change</u>.</p> </blockquote> </blockquote> </blockquote> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It must be kept in mind that such a classification scheme is only a suggestion of alternative possibilities. It suffers the same drawbacks that any other labeling system suffers. The suggestion is apparent that there occurs within the artistic paradigm a focus or proclivity of correlated characteristics of the second type or category. Is this perhaps indicative of the possibility of a certain modal personality type or psychological predisposition or cultural orientation gravitating to the aesthetic paradigm and conducive to the realization of the aesthetic experience? The implications of the characteristics from any of the categories can be interpreted as either positive or negative, depending upon the reader's value orientation--it must be emphasized that the intention is to offer neutral characteristics. These modal categories do not really exist in any real form, they are mere conceptual possibilities by which we can reference our rational understanding. All personalities and all cultures fall within the space and boundaries of the tetrahedron modeled by these four categories. All people and cultures have a blend of qualities from all four categories, with some emphasizing or approximating or tending more strongly in favor of one modality than another. The potential for expression of all four modalities resides within each individual and within each culture. It is merely an imperfect model and not reality itself, but it might be a very effective model for conceptual organization,. There can be seen to be certain tendencies favored or characteristics strongly correlated with the aesthetic paradigm or world view. The problem remains to be empirically validate or falsify this hypothesis cross culturally. The question remains unanswered as to whether there really is a modal personality type that can be associated with the aesthetic experience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <blockquote> <blockquote> <p ALIGN="CENTER">****</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </blockquote> </blockquote> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">What is relevant about the philosophy of the science of art to the anthropological understanding of the aesthetic phenomenon. Various mediums and techniques can be described and the differential influence of such differing methods upon the manifest content of various works of art can effectively demonstrate the importance of the applied aspects of the artistic process. The differences and similarities in aesthetic appearance and affect between an oil painting and a water color of the same still life can be compared. The same musical score will sound different when played upon a piano as when done on a guitar. But this comparison and contrast would not go far in helping to understand the essential aesthetic phenomenon itself, divested of its technical parameters. It is very true that the type of technique employed, the kinds and quality of material and tools utilized, the methodology of the artistic processes itself, has a telling and marked, long lasting affect upon the final aesthetic "feeling" of the work of art. Such considerations are intrinsic, crucial and unavoidable in outcome of the aesthetic process. The finished quality of any art work is crucially dependent upon such physical technical parameters. The skill of the artist and the quality of the inputs makes all the difference in the world between a masterpiece and a failure. But at the same time there have been many well executed works of art which have failed miserably to leave any sort of lasting aesthetic impression on anyone. Obviously then, skill and technique are not the only important factors in understanding the aesthetic process.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">To ask whether or not the aesthetic experience is derived from nature or is artificial--"manmade"--seems to be another "hen or egg" dilemma from which there is no escape once one has taken sides. It is both natural and artificial simultaneously. It becomes important to ask how much does the aesthetic experience derive from nature and how distant is the relationship, how alienated the process, how spontaneous or how well planned.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Might there not be an aesthetic spectrum of sensory experience the extremes of which are sight and vision and sound and hearing. This spectrum would encompass the full range of the arts of the eyes and ears, from the one extreme of pure visual arts of all kinds, to the intermediate regions occupied by writing, poetry just this side of painting, song just this side of the violin. But then where shall dance be placed upon this spectrum, for it is not only a visual art but a body art of physical coordination and motor strength as well. And then what are we to say about the experiences of the other sensory modalities as well. Cannot aesthetic pleasure be derived from gourmet eating, the smell of a rose or the seductive scent of a little perfume or the sensuous feeling of the skin in ecstasy and intimacy with another body. Does not a good chef, or a good masseuse or high price prostitute qualify for the label of artist if they can evoke pleasurable sensations. But such people are not conventionally known as artists, any more than a gardener or a carpenter who is skilled and performs pleasurable work.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Tactile stimulation, smells or tastes are more basic forms of sensation. They are more limited in the variety of affects and they cannot conjure up in the mind the stereo effect--the recreation of the full dimensionality of the physical universe which sight and sound alone can do. We have two ears and two eyes and can hear and see stereophonically and stereoscopically. We can sense space and motion and experience time and change only through these modalities. Even more importantly the more base sensory modalities are non-rational. Beyond the most fundamental associations they stimulate they are incapable of mental organization and hierarchical abstraction of meaning. Both sights and sounds can conjure in the mind fantastic thoughts and we can conceptualize abstractly and rationally only with the assistance of these modalities--as when we write or read words or we recite speeches and tell stories. The word is the beginning of rationality and I suspect, it is the beginning of the rationalization about the aesthetic experience itself. It is a difference between aesthetic appreciation and base sensuality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Now I wish to draw the connection between the verbal world of communication, eminently language, as a tool of human application and conceptually extended manipulation and the visual symbolization system conjuring to life in our imaginations normally only verbally accessible concepts and ideas. It is if there were an artistic spectrum ranging between right and left hemispheres of the brain, between what is heard and what is seen, between music and visual forms of art--integrated by the verbalization of language, between which falls many blended variations, poetry just this side of art, song just this side of musical instrumentation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Art and music are the <u>spontaneous </u>languages of imagination, springing to life from the soul of potentiality. Words and symbolization systems are the responsive languages of the other--the reactive imposition of willpower upon the soulful source of life energies--channelizing, canalizing, conforming. Creation of communication is the final end product of this interrelationship. Communication is the scientistic aspect of human behavior. Self expression is the artistic side of human nature. Expression is communication of the self. Communication is the expression of the other. Art and music is closer to the self, languages are closer to the other. Expression and communication implies relationship and relativity. Might it not be possible that the ultimate goal of visual expression is to create or to bring to life from the spatial dimension of reality the temporal dimension, and vice versa, that the ultimate goal of auditory expression is to bring to life from the pure temporal dimension of reality the spatial dimension. No matter how far fetched the idea, might it not be possible that the objective of art is to create time from timelessness--the impression of eternity; and that the objective of music is to create space from spatial nothingness--the illusion of infinity. Is it not the goal of language to integrate the two possibilities to recreate reality?</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is precisely for this that both are so valuable to both the individual and humanity--it names a part of reality which science cannot touch. And yet both art and music must remain connected, relative to the central body of language, based upon verbalizable forms and concepts, to be of value to the human community.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Furthermore, our holistic experiences of reality, including the aesthetic experience, is usually a simultaneous combination of most if not all of the sensory modalities. Rarely are we able to turn off all or any of the modalities completely to the sole satisfaction of a preferred mode of experience--even when we are at a symphony being drowned in loud commanding music, when we close our eyes, we can still smell the theater atmosphere, still taste the leftover in our mouth or the flavor of our favorite toothpaste, or feel the velvet of the chair against our skin. What distinguishes ordinary sensory input from aesthetic information ultimately depends upon the receivers assessment and ability to differentiate qualitatively, based upon that individuals own value orientation. What is pain for some can be pleasure for others.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">All of this brings me to consider the main point of this section and this is the elaboration upon the concept of the "<u>Holothetic principle</u>". I have coined this word as an amalgam of meanings from holography, idiographic and nomothetic. It is a form of understanding or information about the whole contained in the individual and separate component parts. It refers to the ability of a small segment of a hologram to replicate the entire image of the whole. It represents the totipotency of any integrated sub-organism, such as the genome of a muscle cell, to replicate in toto the nature of the whole super organism, such as the whole human body. Though the entire image of a hologram can be replicated in such a manner it is always of reduced resolution and parallax. Such a principle justifies such an analogy as "homo sapiens evolved from a single celled organism just as the human being developed from a single fertilized egg cell". The holothetic principle is one of Mother Nature's most beautiful designs--something about which our petty rationality can ill afford not to learn about. If Paul Greg's theory of bioholography is to be believed, then it is probably the way the brain stores sight and sound information and accounts for the enormous integrative and storage capacity and complexity in such small spaces. Applied to anthropology it might serve as an important connecting link in bridging the theoretical gap between culture and personality, helping to explain at lest by scientific analogy why accurate stereotypes can be so fitting and yet fit no one perfectly, why individuals of a common culture can be so similar and yet so individually unique at the same time. Such a principle has an important implications not only for the "aesthetic experience", if this is really the way we hear and see, but more important for our rational understanding and conceptual theoretization about the aesthetic phenomenon.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">I wish to interpret the subjective/objective dichotomization of reality in terms of structural dialectics regarding the synthetic integration of reality as a dynamic continuum. The synthetic integrity of the subjective domain is <u>idiothetic</u> in character and it is symbolically interpreted in <u>idiographic fashion</u>--which I prefer to call the <u>verbality </u>of reality, as no other word order in any language better conveys the dynamic character of the continuum than the action expression of the verb--verbality is the spontaneous language of motility--the language of the epistemological self found in purified forms in art and music.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">On the other hand, the objective domain of reality achieves synthetic integrity by symbolic interpretation as a <u>nomothetic</u> construct and its language is essentially <u>nomographic</u>--which I prefer to call the <u>nominality </u>of reality, as no other word order in any language better conveys the contextual relativity of objectivity then the noun or name, which exists as a symbol of a static ideational construct of the present in time and space. Nominality is the responsive language of unity--the language of relationship--of communication with the other.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Together the synthetic integration of the subjective and objective domains might be interpreted symbolically as being <u>holothetic </u>in structure, and it is expressed essentially in <u>holographic</u> symbolism--which is symbolic realism or realistic symbolism. It is the mentalistic functioning of the mind, intellection the meaning of reality. What is reality? Reality is holothetic in its human meaning such that any conceptual subsystem which touts any degree of completeness in truth about reality is "totipotent"--holographic in character--a rough, self contained 'complete" picture of the "whole" reality. The integrity of reality is in a sense contained in a grain of sand.</p> <u> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Holothetic interpretation</u> is the synthetical transcendent concept. I have coined this word to fit this purpose of integration of two otherwise complementary yet analytically separate approaches to human understanding. It is my own formulation derived from the concept of holographic representation--four dimensional reproduction of reality in visual and sonal mediums. Peculiar properties of holograms are the interference patterns, the ability for any small portion of the plate to reproduce almost fully, with reduced sharpness and perspective, the whole picture and the potential tremendous storage capacity of information--a one centimeter cube to have superimposed multiple images throughout its thickness and at divergent angles, virtually a whole set of encyclopedias of information. I propose this to be yet another linking concept in the mind/body dichotomy. It is the bioholographic model of brain function as proffered originally by Paul Greguess. It focuses on neuronal interconnections and chemical structure as replicating the form and function of holography, interference patterns existing throughout portions of the brain, explaining mental consciousness, the ability of such small mass of brain tissue to reproduce perceptually with such four dimensional realism and integration so much information and tremendous storage capacity, and also might help to explain the ability of the brain to retain mental integrity and generalize to some extent brain function inspite of brain damage. I propose to overextend this biological analogy one socio biological step further with the concept of holothetic interpretation of ego reality. In socio biological terms it may be a link between the unique human individuality/universal human nature dichotomy or alternately may serve as a model for integrating the culture and personality dichotomy between replication of uniformity and organization of diversity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Vaguely I will describe holothetic interpretation of ego reality as being the ability of the human ego to function sociologically like a fragment of a hologram, to some diminished degree replicating with some degree of consistency the whole culture, being universally adaptable to any behavioral mode as it is, and with the ability of a person to give an ethnographer a relatively complete or whole rendition of his culture, while at the same time retaining completely individuality in stylization and integrity in cutting up the spectrum of still possible behavior patterns. While each person of a culture is distinct and different, each person retains simultaneously to some extent the gross characteristics peculiar and consistent to that culture.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It might be said that the four metaphysical paradigms and the underlying causal meta types constitute a whole, an integrated understanding of the cosmic egg of the universal human dilemma, but in a sense it might be said that there is yet a higher, quintessential and all embracing paradigm--and this might be thought of as the whole outline in and of itself. I will call the underlying causal meta type of this fifth quintessential paradigm the <u>holothetic organismic system</u>. It is the harmonization of the four meta types and integration of the four paradigms into a single synergistic system. It is the acknowledgment that there are not final absolute answers in reality, that all meta types and paradigms coexist within the same single network and are equally useful though incomplete in explaining reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The <u>holothetic multidimensionality </u>refers to the nature<u> </u>of reality in which all things are reflected in all other things to some extent. This applies as well to the four metaphysical paradigms, as the conceptuality of each is expressible in dimensions of the other stages and are all interrelated to form the whole. It also explains the capacity to explain the reality comprehensively in mentalistic, emotive or active terms, or in sociological or anthropological forms. It accounts for the seeming comprehensive realism contained in any theory and also for the limitations of any theory.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The holothetic principle applied to aesthetics might be summed up by the expression--"to see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower". It might be interpreted as the process of recreating or replicating to the fullest degree possible the subject reality represented, mediums and methodology, in the attempt to recreate "life" or to embody the "holothetic principle", the wholeness of existence or reality, within the technical parameters. It is the process of creating a life force, animating the materials employed. This entails the tricking of sensory modalities when only one or two are being employed, by the subtle use of illusion, causing a synaesthetic response, and vicarious stimulation of unused or inattentive sensory modalities, even if only at a subconscious level of perception.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Certainly humankind has not yet been able to match or ,aster one of nature's finest art works--the dream. Here life is recreated incorporating the fullness of all sensory modalities. Fragments of many perceptions are combined and scrambled into a weird and unparalleled phantasmagoria from which images and beings never before experienced spring to life with such realism as to convince the sleeping psyche it is awake. The scrambling of perceptions and mixing up of sensory modalities is an important aspect of the aesthetic phenomenon. What tremendous power has the mind to conjure to life strange stories in outlandish settings that have a plot and a rationale and a symbolic meaning if such dreams can ever be remembered and sorted out. No magician or artist has yet been able to outwit or out trick the sleeping, dreaming mind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The closest we have come to recreating the dream experience is our most modern and sophisticated art form today--the modern movie, like "Star Wars" or "Poltergeist". Look how much time and money and energy is expended in such elaborate and grandiose productions, the vast organizations and orchestration of many different talents and skills, actors, musicians, writers, film editors, stage hands, etc. and even the best movies are quite crude in comparison to the briefest of forgotten dreams. Perhaps one day, with the advance of holography and quantum leaps in scientific technological progress in many other related fields as well, we will be able to virtually recreate the experience of reality in a person's living room, complete with all the illusions of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings and rationality that seem as true to life as the real thing.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But does the wonderment of the common dream make it an aesthetic experience. Low budget movies have been more aesthetically moving than many costly and overspent flops from Hollywood. As limited and narrow as was Van Gogh's palette--he has been able to create upon his small canvas things movie makers and dreamers alike have failed to do. More dreams have I experienced that were more strange, full of stultifying emotionality, then there were necessarily aesthetically sublime. What are the important aesthetic limitations?</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The original question posed at the opening of this section remains unanswered. The aesthetic experience depends wholly upon the experiencer's own valuations. Values are cultivated by cultural conditioning and educational refinement, determined by natural or acquired tastes, aversions, habits, and by environment reinforcement. But they are also determined by the general orientation of one's behavior patterns, in thought, speech and in deeds, as well as by the choices one makes and the willpower one evinces. A painting might be valuable only to the painter, or only to his family and friends. A Van Gogh, though ignored and despised among his own contemporaries appealed aesthetically to a very basic, deep seated nexus of being common to many men, an appeal of such extraordinary vitality that it has spread throughout the world to many cultures and has withstood the test of time. Other artists have appealed to the aesthetic sensibilities of a nationalistic spirit, perhaps rising to cultural prominence for a decade or two, and then vanishing or becoming obscured from the view of a foreigner by more up to date leaders. And what can be said of the marvelous mysterious sphinx or of the anonymous cave painters of Lascaux whose spirit have survived the ravages of time immemorial.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">And so how can science, whose language is strictly quantitative mathematics, explain the aesthetic phenomenon whose essential characteristic is a qualitative conceptuality that is only vaguely describable? We can measure the sensory input of a work of art impinging upon a typical observer, but what will we learn of the variation of subjective evaluative response that will make the difference between mere banal sensory stimulation and aesthetic movement? We can assign strict definitions to words such as beauty and art, light, color, harmony, and style, and true to correspondence theory construct a nice rigid geometry of aesthetics to explain the aesthetic experience in terms of perspective, balance, harmony, design, chiaroscuro, movement but would this necessarily be how the individual rationalizes in his own psyche the aesthetic phenomenon?</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The symbolism of nominality may be subdivided further into the physical language of mathematics and the metaphysical language of description. Mathematics is the language of the number--it is quantitative in character. The other language is descriptive; the language of the adjective and adverb--in short the language of the word as metaphor as opposed to the number as metanym. It is more inclusive in that even numbers are words with meanings. It is essentially qualitative in character.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The true language of the physical "sciences" is mathematics in which there is an automatic preclusive criterion to meaning a fundamental and irreducible <u>one to one</u> correspondence of terms from the external consistency of actuality to the internal coherence of factuality. It would be nice if the necessity of mathematical correspondence theory of language of the physical sciences existed also in the language of the human sciences, but if and when it does, it does so a-posteriori to the fact of arbitrary human application. Physical language is the language of exclusion: metaphysical language is the language of inclusion. If simple extension of scientific language to essentially nonscientific fields of understanding were a necessity dictated not by contrived human standards but rather by objectively measurable physical reality, then it would be possible, as Descartes hopefully imagined, to turn the precision of the logic of mathematics and geometry upon the nature of human understanding, knowledge, language and ultimately philosophical systems of comprehension and theoretical systems of conceptualization, amenable to innately absolute, intrinsically unquestionable, a-priori laws of rationality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This is what exactly what is attempted in areas of economics, political science, religious science, scientific psychology, social science, social and empirical positivism, etc. Every field of human understanding tends to be <u>over scientized</u> through exclusive dependence upon the independently exclusive language of mathematics. The inherent weakness of such an effort is the implicit denial of the irreducible relativity of human willpower in the consignment of meaning to words. There is no word uttered that lacks completely even the remotest possibility of subjective connotation, of emotional effect, of intrinsic and inclusive description valuation, no matter how abstract that utterance is from the reality of daily interaction. Just as no word is uttered without some relative degree of value attached to that word, there is no such thing as a "science" of human behavior that is <u>value free</u>. Indeed such attempts are systematically and regularly made to formulate just such a value free, mathematically precise understanding of human behavior, but the end result will always be only a very narrow range of understanding founded on only a very limited and overly restrictive and exclusive criterion of validity. The end result is a sterile and inhuman machination, without the beauty and transcendent aesthetic integrity that comes automatically with human emotional attachment and qualitative subjectivity. Qualitative subjectivity, just like quantitative objectivity, is necessarily automatic and preclusive criterion of validity in the human "sciences". If such subjectivity is openly accepted at face value it poses no problem whatsoever, but if it is denied then it turns rationality upon itself into a closed system of defensive rationalization and becomes anathema to natural human value orientation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">As an artist I believe there is much more truth to life and living than is purported implicitly within the narrow and extremely materialist paradigm of "science". Not all of the fundamental philosophical criterion which strictly applies to natural sciences--objective methods of observation, controlled experimentation,, validation and falsification, explanative theory construction and empirical prediction and control--readily cross over unmodified into the "human" realm of scientific investigation, without conscious <u>alteration</u> to fit <u>altered criterion </u>of <u>understanding </u>and <u>truth. </u>While it is most important to strive for the absolute standard of "scientific objectivity" in the natural sciences, it is not only inappropriate but wrong to deny the <u>importance </u>and <u>value</u> of <u>relative arbitrariness</u> of "human subjectivity" in the human sciences.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The ideal of parsimony which seems so appropriate in the natural sciences, does not automatically preclude understanding within the behavioral sciences. Problems arise, especially in academia, when the <u>fundamental philosophical differences in truth criterion </u>between the two paradigms of science and humanism are lost sight of and the strict positivist paradigm is over extended with only slight alteration in substitution of the somewhat looser criterion of human behavioral truth. Absent is the absolute character of scientific law in the study of human behavior. Abundant is the subjectivity and relativity of arbitrary interpretation and consignment of meaning. As an artist, I believe it is wrong to so strictly model the study of humanity upon the scientific model of understanding physical nature, and I believe it is wrong to believe that maybe someday the science of physical nature will ever be so neat or clean cut as the science of physical nature. Perhaps the scientist may one day borrow from the artist the ideal of aesthetic integrity as a substitute for the notion of natural parsimony in the quest for theoretical understanding of human behavior.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If not by science, then how are we to arrive at an objective rational understanding of the aesthetic experience? Such understanding can only be achieved by the study of the structural dialectics of the participants of the aesthetic phenomenon, viewed not from the perspective of causality, but from the viewpoint of the processural perspective--aesthetics as human process--in which dynamic continuum is emphasized by the symbolic interpretation of the behavioral continuum of aesthetic interaction between the psychological concept of the self and the sociological concept of the other. The focus of the fourth and final section of this chapter is upon the philosophy of the anthropological exploration of aesthetics as a symbolic reality. When conceived of from the perspective of symbolic structuralism, the aesthetic experience becomes accessible to rational comprehension.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Rooted in the physiology of the human brain and with the paradox that all normal human beings share a universal similarity and at the same time are unique and infinitely variable--in the neuronal connections and firing patterns, molecular inter-dynamics and bioholographic form and function--are the origins of dreams, fantasies, imagination, comprehension, perceptual sensibilities, of art and science and the mutual integrated understanding of language; the thought process which sparks meaning into empty words. This is the common deep structure of the universal human nature which ties together all aspects of human behavior. This is not to say that just because humans don't always communicate intelligibly that they can't. it is to believe all humans can possibly and potentially communicate and understand each other and hopefully some day will. Rooted in the inherent inter-subjective nature of communication--as dependent of human perception--in the arbitrary construction of terminologies--iconographic naming of all things perceived and perceptible--is the word and the beginning of language and of all imaginable or possible conceptual systems of symbolic integration.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The <u>human reality</u> of <u>verbality</u>. It is deeply related to the expression and communication of human becoming or realization of potentiality. It implies motion, movement, change--dynamic as opposed to static. It is the dynamic interrelationship and inter-functioning between these two realms of organic materially fundamental deep structure of the incommunicable, hence inherently directly unknowable and imperceptible and indescribable of the "unconscious" and the "metaphysical" conceptual reality of arbitrary forms and systems of conceptualization and communication--the superficial constructs of human imagination--the touchable, talkable, reality of signs and arbitrary symbols, which is the reality of being human, from which is derived meaning in being human and alive--through which self and other gain identity and relationship, through which culture and personality integrate, springing into existence together and inseparable as a dynamic life process.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is to both individually unique and culturally relative as possible as well as to be as timelessly universal as possible. It is the same dilemma as confronted by all humans in their own search for identity--to share relatedness to all other human beings--in some deep structural conception of a universal human nature, while at the same time upon the surface to remain distinctly individual; unique, unrepeatable instance of integrity. It is the same dilemma underlying all the human sciences--to find in the deep relational structure of common meaning the communicated reality of the conceptual identity of human behavior, while at the same time tolerating and understanding the infinite degree of superficial stylistic variation and deviation in thoughts, willpower, words and deeds.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A predisposition to causality is rooted in the very structure language takes--from subject to object. It is the verbalization--the relationship between subject and object, which in language is the verb and which becomes downplayed to the overemphasis on names and meanings. Verbs represent a dynamic temporal process of living and spatial interrelationships. They are what creates understanding, bringing to life language, making relationship from the "unconscious" structural reality to the conscious conceptual reality, from the a-priori to the a-posteriori, integrating the universal absolute indirect deep structure with the relative directly discernible surface structure. Verbs make truth happen in language and understanding. Verbs integrate language and life.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">****</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">To talk about the philosophy of the anthropological understanding of aesthetics is to speak of the meaning of symbolism, of the symbolic reality of the aesthetic phenomenon of culture, of interpretative symbolism and symbolic interpretation and to speak of the relational contextuality in which the structural dialectics of the forces impinging upon the aesthetic process creates meaningful symbolism. The meaning of the symbol and the symbolism of meaning has been well discussed in anthropological literature though less well in the literature of aesthetic anthropology. It is most important in surveying literature in semiotics to be aware of the relativity of the interpretations proffered as to the meaning of symbols and of symbol systems. Alternative interpretations founded upon differing contexts of comprehension, about the same or similar aesthetic phenomenon are exemplary of the theoretical divisiveness and unavoidable relativity of alternative interpretations. No single approach to the understanding of symbology is adequate for a reasonable anthropological comprehension of such phenomenon. The value of such a plethora of interpretations is to broaden the understanding of the possible meanings embodied in symbols with the recognition that there are no limitations to such latent and manifest significations. As a whole the bulk of such differing interpretations ought to provide stable foundations for the comprehension of symbolism, making discernible recurring patterns, gestalts or themes by which such understanding can be theoretically systematized. The importance of the understanding of the human being as a symbolizing creature and of human culture as a system of symbolization cannot be over stressed, because it is primarily the uniquely human use of symbols that culture and the development of panhuman civilization has been possible and by which humanity has been able to set itself apart in distinctive identity from its origins in Mother Nature. The theoretical definition of cultural symbolism and symbolic culture is essential to the definitive understanding of human behavioral reality. What remains is the application of the semiotics of anthropology to the iconological understanding of the aesthetic phenomenon, delineating by overview the structural reality of aesthetic symbolism in human society.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">I will begin by first claiming that not all artistic activity or at least all human behavior falling under the rubric of aesthetics is necessarily symbolic, and that not all symbolism is necessarily aesthetic in nature. The latter point might seem more obvious than the former, as language, though possibly put to aesthetic uses, is not necessarily itself aesthetic in character or intention. Unlike language, which is necessarily objective (inter-subjective) in character, communication is not crucially important to the meaning of aesthetic phenomenon. The artistic process can consist of essentially meaningless activity, seeking no symbolic referents in reality. Such an understanding resolves itself upon the idea that no single culture, much less no single individual can ascribe to the whole aesthetic behavioral continuum, and therefore that aesthetic behavior is relatively meaningless to participants in the aesthetic process. It is more a matter of degree of intent and extent, of distance from familiarity than of being absolutely meaningless or meaningful. That aesthetic activity lying in the regions most remote from one's own sphere of aesthetic experience is the least meaningful and suffers the least symbolic content. We can attempt to transcend our personal prejudices and our culturally prescribed prerogatives concerning aesthetics in order to comprehend as much as possible the whole of the continuum of aesthetic behavior, but we must always remain rooted to some one cultural context or another in order to interpret and communicate such comprehension to others, which means that we can never escape absolutely the cultural bounds to achieve the freedom necessary to theoretically comprehend the whole continuum of aesthetic phenomenon. Such a realization of individual and cultural limitations can only bring a sobering attitude to the anthropological understanding of aesthetics.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Furthermore much of what can be interpreted as symbolic in art can only be done so from the idiographic standpoint, if only at the level of latent unconscious psychological content, and such aesthetic phenomena is not necessarily intended for a wider inter-subjective cultural milieu as communication. Even within our own cultural contexts, or of any which is relatively accessible, we are not assured of being able to know with empirical certainty all of the aesthetic activity which transpires, much less its meaningfulness. In this regard such art can be interpreted as self expression rather than as communicably inter-subjective in symbolic content. "Alienated", "abstracted", detached art, divorced from its relative cultural context, is nomothetically a-symbolic in character and of essentially culturally meaningless content, apart from the symbolic content of the aesthetic behavior producing such art. But even such completely self enclosed art as this cannot escape completely the influences of the prevailing cultural milieu, and to such an extent it is symbolically interpretable in a nomothetic context. This perhaps is the "pure" notion of the "art for art's sake" movement, but it must be noted that such art is severely restricted in scope and is for all intents and purposes devoid of meaningful sociological content and is a fruitless field of anthropological investigation. Such purely subjective art is actually nonexistent and is an impossible deal, and those adherents to such an absolutist ideology are every bit as hypocritical as are those at the opposite extreme who believe they perform completely objective art.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It might be well argued that there is no aesthetic activity, just as there is no other form of human behavior, which is irreducibly meaningless and unamenable to anthropological scrutinizations. But from the standpoint of aesthetic symbolism and culture such ameaningful artistic activity is virtually irrelevant and relatively inaccessible, except in perhaps as much such behavior helps to define in negative outline fashion the parameters of aesthetic symbolism. It might also be well argued that just by the meaning of such a word as "aesthetic" that no form of activity labeled aesthetic cannot have at least a modicum of meaningful aesthetic content, but such a claim then will hinge upon how we define the meaning of aesthetic and art.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">While it may seem to the critical reader that I am endlessly quibbling over minor points and pointless issues, I deem it necessary to the appropriate understanding of aesthetic anthropology to elaborate at the outset upon such points. While I intend to elucidate more clearly the possible meanings and so the construct more thoroughly a definition of the meaning of aesthetics, it is necessary at this point in the development of this argument to briefly touch upon such a definition, for the clarification of such issues. The definition of the meaning of aesthetics is just that, a definition of meaning in general and of aesthetic meaning, as compared and contrasted to philosophical meaning. Just as all four paradigms share in the same fundamental truth criterion, so also do all four share in the same basic meaningfulness to human metaphysical/empirical reality. There exists the same essential "golden thread" of meaning coursing throughout the four paradigms of human understanding, tying them together into a unity and integrity that is universal human reality. What is important is to distinguish the different character this meaning assumes in the aesthetic paradigm as opposed to all of the other paradigms, defining the minor differences in form such meaning takes within aesthetics; but such a task is beyond the immediate scope of this argument and must await further development in the second chapter. Suffice it to define aesthetics as that which confers meaning upon human reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">With such a general and simple definition of aesthetics it is then possible to imagine the existence of a theoretical <u>aesthetic continuum of meaning</u> which encompasses universally all forms of artistic behavior, from all people and cultures, the extremes of which are the ideals of the idiographic psychological concept of the <u>self</u> and the nomothetic sociological concept of the <u>other</u>, ranging between the extreme of purely subjective meaning to the opposite extreme of purely objective meaning. Also imagine that this continuum encompasses all aesthetically meaningful human behavior, which for the sake of theoretical simplicity, can be seen to occur simultaneously or synchronically, or more preferably holothetically, along three dimensions of cognitive sensori-motor mechanical activity. These three dimensions can likewise be thought of as a single continuum ranging between the "absolute" extremes of "pure" mentation and "pure" physical action, with the dimension of emotion ranging between these extremes and relative to them. Finally the two continuums of aesthetic meaning and aesthetically meaningful behavior can be thought of as crossing or converging in the exact middle of one another, like the perpendicular axis of a Cartesian graph. It is crucially important the overriding importance of the holothetical principle. All aesthetic phenomenon can be thought of in reference to this graph, and all or any such aesthetic activity can be though of wholly or partially in either conceptual, emotional or physical terms, or likewise as being either wholly or partially subjective, objective or as an anthropological concept of subjective/objective combination ranging between the two extremes, expressed concurrently, diachronically or synchronically upon any of the three levels of behavior. All aesthetic activity can be adequately conceptualized in reference to this highly simplistic theoretical model of aesthetic reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">As subdivisions of anthropology, psychology and sociology are philosophically distinct and different yet they are interrelated in meaning within the anthropological field. In the definition of these two subdivisions there are parallel dichotomies between each sub-discipline and subsequent transcendent integrities by which the symbolic reality of anthropology may be defined. I will break down the following definitions of psychology and sociology into the parallel dichotomic concepts and will elaborate the transcendent synthetic concepts by which the field of anthropology gains humanistic meaning.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Anthropology is a synthesis of independent thetic psychological understanding and dependent antithetical sociological understanding.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Psychology is/an anthropological sub-discipline/of the <u>particularistic</u> human understanding/of the <u>self</u>/by the <u>idiothetic description</u>/of <u>personality</u>/in formal <u>stylizations</u>/of motivational meanings/of functional <u>sources</u>/of <u>power, achievement</u> and <u>affiliation</u>/and in <u>individualistic directional repertories</u>/of <u>intelligence</u>/and <u>psycho-pathology.</p> </u> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Sociology is/an anthropological sub-discipline/of the <u>universalistic </u>human understanding/of the <u>other</u>/by the <u>nomothetic definition</u>/of <u>culture</u>/in formal <u>configurations</u>/of <u>relational significations</u>/of functional <u>structures</u>/of <u>politics, economics</u> and <u>socio religious class</u>/and in <u>collectivistic contextual models</u>/of <u>civilization</u>/and <u>socio pathology</u>.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Anthropology is/the <u>generalistic</u> human understanding/of the <u>ego reality (rationality)</u>/by the <u>holothetic interpretation/</u>of <u>normality</u>/in formal <u>patterns</u>/of <u>behavioral symbolizations</u>/of <u>functional systems</u>/of <u>status, security</u> and <u>sociability</u>/and in <u>organismic conditional process</u>/of <u>rational creativity</u>/and <u>behavioral irrationality</u>.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In order to fully outline upon the cultural character of aesthetic phenomena, first the anthropological character of understanding culture must be at least minimally described. I interpret anthropological understanding of culture as the synthetic holothetic conceptuality of <u>normality</u> arising from dialectical interaction of two, in a sense opposing, but complementary concepts--the psychological concept of the self, and the sociological concept of the other. The concept of normality arises as the result of dialectical, holothetic interaction between the concepts of personality and of culture.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From the psychological perspective of the self, aesthetic meaning can be viewed as an endpoint of gratification derived from formal individual stylizations of functional sources of the basic human motivations of power, achievement and affiliation. Like any other form of human behavior, aesthetic activity is susceptible to the basic drives that underlie all human activity. Whether it is good or bad, healthy or unhealthy, intelligent or psycho pathological is beside the point. Such questions of relative healthiness or unhealthiness of aesthetic phenomenon will be dealt with in chapter four. Suffice it to say all aesthetic experiences are derived ultimately from a combination of all three basic motivations with varying emphasis on one or another of the factors.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">On the other hand it is possible to delineate from the sociological perspective of the other the aesthetic context in which aesthetic meaning becomes the means to service formal cultural configurations of functional structures of relational significations of politics, economics and socio religious class. In other words when referenced in a sociological context, aesthetic meaning can be viewed as a means toward political propagandistic ideological significations, socio religious class reinforcement of the prerogative of the wealthy, as a means of distinguishing the "haves" from the "have nots", as significations of socio religious prestige and beliefs, and as a means to economic status, increased material reward and wealth--in short art as a means of employment and of making money. Again all art probably falls somewhere in between as a combination of each of these contexts. From the integrative, synthetic, holothetic anthropological perspective of ego reality (rationality) aesthetic meaning can be construed in term of formal patterns of normality of functional systems of behavioral symbolizations of status, security and sociability.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is possible to compare and combine these parallel thetical psychological, antithetical sociological and synthetical anthropological concepts and to order these groups along a third continuum ranging from the extremes of power/politics/status at one end and of achievement/economics/security at the other end with the intermediate set of concepts affiliation/socio religious sociability ranging in between. Now we have a possible third axis to our theoretical model of aesthetic reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is another way of conceptually ordering these continuums; namely in terms of a pyramidal hierarchy, with the power/politics/status, the cognitive conceptual, the psychological self concept at the apex and the antithetical concepts of achievement/economics/security, the physical actional, and the sociological other concept forming the ventrices of the base and ranging in between top and bottom are the intermediate integrative concepts of affiliation/socio religious class/sociability, emotionality and symbolization and the anthropological concept of normality. This might then be related to a similar construct such as a human need hierarchy ranging between base biological needs, intermediate emotional needs and highly abstract cognitive and normative needs. But with such a hierarchical organization I do not think it is possible to avoid the undesirable qualitative connotations conveyed by such words as better or worse, higher or lower, elevated or debased, enlightened or transcendent and crude or unrefined or unsophisticated. But such a pyramidal hierarchy may be useful, without trying to guess which side is up and which side is down, to compare with another theoretical model that was mentioned earlier--the model of the tetrahedron. The important point for consideration is the idea conveyed by these models of the holothetic integrity of idiothetic stylizations of meaningful motivations, nomothetic configurations of relational significations and holothetic patterns of behavioral symbolizations which can be found embedded in the structure of any aesthetic phenomenon, as composing the structure of aesthetic reality itself.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Though essentially holothetic in character, it can be seen from the foregoing model that aesthetic anthropology is primarily concerned with the intermediate affiliation/socio religious/sociability system, emotionality, symbolic aesthetic behavior patterns of ego reality (rationality). In other words anthropology is more immediately concerned with the affective, emotional content of systems of aesthetic symbolization used to convey norms of sociability in relational terms of socio religious class and in motivational meanings of affiliation, even as manifest throughout the continuums from extreme to extreme. Anthropology can be said to be concerned not only with the whole theoretical model of aesthetics reality in generally, but also most specifically with the centrality of the model; the point at which the three axis intersect one another. This observation about the anthropological understanding of aesthetic "normality" has important implications which will be dealt with in later chapters.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The aesthetic process can be said to elicit an emotional (i.e. affective) response on the part of the participants. This affective response, a mediator between the physical world of the senses and the metaphysical world of conception, provides the meaningfulness derived from the aesthetic experience. Culture can be said to provide the context, the form, serving as a vehicle a container, a framework, a structure, the objectifiable, quantitative aspects of the aesthetic process. The human being provides the filler of the vacant volume, the energy, the elan vital, the spiritual or soulful life. Anthropology studies the systematic and organismic interaction and integration of the culturally quantifiable and the subjective qualitative meanings in terms of the symbolic meaning an artwork achieves in combination.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">2.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The Question of Aesthetic Meaning</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Aesthetics can be quite a mysterious human phenomena--leaving many unanswered and probably unanswerable open ended questions. What is an adequate definition of aesthetics? Exactly what are the meanings of aesthetics? What purpose does aesthetics serve, if any? What function? Can humanity survive without aesthetic sensibilities? Can aesthetics survive without the spirit of humanity? Such questions as these are perplexing ones, leaving much room for scholarly argument, debate and discussion. It is not so much what answers we give to such questions of the meaning of aesthetics that are important as how we ask such difficult and complex questions. It is the intention of this second chapter to explore and perhaps to redefine some of these questions in such a way perhaps that hopefully partial answers will then become to some degree "self evident".</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">What then is the meaning of aesthetics? Does art even necessarily have a meaning or might it not be just meaningless activity? The affirmative answer that there is some modicum of human meaning in the aesthetic experience revolves around another important question about aesthetics--does art serve a human "purpose" or does the aesthetic process "perform" some kind of human "function", and if so then what might such a purposeful function be like? To be meaningful does aesthetic phenomena even necessarily have to have any humanly relevant purpose--might not the aesthetic process just be an "end in itself"? Answers to such questions are related to other "anthropologically relevant" questions such as what are the underlying factors which influence and determine the survivability, adaptability, modification and development of any particular art sequence? When, where and how does such a development begin, and what are the mechanisms of change, diffusion, evolution and extinction?</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Aesthetic meaning is multifaceted. It is like a precious jewel that has many facets and that reveals many dimensions, just as the meanings of aesthetics are multidimensional. Just as these dimensions vary infinitely, as they are subjectively experienced to an infinitely varied degree between all people, and to the degree that these dimensions of aesthetic meaning become structured by differing cultural contexts, so too are the potential systems of anthropological conceptioning about aesthetics infinitely multifaceted and multidimensional. This condition of multidimensionality in understanding aesthetic meaning is in keeping with the nature of the completely relative holothetic reality which is the recurrent theme of this work. The multidimensionality of aesthetic reality is open ended in the sense that no possible dimensions of meaning can be completely excluded from theoretical consideration of such questions on the basis of being more or less right or wrong, true or false, good or bad, meaningful or ameaningful.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Furthermore it is important when conceptualizing about aesthetic meaning to understand that the aesthetic "object" cannot be divorced from the relative contextuality of the aesthetic of the subjective "subject", that the "objet d'art" cannot be separated from the aesthetic participant in the aesthetic phenomenon, or the aesthetic reality in general, without harming or critically destroying the essential relevant meaningfulness of the aesthetic experience. Aesthetic meaning and aesthetic phenomenon in general are inseparably tied to the relative human aesthetic experience of such phenomenon. These meanings must be considered from the synthetical, synergistic, holothetic perspective rather than being analytically dichotomized into such realms of subject and object.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is no doubt that the aesthetic experience itself is at least to some extent derived from nature, expressed as a sublime, soulful movement in harmony with or reaction to the splendid wonders which Mother Nature continually reveals to the senses whether it be the exquisite fragile structure of a rose or some other enormously wonderful complexity. What artificial human machination or concoction can match the splendid serenity of natural processes? Whether we say the aesthetic experience is supernatural, preternatural, a derivative of nature or a harkening essential relationship with Mother Nature, or simply an experience of the "self" of human nature, id, instinct, unconscious, or whatever, in order to say that the aesthetic experience is to any degree based on nature it becomes important to define exactly what is meant by aesthetics--or the meaning of aesthetics--and this is precisely my answer--meaning.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">By aesthetics I am not meaning simply the appreciation of "beauty" as a relative set of ranked or hierarchically ordered valuations--as a qualitative, descriptive essence--compared to ugliness or as being more or less beautiful. The appreciation of "beauty" is fat too narrow a category for the multidimensional meaning of aesthetics. The quest for ephemeral beauty is at best like the quest for elusive happiness or fleeting pleasure; such a quest for El Dorado is only a vicarious and ill fated master. The meaningfulness of the aesthetic experience is not necessarily dependent upon the experience of pleasure, as some utilitarian philosopher might hypothesize. The aesthetic experience can be a wonderful--an immensely pleasurable one, but art can also invoke feelings of displeasure or unpleasurable aesthetic experience, inducing states of unhappiness, ambiguity, perplexity, displeasure, of pity or agony, as well as being gloriful, awe aspiring, sublime or ecstatic. Furthermore an art object can purposefully induce no mood alteration or subjectivity discernible experience whatsoever and yet still be quite a movable, meaningful experience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">To claim any one of the many dimensions of aesthetic meaning over any other is to thus become infallibly self entrenched in self defeating and self perserverating aesthetic ideology the adherence to which requires preaching many programs of preferred aesthetic processes. Many artists themselves become closed minded in such a manner and promote such aesthetic ideologies. There are and have been enough such aesthetic movements and counter movements and just as with philosophy, such perpetual aesthetic argumentation seems nevertheless to revolve around a central locus of basic human issues or concerns or paradoxes or dilemmas or fundamental questions about the meaning of human reality and the experience of that reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">I prefer to use the term "meaningful" as opposed to "a-meaningful" not just love (passion) or hate (antipathy), but demanding attention and sympathy or at least empathy as opposed to apathy and ignorance. Meaningfulness can be both quantitatively measured and compared or qualitatively described and hierarchically ranked as more or less so. But the problem of meaning, even more, can be simply a yes or a no problem, with or without love or hate connotations. An experience can either be meaningful in some degree or manner or it can be without meaning.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But all of this does not mean that we can ignore the important question of aesthetic preference, of tastes or aversions, whether naturally determined, individually acquired or culturally conditioned. Are such preferences merely a question of habit, or does the aesthetic selection process depend upon certain "innate" a-priori and perhaps universal criteria--whether the basis for such determination is in the structural psychic unity of humanity or in the intrinsic nature of the aesthetic phenomenon itself or is a function of culture? Why is some art deemed better than other art and why is some form or kind or degree of aesthetic experience preferable to some other kind? Exactly what is the basis for qualitative evaluation of aesthetic phenomenon. Is it possible to move beyond merely sophisticated sets of criteria for qualitative description and categorization and labeling with subsequent appelative or derogative connotations or denotation upon a comparative evaluative premises of better or worse, good or bad, that moves beyond mere prejudice, opinionation, and had empirical/metaphysical validity in the greater "universal" human reality? Can a universalistic formula or elemental set of criteria be derived from a comprehensive study of art by which all aesthetic phenomenon can be so judged and qualitatively evaluated by virtually by "normally qualified" person who acquires the proper critical skills and would the individual judgments using the same set of criteria then necessarily be nearly the same or similar, and knowledge and effective application of which is sure to improve the "affectiveness" of a participant's aesthetic experience?</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">My only answer to such question is to state unequivocally that any such contrived criteria are a-posteriori to the meaningful human experience of aesthetic phenomena and the derived understanding of such experience, and cannot be a knowable a-priori in the intrinsic (or extrinsic) nature of human reality. In other words such criteria are conceptually contrived, derived from aesthetic experience which is primarily psychologically meaningful and secondarily sociologically relative; in other words anthropologically relative to the predominating "norms" or "normality" of ego reality (rationality) arising from the systemic interaction and organismic integration between personality and culture, of psychological "self" and sociological "other". The aesthetic process experience, phenomenon, performance or participation, serves the expressly meaningful human purpose or function as an "<u>affective" symbolic mediator</u> providing relative contextual frames of reference and directions and targets of affective emotional transference by which to (re)organize and (re)integrate the human ego rational experience of reality. Furthermore the "purpose" of the aesthetic process is to embody the subjective experience of human ego reality in its objective recreation, mimicking the "real thing" and inducing a sort of disassociation state by providing an alternative model to that "subjective/objective" ego reality, out of context from the original "true to life" phenomenological state of reality, and enabling a behavioral adjustment to inevitable and perpetual changes of ego reality. What is effected is a juxtapositioning of subjective/objective contexts to allow a subjective/objective transformation, providing symbolically expressive meaning to on going existence, the "affectiveness" of which the aesthetic "quality" of the meaningful aesthetic experience is achieved. Furthermore such an "affective" aesthetic experience can be largely an "unconscious" (i.e. nonverbal, pre-logical, non-rational) one. In (re)integrating the diverse strands of the analytically dichotomized epistemological/metaphysical (conscious, rational, logical) reality of human existence, such as the self/other dichotomy, the nature/culture dichotomy, life/death dichotomy, ideal/real or variously mind/body or spiritual/material) dichotomy, the "affective" meaningful nature of the aesthetic phenomenon achieves its apparent holothetic multidimensionality in symbolic interpretation and interpretative symbolism. The gist of the foregoing is that at least from an anthropological viewpoint the aesthetic experience is to be seen as primarily, but not exclusively as an emotional affective one, that is not necessarily analytically rational or critical or even verbally logical in nature, structure or content. The aesthetic process functions as a symbolic mediator to reify the ideal and t deify the real, to animate and revitalize the dying and the dead and to immortalize and memorialize the living, to "naturalize" culture and to "enculturate" nature. From an anthropological perspective the purpose of this affective process of transformation is to bring together and to reintegrate the dichotomized and opposing concepts of "self" and "other" and to harmonize and stabilize the resultant ego reality (rationality) in a steady balanced condition of "normality".</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Art as a symbolic medium can serve at least potentially as a primarily "affective" behavioral symboling system for the manifest expression of latent values important within a cultural context. This symboling system is in a sense "iconological", providing personally meaningful and culturally significant representational imagery-- food for the imagination. The structural role of the artist, of the aesthetic process in general, evoked or invoked by the participants in the aesthetic experience, is that of iconographic or symbolic mediator between the psychological concept of "self" and the sociological concept of the "other" between the a-priori ideals of epistemological/metaphysical reality and the a-posteriori experience of space/time and motion and change, between the spiritual realm of the ideal and the material realm of the real, from the behavioral extreme of pure concepts and conceptuality (or conceptual reality) to the opposite extreme of pure percepts and perceptuality. The iconograph serves as a cultural and personal symbolic mediator. The cultural function of the aesthetic experience can be seen to be one of integrator of reality, of the disparate and often contradictory, seemingly unrelated analytic subdivisions of the cosmic whole of reality. The ultimate "affect" of the aesthetic experience is the creation of a feeling or at least verisimilitude of "atoneness" (atonement) or unity or integrity between nature and culture, self and other, mind and body, ideal and real, life and death. If aesthetic phenomenon can be viewed from the perspective of organismic holothetic multidimensionality, then it is possible to identify the functional modes of thetical psychological, antithetic sociological and synthetic anthropological multidimensionality aesthetic meaning acquires.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The aesthetic experience is largely nonverbal or at least is not contingent upon analytical verbalization for its symbolic content. As I have said before, such "verbalization" or "conceptualization" can destroy as much as it can enhance the affective meaning derivable from the "original" aesthetic experience. Oftentimes people don't know what to say in response to an aesthetic experience, and this is quite all right--for people don't need words to have a meaningful aesthetic experience, such an obsessive need for verbalization is perhaps indicative of an underlying "scientistic" orientation of the western tradition of cultural and aesthetic valuation. Like dissecting and analyzing, verbalization and conceptualization about the symbolic experience of art can destroy its holistic, synergistic vitality of the meaningfulness. Nonetheless, in order to understand the anatomy of the aesthetic process the good positivistic scientist (or scientistic) anthropologist must analytically conceptualize in order to theoretically examine the personal meaning and cultural significance of aesthetic symbolization systems, even in the infinite degree of variation and deviation from established "norms".</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Art reveals the true "deep structure" of human reality, of human experience--that which is modeled from pure percepts of sight and sound, without an a-priori predetermined conceptual associations. In a sense aesthetic experience can be considered preverbal and pre-logical, perhaps intuitive, but even concepts can be real percepts when seen written on paper or heard in speech and can become the foodstuff of the aesthetic imagination. This is part and parcel of the holothetic multidimensionality of aesthetic reality. The aesthetic process organizes and reorganized percepts and perceptions and the derivative "abstracted" concepts and conceptions into patterns or holothetic "images" or "gestalts" of probabilities and possibilities, of intuition and conjectural speculation, that the participant feels and finds expression for and reiterates upon.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In a sense that the aesthetic experience is soundly based upon percepts and perception, it can be said that the aesthetic process is a reflection of the environmental context of the individual participant--the environmental landscape becomes reflected in the forms of expression the aesthetic experience assumes. Likewise in as much as concepts and conceptions, as derivatives of empirical perceptuality and founded upon language and inter-subjective communication, find abstract expression or "abstraction" in the aesthetic process, the aesthetic experience becomes a symbolic interpretation of the perceptual environment. But in a sense the aesthetic process is a limited, perhaps severely restricted one, while the environmental possibilities for reflection and interpretations are virtually unlimited. It is not enough to say that the aesthetic experience is merely a reflection of any part of the meaningful reflection it must be a reflection of what is important or highly valued to the participant. Furthermore, in as much as the aesthetic experience is one of "symbolic" interpretation of conceptuality abstracted from perceptuality and in as much as such conceptuality is founded upon the criteria of inter-subjective (objective) communication, based upon language and verbalization, with the word as metaphor serving as the "key" symbol, then the symbolic interpretation is most likely not to be of any possible abstraction, but of some conception probably deemed vitally or normally important in a personality/cultural system. While there are a potential infinitude of variations of culturally prescribed contextual signs, there are, within any given cultural context, perhaps a modicum of reducible artistic forms which are recurrent, all pervasive and yet highly variable and themselves evolving. Here we might see the powerful influence which culture might bring to bear upon the structure and "imagery" of any individual participant's aesthetic experience. It can be likened to the nature of culturally sanctioned and proscribed use of mind altering drugs which provides a "cultural" context for hallucinogenic experiences, episodes and imagery. When cultural norms prescribing such substance induced alternative states of consciousness are nonexistent or prohibitive then the meaningful experience will become merely idiographically non-directional and idiosyncratically randomized, unstructured, unpurposive and unfunctional under the prevailing restrictive norms of a culture. The same holds true for aesthetic experience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In short due to the human limitation of the aesthetic process, aesthetic imagery tends to become a subjective/objective probabilistic synthetic reflection and symbolic interpretation of subjective thetic perceptuality and objective, antithetic, conceptuality of values which are important, of "norms" or of the ego rational normal reality of the individual personality and the cultural contextuality. We can appreciate the cave paintings of Lascaux for a way of life which the imagery depicts, one centrally dependent on regular cyclical seasonal rounds of hunting herds, encampments and migration. Or we can speak of the important aspects of the neolithic lifestyle in terms of geometric designs, repetitive floral patternings and the appearance of the stylized human figurines especially of fertility and cult imagery, which might be simply interpreted as the increased importance of permanent man-made dwellings, of architectural modification of the environmental landscape, of new "village" landscapes, of the importance of cultigens and of domesticates, of the increased sexual division of labor, part time specialization and enhanced fertility of the people and the land. In short people paint what is important to them. The aesthetic imagery is not only reflective but symbolically-iconographically interpretative of the important norms and values of a people and their culture. Iconographic imagery and symbols tend to be representational reflection and abstract interpretation of a people's and culture's important values and "normality".</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">What is pressing or of overriding importance environmentally "in perceptuality" (the possibilistic framework) and in "conceptuality" (probabilistic framework) becomes the central focus of the aesthetic process and hence experience, determining its structure and manifest and latent content. Iconographic imagery, like the totem, can serve as the symbolic representation of a people and their cultural way of life, helping to reinforce the norms of the culture, and in variation providing alternative interpretation and adaptability to alterations. Conformity to, variation of and deviation from the aesthetic "norms" of a culture are the possible directions of individual response and freedom. The symbolic function of art forms are virtually similarly to the symbolic function of any other form of symboling system, and is therefore amenable to the pertinent anthropological literature concerning the importance of symbology to understanding culture, but the aesthetic function is not only or just symbolic in importance, but is also iconographically representational and psychologically meaningful as well. The concluding implication of the foregoing discussion is that of the predominating normality of aesthetic reality, of the normative cultural function and purpose of the aesthetic process, by which aesthetic experience is imbued with affective meaning that is qualitatively interpretable in symbolic terms or forms. Art is a representational reflection and symbolic interpretation of the values and reality of a people and their culture.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">****</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">beyond recognizing the mere meaningfulness of the aesthetic experience of reality and an expression of values, both motivationally relevant and contextually relative, it is important also the emphasize the point that the aesthetic phenomenon, though derived from reality, (perceptuality and conceptuality) is a <u>reflection </u>and <u>interpretation </u>of that reality and is not reality in itself. This is not saying that the aesthetic phenomenon is not real. Indeed it is, but the fact that it is a <u>re</u>creation, or reflection or is derived from reality is vitally important to the understanding of the meaning of aesthetics. The important point is that art is perceived and conceived to be separate from nature and reality, as derived from it and depicting reality, but also different and is not the "original" reality itself. It could not be reality, either, not without eliminating the meaningfulness of the aesthetic experience. In other words, in order for an aesthetic phenomenon and the reality from which it is derived. If the phenomenon were perchance misconstrued as being reality in and of itself, then the meaningful content would be missed. In short it is crucially important in understanding the meaning of aesthetics to recognize that all aesthetic phenomena are contrived <u>illusion</u> of reality, and is not directly that reality itself. It is not supposed to be reality. It is intended to be the unreal. Furthermore it is crucially important to the affectiveness of the aesthetic experience that the participants now that it is illusion and not reality. Why is this so?</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Aesthetic phenomena are meaningful just because it is illusive; it is not meant to be real. I believe this to be so because in order for the aesthetic process to become "affective" it must induce a subjective/objective transformation on the part of the participant, and that it does so by breaking per force imaginatively from the constraints of reality and by providing "unrealistic" alternative possibilities and patternings, disrupting the original context and going outside the "normal" bounds of probable, unimaginative reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Aesthetics provides in a sense emotive and cognitive liberation, behavioral freedom, from the normal perceptuality of the senses, through a kind of synaesthetic deceit, tricking the normal sensibilities into a temporary "abnormal" or unusual or unconstant context. Aesthetic appreciation requires a rich imagination, unconstrained by the perceptual and conceptual habits of ego rationality. Meaning is thus achieved by being able to go beyond the undimensional boundaries of reality, providing an alternative framework by which to compare and contrast the similarities and differences between the aesthetic model and the reality it depicts, thereby helping to better understand reality, to adapt to changes in reality and to help alter reality. Aesthetic phenomenon provides a form of freedom and access to a wealth of alternative imaginary percepts and concepts than is what is ordinarily presented to the immediate, direct, superficial reality of existence, helping in a sense to expand and to transcend the perceptual bound and conceptual norms of that reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Reality is limited; the limitation of human reality are virtually the limitations of the human being itself to experience the totality of that reality. Existence is bounded by the world of greater possibility, representing only a very narrow range of probability and patterning. Imagination provides access to that greater world of possibility. Aesthetic sensitivity is dependent upon a strong imagination. The affectiveness of the aesthetic experience arises out of and is dependent upon the effective recognition and imaginative utilization of the limitations of reality. Without the limitations of existence aesthetic transformation and meaningfulness would be nonexistent and impossible to experience. The limitations themselves become manifest in the aesthetic experience itself, imparting upon it shape, structure, form and vitality--a meaningful content both latent and manifest. The imperfect relative model of relative reality, the aesthetic experience itself is a severely limited version, even more so than reality itself. This is crucially important. The freedom of transcendence and transformation attained in an aesthetic experience is dependent upon and results from the unavoidable limitations, not upon their elimination or denial, but upon their effective utilization and exploitation. Art provides a means of suspending temporarily belief in reality, detoxifying the apparent credibility of first hand experience of existence. It requires a willingness to believe in unreality, an active and passive imagination, flights of fantasy and fancy, a susceptibility to the power of suggestion. The aesthetic experience, to be effective, requires a temporary "leap of faith" of the most rudimentary order. Meaning can thus be seen as a process of expansion of reality, and of transcendence of its limitations. Meaning is a dynamic process of subjective/objective interaction, transformation and reintegration. It is not static. It is relative to a aesthetic behavioral continuum which is part of a larger universal dynamic behavioral continuum. It is not a matter of being absolutely meaningful or ameaningful, but of becoming relatively more or less meaningful.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The aesthetic experience can then be seen to be essentially a <u>vicarious</u> experience, in which the participant seeks to escape from and eventually expand the horizons of reality. The importance of aesthetic reality is that it is irreducibly <u>nonreal</u>. No art can be said to be wholly natural or real, even though all art can be said to be derived from nature. Nor can the wonderousness of Mother Nature be said to be necessarily aesthetic in character--though aesthetic like. Aesthetic phenomena are <u>synthetic</u>, a result of human behavioral integration with the environment--it is subjective/objective and ego rational. In as much as art is symbolic or culturally significant, the aesthetic process can be said to be the result of interaction and ontological integration between the self and other--in other words the aesthetic experience is artificially synthetic, not natural.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The more capable an aesthetic process is in "capturing" the vital essence of the reality it portrays, and in tricking the aesthetic sensibilities into believing that it is indeed "real", inspite of the prior knowledge to the contrary about its lack of credibility, the more valuable the phenomena is; the more "affective' in bringing to clash the opposing forces of metaphysical/epistemological, mind/body, self/other, nature/culture, ideal/real dichotomies. Art is intrinsically out of the ordinary, unusual, "abnormal" serving to disrupt the habits of normal perceptuality and conceptuality, in order to affect a meaningful reorganization or reintegration and expansion of reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Like a magician, the skilled and "affective" artist is a master of illusion and suggestion of possibilities open to the imagination of the aesthetic participant, which are not really credibly present in reality. This explains perhaps part of the mysterious character of the aesthetic experience. The sublime power of the aesthetic process can be seen to be one of suggestion, suggesting the illusion of other imaginary possibilities, and as such can be likened to the power of the hypnotist and of the magician or shaman. The important point is that an aesthetic experience is affective because the participants are either overpowered, overawed by the ineffable power of suggestion, or are more likely to be duped into suspending normal habitual critical rationality and are more susceptible to believing the aesthetic experience because of a powerful imagination. The aesthetic participant chooses to be induced by the power of aesthetic suggestion. Thus the power of suggestibility of any aesthetic phenomenon can be willfully resisted and denied if the potential aesthetic participant, in this case the recipient refuses to suspend normal rationality and belief, or else refuses to be induced by the suggestive power of the aesthetic phenomenon. If the aesthetic experience lies will within the habitual norms of the participants, of both the originator and the recipients, then the innate "affectiveness" of the aesthetic experience will be detoxified, proportionately reduced and diffused upon the a more general "religious" experience of affiliation. The aesthetic experience can thus become one ceremoniously ritualized by conformity to culturally prescribed norms for the reinforcement of the religious feeling and solidarity, a sense of belongingness to a group, overcoming a sense of aloneness, reinforcing and making seem real the ideology, norms and values of a group, and making seem ideal the limitation of reality from which the aesthetic and religious experience is derived. The aesthetic experience is closely related to the religious experience; a matter I will seek to deal with in later parts of this work.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In functioning akin to the hypnotic spell, the aesthetic experience can be likened to a primarily emotive trance like state of being, affording a temporary escape or release from existential reality, providing a sort of ineffable enrapturement momentarily capturing and fooling the normal, ego rational sensibilities and suspending for the time being the ever present press and stress of the reality of "antinomality" created by the inimical dichotomies of life/death, self/other, nature/culture, mind/body, metaphysical/epistemological, ideal/real, etc. The aesthetic experience is then a vehicle or a means of escape, providing a temporary respite from the inescapable and irreducible human realty of antinomality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">"antinomality is the essentially irreducible quality of our knowledge of the a-priori absolutes of metaphysical truth and epistemological self, of our experience of the relativity of space and time. Antinomality is a background condition of our common human experience of these a-priori absolutes--it creates in our absolutely relative knowledge an irreducible uncertainty of our situation. Antinomality is in a sense a background texture of all of our knowledge of reality. What is meant by antinomality is an unresolvable sort of internal psychic conflict "generated by a proposition that suggest its contradictory (or the domain of its contraries) as strongly as its own affirmation, at the moment of its affirmation. Antinomality creates a shadow of uncertainty enveloping all of our consciousness.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The suggestion is that the power of the aesthetic experience to provide a temporary release, escape, respite and illusive, imaginary resolution of the fundamental antinomality of human reality. Antinomality is an ever present stressful condition of human reality, an apt metaphor summarizing the limitations of that reality, created by the unresolvable dichotomies of metaphysical/epistemological, self/other, mind/body, life/death, nature/culture. This implies that the human being might well need the aesthetic experience, or some experience akin to the aesthetic one, such as the religious experience, the substance induced alternative state of consciousness, the hypnotic trance state, or perhaps a state of temporary psychosis, as an important means of dealing with the unresolvable dilemmas of reality--the self/other, life/death, mind/body, nature/culture, epistemological/metaphysical dichotomies, some thing above and beyond the mere function of providing motivation, meaning, reinforcement of cultural values and ego rational norms which are the prevailing habitual tendencies of probabilistic human behavioral patternings. It is highly problematic whether the human species can survive without such experiences similar to aesthetic transformation and transcendence of antinomality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The aesthetic experience, induced by the power of suggestion of an affective illusion of reality, is a temporary, primarily emotive transformation state, brought about by the synaesthetic tricking of habitual sensibilities and suspension of belief in ego rationality and by providing out of context or alternative versions of reality or alternative frames of reference for reality. The power of suggestion of the aesthetic experience depends foremost on the willfulness to participate and in a strong imagination. The power of suggestion, the affectiveness of the aesthetic phenomenon is dependent upon the suggestibility and susceptibility to suggestion of the aesthetic participants, both the active originator and the passive recipient. If the threshold of suspension of normal credibility and suggestibility is too high, if the audience is unreceptive or not open to the potential aesthetic experience, or if the aesthetic phenomenon itself is too far out of context, too strange or alien to the habitual norms, or if the artist himself cannot become empowered and effectively master the power of suggestion and illusion, then the resultant aesthetic experience will be weak, relatively "ineffectual", comparatively inferior in quality, ameaningful and "unaesthetic". Aesthetic phenomenon provides the illusion of meaning by the selective emphasis of limitations due to the irreducible antinomality of human existence, which in a sense can be juxtaposed, contraposed, reorganized, and repatterned into mutually canceling or reinforcing and aesthetically sensitive and meaningful ways.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">****</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">in consideration of the multidimensional meanings of aesthetics it becomes important to focus upon the "objective" side of the aesthetic phenomenon, distanced somewhat or in a sense divorced from its "subjective" counterpart dealt with in the preceding section. From such a subjective standpoint the individual is to be viewed as the primary agent and principle concern of the aesthetic experience, as the independent, thetical, exclusive experiencer of aesthetic phenomena. The objective viewpoint is more concerned with the inter-subjective contextual perspective which is antithetical, dependent upon the subjective perspective and is inclusive of it. From the relative context of the point of view of the aesthetic participant, regardless of the particular role of performer, originator, or receiver or whatever, the important point of aesthetic meaning is that it is primarily an act or episode of compensation, sublimation, substitution or consolation as something in place or something else. Whether it is compensation for loss or frustration or failure or hard work or personal inadequacy, or sublimation of sexual energy, desire, libido, lust power motivation or substitution for something better or worse, preferable or more detestable, or consolation for insecurity and fear, when looked at from the "objective" point of view this facet of aesthetic meaning can be seen as a reverse sense from the meaning of the previous part concerning art as an illusion and meaning as a power of subjective suggestion. When as illusion art functions as an ego rational symbolic mediator it can be interpreted in a general sense as deification of the real, in the sense of art as substitution, sublimation, compensation or consolation in lieu of some other form it can be construed as being more reification of the ideal. The subjective content of art as suggestion and illusion can be thought of as manifest and to some extent or tacit intent "self evident" to the aesthetic participant, the objective content can be construed as being latent and not so "self evident" as more "other evident" to an outside "etic" participant observer of the aesthetic process. The function of aesthetics from a social functional perspective focuses more generally upon the objective interpretation of the latent content of meaning in terms of contexts of sublimation, compensation, substitution or consolation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Art as something meaningful in place of something more or less meaningful implies that the participant uses the aesthetic experience as a means to some other end, or as an end in lieu of attaining some other desired affective end. The connotation of such a statement is that the aesthetic experience arises out of some kind or form of perceived or felt inadequacy or deficit or perceived indirect frustration. Again the affectiveness of the relative aesthetic experience will be determined primarily by the degree to which it adequately supplants and sufficiently replaces that some other, better or worse alternative. The alternative might not be reality itself, but necessarily the limitations of antinomality which serve as the basis for subjective content, even though these are included in the objective perspective, but even more the frustration, inadequacy, insufficiency and deficits to which the limitations of reality give rise is objectively expressed and conceived, and the alternatives can be ideal, "non-real" figments of a collective imagination, like the aesthetic experience itself. It is an ideal which is directly unrealizable, absolute, perfect only indirectly attainable; realizable made possible, given vitality and reality by means of the aesthetic process itself.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Where art as subjective illusion upon the limitations present in reality itself, art as objective substitution depends not only on realistic limitation but upon the limitations of the aesthetic experience itself to adequately substitute or convey the desired effect. Art as substitution is more a product of collective ideology, habitation or norms of conceptuality and perceptuality than a product of imaginative deviation from such habituated norms of behavior patternings.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The objective aesthetic experience is necessarily not only as an end in itself but is a means to other ends as well. The meaning of aesthetic phenomenon cannot be wholly understood divorced or separated to any appreciable extent from the relative contextuality in which the aesthetic process occurs. Art as a means of interpretation, as interpretation itself and the interpretation of the aesthetic experience is all important to the divination and conceptual comprehension of the latent, sublimative content of aesthetic meaning. The number of relevant interpretations is virtually unlimited, unbounded, and the relative context is in this sense open ended. The aesthetic process then becomes important by providing the limitations and realistic bounds to an otherwise unbounded realm of imaginative possibilities of conception. It becomes possible to rank and order the relative evaluation and importances or comparative relevances of these alternative interpretations by the principles of proximity to the subjective course and similarity in space and time to the aesthetic object.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The question of relevance becomes important to aesthetic meaningfulness as well as the matter of similarity of relative contexts. Art removed from or within a strange unfamiliar context will be poorly interpreted and its latent, objective meaningfulness will be likewise reduced. The paradox is that it will also be simultaneously more difficult for the aesthetic participant to "objectively" interpret his/her own aesthetic experience, divorced from his/her own subjectivity, even though the latent interpretation he/she proffers will be most relevant and meaningful, while the more distanced in relative time and space the participant observer is, the broader and more "objective" the possible framework of interpretation, but also the less aesthetically relevant and meaningful will the interpretation be. It will be objectively, conceptually abstracted and to some extent "alienated" from the immediate meaningful relevancy of the perceptual aesthetic experience--its content reduced.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The question often arises as to whether or not there might be some kind of physical structural unity underlying the aesthetic experience by which the relative contextuality of such phenomenon might be suitably interpreted. If there is such a unity, then what would be the most suitable way of theoretically defining its universal structure? I believe such a definition must be most conveniently set within a framework of a universal human behavioral continuum with the ideal extremes of mind and body, mental and physical, purely passive and active, cognitive and connative, spiritual and material. The implication here is that all human behavior, including aesthetic behavior, may be fit somewhere within these ideal extremes. This continuum must be construed as being dynamic in space and time, as relative, changing. Any specific expression of behavior is contextually relative to the whole continuum. The universal human behavioral continuum provides the relative contextuality for the interpretation of any particular behavior pattern. Due to the principle of holothetic multidimensionality, any behavior possible may be interpreted along the lines of either, cognitive, emotive or physical dimensions, but from an anthropological point of view we are concerned principally with the emotive interpretation as an integration and affective expression of the two ideal extremes. It represents the synthetic, ego rational form of interpretation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Being dynamic, this continuum can be modeled as a spectrum which is crossed in the center perpendicularly by another temporal/spatial continuum with pure time at one extreme and pure space at the other. At the risk of gross over simplification, all aesthetic behavior can be referenced along this continuum. The point is that all aesthetic phenomenon can be interpreted relative to a space/time behavioral continuum. Aesthetic sensibilities are composed of spatial/temporal awareness and the sensory perception of sight and sound are the exclusive modalities of aesthetic sensitivity and experience--forming the rudimentary basis of imagination, being the only sensory channels by which the vicarious illusion of aesthetic imagery is affected. The other sensory modalities being non-abstract, non-vicarious, non-divorcible from the immediate experience, but they serve as alternative subjective modalities for synaesthetic suggestibility which is the basis of illusion and transcendence of temporal/spatial limitations. All five and possibly more sensory modalities can serve as alternative synaesthetic channels for aesthetic experience, but only the temporal/spatial modalities of vision and hearing provide the interpretable objectifiable meaningfulness, the possibility of abstraction, conceptualization, rationalization, hierarchical evaluation and organization of the aesthetic experience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This confinement of aesthetic limitations to the temporal/spatial continuum to the exclusion of other sensory modalities has important implications for the understanding of aesthetic meaning. In the first place the word as metaphor is the principle symbolic mediator of the spatial/temporal continuum; implies that there is a close connection between the "affective" meaningfulness of the word, either spoken or written, and the affective meaningfulness of the aesthetic image, either visual or sonal. While the word is probabilistic, highly abstracted conceptual tool, the aesthetic image is not necessarily so abstract or conceptual, but can be more rudimentary perceptual in nature, more iconographic in representative reflection that symbolic in interpretation. The aesthetic process is closely related to language, and the two overlap within the human behavioral continuum. Along the temporal/spatial aesthetic behavioral continuum language and all possible art forms of language lie somewhere in the middle intermediate region between the extremes of absolute space and time, while "pure" visual and sonal art lie more along the extremes of the continuum. Symbolic interpretation of the aesthetic experience consists of multiple translations of the original subjective meaning in alternative dimensions of temporal, spatial, mental or physical although primarily in terms of symbolic emotive language. Art presents its imagery, its meaning, simultaneously graphically, visually relationally, across space, not time. It is geometric. Music presents its meaning diachronically, in time, and not in space, "algebraically" pardon the expression.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Art reveals the true deep structure of human reality, of experience, that which is modeled from pure percepts without necessarily conceptual associations implied by language. Art is preverbal, pre-rational, pre-logical, intuitive and imaginative, but even concepts are real percepts which can become the foodstuff of aesthetic imagination. This again is the holothetic multidimensionality of aesthetic reality. The deep structure of art provides the pre-logical, intuitive semantic rudiments of meaning for the structure of language. Art is a kind of rudimentary proto-language.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Being similar to language, the structural analysis of art can proceed along lines similar to the structural analysis of language, with a breakdown into its structural components, revealing its semantical meaning and syntactical organization. This can be done in terms of pure sound, sight or in terms of language itself. Being ignorant of music, I will concentrate upon proffering an alternative possibility of structural analysis of the visual arts. What structure does the "visual" language of iconographic aesthetic experience take? It can be said here to be a kind of language, an objective systematic form of pre-rational communication, of affective communication of meaning, which it must certainly be to be culturally relevant and amenable to anthropological interpretation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">I reduce the elements in visual perception down to three extreme absolutes to be modeled as lying upon the vertices of an equilateral triangle and as forming a thetic, antithetic, synthetic, structural dialectic, a hierarchical relationship and as being the basic structural reality of visual art. The first structural element is pure color, and it is to be seen as the basic visual percept, the definer of rudimentary structure in our visual reality. In keeping with the structural dialectics color is to be seen as the thetic, independent and exclusive element. Any picture or visual image can be reduced down to being a matter of different colors. Color connotes the pure perceptuality, the "physicality" of reality. While color can be broken down into a variety of complex color schemes, for the sake of simplicity, I will confine the model to the presence of the three primary reflective colors--red, blue, and yellow. The second structural element is line, represented either as a curve or as a straight angle. This is the antithetical, inclusive, dependent extreme of pure line, representing pure rationality, abstraction, distilled from the outline shapes of color. Between the extremes of color and line is a continuous dimension of shading or color value or intensity of light and dark. The third synthetic integrative vertex is the temporal/spatial dimensionality, representing an ultimately inseparable continuum by which this simple model can be expanded in the shape of a tetrahedron with the ventrices of space and time. The temporal/spatial dimensionality of visual art is the integrative, emotive, changing element expressed in terms of perspective and motion. Between line and the temporal/spatial dimensionality lies continuous degrees of shape or form. All artwork can be systematically analyzed within such a matrix. General categories or types of art might be seen as tending primarily toward one or another of the extremes, as "graphic" pictures dominated by hard angles and straight lines might be indicative of an predominance of an inflexible rationality. All pictures would fall somewhere within such a matrix of visual perceptuality, and would incorporate in some degree most or all of the elements. The relationship between elements and the relative association of meaning they connote might determine the latent content of the aesthetic object, the diverse combination of these elements, their presence or absence, will determine the structural dialectics and the interpretable meaning of any given visual artwork. Primary association of colors, shapes, lines, textures and spatial/temporal dimensionality will determine the manifest content, while secondary associations and relationship between these elements will determine the objective latent content. The question whether there are universally valid associations, a circle always means a sun, the color red always signifies blood, is impossible to answer without a leap of faith in ones conceptual premises. Such association are contextually dependent--relative to the interpretation of the participant observer, varying infinitely between many people.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The close relationship between aesthetic objectivity and language belies yet another affinity between aesthetic experience and religious experience in general. Understanding this relationship reveals the normative aspect of aesthetic meaning and the definition and functional importance of aesthetic ego rationality and aesthetic normality. In a previous section it was implied that the aesthetic transformation experience underlies and is a rudimentary form of the more elaborated religious transformation experience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">I will risk making a conclusive sounding generalization, that art and the aesthetic phenomenon is a cultural, i.e. a symbolic human experience, a so shares a close affinity to the religious phenomenon of myth and ritual in culture, and this inspite of any possible connections to the Levi Strauss's version of structural anthropology. Would it be right to say myth, well founded in objective language, came from objective art, or that art arose out of myth, or again like the hen and the egg, both are inseparably interrelated, arising out of the same primordial reality eons ago in some dark, dark cave. This close affinity between the two areas of religious and aesthetic behavior would be left wanting to bear out a similar association between art and ritual, in as much as myth and ritual are also closely associated, but the preferred stylization and variation of the artistic process would seem inimical to ritualization. Of course we can speak of art forms as being highly ritualized or about ritualized myths, but are we talking then of art or myth per se or rather about artistic ritual and mythic ritualization? I think the latter is a more fitting label. I am not saying that all art is similar to myth, that maybe individuals are not involved in an aesthetic experience upon a mythological matter, but the cultural symbolic meaning of the aesthetic phenomenon is to be meaningfully understood, much less theoretically conceptualized, must be interpreted from a mythical religious context. Would it be to much to say that assuming such a close affinity to be true, in order to understand the symbolic interpretation of objective art, we might look to the more thoroughly developed anthropological area of mythology from which to borrow sound ideas and theories?</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">I would hold one important reservation in the comparison between aesthetics and mythology, and this might be a crucial difference; that while mythology is a fully rational, conceptually full blown, phenomenon, the aesthetic phenomenon remains in a sense a "semi conscious" pre-conceptual or pre-rational phenomenon, and that while myth tends to be exclusively derived from and oriented to the past, art tends to look forwards, or at least away from the direction of the past, in the anticipation of change, or divination. Of course, like the myth, all component pieces are built from the past, and from no other source, but unlike myth, the importance of exact duplication tends to be less sacrosanct in art. The cultural fertility of objective art indeed depends upon for its wealth upon the traditions of the past. In such a structural context, we might interpret aesthetic symbolism in all the diverse forms it has been manifested in all cultures, perhaps from the dawn of civilization.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But have I really said much more that hasn't already been said before. Like myth, the analysis of art can proceed apace with the breakdown into its structural components and like the recurrent themes of a myth, the recurrent themes and symbols between pieces of art in a cultural stylistic series--processural interpretation will reveal the values, significances, symbolic meanings the aesthetic expressions attest to. In a sense myth is a more refined, elaborated, sophisticated process of development than is art. Recurrent themes in art, in time, and in history and across cultural boundaries bring to focus the values of human nature and perhaps reveal a little bit of the basic existential reality of what it means to be human.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The cultural identity of art is achieved if not in out and out conflict with, and then least in contention to, or tension between ritual, or might it be better to say that ritual achieves authentification and cultural meaning in response and reaction to aesthetic experience, and myth emerges as the mediator--the last word so to speak. It might be another way of saying the same old thing. "Primitive" art is a religious phenomenon as well as an aesthetic phenomenon. But one must remember that in "primitive" culture all phenomenon are virtually religious--there are not sharp distinctions between the natural, man-made, the preternatural or supernatural, just as hopefully for the artist there are few such distinctions either. In the process of ritualization, aesthetic phenomena becomes socio religious, a transformation for which myth becomes the ego rational mediator and symbolic interpreter. In a sense, if such a thought were true, then it is logically possible to assert that aesthetics precedes ritual as the thetical, exclusive, independent beginning in a structural dialectic and is perhaps more psychologically rudimentary than antithetical, dependent, inclusive ritual, psychologically deeper rooted, a phenomenon hence more highly varied, the wellspring out of which ritual and in the dialectical process, mythological rationalization emerges. It is probably more accurate to say that with the invention (or discovery) or spontaneous development of the symbol, the embryonic beginnings of philosophy, art, science and religion sprang into being simultaneously, or at least gradually emerged at roughly the same time.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Religious ritualization of aesthetic processes entails a habituation of aesthetic behavior into highly conventionalized, stereotypical patternings and thus becomes the traditionally codified "normality" of the culture. Ritualization entails usually strict conformity and congruence by the individual participant to these aesthetic "norms" while ego rationality in the form of mythical rationalization of aesthetic reality permits a modicum of stylistic variation and freedom necessary for individualized self expression, aesthetic transformation and ego identity in conformity to stylistic conventions. Such a modicum of freedom is necessary for the maintenance and survival of aesthetic vitality and affectiveness. Radical or extreme deviation from such established norms usually is regarded as threatening and disruptive to the moral order and established conventions, indeed to the cultural survival as a whole, and so is often repressed, persecuted, prohibited and prevented from developing.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Mythology serves the function of systematic rationalization for the established ritualization of aesthetic norms and conventions, reflecting in part the aesthetic behavioral norms as well. Stylistic variation is often times a part of myth as much as it is a part of aesthetic expression in a religious context, and serves as a mediator between the divisive tendencies of aesthetic subjectivity and the opposing tendency towards uniformity and conformity of religious ritual. Myth has elements of both aesthetic subjective/objective reality and of religious ritual. Myth is ego rational. The movies, drama, television, books and anthropology all have a common ancestor in the "primitive myth".</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">What is an aesthetic transformation in an individual context becomes a ritualized religious transformation in an objective social context. What were once aesthetic norms and stylistic conventions become through congruence and ritualization ethical norms and conventions of right and wrong behavior, good and bad behavior, rationalized in terms of myth. Ethics is the socialization of subjective/objective aesthetics. Religious ritual is the socialization by conformity and congruence of aesthetic stylization. What is an irreducible condition of antinomality in the aesthetic transformation process becomes by congruence and conformity to habituated, ritualized and highly conventionalized religious norms, a means of dealing with a condition similar to antinomality and this is the condition of limenality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The third irreducible quality of human existence is "limenality". This is a concept borrowed from the ideal of the limenal stage of being "betwixt and between" usually occurring during rites of passage. It connotes a sort of being simultaneously nothing and something, of being "nowhere" and "somewhere" or an identity of "nothingness" or "somethingness" which is a result of our knowledge of metaphysical self by the experience of motion which pervades our life as a single long (or short) passage from birth to death. Like paradoxicality and antinomality limenality creates an unresolvable conflict of uncertainty pervading all our understanding of human existence.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Religion is the foremost expression of cultural values. In as much as aesthetics is a reflection of this cultural reality and an interpretation of these values, aesthetics remains a religiously conventionalized phenomenon. Religion seeks to impose stylistic conventions upon the forms of expression aesthetic processes take in order to reinforce the group solidarity of religious affiliation. Religion taps into the individual subjective source of aesthetic power and energy, and achieves through socially reinforced habituation and ritualization of religious aesthetic conventions a transference of this aesthetic energy from the subjective aesthetic transformation experience, from the psychological realm of the individual aesthetic participant, to the objectified religious transformation experience, to the sociological realm of group religious participation--affecting a "diffusion" as well as an intensification of aesthetic experience from the aesthetic individual to the religious group.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The subjective aesthetic transformation resembles a kind of psychological passage rite similar in structure to the religious rite of passage. Indeed aesthetic transformation in quest of greater meaning and integrity of reality , of higher order ontologic integration of meaning of reality, is a rudimentary basis of the larger scale, more intense, group oriented religious passage rite. The similarity and analogy of the rite of passage for achieving not only aesthetic or religious transformations but other transformation states as well, has important implications for the anthropological theory of aesthetics which I will elaborate in the fourth chapter.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">3.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Aesthetic Stereotypes</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In this chapter I am concerned foremost with the clarification of the nature of stereotypes, prejudice, selective perception, common labels and systematic aesthetic methodologies and ideologies regularly employed in the analysis of aesthetic phenomena cross culturally and recurrent in the scant literature on aesthetic anthropology. My own objective is to demonstrate the conceptual limitations of the "limitations" so to speak, upon which all aesthetic phenomena and experience are predicated, and perhaps to suggest some positive means of transcending such cognitive frames of reference in regard to our improved appreciation of aesthetic anthropology.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">First off, it is important to reiterate that the aesthetic phenomenon in general is to be regarded as nearly a cultural universal as for instance religion, with the paradoxical stipulation that aesthetic experience is simultaneously as universally relative as is possible (or imaginable). It is an intrinsic, inseparable "part" of human culture, an organismic whole, one which cannot be adequately extricated in formal analysis from the understanding of other aspects of culture like language and religion and economy. Furthermore aesthetic phenomena and processes refer to the whole corpus of human aesthetic experiences, subjective and objective, in whatever form in which they are manifested, including music, dance, drama, visual art as well as aesthetic deviation from virtually any human activity including sex, war, crime or science etc. The essential, rationally irreducible aesthetic meaning underlying each and every one of these diverse forms of aesthetic expression is similar to all human beings and yet uniquely different for each individual. Also there exists an especially close relationship between art and religion in general and myth and ritual in particular. Aesthetic behavior and religious behavior are not so much causally related, that one precedes the other as cause and effect but they arose simultaneously with the development of culture and both share in a processural relationship dynamic in space and time.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is a kind of tension between art and ritual arising from a dialectical opposition. Art provides the essential subjective meaning and ritual the objective cultural context, while myth can be viewed as a sort of "ego rational" mediator of that tension in the conceptual, linguistically based, interpretation, derivation, explanation and rationalization. Myth makes art and ritual symbolically real and veritable, culturally significant and personally meaningful. There are no distinct analytical dividing lines separating myth, ritual and art within the universal human behavioral continuum. In this sense the interrelationships between the religious and aesthetic phenomena, personally subjective and culturally objective, must be considered as an organismic whole--from a holistic perspective as manifesting a synergistic-ontological character that is analytically irreducible and which cannot be analytically dichotomized in any way to be comprehensively explained. There is an innate multi-focality of symbolic aesthetic meaning occurring at many different levels of conceptual abstraction. This is the holothetic multidimensionality. What is left is simply a wide ranging penetration beneath the superficial conceptual façade of words and labels and the exploration of the deeper multifaceted meanings of aesthetics.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Religious meaning, a form of ritualistic transformation experience is based upon the transcendence of the limitations of liminality and is derived from and therefore dependent upon aesthetic meaning, which is a subjective personal transformation experience, based upon transcendence of the limitations of antinomality. Aesthetic and religious transformation and meaning is derived from the "out of immediate context" experience of the multi focality or holothetic multidimensionality of symbolically understood and rationalized meaning. Aesthetics is primarily personally meaningful, or subjective, while ritual can be viewed as antithetically <u>ameaningful</u> from an aesthetic point of view--ritual is a kind of temporary suspension of subjective meaning through behavioral compulsivity, rote memorization, perserveration and repetition and reenactment of an acquired and well learned behavior, habitualized conformity to norms and conventions, affecting a kind of subjective/objective transference of meaning, a <u>diffusion</u> of subjective personal aesthetic meaning onto an objective, interpersonal framework. Ritual becomes meaningful simply by its continual reenactment or performance, providing a religious freedom from the aesthetic constraints of subjectivity. The repetitive performances or reenactment of a ritualized behavior pattern allows temporary suspension or blocks aesthetic meaning on a personal level and it becomes a substitute for this meaning--affecting its reincarnation of religious meaning on a transpersonal level, providing the basis of personally subjective and culturally objective <u>integration</u> of ego reality and this integration is dependent primarily upon congruence and conformity of behavior. The synthetic reality of symbols makes seem real the norms and conventions of ego rationality, an integration between self/other, personal/cultural and provides a means of communion and social organization and order. What was once aesthetic meaning becomes when set into a ritualized context transformed into religious meaning. This is another way of saying religious and aesthetic meaning are inseparably interrelated and are on a higher ontological plane of comprehension virtually the same--in terms of the mythical symbolic reality of ego rationality. Aesthetic meaning provide the dynamic content, religious meaning provides the structural context. "Secular" art is an "end in itself" while religious art is principally a "means" to some other end. Religious transformation provides the objective deification of personal subjective meaning and the subjective reification of objective structure and form, aesthetic transformation provides the objective reification of subjective meaning and the subjective deification of objective from and structure. Religion and aesthetics are virtually interdependent and culturally inextricably interrelated.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is a third member of the behavioral troupe, and that is the role of symbolic interpretation, or mythical rationalization or ideological systematization and conceptual abstraction of meaning beyond the mere perceptual imagery or behavioral enactment. This is the synthetic ego rationality (reality) of symbolic meaning transcending and bridging the gulf between aesthetic and religious transformation experiences. This is the higher ontological plane of meaning, derived symbolically from the tension between aesthetic subjectivity and religious objectivity. Rationalization and conceptualization is the anthropological arena of myth and mythologization. Aesthetic anthropology itself is a "high order" form of "scientistic" myth or mythical rationalization. Drama, story telling, plays, movies, books, science, anthropology, these are essentially myths transfusing aesthetic meaning and ritual behavior patternings. The core or key symbol of myth is language. The word as symbolic metaphor is the key constituent element of all forms of myth. Language is the principle mode of conceptual communication, providing the ego rational, transcendent symbolic reality by which we can symbolically interpret and integrate aesthetic meaning.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is possible under the condition of holothetic multidimensionality to carry this synthesis one order further by imagining a tripartite interrelationship between aesthetic meaning, religious meaning, and mythical symbolic meaning with each form serving as the mediator between the opposing tension of the other two forms of meaning. In terms of the behavioral continuum myth can be thought of as a primarily passive, cognitive meaning, aesthetic meaning can be thought of as emotive, feeling, perceptual and religious ritual meaning can be thought of as primarily active, connotative sensori motive behavior. The same behavior can be interpreted and experienced in each of the three modes. But we must look at the whole human behavioral continuum, at all possible behavior patterns, in thought, speech and deed, cognitive, emotive and connotative, of all human beings being relative in space and time. Individuals and cultures can only utilize parts of this whole continuum--it is universal in the sense of incorporating all behaviors of all human beings whether we interpret it as primarily aesthetic in meaning, or as ritual and religious or as ego rational and mythical.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Definition and analysis of aesthetic stereotypes is a "scientistic" exercise in labeling and analytical dichotomization. It is to be viewed in a sense as the "science" of aestheticism. The intent is to hopefully and honestly identify and redefine the stereotypes prevalent in aesthetic comprehension and to therefore reintegrate the analytical boundaries and divisions separating and dividing aesthetic conceptually into some kind of meaningful whole. Much damage has been done in the formal anthropological understanding of aesthetic phenomena by the loose application of ill defined labels and connotative name calling in the name of science.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">First it is important to focus upon the aesthetic aspects of the universal behavioral continuum incorporating all human aesthetic behaviors and experiences, whether passive or active. As I have previously suggested this continuum must be referenced along dual spectrum ranging between subjective/objective, or "self/other", and space/time and passive ideal/active real or conceptual, cognitive, spiritual, rational versus perceptual, behavioral, empirical material or simply mind/body. Any and all aesthetics phenomena, whether song or poetry, dance or drama, or painting or sculpture, can be referenced as lying somewhere within this "aesthetic rationality (reality) matrix". The suggestion is one of an emphasis of dynamic relational continuity of different aesthetic behavior patternings within a relative contextuality of the whole continuum rather than one of analytical dichotomization and emphasis upon discontinuity between different forms of aesthetic behavior, due to rational line drawing and categorization of names and labels and definition of meanings--"art" as distinct and different from music or dance. As with any stereotypes once we employ any kind of aesthetic stereotype in our description and definition of aesthetic behavior we tend too overemphasize the differences in meaning and tend to ignore the similarities. There is a marked tendency that the differences are usually only superficial and often illusory or trivial in importance while the similarities are more often deeper "seated" and of greater theoretical relevancy, even though human stereotyping tends to reverse this against reality. The similarities as well as the differences are then emphasized when considered within the framework of an aesthetic behavioral continuum, rather than being predicated so much upon a deep lying "psychic unity" of humankind, disavowing the connotation of the enormous degree of individual and cultural behavioral variation and deviation and inducing an illusion of scientific exactitude and artificial uniformity of meaning as opposed to "similarity" in aesthetic stereotyping, the universal aesthetic behavior continuum allows a wide, open ended range of differences as well as similarities to be described and adequately explained within one frame of reference--a single universal relative contextuality. The implications of this alternative conceptual model for the theoretical unification of anthropological aesthetics are enormous.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The role of "science" in aesthetics is partially the role of aesthetic criticism and systematization of aesthetic evaluation and interpretation based principally upon the western aesthetic tradition called in academic parlance "art history". Western aestheticism</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">is a highly unconventionalized systematic methodology which is employed for the rational description and analytical evaluation of all aesthetic processes and experiences. It is scientific in its tacit claim to universal empirical and rational validity. Aestheticism in general and aesthetic anthropology included is a form of rational mythologization about aesthetic phenomena, and formal schools of "art criticism" and "art history" are stereotypically systems of rationalization arising in the cultural tradition of occidental western society and represents the exclusive standards of comparison in the world of aesthetic behavior against which all aesthetic phenomena tends to be judged and evaluated. Western aestheticism and aesthetic rationality is paradigmatic in the sense that Thomas Kuhn uses the word paradigm in describing the world of science and scientific behavior. The norms of cumulative everyday aesthetic meaning, suggested portentously by the gradual appearance of anomalies to the regular aesthetic normality. Whether the gradual cumulative evolutionary changes have a greater net influence rather than the periodic and infrequent, but decisive and direct revolutions, is an important unanswered question. I believe it is important to realize that the concept of decisive radical revolution is a characteristic peculiar to the western historical tradition, including art history, and may be indicative of a fundamental bias in or understanding of the development and evolution of aesthetics. Anyway there is a marked overriding tendency to think of all aesthetic phenomena primarily, mostly and almost exclusively in terms of the western aesthetic tradition and this tendency is almost overwhelming in the realm of aesthetic phenomena. Indeed the aesthetic tradition of western civilization is remarkably rich and sophisticated, but the aesthetic phenomena subsumed under this one general tradition is essentially of a single common historical lineage and heritage, a family tree of interrelated cultures sharing common ancestors--the European cultures and essentially is exclusive of the often equally rich and sophisticated aesthetic traditions of the many diverse cultural traditions and heritage of Africa, Australia, Oceania, the Americas and the Arctic. The aesthetic norms and conventions prevailing in "Western" aesthetic tradition and composing the corpus of aestheticism and aesthetic criticism, are not necessarily the same norms and conventions in other cultures at other times and places. It is a mistake to arbitrarily superimpose the aesthetic conventions of western civilization upon the aesthetic phenomena arising in other cultural contexts. The distinguishing and remarkable characteristic of western aestheticism is the degree of its rational "scientism" something almost unique and distinct from most other aesthetic traditions, which haven't been so divorced from magico-religious contexts. What is merely one ideological system of interpretation is becoming by virtue of the strong imperialistic and colonial traditions of western civilization, an "overpowering" force for the influence and takeover of "weaker" aesthetic traditions. I have read books that have attempted just this--a critical scientistic "analysis" of nonwestern aesthetic phenomena in the terminology of western aesthetic norms and conventions. It is in a sense a reflection of the greater political social and economic reality, by virtue of the political, social, economic domination of the world by western "civilization" we have superimposed a seemingly "world wide transcultural" set of aesthetic norms and conventions derived only from western aesthetic tradition. It is quite dubious that western aestheticism and aesthetic appreciation would have made such a profound impact upon the "nonwestern" aesthetic sensibilities of the majority of humanity if the western imperialistic nations and their cultural colonies had not achieved political, military and economic ascendancy over the rest of the world. Western aestheticism derives its powerful influence from the international politicking of western culture, which seeks global domination. Seen from a "world wide" context, it is easy to mistake the ethnocentric and culture bound scientistic and paradigmatic phenomenon of western aestheticism as being a transcultural, scientifically valid system of rationalization about aesthetic phenomena which is pan human and universal.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But western aestheticism is merely a pseudo-science--one of the systematized description and labeling a-posteriori to the fact of global imperial ascendancy of western culture but not necessarily more rooted a-priori in the empirical reality of human behavior and culture. Aestheticism has become an after the fact reality, a self fulfilling prophecy of purposive human behavior, more similar to the economics of capitalism or the politics of American government than a true "science" of economics or political behavior. It is not a "science" at all in the sense that the natural sciences are founded upon premises of scientific methodology, causality, objectivity, empirical validation and falsification and theoretical parsimony and prediction and control. It is a by product of the influence of logical positivism and empiricism in seeking to ignore semantical connotations and focus exclusively upon structural relationships in the understanding of human behavior. It is rather only an elaborate labeling system of description and rationalization, categorization, analytical dichotomization rooted in the philosophical tradition and with ideological overtones and teleological implications. In fact an honest anthropological survey of "nonwestern" aesthetic norms and conventions tends to bear out the fact that much of what is mistaken to be "scientifically" valid in western aestheticism is not transcultural and is merely the superimposition of western cultural norms and values on nonwestern aesthetic forms. Much of what is regarded as unique and "revolutionary" in the tradition of western aestheticism, for instance "abstraction", "expressionism", "surrealism", have virtually similar equivalent referents not only in nonwestern aesthetic traditions but in earlier "epochs" of western "civilization" as well.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The aesthetic tradition of western civilization has become almost universally the unquestioned standard of comparison against which we evaluate and rationalize upon the meaning of nonwestern aesthetic phenomena. The cross cultural comparison if aesthetic norms and conventions using the criteria of western aestheticism is theoretically highly untenable. Aesthetic phenomena are just not readily transferable and comparable beyond cultural boundaries, removed and distanced from the crucial cultural context from which aesthetic phenomena originally arises. We have erroneously elevated western aestheticism as a transcendent and "non-ethnocentric" or "transcultural" or "pan human" "universal" and have inadvertently evaluated and assessed and ranked in a great systematic "chain of order" all other aesthetic traditions as to degree of similarity and dissimilarity, distance or proximity to western aesthetic phenomena, and being therefore unable to avoid the prejudicial connotations of good are as being more like western aesthetic ideals and poor art as being different. There is at work here an in group/out group prejudice in which familiar western aesthetic phenomena is highly regarded as valuable and indicative of a qualitative superiority of the western self--reflected in our tendency to view the historical forces of aesthetic change in highly individualized ways--as opposed to all other "nonwestern" aesthetic phenomena which is regarded as strange, unfamiliar, worthless and reflective of a qualitative inferiority of the nonwestern other--stereotyped by our tendency to view nonwestern aestheticism as non-dynamic, unchanging, culture bound static and unindividuated, expressing a strong latent influence of primordial instincts and base desires. It is rather like our lack of appreciation in the individual appearances of people of foreign cultures which makes stereotypes seem so vividly accurate--if you've seen one, you've seen them all, while when we regard our own people all we tend to view are the individual differences in appearances. We also project our prejudices of being unchanging and culture bound, and unindividual, traits of our stereotypical prejudices which we deem unacceptable and incongruent to social order and security, upon the faceless, unappealing masses of the nonwestern other.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Cross cultural comparison is similar to the common practice of comparing art cross personally or socially, as being better or worse, more or less aesthetic than another's, with the unavoidable implicit presumption that such comparisons are founded upon some secret "psychic" unity of mankind. The art arising from the individuality and from the differing personal contexts is not readily or easily comparable to others as we would like to think it ought to be or have tried to make it become. It is a form of systematic social classification and cultural ranking and involves a tacit valuation as to better or worse art, with white culture and western aestheticism and its best individual artistic representatives at the apex of the hierarchy, while the nonwhite culture and nonwestern aestheticism and its anonymous culture bound practitions at the base. It is based upon the compelling belief in the necessity for competition, cross personally and cross culturally, for access to scarce and limited resources, a form of social Darwinism, of survival of the fittest, based upon an underlying "just world hypothesis" of the Christian ethic, and becoming an a-posteriori, after the fact of successful demonstration, a self fulfilling prophecy with a set of mutual, reciprocal expectations in the interaction and interrelationship between western "self" and nonwestern "other". Our cross cultural appreciation of other peoples aestheticism is still today heavily saddled by the enormous burden ethnocentric and culture bound prejudices of western aestheticism. The relatively recent western aesthetic awareness and appreciation of nonwestern aesthetic phenomena represents a "borrowing" out of original cultural context the forms and images of nonwestern art, divorced and alienated from the original aesthetic and religious meaning. This is not nonwestern art per se but the westernization of nonwestern art, accepting it into the western tradition divorced and distanced from its original cultural context. This is a kind of reverse acculturation process but is still only a minor counter current and heavily dominated by the major tides of power which threaten to destroy forever nonwestern aesthetic traditions.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is a central core problem for the "authentic" aesthetic anthropologist to cope with and to "rationalize away" this western aesthetic ethnocentrism and culture bias. This is a dilemma of western ethnocentrism which is in a very real sense ultimately unavoidable and yet one which any "self and other" aware authentic anthropologists who are honest and open minded must seek to minimize and somehow overcome in their comparative wholistic and hopefully transcendent understanding of cultural aestheticism, both nonwestern and western. It is virtually impossible to escape completely the chains of one's own original cultural context. Emancipation and transcendence from culture bounds, biases, ignorance, prejudice, and pride is only relatively attainable by both a distancing and divorcing of oneself and one's lifestyle from the everyday life, the normal behavioral patterns, the socio economic incentives and rewards, the values and impulses of one's own culture, escaping from its aesthetic norms and conventions, and becoming in a sense a liminal, marginal, social pariah, outcast and outside looking "objectively" inward, peripheral to the mainstream and major currents of the day, and by the immersion as much as possible in the cultural forms and norms of other people in other places and times. While bound by western aestheticism, it is virtually impossible for the western self to conceive of the nonwestern "other" as an aesthetic "self" or to conceive of the western "self" as an aesthetic "other" in nonwestern eyes, except by becoming relatively that nonwestern self by emic immersion, incorporation and behavioral reintegration into the cultural norms and values of that nonwestern other, but then the scientistic "objectivity" of a distanced rational "etic" approach must than be forsaken, a proposition which seems quite unacceptable to many western anthropologists. The result seems to be a state of anthropological liminality between cultures, neither fully a part of any culture, nor fully objective or subjective, etic or emic in understanding the culture of self and other, a confusion between self and other, western and nonwestern, and a kind of anthropological anomie. This anthropological liminality can be both advantageous as a path to revitalization of anthropological theory or disadvantageous as a pathway to greater anthropological "epistemopathology". It can be a means of transcendence and power in culture brokerage and integration or a means of descent into darkness and "banality". This is the major obstacle confronting the rise of aesthetic anthropology into its own identity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In setting up as a standard of reference western aestheticism as qualitatively superior art, we have unwittingly developed a stereotype of all that is aesthetically acceptable, and we have simultaneously erected a dividing line separating this from all that is considered aesthetically undesirable or unpleasing. As western culture gradually and rapidly assimilates, syncretizes, diffuses and destroys forever nonwestern aesthetic traditions through imperialistic exploitation and colonial acculturation, we replace the resultant aesthetic vacuum with nothingness or with cheap out of context, counterfeit western aesthetic norms of inferior status and meaningfulness. "Nonwestern" aestheticism becomes an opposing antithetical "negative" realm upon which all that is unacceptable by western standards is projected upon the aesthetic phenomena of nonwestern people. The aesthetic experience of nonwestern people is seen as empty, meaningless, dead, dry and void and dull and valueless. In as much as both "western" and "nonwestern" are merely stereotypical labels representing at best a single in group/out group prejudice of faithful rational commitment and adherence and conformity to a single ill defined aesthetic ideology of western aestheticism, art criticism, and art history, neither are adequate labels for the understanding of any art, even western as well as nonwestern, but only for the understanding of the scientistic ideology of aestheticism and aesthetic prejudice itself. But this is theoretically the major analytical dichotomization of aesthetic reality prevalent in all aesthetic literature. There is as much diversity and deviation from the norms within western "civilization" which when closely scrutinize in actuality consists of a whole plethora of diverse, culturally distinctive and separating incomparable aesthetic phenomena. It is as nondescript to call "western" as a catchall the diverse and different aesthetic traditions of a whole cluster of European cultures as it is to call nonwestern all non European cultures, without distinguishing Russian from German or French or Croatian from Slavic as distinguishing Kwatiutl from Yamomama or Yoruba or Asmat. There is in empirical reality no such thing as "western" versus "nonwestern" art, such labels are merely synthetically contrived catch all stereotypes or summarizing metaphors for easy, rationally simplistic and reductive, closed minded systematization and ideological organization by which to rationalize in group/out group prejudice. In anthropological rejection of and reaction to the "western" stereotype we have committed unwittingly as big a mistake as adherence to such a stereotype--it has become a form of "ameaningful" negative stereotype, a nonreal negative standard of reference by which we romantically idealize and reverse the order of superiority between nonwestern/western aestheticism. Western/nonwestern aestheticism is merely a convenient but unrealistic myth contrived to maintain class barriers and cultural boundaries and to justify the continuing domination and exploitation and extermination of the "nonwestern" other by the "western self".</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Nevertheless there is in this fundamental western/nonwestern dichotomization of aesthetic phenomena two essential differentiating characteristic prejudices--there are that western aestheticism is rational, while nonwestern aestheticism is in some way or some how something other than rational, irrational, non-rational, pre-rational, or pre-logical. The mute and silent, illiterate, illogical, and insensible other is reflected in his aesthetic insensitivity and incapacity. The presumption of this applied aesthetic irrationality and insensibility if the nonwestern other is a rationalization, again in support of western cultural ascendancy and dominion, that the nonwestern other is in that way less aesthetically pleasing, uglier, and somehow inferior to the western self. The second common prejudice upon which this western/nonwestern stereotype is explicated is that western aestheticism is superior in that it transcends its cultural boundaries through a stress on the self and on individuality and revolutionary freedom, while nonwestern aestheticism is tightly culture bound and more conventionalized, ritually stylized, anonymous, culturally determined, fossilized, archaic other--impressive rather than self expressive. The nonwestern aesthetic freedom is seen as strictly and rigidly controlled, to the point of a lack of willpower and self determination, by religious context. The logical inference is that nonwestern art is automatic, unimaginative, aesthetically unmeaningful, and aesthetically absent or devoid of any real content, except the most base, instinctual, animalistic and animistic while western aestheticism is all powerful, religious as opposed to brutish or crude, authentic as opposed to copied or unoriginal, genuine, meaningful as opposed to counterfeit, unvital and therefore dead. Western art is seen as progressive, vital, strong--nonwestern art as regressive, dead, fossilized.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is a third presumed prejudice upon which the western/nonwestern aesthetic stereotype is founded, and this is the notion of "primitiveness" of "primitive art" which is the most common anthropological rubric for the definition of nonwestern art. It is the notion that nonwestern art is fossilized, prehistoric, non-literate and static, undynamic, stagnant, regressive, maladaptive and unhealthy while western art is dynamic, progressive, evolutionary, changing, alive rather than dead. I do not discredit the idea of cultural evolution, growth and sophistication; the idea of "civilization", but I do not think such evolution is a typically or exclusively western phenomena. Civilization is not necessarily synonymous with western culture and western culture is not necessarily the epitomy of "civilization". The concept of civilization as an evolutionary growth and "progression" through successive stages is meta cultural and pan human. Our art in many ways is as unsophisticated, barbaric, unchanging and maladaptive as the art of the primitive nonwestern other can be. Cultural evolutionary development tends to be divisive and divergent as well as diffusive and convergent, proceeding simultaneously along several possible pathways. I do grant that aesthetic processes under the complexity of technical and technological application than comparatively unsophisticated nonwestern aesthetic processes, but this is too much of a materialistic and mechanistic an explanation of "civilization" to explain aesthetic evolution and development. This technical scientific aspect of aesthetic production, akin to defining the aesthetic phenomena as wholly a product of skill and skillful performance without affective transformation, is not the only or the first or best ingredient in the determination of aesthetic civilization. It can be as alienating and ecologically disruptive and evolutionary maladaptive as it can be "aesthetically" affective or sophisticated. Nor can we judge the level of civilization exclusively upon aesthetic criteria or technological criteria. Evolution of culture and the development of civilization is not necessarily stage dependent and therefore analytically discontinuous, but it can be as much continual, cumulative, gradual and processural, as causal deterministic, decisive, revolutionary and stagial. I propose the general rule that most cultures probably evolve aesthetically at similar rates and revolutionary shifts of the aesthetic paradigm are the rare exception rather than the rule, as dependent upon appropriate environmental influences and chance happen stances as upon free will and self determination or upon divine will and fate.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">All three basic prejudices underlying the western/nonwestern stereotype are both common to anthropological literature and dead wrong. It does not take very much savvy or investigation to realize the tremendous inadequacy of such labels in describing the tremendous aesthetic sensitivity, imagination, power, meaningfulness, individuality, rationality, vitality, and adaptability of the aesthetic nonwestern "other" or of the art of any peoples and culture. Within context of his own aesthetic norms and conventions the nonwestern artist is every bit as rational and as individually vital as is the western artist. The paradox is that the degree to which we ignore variations and remain culturally entrenched in our aesthetic values and ignore and are unfamiliar with "nonwestern" art and unaccustomed and unattuned to nonwestern sensibilities, but then we really don't need to be if we believe unquestionably in the prejudices and stereotypes of western aesthetic ideology--in the aesthetic inequality between western self-nonwestern other. Much of what falls under the rubric of individuality, originality, creativity, in western aestheticism is actually minor, often perverse variation of the poorly defined norms and conventions of our own aesthetic preferences and prejudices. Western aestheticism has been every bit as culture bound and as irrational and maladaptive as has been nonwestern aesthetic phenomena. The paradox is that probably the nonwestern "other", ignorant of western values and norms is probably thinking the same prejudiced things when he views western art. The message of aesthetic anthropology is foremost one of aesthetic equality and aesthetic appreciation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Strict application of western aestheticism to nonwestern aesthetic phenomena is analogous to the application and proselytization of the missionary Christian religion on the cultures of nonwestern people. It becomes the universal, the absolute, the highest, the truest, the one and only by virtually overwhelming cultural power, sustaining and promoting itself by mythological rationalization and self legitimization and self validation--a self fulfilling prophecy. But this is not the same thins as saying that western religion (or aestheticism) does not share similar, pan human and transcultural religious and aesthetic values and norms with all other religious and aesthetic systems of behavior, transcending personal prejudices and cultural biases, and that these facets of religion and aestheticism cannot be extricated and explicated and distinguished from culture specific limitations and ideological prejudices. There is an underlying behavioral unity of aesthetic phenomena pan culturally which can be found in any and every aesthetic cultural tradition and which when theoretically derived and distilled and defined, might serve as a proper humanistic "scientific" comprehension of the meaning of aesthetics. Exactly what universal aspects of aesthetics composes this theoretically comprehensive definition of aesthetics remains to be resolved, but it is certain that western aesthetics does not have an advantage or a corner in the undertaking of this understanding--at best it merely hints in a possible direction we might want to take. Such understanding is to be achieved only by going outside of our own cultural rationality transcending the western/nonwestern dichotomy by studying as much as possible the western other and the nonwestern self. Only by such an honest anthropological endeavor can we hope to gain such transcendent wisdom about the multifaceted meanings of pan human aesthetic reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">****</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The purpose of this second section is to examine the power if the stereotypical pejorative of "primitive" which anthropological literature has commonly, loosely and mistakenly applied to nonwestern aesthetic phenomena. Indeed "primitive" is a commonly recurrent label found in the titles of many aesthetic anthropology texts. So beyond the manifest justifications proffered for the use of such a label, what might be some of the latent reasons and meanings implied by such use in western texts. What it is like to have oneself and one's culture and one's art to be described by professionals as "primitive". As is suggested by literature about labeling theory such names help to cognitively and behaviorally maintain boundaries and elevate thresholds for crossing boundaries between peoples, hindering communication. It seems then that such a label does more harm than good in channeling and preventing flow of information across boundaries, if free flow of information is to be regarded as a positive asset to "openness" and "objectivity" upon which comprehension is predicated. If it is harmful, then why do we continue to use such a label as "primitive"? Sometimes it is justified as being the most appropriate summarizing metaphor for the naming of the aesthetic behavior of nonwestern peoples. But what then are the symbolic connotations which such a metaphor suggests? I suggest the possibility that once blessed with such a stereotype it becomes extremely difficult to break free from the vicious cycle it entails. And such seems to be the case for "primitive" nonwestern aestheticism as it spiral downwards to virtual extinction and as western aestheticism spirals upwardly to manifest destiny and white divinity. Furthermore, I hope to convincingly suggest that our aesthetic stereotypes and prejudices are not only mistaken but are indeed harmful, setting in motion murderous behavioral feedback cycles which have degraded, deteriorated and destroyed the aesthetic sensibilities and potentialities of the "primitive" nonwestern other. It is not merely desirable that we strive to dispel such prejudices but we are morally compelled to do so, for the sake of humanity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In the first case it is important to examine such "primitive" art from the context of change. Throughout the world art labeled as primitive has been and continues to be in a dramatic state of flux; a movement of almost revolutionary significance, likened to a major aesthetic paradigm shift, if it weren't the case that most such changes have been for the worse rather than for evolutionary aesthetic advancement, and that major cause of such dramatic change were internal adjustments of the traditional cultures rather than the overwhelming acculturation pressures of the predominating western aesthetic paradigm. Indeed, true to form, primitive art seems on the verge of expiration, rather than revitalization.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">First of all the aesthetic potentialities of many peoples have been shorn of the traditional aesthetic and religious cultural context and aesthetic requires for evolutionary development and flourishing. This has been accomplished primarily by the imperialistic ascendancy and domination of the world by western "civilization". Some instances there was a hearty resistance and defeat followed by slaughter or surrender to colonial segregation and colonization, an enforced disappearance of the valuable cultural context or a gradually induced erosion of values and deterioration of aesthetic and religious norms. Western explorers, scientists, soldiers, colonists, ambassadors, missionaries, traders, and businessmen and tourists have adequately corrupted and impoverished the original untainted cultural ecology and fatally disrupted the traditional continuity necessary for aesthetic evolution. But it sometimes seems easier to destroy and undermine a culture with moral impunity and self righteousness then to destroy a people without raising cried of moral indignation. Entire people, stripped of cultural continuity and contextuality, impoverished and destitute, have either futilely resisted, surrendered abjectly or else perished. The power of acculturation of "primitive" people by the predominating western civilization has lead to the demise of their aesthetic traditions and a deterioration of their aesthetic sensibilities. But unless destroyed utterly, living people do not exist for long in a vacuum without making some kind of adaptive response for survival and perpetuation of their way of life. Often disparate and desperate and destitute survivors have attempted to respond in any way they know how. Of course the case for western civilization can be made, as it most often is, that acculturation of nonwestern peoples has been if not entirely beneficial then at least inevitable. I would rather say that it has not been entirely evil, even though western mankind has always had alternative choices.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Despite the primary prejudice of changelessness and maladaptiveness the rubric of "primitive art" connotes, the aesthetic paradigm of nonwestern cultures subsumed by this label is primarily and most importantly one of dramatic change and adaptation to overwhelming acculturation pressures, enforced by the western aesthetic paradigm. Primitive art has become an <u>art of acculturation</u> of nonwestern peoples. Generally speaking, aesthetic responses to changes due to acculturation pressures serve to mediate between the conflicting values and tension of forms of power between the dominant western civilization and the subordinate and submissive nonwestern culture, to bridge the indeterminable gulf of the present between the glorious but ignominious past and the uncertain but hopeful future, to provide affective models and appropriate frames of reference by which to guide adaptive behavior patterns, to assist resistance or assimilation, to achieve and reinforce personal and cultural integrity and order behavior. The aesthetic response is in many ways similar to the religious response which is understood anthropologically in terms of revitalization movements--whether reactionary, nativistic cargo cults , syncretistic or eventual gradual assimilation. It is therefore appropriate to speak of the "art of acculturation" in terms of aesthetic revitalization movements in response to the superimposition of western "civilization" upon nonwestern cultures, similar in kind and purpose to religious revitalization movements. There has emerged among nonwestern peoples a continuum of identifiable forms which these aesthetic revitalization movement of the "arts of acculturation" have taken and gradually there has emerged a kind of ethnicity continuum within national boundaries in which alternative cultural modes of adaptive behaviors are syncretised and integrated. At one extreme of these aesthetic revitalization movements are the dead and dying aesthetic traditions, which, if not carried off by treasure hunters and well meaning archaeologists and anthropologists and art collectors to be entombed in some foreign museum or gallery or else is destroyed by the convulsive self destructive rampages of some nativistic movements, then most of it has become buried in nationalist museums or private galleries and homes--dead artifacts of a forgotten past to be somehow remembered, old beginnings of a new national tradition. Then there are the corrupted, highly stylized, unvital and lifeless "tourist" or "airport" art, arising out of severe economic poverty and ecological disruption, which in some ways is the epitomy of "primitive art", conforming in every way to the western tourists preconceived stereotypes of what "primitive" art is supposed to look like, unrefined, unmeaningful, exotic, irrational, bond by stylistic conventions, the empty counterfeit forgeries of a dead tradition and most importantly cheap and inexpensive souvenirs meant to decorate the fireplace. Of course not all traditional art is good by anyone's standards and not all tourist art is necessarily bad, but this does not cure the general aesthetic malady of the arts of acculturation. In many areas tourists art amounts to economic exploitation of the indigenous peoples as well as deterioration of aesthetic norms, conventions and sensibilities among the aesthetic participants. Airport art is "sell out" art. Next there has gradually emerged new, more revitalized arts of assimilation and westernization and tending towards reinforcing the emergence and socio political integration of a new national consciousness and society. Many of these "ethnic arts" are syncretistic, borrowing liberally from both past aesthetic traditions, surrounding environments and the future course of western aestheticism. Folk arts and crafts tend to be reminiscent, quaint, romantic, longing for a return to an old lifestyle, considerably novel and inventive and adaptive. Much is utilitarian in origination, even if only decorative art. Of course a few traditional cultural contexts and aestheticism has survived relatively intact and comparatively unharmed by western acculturation pressures, if only slightly modified to meet heavy market demand, holding out to an insecure and indeterminate future of eventual cultural disintegration and acculturative corruption. Many original, highly individual native artists have been trained with the western tradition of aestheticism to emerge as the leading aesthetic spokesman for new westernized norms of modern nationhood. Other independent individuals have has to break completely with both their own cultures and western influence to formulate a new original personal mythology of aesthetics and to realize new revitalized aesthetic norms and conventions. From all of these aesthetic patterns there gradually emerges a new revitalized aesthetic tradition, usually saddled with the spirit of nationalistic propaganda.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Whatever the course of evolution aesthetic behavior or nonwestern peoples take, whether towards extinction, assimilation, revitalization, nationalization, the predominating theme of "primitive art" has always been and will remain for a long time the theme of westernization of aesthetic norms and conventions--the art of acculturation by the western aesthetic paradigm. The western aesthetic paradigm remains the unchallenged standard against which all other aestheticism, primitive or revitalized, is destined to be compared and evaluated through western eyes. Thus the theme of "primitive art" we must turn to an exploration of aesthetic phenomena as sources of power and symbolic mediators for power, both intraculturally and interculturally.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The stereotype of primitive art is closely related to two other stereotypes which are common the western aesthetic mentality--these are the stereotypes of neurotic and psychoid art and of childlike and childish art. All three stereotypes, the art of the primitive, of the deranged and of the infant share a common prejudice in western aestheticism in the sense that all three are supposed to be similar in form and content, relatable with presumed instinctual origins in the "psychic unity" rooted deep in the limbic system of the inchoate primitive brain, next to the centers of brute emotion, sex and aggression. All three together constitute the antithetical prejudice of western aestheticism, the stereotype of "primitive art" and so are useful in describing and understanding the latent connotations and limitations implied in the usage of the label "primitive art". Primitive art is prehistoric, preliterate, pre-logical, fossilized, dead, static, unchanging and unadaptive. Child art is said to be naïve, innocent, simple, necessitating parental guidance, education and enculturation, pre-conventional, immature and undeveloped. All three stereotypes designate art forms which lie outside of the normal rational order of western aesthetics--the primitive past, the irrational present and the youthful future and as such all three are simultaneously ambivalent sources of disorder and mysterious power. All three forms are commonly thought to exclude a crude spiritual form of power, an emotional and non-rational energy, which is magical and mysterious in nature, but also irrational and unscientific. Underlying these common prejudices about "primitive art" is a source of power which lies beyond the rational conventions and norms of western aestheticism, a power not easily rationalizable by the scientistic western mind, potentially threatening to the established rational order of western civilization and misunderstood source of latent insecurity and fear. The source of power in aesthetics is the source of meaning of aesthetics itself--it is the libido, the life instinct, eros, the will to live, the willpower of the objective participant. It is the spiritual power of life itself. Aesthetics is a form of expression and communication of this power of life. What western aestheticism rejects as primitive art is what its senses at the bottom of its own rational mentality, lying underneath, forever trying to escape, imprisoned and denied by the rational intellect, feared and repressed as being uncivilized and imperfect.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This magical and mysterious power of primitive art is viewed through western eyes as being at best fickle, ephemeral and transitory and at worst as being the source of evil. This stereotype though highly reductionist and oversimplifying of reality is not without a modicum of truth, for it points up a more general similar stereotype found to occur in many nonwestern as well as western cultures, and that is the ambivalent role of the aesthetic practitioner and participant--one that is peripheral to the normal order, liminal, marginal, as well as being the source of power, as mediator of past/future, self/other, life/death, mind/body, ends/means, nature/culture--symbolic mediator of the fundamental conflicts within all cultures. The artist is often characterized as a solitary, if somewhat obscure fellow. This role is not too dissimilar to that of the traditional shaman who is feared and not to be trusted, but who is nonetheless powerful, important, and to be respected. There seems to be a continual tension in ambivalence of the role of the artist as being an noteworthy somebody and a notorious nobody, a lazy useless luxury and a vital necessary adjunct. A stereotype common the artist in many cultures is just such an ambivalent role, marginal, despicable, untrustworthy, of low status but simultaneously admires, respected and sometimes honored. It is possible that such a constant state of ambivalence as symbolic mediator of the fundamental conflicts and dichotomies which beset any culture. This ambivalence about aesthetic power is no doubt why many religions have sought to strictly and rigidly control, restrict, taboo, and sanction all kinds of aesthetic phenomena. The ambivalent role of the artist is in some ways both a reminder of and the very living characterization and a symbolic epiphany of a very basic set of conflicts in each of our lives--between instinct and desire, nature and responsibility, morality, culture, between self interests and others interests, between ends and means, life and death. It is the role expression of a fundamental harkening back to a basic antinomality which is the source of much discontent in our existence. We expect the artist to conform to our stereotypes of him and he does so true to form, even if in rebellion against such aesthetic norms and in order to become successful he learns to behave and become what we expect him to be like. The stereotype of the ambivalent artist is loose enough a label so as to include the most extreme aesthetic deviations. Indeed oftentimes the more exceptionally deviant from established norms the better. The aesthetic experience is ultimately a subjective one, as such it has strong asocial tendencies--powerful tendencies away from social behavior patterns. The artist is first and foremost an individual and each of us are artists to some extent that we cultivate a unique individual style of living. It is a basis of our individuality and or self identity. Affective aesthetic experience depends upon self respect and self esteem--aesthetic appreciation requires respect for others. Often this subjective individualizing role of aesthetic experience and development is at odds with a counter movement towards socialization--competing for the same power and energies and resources and often it is at odds with the prescribed roles, behavior patterns and norms of a culture itself. There is a continual need for culture to channel aesthetic power to its own ends and to restrict and control the potential freedom of its movement. This has important implications which I will discuss in the last section of this chapter.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The power of the primitive art of acculturation which is related to another observable phenomenon--the high positive correlation between periods of aesthetic flourishing and exceptional proliferation of the arts during periods of exceptional military aggression and political domination. The relationship of imperialistic tendencies to the class stratification of a society might partially explain the correspondence between aestheticism and aggression. In part art is a form of substitution and sublimation of sexual and socioeconomic frustration and aggression. Aggression is most likely at times when class boundaries are sharpest and class conflict is most threatening--when the frustrated lower classes begin clamoring for more and the political powers that be find a release valve in foreign conquest. Imperialistic tendencies are seen as an alternative to the reallocation of resources across class boundaries. Aesthetics can serve to reinforce socioeconomic status, class boundaries and its power can be utilized as a form of propaganda in support of imperialism and aggression. Indeed aesthetic appreciation and refinement is often the exclusive privilege and prerogative of the well to do and rich. Art, from body adornment to acting, is a source of social status helping to demarcate class boundaries and contrived systems of social ranking and stratification. Indeed we tend to stereotype the "haves" as the beautiful people. High fashion of the very rich, patronage of the fine arts as opposed to vulgar folk arts are common examples of the status conferring power and class prestige associated with aestheticism. Aesthetics can become part of political ideology in social context instead of the more usual religious context, especially at times when political fanaticism and power motivation runs strong and religious adherence and affiliation motivation is ebbing. The artificial creation and symbolic reinforcement of prestige and class status boundaries might also help explain why many monarchs and imperial powers cultivate a strong aesthetic flourishing in the royal courts and centers of power--perhaps partially to tap directly into and to control the power of aesthetics. Any form of power, aesthetics included, is a double edged sword--it can be as threatening and risky to oneself as enhancing and empowering.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The ambivalent role of the artist belies another stereotypical dichotomization which seem to be more generally prevalent than being just a stereotype of western aestheticism. This is the dichotomization between work and play, business and leisure, utility and frivolity, between aesthetics as a source of power and art as decoration and adornment. Now like any other aesthetic stereotype these extremes are fictional, rather than factual, more contrived to deal with basic internal conflicts and rationalize basic social values--especially socio religious predominance over aestheticism. But it is indicative of a more general prejudice concerning aestheticism--in short it is a prejudice based upon the ends/means dichotomy--decorative art as an end in itself (decoration) and powerful art as the means (power) to some other end (socio religious, socio economic or political). The question of causality and precedence of decorative versus powerful arts is another hen and egg dilemma of a false unresolved dichotomy. It is true to say that the nonfunctional vale of powerful art tends to be latent, but decorative and powerful arts are the same and any aesthetic phenomenon is simultaneously both decorative and powerful, both manifest and latent. Nor is there any necessary dialectical opposition or tension between the two extremes--some kind of inverse ration of relative decorativeness or powerfulness--a negative correlation between two forms. It is only that the ends and means of art may be close together or far apart or one and the same, the ends may be great and the means trivial or the means may be important and the ends desultory.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Thus it can be seen that a deeper prejudice underlying the stereotype of "primitive art", the ambivalent role of the artist and the aesthetic dichotomy between decoration as an end in itself and powerful art as a means to some other end, is merely a reflection of the ways in which a people and their culture have tried to resolve the ever present problem of means versus ends in relation to adaptive change and evolution. Aesthetics as magic has been used as a form of divination in determining prospective and probabilistic outcomes or retrospective and retroactive influence upon the past as present. It is progressive as well as regressive. The question as to how aesthetic phenomena might divine the future, or tap into that mysterious power to control or determine the future, or providing rational systems of understanding such mysterious facets of the power of aesthetics, will be dealt with more thoroughly at the end of the book. It might be that aesthetics perhaps enables a random breakup of habitualized, ritualized but maladaptive behavioral patterns and a reinstitution and revitalization of new alternative and possibly more adaptive behavior patterns. The artist, like the shaman and diviner, might be more in tune with the "non-rational", pre-logical, intuitive, holistic, unconventional elements of reality, able to sense patterns and degrees of order the normal are unaccustomed to, tapping into a higher holistic ontologic energy level, a form of spiritual cosmic consciousness not usually accessible to normal rational consciousness or of greater than normal imaginative faculties, an over active imagination capable of seeing and realizing more new patterns and alternative possibilities, more able to deal with conflicting information or needing more to deal with ambivalencies in living, increasing the probabilistic likelihood of adaptive aesthetic potentialities and augmenting aesthetic power. The artist might induce a self fulfilling prophecy on the part of aesthetic participants, providing alternative frames of reference for the valuation of meaning and the redirection and reorganization of behavior and the reordering and reintegration of personality and culture--encouraging social reinforcement of preferred behavior patterns, making the predicted future come true by willing it and actively creating it.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The aesthetic practitioner presides and affects the aesthetic transformation process. Aesthetic phenomena, always new and varied might help to put and keep the aesthetic participant in tune with certain aspects of an environment bigger than "life" so to speak with supra normal consciousness--super rational, synthetic and holothetic rather than analytic and dichotomic, making the experiences more aware than is normally possible, a heightened state of consciousness, being able to recognize and draw attention to facets of reality normally habitually blocked out or ignored and therefore creating a kind of reverse "déjà vu" type experience--making the participant more amenable and receptive to therefore unlikely changes which were nevertheless always present in the "greater environment" and always possible if one is open to them.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is important to conclude that I believe aesthetic phenomena to be not merely important, or valuable to humanity for the enhancement and embellishment of cultural existence, but even more aesthetic phenomena is an important source of vital willpower in life--which is vitally necessary and crucial to the healthy adaptation to change and not only to cultural evolution but human evolution in general. Aesthetics is a principle mechanism of not only adapting to changes but with helping to determine if not actually divine the future course of events by directing relevant behaviors--a mechanism which cannot be completely foregone without deleterious effects on the evolutionary capabilities and potentialities of culture and humanity. Unless humankind can find an adaptive alternative structure for the organization of culture other than the dialectical interrelationship between aesthetics, religion and mythological rationalization, an extremely unlikely event, the hypothetical elimination of culture itself and portends disastrous consequences for that people. Aestheticism is integral to culture, like religion and cannot be separated from culture without the destructive annihilation of both. Aesthetic experience is the very heart of evolutionary adaptation and survival of humanity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">****</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Important to the understanding of aesthetic stereotypes is the role which "selective perception" plays in our lives. The ultimate limitation of our reality is our own consciousness--in a reality with potentially unlimited amounts of information our awareness is only capable of processing so much information. It is for this reason that I prefer to use reality and rationality interchangeably --for they are virtually one and the same thing--our meaningful experience of existence. Our consciousness structures our reality, and in as much as there exists a capacity for communication of reality between all human beings it makes sense to speak of a "psychic unity of humanity". But at the same time there is no distinguishing our rational structure of reality from reality itself--it is made up of perceptuality. There is only one reality, and if it is rational it is also empirical. The rational/empirical dichotomization is in this sense a false one. I will make one distinction--when I am speaking of rationality I am referring more to the structure of consciousness and when I am speaking of reality I am referring more to the perceptual experience, or content of reality. If there is reality greater than a-priori to our rational experience of it, then it is impossible to know or experience it directly, but can only be inferred indirectly--circumstantially, so to speak, by certain observable phenomena of reality and the truth of these inferences must ultimately become believable by a leap of faith, a behavioral commitment to the will to believe in this "supernatural" reality. Our consciousness, our perceptuality, conceptuality, rationality and behavioral normality, constitutes a complex mechanism for filtering out redundant, or unnecessary or irrelevant or unimportant information, and allowing for a focusing of our limited awareness or conscious attention upon "important" or relevant information. What criteria we se for distinguishing the important and relevant from the unimportant is our rationality and behavioral normality "matrix"--a relative "unconscious" context, requiring willful behavioral commitment to its greater than natural or normal <u>meaningfulness</u>. It is possible to speak of a "consciousness filter" of our rationality or rational reality. The manner in which this filter is structures and organized is the way our behavioral reality is structured and organized, and though not exactly the same for all humans, it is probably similar, presuming the possibility of universal communication between all human beings.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is an obvious point to say that aesthetic experience, a product of our active awareness, is a byproduct of this filtration of data and focusing of attention about rational reality, with aesthetic sensibilities functioning automatically as a kind of "selective perception" of reality, with aesthetic experience a kind of attentive focusing of rationality. But it is important to further assert that aesthetic awareness and attention constitutes a whole way of viewing reality, one that is all pervasive and multidimensional and multifocal. In other words aesthetic perception is the most basic, most natural manner of viewing rational reality, our aesthetic rationality constituting the most common and natural structure our consciousness takes. Aesthetic sensibilities probably constitutes a "whole" way of viewing reality--or experiencing behavioral rationality--consisting the bulk of conscious awareness and attention, even when we are not actively involved or attuned to such aesthetic comprehension. We tend to take aesthetic comprehension more or less for granted--as unquestionably self evident. Aesthetic awareness constitutes a wholistic and natural form of selective perception and focused attention of rational reality, and occurs within as "unconscious" framework or relative context of aesthetic normality matrix, composed of a tacit aesthetic behavioral paradigm or rational aestheticism. We might speak of an aesthetic rationality matrix, part of a larger rationality matrix, which composed the theoretical and ideological dimensions of our reality and functions as a "universal" or absolute frame of reference against which we identify our aesthetic meanings and vales and achieve personal and cultural identity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The idea of "selective perception" is central to an understanding of the theory of prejudicial behavior, as a form of maintaining and asserting power across a differential gradient between distanced and demarcated social boundaries and groups--a way of raising or lowering behavioral thresholds for controlling the flow of information and hence power between people. Aesthetic paradigms in general function as forms of ideological systems of rationalization about reality. Aesthetic rational reality constitutes a subtle and sublime yet powerful yet powerful and all pervasive form of aesthetic behavioral and rational prejudice. This is speaking primarily about "powerful art". The idea is that aesthetic behavior constitutes a subtle kind of "seemingly natural" prejudicial ordering of reality into preferred aesthetic patterns of perception, conception, rationalization and behavioral normalization. Aesthetic prejudices can serve the socio religious and political and economic functions of "power" by maintaining the status quo between groups of people, reinforcing in group-out group boundaries, class hierarchy and social stratification, of limiting behavioral interaction and controlling the differential flow of power between people and cultural groups. Aesthetic reality constitutes the synthetic reification and concrete affirmation (concretization) of or aesthetic behavioral prejudices. It becomes the real perceptuality of our idealistic rationality. It is rational and ideological prejudice realized and concretized in our perceptuality. In a very real way our aesthetic rationality structures and determined the way we see and experience reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Much consideration has been given to the negative aspects of selective attention, perception , behavioral prejudice and aesthetic rationalization. But it must be recognized that the limitations of consciousness are unavoidable and in fact are necessary and beneficial because they provide the basis for the aesthetic transformation experience, predicated upon transcending limitations in reality. Without the limitations of conscious rational reality there would be no aesthetic reality. Conscious limits are necessary to define and channelize an otherwise overwhelming flood of conflicting and confusing information. It is important in this regard to consider the usefulness of behavioral habituation or aesthetic habitation, as a kind of substitute for instinct, as a manner of releasing or keeping free "psychic" and behavioral energies from the mundane "mindlessness" and "thoughtless" activities, of simplifying the complexity of or day to day ordinary lives in order to deal with the many problems of life in an efficient, systematic manner. We have a tremendous capacity for acquiring habits for dealing with the complex currents of day to day existence. Such habits can be good or bad; aesthetic habituation and routinization included. Closely related to aesthetic habituation and routinization of behavior is aesthetic ritualization and this refers to the imposing of unchanging repetitive and perseverative behavior patterns as a way of dealing with stress. Closely related also are aesthetic rationalization and aesthetic normalization of behavior. Aesthetic normality is the principle means by which we gain personal (and cultural) identity, achieved through recognition of differences and variation. It is cultural superimposition of norms and conventions defining acceptable forms of aesthetic behavior. Or cultural reality is replete with aesthetic norms. The dichotomizing analytical lines of aesthetic rationality demarcate the limits or boundaries of aesthetic behavioral normality--helping us to judge and evaluate the relevancy and importance of aesthetic behavior. Selective aesthetic perception and attention, aesthetic habituation, routinization, ritualization, rationalization and normalization constitutes the behavioral limitations and prejudices of aesthetic behavioral reality and explains the many common aesthetic stereotypes which compose our lives.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">To speak about aesthetic stereotypes and prejudice is to speak about relative degrees of open or closed-mindedness. There is no better indicator of the extent and limits of an individual's prejudice and open-mindedness, of his/her rationality, than in the capacity or incapacity to participate genuinely and wholistically and to authentically appreciate (i.e. the ability to have and sustain an aesthetic transformation experience) by engaging in aesthetic phenomena which is strange or foreign or different or unconventional by his/her culturally prescribed norms. (To appreciate fully the idiosyncratic individual stylization)? the rate of familiarization with unusual aesthetic phenomena, a capacity acquired after constant and continued self exposure to many diverse multifarious aesthetic phenomena, determines the extent of one's aesthetic reality (rationality). Indeed much of aesthetic appreciation and participation depends upon habitation and familiarization. Aesthetic appreciation and stylization is a remarkable indicator of prejudice and closed-mindedness. Being able to genuinely appreciate different and new aesthetic phenomena is the first sign of an expanding consciousness. In speaking of open versus closed-mindedness, there is an implication of absolute extremes and ideal stages of being-a false open/closed minded dichotomy. It is rather a relative phenomenon and so it is preferable to speak of relative degrees of broad-mindedness versus narrow-mindedness. Aesthetic narrow-mindedness constitutes the extent of aesthetic behavioral prejudice. To aesthetically broaden one's aesthetic horizons or comprehension is virtually the same as expanding and enlarging one's reality (and rationality). To narrow one's aesthetic reality is to restrict one's rational reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The authentic artist exists on the frontier of or reality--of or imagination, or perceptibility, our conceptuality, rationality and normality, seeking always to keep meaningful and to revitalize and infuse meaning in the aesthetic reality which so fundamentally and irreducibly constitutes and organizes our qualitative existence. For most of our aesthetic norms are dictated by our culture and "nature", but the artist creates new norms and expands the meanings of nature. "Pure" and genuine aesthetics is a "natural" way we view reality, structured and unhampered by arbitrary and overly restricting systems of rationality and behavioral normality. It is wholistic and undichotomized as a way of understanding. It is just not an alternative way of seeing and comprehending reality. It is the naturally normal way of knowing reality unbeset by distracting and self limiting alternatives. Aesthetic perceptuality is the unrefined meaningful way in which we structure and organize rational reality, constituting the "psychic" unity of human reality. It is the form of meaning, qualitative in nature, which our reality takes, unabstracted unnaturally into more remote analytical systems of rational dichotomization. All of reality is the food of the aesthetic sensibilities--even rationality itself. Aesthetic sensibility defines the outer most limits of reality and only be expanding and developing these aesthetic sensibilities are we capable of expanding our reality. It is the most basic form of prejudice but it is also the only means of breaking free from the self imposed prejudiced limitations to our reality. Aesthetic creativity involves creation of new meanings of reality, expanding the limits of rationality and reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The concept of meaning is all important to anthropological understanding in general and aesthetic anthropological theory in particular. Meaning is the golden thread of human reality. We need meaning to sustain our existence. Whether illusion or disillusionment we require some kind of meaning in order to survive. A life void of meaning is one void of breath. This need for meaning is a peculiar and remarkable characteristic of the human species, one that I believe he shares with many other life forms. I will discuss more fully the implications and theoretical ramifications of the central concept of meaning in the fourth and final chapter. Here suffice it to say that the concepts of meaning and ameaning is the key to understanding the difference between healthy, good, broad minded natural aesthetic reality and pathological, poor, narrow- minded unnatural aestheticism.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is a common human tendency that the more complex and confusing and conflicting the influx of new information in our existence the greater the stress in coping and filtering and processing this information and the greater the degree of "cognitive dissonance" and the more incapacitated we are for effective, rational normative behavior, and therefore the more we tend to implement and depend upon habitation and systematic routinization, selective perception and prejudice in behavior, in order to block out contradictory and stressful data. Habituation and routinization, ritualization, rationalization and normalization are functional healthy coping mechanisms as long as they serve as a means to achieving aesthetic meaningfulness. But when they become ameaningful substitutes for meaning, patterned unchanging behavior as an end in itself resisting adaptation to change, then it becomes pathological and "irrational" behavior. It becomes a feedback cycle, of growth and broadening of aesthetic capacities or of retardation and restriction of aesthetic self limitations.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is homeostatic in a sense that it tends to be a self controlling system under most regular, normal circumstances. But the more conflicting and confusing the new information becomes, the narrower we need to delimit our rational and normal behavioral systems for dealing with the increased stress and the more in turn incapacitated we become for dealing with more incoming information. The more we narrow our focus of attention, and block out new changed information, the narrower and more restricted our consciousness and rationality and reality becomes. This feedback cycle can be one either negative or positive, one of growth of aesthetic reality or one of atrophy. The more we substitute mindless "ameaningful" custom and convention and norms and habit for conscious purposive rational activity in our lives, the more "ameaningful" our lives can become.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The more we superimpose on our natural aesthetic way of knowing and the more we substitute alternative systems of rationalization (philosophical, scientific and religious) for our rudimentary aesthetic rationality, then the more difficult aesthetic sensibility becomes and the more alienated we become from or own essential "meaningfulness" in our lives. We become out of tune with our own aesthetic capacities, our own needs for aesthetic meaning become lost and confused. The overall effect has been a general kind of aesthetic "anomie" and the amorphousness of aesthetic reality. We have become chronic sufferers of aesthetic derealization and aesthetic depersonalization. We live in an irrational condition of aesthetic dissociation, meaningfulness, divorced, dichotomized, delineated from the common source of aesthetic reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Aesthetic normality for most of our waking lives is based upon culturally prescribed aesthetic norms which we seldom if ever thoroughly identify or understand. Aesthetic normality is a minority experience in most of our lives, even though it is a continual background epiphenomenom for all or experience. Most people only infrequently focus attention directly and exclusively upon aesthetic phenomena. Only a few individuals make the world of aestheticism a central focus of their lives. This is another way of saying that aesthetic normality is only a minor, or minority part of the sum total of most of life experiences. This implies that it is usually "dominated" by other types of experiences, which in fact seem to be case stereotypes which influence the structure and content of aesthetic rationality and normality in context to a greater normality and rationality. Aesthetic stereotypes and generalizations common in our daily lives are seldom if ever questioned. Aesthetic reality is always at the periphery of or "normal" attention, constituting a comprehensive but unnoticed behavioral background. It is too bad we relegate as unimportant or frivolous this "way of seeing" to the background of our indirect attention and normal behaviors, tending to focus instead on a "unaesthetic" subject distinguished from the aesthetic background. The relationships between figure and ground become ignored. The whole subject must be the whole, rather than merely a part of this whole. Indeed this subject/object, figure/ground, in group/out group dichotomization is the structural basis of all our behavioral prejudice, helping us to distinguish the meaningful from the ameaningful, the important from the unimportant.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It becomes important in this regard to recognize the difference between "aesthetic equality" (or equivalency) of aesthetic rationality, as opposed to "aesthetic authority". These alternative ways of ordering our experiences of aesthetic reality, the ways we structure our aesthetic consciousness and comprehension will determine the self imposed limitations, open mindedness versus closed mindedness and the extent and health of our aesthetic behaviors. It is an important concept in considering the power implications of behavioral prejudice and the related egalitarian versus authoritarian character types of the open versus closed minded. I am not speaking of absolute aesthetic equality as opposed to absolute aesthetic authority, but of the relative degrees of each. Equality generally is the tendency to view all aesthetic phenomena and experience as more or less similar, equivalently ranked in powerfulness, while authority is the tendency to view all aesthetic experience as different and hierarchically ranked in powerfulness. Equality of aesthetic experience tends to delight in complexity and diversity between experiences seen as basically similar in relationship, while authority of aesthetic experience tends to superimpose simplicity and uniformity upon experiences which are seen to be fundamentally different.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Aesthetic prejudice is a very special kind of prejudice, because it is honest as opposed to hypocritical, a kind of prejudice which nevertheless often victim of human deceit and hypocrisy. By honesty I am referring to behavioral rationality, a logical order of behavior from the said to the done, from the plan to the action and behavioral harmony between passive thoughts, systems of rationality, emotions and feelings and physical behaviors and actions, being primarily an indicator of behavioral integrity. The capacity and open mindedness of the aesthetic participant is determined in large part by the behavioral honesty of that participant's existence as opposed to the hypocrisy of saying one thing, doing the opposite and thinking about neither. Honesty in this sense is not so much moral rectitude or truthfulness, although this is one part of it, but it is more a matter of behaving how one believes and feels and believing how one behaves. Moreover it requires the capacity to see reality rationally, honestly truthfully, as reality and not merely as an illusion. Underlying this honesty is intuition. By intuition I mean a wholistic behavioral response, a being intune naturally with one's own deepest feelings, a behavioral harmony, as opposed to the aesthetic alienation, derealization and the substitution of ameaningful system and order and activity for meaningful behavior. An animal's behavioral reality is primarily intuitive and aesthetically honest. I think it is impossible for an animal to be behaviorally aesthetically deceitful or dishonest, whereas such dishonesty is often the case with human aestheticism. Dishonesty is the denial of reality, intentionally or implicitly. Why this might be so I will venture to explain in the next section. Animals respond wholly to their reality. Only humans can be divorced and alienated from reality. The aesthetic reality is the animal inside of s that we tend to want to deny. Intuition is not unrational, or non-rational, but incorporates rationality as part of its immediate open response to reality. The animal of the "primitive" art is the animal we hide and repress within ourselves and within or own "art". Honesty involves a trust in one's intuitive faculties and capacities. Intuition is impossible to define analytically. I will define it holothetically as a "wholesome" intunement to one's own subjective experience of reality. One must be open to one's own interests, needs, feelings, fears. Self attunement or intuneness, expanding one's own subjective reality, the prejudicial limitations of rationality, a continual discovery of new capacities, vibes, energies, facets of self identity. Ultimately aesthetic integrity requires self honesty.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Honesty, openness and communication are the primary intrinsic aesthetic criteria by which we evaluate the subjective meaningfulness of aesthetic experience and by which we judge the integrity of aesthetic behavior. This behavioral integrity becomes "self expressed"--an intrinsic subjective quality of any aesthetic phenomena. This explains why it is so difficult to say exactly why one aesthetic piece is exceptionally meaningful or moving, except by an intuitive acknowledgment of the ineffable integrity inherent in the "whole" work. These are the only intrinsic criteria for the evaluation of aesthetic phenomena, all other criteria a "a-posteriori" to the primal aesthetic experience and extrinsically applied in relationship to its functional powerfulness. But if this is so then how can we compare and contrast the aesthetic merits of different artists in other bit some kind of socio cultural context, as being inherently more meaningful, besides what we arbitrarily attribute to it, except in such a grossly indeterminate and unanalytical way as intuition. Such nomothetic comparison of aesthetic experiences is akin to the comparison of intrinsic merits of individual personalities as being in some way unequal or unequivalent, as being ranked as superior or better and inferior or worse. Are all people normally aesthetically (naturally) equal or equivalent, instead of being aesthetically superior or inferior? If so, then the differences between the beautiful people and the ugly people are more artificial then genuine, more arbitrarily contrived than genuinely natural.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">I don't think an intrinsically derived form of aesthetic criticism can be rationally systematized easily for all or the select few to easily use to rank aesthetic phenomena authoritatively instead of equivalently. There is a general vague skill, experience of the aesthetic performer and evaluator, requiring an intuneness to its inherent qualities, or meaningful integral messages, which must be fathomed, related individually described subjectively and interpreted wholistically, intuitively, idiographically instead of nomothetically without nomothetic comparisons to other aesthetic phenomena.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The degree of one's self identification, aesthetic behavioral integrity, individuality, self awareness and attunement, will determine the scope and unique original stylization of one's own aesthetic behavior, the prejudicial limitations of one's own aesthetic reality, the ultimate meaningfulness and quality of response to aesthetic phenomena and "openness", honesty and equality of one's own aesthetic experience, as well as providing the basis for relating to and communicating aesthetically with others. The degree of aesthetic intuneness to oneself determines the degree of aesthetic openness to another--employing a pan human transcultural form of intuitive symbolism transcending culturally defined modes of communication. Aesthetic appreciation and communication is a kind of sympathic or sympathetic or compassionate or empathetic intuneness and attunement of vibes, or energies between self and other, a giving and receiving of feelings, intuitions and rationalities between people. Aesthetic attunement and appreciation constitutes the best way of understanding self and other. Aesthetics functions as a form of personal and cultural identity, helping to bridge the gap between subjective/objective, integrating personally and culturally self and other. Ability or capacity to appreciate aesthetic differences determined by relative open or closed mindedness and behavioral prejudices.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">****</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In human behavior the problem of aesthetics is closely related to the problem of ethics. At a very early age in life, there occurs a general association, and perhaps interchange, between what is construed as aesthetically good and what is to be considered ethically pleasing. It is no wonder that our aesthetic stereotypes are replete with images of evil as ugly repulsive beings and images of right always seem to be the epitomy of beauty. Such stereotyping is too repetitive throughout many cultures for such a close affinity to be explained merely as a happenstance occurrence of human behavior. On the other hand enough exceptions to the rule occur to rule out the possibility that such a close association is to be seen as indicative as part of the innate structure of human nature. An explanation lies in the processes of enculturation and socialization and what is effected is a form of transference of power in human behavior from an aesthetic form of power expressed in aesthetic behavioral prejudice to a religious form of power expressed in religious behavioral prejudice. It is my contention that religion derives its source of power from the conversion of the power of the aesthetic transformation experience through the process of authoritarian socialization and enculturation by the ameaningful suspension of aesthetic pleasure through the imposition and reinforcement of repetitive social behavior patterns in the form of habituation, routinization, ritualization, conventionalization, rationalization and normalization. The implication is that socialization and religious experience in general seems somewhat antithetical and inimical to aesthetic experience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This conclusion seems to be more than adequately born out by empirical experience and evidence as the majority of humanity seem so well socialized in their behavior as to be for all intents and purpose of sync or out of tune with their own aesthetic experiences. People learn early in life to seek religious meaning through social interaction rather than aesthetic meaning by turning inwardly to attune themselves to their own aesthetic sensibilities. People become accustomed to being told by authoritative others what is beautiful and ugly, usually with an ethical connotation of right and wrong behavior attached. Their aesthetic standards become dictated by socio religious norms of their culture to the exclusion of their own subjective aesthetic preferences and awareness. Having social relationships becomes their alternative "art form" and their religious transformation experience is the principle means of gaining meaning in life. The aesthetic meaning originally derived from the self as source is turned off through superimposition of socio culturally proscribed behavioral norms, religious systems of ideological rationalization and is projected objectively upon the other as responsive source of religious meaning. They look for in other people what they can only find in themselves and so always come away disappointed and dissatisfied. Religious normality and rationality are not the same things as culturally prescribed aesthetic normality and rationality, though these might justly be called an aesthetic ideology and religion.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The transference of the affective power from the aesthetic transformation to the religious transformation experience through socialization is not necessarily detrimental to the development and power of aesthetic experience, if there could be affected a relative balance between the two forms of manifestation of power. The problem is that such balance between personal integration of the self and cultural integration of the other is very difficult to achieve given the prevailing and predominating authoritarian religious norms of most cultures. It is a very difficult balance to maintain, as there is always a tendency for swinging in favor of one or the other form, the result is such that most people in most cultures find it easier and more functionally rewarding and satisfying to opt for the imbalance in favor of the other in terms of enhancement of meaning through the religious transformation experience rather than in favor of the self in terms of enhancement of aesthetic meaning. Indeed most people are not even given the freedom to make such choices.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Aesthetic reality for most people most of the time becomes background, peripheral and minor source of meaningful satisfaction and power. On the other hand a minority always seem to go to the opposite extreme for ego imbalance in favor of the self. The net result is a seemingly irreconcilable antagonism and rational dichotomization between the two forms of experience--on the one hand personal, primarily subjective, aesthetic integration of the self and on the other hand cultural, primarily objective religious integration of the other. Most people--the generally prevalent behavioral condition of humanity is to turn off the cultivation of their own aesthetic sensibilities, tune themselves out aesthetically, disregarding the view of aesthetic equality. They then fall easy prey for the ameaningful routinization and ritualization activity aesthetically ameaningful as an end in itself but religiously meaningful as the means to some end beyond the self, and they substitute culturally prescribed religious systems of rationalization and normalization of behavior for aesthetic rationality and normality. Under such an authoritative religious pretext, aesthetic rationality and normality becomes the hand maiden and faithful servant of religion. The people become believers and practitioners of "aesthetic authority" and generally narrow and restrict their aesthetic horizons to the culturally normal and conventional. This is such a prevalent condition for most humanity that it is almost tempting to deduce that religious transformation experience is naturally and automatically inimical to aesthetic transformation experience, but we have a normative choice as to which one of the two general directions we wish to direct our behavior and powers.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The seemingly natural religious repression of aesthetic behavior is not born out by the many minority aesthetics who choose the alternative direction. The fact of the matter seems so far best explained by the need for socio cultural reinforcement for religious behavior patterns by the conscious authoritative rational repression of aesthetic awareness simply because of the latent reason that aesthetic behavior is more natural and stronger and dependent upon the derivation of religious power. It works as a taboo against incest might be explained. With a natural weakness of power, the insecure position of religious behavior, felt by many a true believer, has a stronger need than aesthetic behavior to affirm itself by domination and cultural reinforcement. If aesthetic power can be seen as a form of compensation for the limitations of reality, religious power can be seen as a kind of over compensation for even greater limitations of rationality. This is an insecurity that can be testified to by the "mindless" fanaticism of so many religious practitioners. No such "mindlessness" is ever present in aesthetic behavior, except when it has been securely harnessed to the band wagon of some religion. The spin off is that hypothetically aesthetic transformation experiences can evolve independently of religious contexts, but that religious transformation experience cannot evolve independently of the subordination and subjugation of aesthetic experience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The aesthetically turned out, rejected, represses latent potentialities within ourselves becomes directed outward and projected onto others--in as much as others are similar or like ourselves, whose behavior is congruent and conforms to the same set of religious norms and conventions, then they are to be seen as mirror reflections of or own limited self and as aesthetically acceptable as well as religiously appropriate, but if they are members of some out group, if their behavioral rationality and normality deviates or is different to any great extent from our own then they become members of the out group on whom are projected all the rejected and unacceptable repressed possibilities of the self. Western and nonwestern stereotypes. This is the case with the animal like nature of "primitive art". It should be noted that this form of in group/out group dichotomization of rationality is primarily a religious behavioral prejudice and is not inherently an aesthetic prejudice. It is an extrinsic contextual limitation of aesthetic reality. Aesthetic rationality, unalienated, undisassociated from its own nature is innately inimical to such self projection.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Since I have remonstrated about the "intrinsic" criteria of aesthetic evaluation as being intuitive honesty, subjective openness and sympathetic or compassionate communication, it becomes important to discuss the "extrinsic" factors which limit and influence aesthetic behavior. In this regard religious context becomes important as necessary for the cultural flourishing of any aesthetic form. Extrinsic aesthetic criteria of religious context are as capacitating as they can be debilitating to the evolution and development of aesthetic behavior. I am referring specifically to the cultural norms and conventions which are superimposed religiously upon aesthetic expression and communication. What is the point at which an aesthetic transformation experience is to be reinterpreted as a religious transformation experience? What are the fundamental differences between aesthetic rationality and religious rationality? Can we really draw a strict dividing line between aesthetically ordered behavior and ethically ordered behavior, between aesthetic normality and values and religious normality and values? Is there a necessary connection between the two in the structure of rational reality or human behavior or are they causally or processually independent? Aesthetic normality can be said to be independent of religious normality but needs its context for interpretation and communication. The important question becomes to what extent , on what rational premises or context are we to base our "universal" or "transcultural" pan human aestheticism? Is there such a thing as a form of aesthetic experience and aesthetic appreciation which transcends all cultural boundaries and if so what would be the appropriate religious context for such aesthetic forms? Rationality becomes a relative thing, so what are the most appropriate premises for the construction of a truly valid and objective extrinsic aestheticism?</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The extrinsic truth criterion are virtually the same as the intrinsic criterion--namely honesty, openness, and communication. This translates into a transcultural religious context of humanism or the ethical norms of universal human rights--everywhere being violated to some extent and nowhere on earth fully realized or protected. We have in human rights and the ideology of humanism a pan human religious context for rationality and normality for formulating a rudimentary set of "universal" criteria by which to evaluate aesthetic phenomena. What is interpreted in terms of aesthetic equality becomes unacceptable in a world where religious equality reigns supreme and the order of the day is to make religious equality an unpardonable social pariah. The power of religious authority demands the dominance and transference of the power of aesthetic authority. Only when religious equality becomes powerful through religious toleration and open mindedness will aesthetic equality be allowed to be cultivated to any appreciable extent. What then is to be considered out of context art, as intrinsically disharmonious or extrinsically out of religious context--unpowerful art? Aesthetic authority means aesthetic inequality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Behavioral balance of ego rationality for the majority of humanity is a hopeful alternative to the present state of political affairs and the sovereignty of religious prejudice. It can only become a possibility if more people willfully resist the cultural strangle hold of socio religious prejudice and seek to cultivate their own independent and potentially powerful aesthetic sensibilities. Though precarious and difficult to maintain, an optimum behavioral balance between aesthetic and religious forms of transformation experience, resembling rites of passage and revitalization movements, is possible and necessary before a modicum of aesthetic meaning can be restored to human existence and ameaningful religious behaviors rendered unrealistic. The culminating movement toward humanity is not so much a religious revitalization movement as it is an aesthetic revitalization movement.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">4.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Towards an Aesthetic Anthropological Theory</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The intention of this fourth and final chapter is to speculate upon the main themes that have so far been recurrent throughout this work with the suggestion of some kind of bare rudimentary skeletal outline of what a "comprehensive" aesthetic anthropological theory might look like. Any such theory is necessarily "metaphysical" being somewhat removed from the physical reality of aesthetic phenomena in general and dealing instead with the aesthetic paradigm as a form of rational mythology. Any comprehensive anthropological theory encompasses all human aesthetic behavior and behavioral aesthetics, aesthetic rationality and aesthetic reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">What are the limitations of any kind of theory, whether anthropological or some other kind? Is it really possible to construct such a comprehensive theory about human behavioral reality without the over simplification and reductionism which seems to so characterize so many pansophistic "explain all" theories? A theory is only a simplified, limited and imperfect model of behavioral reality which is derived ultimately from the human psyche--from the conscious awareness of rationality. Like any work of art or aesthetic experience which reproduces some facet of reality, all theory suffers severe rational restrictions, but these limitations are also the means of transcendence for any theory--the way of achieving some modicum of pansophistical integrity and comprehensivity of understanding. According to our behavioral systems of rationalization and normality, we incorporate into our theoretical constructions only those few elements of reality deemed important and relevant to the outcome of theory. No theory exists outside of or psyches a-priori to our awareness to be discovered somehow in our "objective" investigations of "empirical" reality. We invent, create, choose and believe and behave theoretically according to the whim of or willpower. We judge the truth and "reality" of any theory according to it’s a-posteriori "proven" behavioral successfulness. We discard theory which is disproven as behaviorally unsuccessful. But it is the nature of the "psychic unity" of humankind to always have some kind of theory by which to make behavior if not intentionally then at least contextually, tacitly <u>purposive</u>. It is the nature of human reality to always need purposive behavior which is somehow theoretically sensible. Rational human reality is a purposive, rationally ordered, behavioral reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There seems to be an overriding behavioral tendency to adopt theoretically only those few elements of reality which seem most consistent and congruent with our behavioral systems. We emphasize, exaggerate these few to the ignorance and neglect of all else in reality, and so our resultant theory is inevitably a much distorted version of our previous behavioral reality. We prejudice our theory, in the ways our behavior is prejudiced, and we prejudice our behavior in ways we have prejudiced our theories. There are no ways of permanently escaping these behavioral/physical limitations in the theoretical modeling of reality. Nor can we easily forsake parsimony for detailed a-theoretical empirical factuality--we become quickly inundated with so much discordant factuality self contradicting and anomalous to theoretical limitations. The difficulty of theory of any kind is not so much in extrinsic "empirical" consistency--anomalies will always arise once we have conclusively defined our theoretical limitations--as in the intrinsic "rational" coherence of theory. We need to become more "self aware" of the physical/behavioral limitations of theory. A theory must inevitably focus upon very narrow dimensions of reality, singling out specialized topic areas for scrutiny and organization in order to have any behavioral relevancy at all. The problem then becomes one of making these varying "delimited" theories mesh and synchronize with each other.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In the confrontation of these "innate" theoretical limitations there is a common tendency to overcome the limitations by over extending the behavioral implication by metaphorical, symbolic analogy in order to explain anomalous, diverse and unrelated behavioral phenomena--passive and active. There is a need to keep a theory as rationally simplistic and parsimonious as possible, with as few leaps of faith as necessary and describing as much of behavioral reality as possible. It seems also that there is often much redundancy of meaning between differing and often competing versions of theory about behavioral reality. Different names and definitions are employed to describe and understand the same phenomena. It sometimes seems that if we might somehow arbitrarily or culturally standardize and unify for everyone the naming and meaning of reality we might eventually all arrive at the same global system of reasoning and behaving. Even more we must recognize the complexity of human behavioral reality and the difficulty in theoretizing about it imposed by this extreme complexity. Nor can we be strict and careful neat little logical positivists or logical empiricists in regard to formal theorization about human behavioral reality--human behavior resists the clinical coldness and feigned neutrality of scientific observation modeled on the "physical" sciences. We must somehow substitute causal explanation of "nature" with the intent to predict and control and dominate nature, with <u>processual</u> description of "behavioral" reality to qualitatively "improve" and enhance the meaningfulness of human existence. Such a form of theoretization is relational and continual rather than deterministic and mechanistic. What we need is some kind of "metaphysical" form of theoretization about theory --providing a set of "self limiting and self evident" guidelines which might assist s in accomplishing theoretical unification and comprehension of behavioral reality which is neither rationally oversimplifying or reductionist nor empirically too complex and delimited. I will in the course of this chapter suggest hypothetical alternatives--meta themes which seem necessary for the construction and elucidation of such metaphysical theoretical limitations.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">All theory is mythological rationalization--functional for resolving conflicting and tension causing dilemmas imposed by the cognitive/behavioral limitations of our rational and behavioral reality. No theory can possibly be omniscient and absolutely comprehensive. Competing theories offer varying and differing interpretations and insights into the nature of behavioral reality. We tend to impose upon our reality out mythological systems of rationalization and so interpret the reality in such a way as to be consistent and suitable for our purposive behavior. The manner in which we mythologize about reality determines our behavior and our reality is behavioral. We become the way we think. We create our behavioral reality by our myths. Our past, present and future become mythically real. Myth becomes metaphysical reality and the metaphysical reality becomes a myth. But our myths impose the limitations from which we cannot but briefly escape and provide the vicarious means by which to metaphysically transcend behavioral reality. Our metaphysical paradigms, philosophical, aesthetic, scientific and humanistic are the fundamental forms our mythology takes.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">I propose hypothetically that there are six dimensions of tension underlying all of or mythological theoretization--these dimensions are the fundamental dichotomies which compose the essential limitations of our rational and behavioral reality. They compose the differing interrelationships between the four metaphysical paradigms--philosophical, aesthetic, scientific and ideological. These six dimensions of metaphysical tension are what might be referred to as the mythological--theory dynamics set up by the interrelationship and tension of opposition and differentiation between the four metaphysical paradigms of the metaphysical matrix of rational reality. The six dimensions of dialectical tension are the six dichotomies of mind/body, nature/culture, male/female, subjective/objective, life/death and means/ends. The tension between these dichotomies forms the mythological limitations from which we derive all of our transcendent meaning embodied as truth in our theoretical systems. These dimensions compose the mythological limitations of all theory and the transcendent synthesis of meaning constitutes the dimensions of possible freedom and truth for any theory. All theory is modeled from these limitations. All mythological, theoretical systems of behavioral rationalization about existential human reality may be reinterpreted and meaningfully reduced down to terms of these six dimensions of mythological dynamics. Any theory claiming any degree of meaningful comprehensivity of rational reality must be in some manner adequately resolve the tension between these dichotomic "ideals". Theoretical truth is movement towards the meaningful resolution of the tension produced by these conflicting dichotomies. To be considered "objectively valid" empirical "evidence" must be found to corroborate or to disprove the theory, but it must be remembered that all such evidence is indirect and circumstantial to the proof of truth.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The first meta theme that has been repeatedly suggested throughout this work so far has been the theme of integration or the attunement of integrity. The synthetic reintegration of a dichotomized reality is the way of achieving meaningful integrity. Furthermore integrity is seen as an ideal seldom attained and yet manifested throughout reality. Integrity is synergistic, qualitative, wholistic, ontological in character--it is a "quality" which is more than the mere sum of its parts. I propose it be an essential characteristic of rational and behavioral reality. Integration can be interpreted as a means of achieving meaningful behavioral order and is said to be rational.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Aesthetic transformation experiences can be interpreted theoretically as a means of the self achieving meaningful transcendent integration of personality of rational reality. It is no wonder that art is often the last hold people have upon reality. The religious transformation experience is a means of the other achieving meaningful transcendent integration by culture of rational reality. In as much as aesthetic and religion are interrelated and interdependent, aesthetics as a product of cultural context and religion as a subjective experience in reality, both can be said to achieve meaningful integration of personality/culture of the dichotomies of self/other, nature/culture, male/female etc. The quality of an aesthetic degree of extrinsic/intrinsic, subjective/objective integration. Integrity is the truth of reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Likewise in as much as aesthetic and religious behavior patterns fail to achieve integration of reality, such behaviors leas to disintegration of personality and culture and eventuate in a disordering of behavioral reality (irrationality). This can be witnesses in the alienation of the extrinsic aesthetic contexts and in an intrinsic dissociation state. It can be described as aesthetic depersonalization and aesthetic derealization.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In as much as some theories concerning aesthetics or religion posite that such complex behavioral phenomena are only a function of male/female dichotomization--claiming that prehistoric art is an expression and mythological concern with sexual ambivalence by the cave dweller to the neglect of other possible interpretations involving other alternative dichotomies underlying aesthetic reality, then such theories fail to achieve the necessary comprehensivity, and so express only limited truth and narrow minded integrity. Such explanations seem to be more the mythological projections of the sexual concerns of our own age.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Though the phenomena of the aesthetic transformation experience and the religious transformation experience in general have been analytically dichotomized and dialectically opposed for the sake of explanation, it is important to remember that in actual phenomenological human reality the two forms of transformation experience, though different, are inseparably interdependent and interrelated. It requires a leap of faith to believe that of the two kinds of transformation experience, aesthetic experience is the most "natural" and primal of the two. Neither of these irreducibly the only two kinds of transformation experience available to human beings. It is possible to speculate about fundamental philosophical and scientific transformation experiences as well. All types of transformation experience can be considered rational covariants of one another revolving about different dichotomies and may be equally fundamental and wholistic in human mythological rationality. To say that art is primary is to imply that aesthetic development preceded and gave rise to other forms of development in the evolution of human culture. Which form of transformation experience preceded and caused the other cannot ever be proven empirically or rationally true or false one way or another, and so much scientistical theoretization must be viewed as being unscientific as well as unhumanistic.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">****</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Two other meta themes which have been recurrent throughout this work is that aesthetic reality in particular and human reality in general is <u>meaningful</u> and this meaningfulness is expressed in metaphysical mythological theoretical terms of <u>holothetic multidimensionality</u> of reality. Holothetic multidimensionality is the transcendent relational concept which enables transcendence of meaning in rational and behavioral reality. These two meta themes of meaning and holothetic multidimensionality are like the warp and weft of the weave of reality, underlying, composing, and tying together all of the diverse patternings which emerge from the mythological weaving of the tapestry of life. Holothetic meaning is the fabric of reality. In as much as human reality is a rational and behavioral reality and is therefore a "purposeful" reality, holothetic multidimensionality of meaning constitutes the many theoretical alternative and possibilities of purpose for existence. The degree of comprehensive integration achieved in theory--its truth value is measured "qualitatively" by the degree of its meaningfulness and the holothetic multidimensionality of interpretation of this meaning.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Likewise existence which is relatively "a-meaningful" is to be seen as lacking or relatively deficit in integrity-or rationally and behaviorally disintegrating. A-meaningful rational and behavioral reality is a denial of reality-irrationality-representing disintegration of personality and culture. It is a failure to achieve meaning in existence--whichever its form or function-leading to a disintegration of reality. Aesthetic experience which is relatively a-meaningful is poor and possibly pathological art. The meaningful existentialism of modern times is a symptom of which failure-a manifestation of a rotting at the mythological roots of modern civilization.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Existentialism postulates a very pessimistic presumption about human existence--that life is essentially inherently meaningless. This meaninglessness renders absurd the whole human drama. But in my own life, in my anthropological quest for pansophistical understanding about human existence and reality, I have inevitably found this existentialist premise to be quite empirically unvalid and rationally self contradictory. Even if all we have is the illusion of meaning, mythological in truth and not more, or that we are merely actors in a existential drama--involved in the tragic comic enactment of or lives-then this is all we have anyways and so is meaningful enough in itself. To say that life is meaningless is to express a failure to achieve some tacit purpose for that life, to compare the intrinsic value of living with some extrinsic standard. Such questioning of the greater reason or purposefulness of meaning is a self denial of the intrinsic meaningfulness itself. There is no rational or behavioral need to look for purposeful meaning beyond or outside of existence itself. Meaning can not ever be adequately divorced or separated from human existence--such a feat is impossible except for the blind philosophical fool who takes a leap of faith and convinces himself that what is isn't and what isn't is and so on and on and on reductic ad absurdum ad infinitum. Indeed meaning inheres intrinsically in human reality--it is human reality, and as much as this reality is rationally and behaviorally purposive, so meaning too is rationally and behaviorally purposive. Meaning is human rationality and behavior. Meaning is mythological.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">I have arrived at a theoretically important and personally profound conclusion concerning the meaning of existence and the "purpose" of human existence. Whether it is the quest for happiness, for aesthetic or religious fulfillment, for self awareness, for wealth, for sex, for prestige, for truth, for destruction, for eternity or immortality, for El Dorado or for the fountain of youth or for paradise or heaven or hell, for just a little bit of socio economic status and modicum of security, such a purposeful quest for meaning is what it means to be human and alive and the <u>purpose of human existence is the quest for ever greater meaningfulness of reality</u>, what ever its relative and relevant form or function. Meaning is like a golden thread coursing through all the weaves of existence, composing the fabric of the many parts and pieces--underlying the reasons and purpose and grand truths of life. This might sound a bit grandiloquent and reductionist and tautologically oversimplified, but to say meaning alone is not enough. What is the interesting and relevant theme is the translation of meaning to and from the many diverse forms of expression it can take in human behavior.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Meaning in human reality is multifaceted and multidimensional and multifocal. In short it is holothetic. Meaning is fluid, dynamic and it is relative and contextual. It is relational and continual, it is processual in interpretation and not causal. It is ontological and wholistic, just like integrity. Meaning is the qualitative, affective evaluative manifestation and expression of integrity. Meaning can be interpreted at many different levels of abstraction. It can be expressed mentally, emotionally or physically. Meaning can be spiritual and material, self centered and other directed, male and female, subjective and objective, living and dying, ends and means, forms and functions. The source of meaning is tension derived from very fundamental conflicts arising from rationalistic analytical dichotomization of human reality. These conflicts between opposite sets in motion a dialectical interaction from which symbolically interpretable meaningfulness arises. To be truly meaningful, great highs in existence must be contrasted by the great lows--meaning is to be fond in tragedy as well as in comedy and either alone cannot be meaningfully fulfilling. Some of the most very basic dichotomies of human existence are mind/body, life/death, ends/means, subjective/objective, nature/culture and male/female.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">These dichotomies are the limitations at the heart of the many superficial problems which plague existence with anxiety, liminality paradoxicality and antinomality. In a very real sense meaning arises from a deep seated, irreconcilable tension rooted in human existence as a rational, synthetic means of integrating reality, of harmonizing dichotomic discordance and of transcending the dichotomic limitations mythology imposes upon human rational and behavioral reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The key or master control of meaning in existence is the word as metaphor. Without language human beings would have no culture and no civilization; language is the principle symboling system of humanity. Meaning is principally interpreted symbolically, conceptual, logical, rational, mythological, abstracted from and rooted to irreducible percepts. The word as metaphor functions as analogy, with generalizable meaning relating and tying together diverse and differing and seemingly separate and unrelated concepts and percepts, bridging the differences and resolving the tension, imposing frames of reference out of original context, upon new subjects. Metaphor suggests new possibilities of meanings, expanding meaningfulness qualitatively beyond a mere one to one mathematical correspondence between a name and its immediate empirical referent. Symboling patterns of rationalization, helping to reintegrate and disparate and analytically dichotomized fragments of reality, function as myths. All of or systems of rationalization about reality are mythological including science. Myth as metaphorical meaning sets the tragic comic human stage for the dramatic enactment of all human behavior.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In a very real anthropological sense, meaning is the basic answer to the question of "why do we exist?" or "what is the purpose of life?" and to ask "what is the meaning of life?" is to be answered "anything you want to make it mean." Meaning underlies all human behavior, whether it is aesthetic, philosophical, scientific or humanistic-ideological, whether it is social sexual, socio religious or socio political or socio economic--whatever its form or function, good or bad, happy or sad, beautiful or ugly, rational or insane, selfish or altruistic. The purpose of human existence is the quest for greater meaning in reality, which ever manner we choose to interpret that meaning. Meaning in existence is unavoidable and ineluctable, no matter how we may choose and try to deny it, ignore it or destroy it in our rationality or behavior. Only the dead are meaningless except if one is willing to believe in some kind of life after death, a continuity of human meaning after death and beyond life, but as I have said before this constitutes a kind of indirect and inexplicit denial of meaning of life as an end in itself. But to say that existence is basically meaningless is just plain untrue. It is merely absurd nonsense. It is impossible to conceive of any form of existence without some kind of meaning-what is the meaning of meaninglessness?</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This golden thread of meaning is tremendously important as a keystone to the theoretical unification of anthropology, which can be loosely described as the wholistic study of behavior of humanity--personal and cultural, whatever its mode or form of expression and function. This meta theme can be applied as the theoretical key for the unification of explanations of all kinds of human behavior--whether the meaning is latent or manifest or "a meaningful". Furthermore it offers a powerful source of hope for rationally comprehending the darker side of human behavioral reality, and for teleological application to the solutions of some of the most pressing social problems confronting the "human race" today--whether it is a rat race or an arms race or just plain old foot race. Even more to say that life is essentially, irreducibly meaningful is to start off on the right foot for an existential change of pace--one which will hopefully lead to a more optimistic outlook on the reality and destiny of humanity. Human meaning is the golden thread of human reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">****</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There are two more interrelated meta themes which are important to the construction of a comprehensive theory of aesthetics--the themes of creativity and change. All human behavior and rationality is relative, contextual, relational and continual, processual and dynamic. Human existence is an on going current of events within an ecological and evolutionary framework. Most importantly reality is changing, and the process of change is inevitable, omnidirectional and irreversible. It is a moot and trite issue to argue that inevitable life changes are epiphenomena of entropic and anti-entropic powers in "nature". The process of change is omnipotent and pervading the whole universal reality. Our rationality and or behavior is evolving in relation to an ever evolving ecological context of reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">All human behaviors, including aesthetic behavior is normative--that is it occurs within a normative context. Human rationality and behavior consists of willful decision making--a series of choices in a context of inevitable life changes. Normative decision making has two general directions or conditions of freedom--entropic destruction or anti-entropic creation. Creativity is a natural, rational and behavioral normative decision making process of adjusting and adapting to inevitable life changes. Behavior does not have to be purposively destructive to be pathological. A failure to be creative in response to continual life changes can be viewed as a steady progression of evolving events into the future. Normative rational behavior which is progressive is construed as healthy creative adaptation. Behavior which is destructive and pathological is to be reviewed as regressive, not so much a reversing of a forward flow of events, but rather a failure to change and adjust, and an apparent regression of reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">To say change originates in the human mind or in the origins of nature is to reflect upon the causality of change--or upon its discontinuity. Discontinuity of change is a peculiar human tendency or proclivity of attributing mechanistic causality and organismic stability--a significant characteristic of the human conditionality of reality. We are able to temporarily suspend the continuity of change by ignoring its imperceptible and subtle signs and we are able to make ourselves believe in the illusion of the static, the permanent, the eternal, the absolute and unchanging. We adopt behavior patterns and systems of rationalization which are inflexible and static and resist change. We impose with our rationality analytical stops to change, dividing lines upon the continual flow of conscious events. The attribution of causality to reality is a peculiar human capacity--which is not self evident in nature except through human expression. The only thing about reality which might be said to be permanent and all pervasive, unchanging and absolute is the fact of change. From where does this deceit and self denial of change stem? Where does the human predisposition come from--this need to impose rational and behavioral order upon a seemingly disordered and randomly changing reality?</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Creativity is a natural human proclivity to create new, original forms from the reintegration and reorganization of old forms--a reintegration of the elements of human reality to achieve a new organismic integrity. Creativity is a process of organismic reintegration of changing reality--destructiveness is a process of organismic disintegration of reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Human rational and behavioral reality tends to be self stabilizing and seeking relatively temporary periods of static "permanency" until such states fall into ecological disequilibrium with the evolutionary environmental context, at which time such states become punctuated by temporary transition periods of transformation and reintegration of reality in relation to an evolving ecological framework--for the re-establishment of ecological equilibrium and stability--a new condition of organismic stasis. These transition periods of transformation of human rational and behavioral reality are important adaptive and restabilizing mechanisms for creating and conserving personality and cultural integrity--adjusting and adapting creatively to a continually on going flow of evolutionary events.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Without such transformation periods, and rational and behavioral mechanisms which drives and capacitate these events, humanity would be unable to adapt and survive and would eventually become extinct. We may speak of a need in human reality to achieve and maintain organismic integrity and unity with the evolutionary universal reality--a meaningful sense of purposive rational and behavioral organismic stasis and order--against a natural entropic tendency of change for disorder and randomness. Transformation states are necessary in the continuation of organismic integrity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Meaning arises out of personal and cultural "rites de passage"--affecting socialization and social organization, integrating self/other and the ideal and real. The analogy of rites of passage and revitalization movements are applicable in describing the basic transcultural nature of transformation states of human reality. They are conservative and creative, revolutionary characteristic human mechanisms for dealing with change adaptively and for maintaining cultural and personal integrity and organismic stasis. The anthropological paradigm in particular is one based upon this analogy to "rites de passage" and "revitalization movements". In general the analogy consists of three stages, an initial stage of stressed and eroding meaningful integration and organismic stasis--an initial period of unchanging rational and behavioral patterns against an evolving context of change with the threat of increasing disintegration and organismic disruption, an intermediate transitional stage called the liminal phase--a period of disintegration of meaningful reality, "betwixt and between"--ameaningful reality and a culminating stage of a new order and conditionality of meaningful reintegration of reality--a new period of organismic integration and stasis. This metaphorical analogy can be applied to psychotic regression states and personality reintegration, mental illness, substance induced and natural alternative states of consciousness, dreams trance states, transcendent meditation states, socio religious passage rites and ceremonies and to socio religious revitalization movements and political revolutions as well as to aesthetic experiences and aesthetic revitalization movements. I recognize two antithetical and generally opposing forms of transformation--what I have called the aesthetic transformation experience and the religious transformation experience--where the first is primarily a subjectively personally meaningful experience and the second is primarily an intersubjective socially significant experience within a wider socio cultural context.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In general, transformation experiences, whether aesthetic or religious or some other kind, can be either destructive or creative, disintegrating or reintegrating, rendering reality either relatively ameaningful or making it more meaningful. Transformation states are necessary human adaptive mechanisms as either revolutionary revitalization episodes punctuating normal "static" periods of rational and behavioral reality, or as conservative evolutionary personal or cultural symbolic rites of passage incorporating normal changes, for adjusting to inevitable continual life changes which tend to gradually or rapidly erode, destroy or disintegrate contextual ecological equilibrium and relational organismic stasis. As one important and healthy form, indeed I believe it is a primary and essential and indispensable form integral to personality and cultural development and evolution, of creative and adaptive transformation experience, aesthetic phenomena are to be seen as an important and vitally necessary contribution to the health and well being of any person or group of people, the denial or repression of which leads only to increased suffering and destructive, maladaptive pathological consequences.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">****</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It might appear intelligent and wise to conclude this work with some kind of grandiloquent definition such as "The aesthetic phenomenon in general is an "affective" transformation experience effecting a holothetically multidimensional, meaningful reintegration of "purposive" human rational and behavioral reality, restoring relative ecological contextual equilibrium and relational and processual organismic stasis in creative adaptation to inevitable, eroding and continual life changes". But what does such a conclusion really tell us? Such a statement seems to summarize and simplify the whole problem of aesthetics into one neat sentence, but how much does this really inform us about the phenomenological reality of aesthetic behavior. A simple word such as "aesthetic reality" really says nothing about a whole lot--a summarizing generality encompassing many diverse and different types of aesthetic phenomena from many distinct cultures and peoples. Can a common relationship between so much diversity of human behavioral phenomena really ever be empirically verified or falsified, scientifically proven or disproven? Can any anthropological theory ever be empirically substantiated beyond a shadow of a doubt? The original question of this work remains unanswered--"why study aesthetic anthropology?"</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The mere stringing together in a summary sentence the key meta themes of fundamental dichotomies, conscious limitations, mythological rationality, symbolic synthesis and integration, integrity and truth, the golden thread of meaningfulness, the purpose of human behavior to enhance greater meaning in reality, the holothetic multidimensionality of meaning in reality, relative contextuality and relational continuity, reality as processual and continuous change, instead of discontinuous mechanistic causality, ecological equilibrium and organismic stasis, organismic conditionality of creativity and destructiveness, human reality as being symbolic, wholistic, ontological in character, synergistic, as being behavioral and rational, these names and their general meanings are not satisfactory for a complete and comprehensive understanding of aesthetic reality--they are silent about color and line, harmony and melody, dragons and princes. We can speak of aesthetic equality and aesthetic authority and the need for a general aesthetic revitalization movement of human civilization in the cultivation of greater transcultural and pan human appreciation of aesthetic reality. We can say "the aesthetic experience is a transition state which temporarily puts the aesthetic in "tune" with a higher supranormal state of being--a sense of "unity" with the universe, an omniscience, and "at oneness", an out of self "atonement" with a greater than life "cosmic consciousness". We can say that humankind creates their mythological reality--giving birth to reality in their unlimited imagination. We can say that human reality is aesthetic in character and structure--that aesthetic reality is primal and natural. We can also sat that science, including aesthetic anthropology is mythological. But we can prove scientifically none of these statements and so they are not factual.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">And is it possible to speculate about what lies beyond the borders of human reality, past the edge of aesthetic reality, beyond the limitations of human consciousness and psychic awareness, beyond even imagination and human possibility, about things which cannot even be known by our most fictitious and artificial myths? What evidence is there to construe the unimaginable and unknowable, for choosing to believe in a greater than "human" reality? We speak of anti-entropy and the organismic ontological character of human consciousness as some kind of "spiritual" entity more than the mere combination and summarization of its parts. Biologists and scientistic behavioral "scientists" at least implicitly believe in being able to eventually explain all human phenomena and all "natural" phenomena of life in general, through involvement in scientific methodology and materialist and mechanistic reductionism. Science has dichotomized and separated the rationality of nature from the irrationality of the supranatural. But true believers in science, logical empiricists and positivists alike, are far from explaining the qualitative and ontological organismic character of even a single celled amoebae, much less to explain why humanity is on the verge of global holocaust or suffers from such complex symptoms of "culture" (itself an as yet unexplained organismic phenomena) as an aesthetic behavior or religious behavior.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Can we "see" beyond the empirical, objective barriers of scientific logic and rationality without a blind leap of faith? But how do we explain the increasing organismic complexity of human civilization, not just a "western" ethnocentric cultural phenomena, but a transcultural experience belonging to all of humanity. We continually re-emerge from our transitional transformation episodes, as in a continual rebirth into an increasingly sophisticated and complex evolutionary reality. We have created or brought into being or given birth to, many more facets of organismic reality from "nothings" virtually and previously nonexistent even a decade or a year ago. We perform a kind of mysterious magic with our science and yet as scientists we choose not to believe in magic. Our reality is growing slowly, quickening rapidly in pace, just like any other life form which grows and evolves and flourishes. Might we speak of a kind of quintessential "cosmic consciousness" of which our own limited psyches are but imperfect manifestations, whose primary symptom of revelation is an anti entropic universal phenomena of growth, increasing synergistic organization and ontological order, increasing sophistication and complexity of human reality, creation of something out of nothingness, qualitative in nature instead of merely quantitative, wholistic, holothetic, synthetical instead of analytical.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If we choose to believe in such an unscientific notion such as "cosmic consciousness" of which all life might be a virtual manifestation and even physical, non-biological phenomena of the material universe share in its being, and order and structure and nature and cosmic awareness, then might it make sense to speak also of a consciousness or a spiritual awareness of a dog or a bird or a plant or an amoebae. We think most non-human species of life are governed almost completely by "instinct" and yet we cannot yet adequately scientifically explain the meaning of instinct, but might it not be the limited structure of their organismic spirit, their share of the cosmic consciousness, which orders and structures their existence, and so can also be used to explain in lieu of a more mechanistic proof, their "instinctual" behavior patterning? And then might not our own physical structure of our conscious awareness of reality be the starting point for the organization of our own behavior and our own reality? But to presume belief in a "cosmic consciousness" brings us no nearer to explaining the magical and mysterious "qualitative" nature of human reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">To speak of such greater than life "being-ness" pervading all reality and extending beyond would be quite unscientific-unamenable and untenable to scientific methodology and therefore unfalsifiable and unprovable. We believe our science must be neutral in regard to such "metaphysical", spiritual and qualitative questions and "true" science is not supposed to take any "leaps of faith" in its reductionist explanations. But neither does "science" share in the human responsibility for the behavior it unquestionably promotes--whether it is the disruption of biological ecosystems, the extermination of whole species of life, or the research and development of nuclear arsenals and other lethal dooms day devices. Instead of "scientifically" reordering ethics in the systematization of human behavior, in the attempt to render the "science of human behavior" more tractable, mechanistically explainable, predictable and controllable, might we instead look forward to the ethical reordering of our scientific rationality and behavior more diverse, unpredictable, uncontrollable, unexplainable and yet more adaptable to increasing complex changes brought into being by the scientific domination of reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">One certain virtue such a belief in 'cosmic consciousness" would elicit in human behavior, that is profound respect for "nature"--for all phenomena of universal human reality, alive or otherwise. Such respect would go far toward the improvement of humankind's relationship to "nature"--whether mother nature, human nature, or culture. Whether we begin in aesthetic anthropology or in some other esoteric academic field of human understanding or in the esoteric phenomena-logical reality of everyday affairs, such respect for the transcendent integrity of all of human reality is both the beginning point of departure and culminating purpose for our increased human comprehension of processual nature. Common people, bound by a common culture, continue to be disrespectful of nature and morally myopic of their own humanistic "purposeful" nature and mythologically dichotomic of their common reality. The cultural imperative is domineering and authoritarian--prejudice is the cultural prerogative of the majority of humanity who continue to be culture bound--mass man the social animal. Cultivation of aesthetic behavior is a means of transcending the prejudice of culture--a means of achieving a "universal" brotherhood and sisterhood of the whole of humanity. All people are potentially creative. They need to become normatively independent in their decision making capacities--primarily through the cultivation of aesthetic creativity, in order to restore some modicum of aesthetic meaningfulness and wholistic integrity to their existential reality. If a person fails to become relatively independent in the cultivation of his/her aesthetic normative decision making capabilities, from his/her cultural aesthetic authoritarianism, then someone else will have the power to make decisions for him/her and he/she will inevitably become dehumanized marionettes manipulated by power mongers from above. The fate of humanity is virtually in the hands of a few demagogical demigods. Belief in some kind of "cosmic consciousness" empirically evident and rationally purposeful is an aesthetic and religious revitalization movement in the right direction. We need to wrest control from the clutches of a few "haves" and resurrect the spiritual ghost of humanity--God, otiose and ontic--from its existential grave, before we suffer the catastrophic and irrational self fulfilling prophecy of species suicide.</p> <font FACE="Times,Times New Roman" SIZE="2"> <p> </p> <hr> <p><a name="Copyright">Blanket Copyright</a>, Hugh M. Lewis, © 2005. Use of this text governed by fair use policy--permission to make copies of this text is granted for purposes of research and non-profit instruction only.</p> <p>Last Updated: 08/25/06 </p> <hr> <p> </p> </font> <p>  <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p align="center"> <SCRIPT TYPE="text/javascript" LANGUAGE="javascript"> s="na";c="na";j="na";f=""+escape(document.referrer) </SCRIPT> <SCRIPT TYPE="text/javascript" LANGUAGE="javascript1.2"> s=screen.width;v=navigator.appName if (v != "Netscape") {c=screen.colorDepth} else {c=screen.pixelDepth} j=navigator.javaEnabled() </SCRIPT> <SCRIPT TYPE="text/javascript" LANGUAGE="javascript"> function pr(n) {document.write(n,"\n");} NS2Ch=0 if (navigator.appName == "Netscape" && navigator.appVersion.charAt(0) == "2") {NS2Ch=1} if (NS2Ch == 0) { r="&size="+s+"&colors="+c+"&referer="+f+"&java="+j+"" pr("<A HREF=\"http://www.TheCounter.com\" TARGET=\"_top\"><IMG"+ " BORDER=0 SRC=\"http://c1.thecounter.com/id=515383"+r+"\"><\/A>")} </SCRIPT> <NOSCRIPT><A HREF="http://www.TheCounter.com" TARGET="_top"><IMG SRC="http://c1.thecounter.com/id=515383" ALT="TC" BORDER=0></A> </NOSCRIPT>  <p align="center">  </body>