Eugene Han
A Theory of Common Form in Aesthetic Perception (2019)
Abstract:
The following research develops a theory of form as a question of aesthetic perception placed at the crossroads between the arts, philosophy, and psychology. It is founded on the acknowledgement of seeing as an inherently interested and creative act. Accordingly, the value that a ‘reader’ imparts onto a work of art, regardless of its medium, must be given due consideration as is typically conferred to a work’s ‘author’. Contrary to a formal theory that is predicated upon identifying absolutes of aesthetic categorization, this study provides a discursive foundation of form that looks to difference rather than similarity, on disagreement over consensus, and on the contingent over the absolute. It does not look for transcendent origins which subsume varied works under universal meaning, but rather, on the changing and productive potential inherent in subjective perception. It is therefore founded on the terms of seeing.The research commences with an examination of the disciplinary fissures at the very end of the 19th century. This period bore witness to the birth of both modern experimental psychology and philosophical phenomenology, two intellectual extremes that were united by their shared polarity to one another. Their concurrent emergence represents a paradigm in which disciplinary opposition was a productive force for the benefit of knowledge throughout the 20th century and to the present period. From the vantage of aesthetics, where certain disciplinary allegiances between philosophy and psychology no longer pertain, the fierce debates that typified this period provide the theorist with fertile ground from which a descriptive approach to form can be constructed.Following an outline of the historical confrontation between philosophy and the sciences, the phenomenological project is described by the works of two philosophers: Roman Ingarden and Hans-Georg Gadamer. While their works were not causally related, together, they helped to mature phenomenology as a varied movement with direct applicability towards the arts. Ingarden provided a philosophical grammar upon which aesthetic perception was rendered within the terms of reading, while for Gadamer, reading was rendered within the terms of interpretation. By their concatenation, they provide a structure upon which form is conceived through aesthetic perception.The latter part of this research is constituted of three ‘case studies’, which integrate theories from the arts, philosophy, and the sciences, towards the analysis of eye movements. Throughout each topic of Rhythm, Depth, and Multiplicity, the ostensibly disparate approaches that dominated phenomenology and psychology are unified under a single aesthetic motif, so as to collectively contribute towards the problem of form. The included case studies should be construed as modular, non-sequential, and their topics expandable beyond the limits of the current author. They serve as a blueprint in which aesthetics could actively engage across both researchers and the limits of any single discipline, and held together by the common problem of perception. In content and in methodology, the basis of this study recognizes that the idea of form is variegated and dependent on dialogical development, rather than on the ‘genius’ of any singular idea. This research acknowledges the reality in which form is conceived, which is never the product of absolute dogma, but is always forming through the manifold of oppositional perspectives and intellectual practices.