Three Lectures on Aesthetic. Bernard Bosanquet

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       Bernard Bosanquet

      Three Lectures on Aesthetic

      Published by Good Press, 2021

       [email protected]

      EAN 4064066459048

Table of Contents

       Preface

       Lecture I: The General Nature of the Aesthetic Attitude — Contemplation and Creation

       Lecture II: The Aesthetic Attitude in its Embodiments — “Nature” and the Arts

       Lecture III: Forms of Aesthetic Satisfaction — Beauty and Ugliness

      Preface

       Table of Contents

      PREFACE

       Table of Contents

      These lectures were delivered at University College, London, in the autumn of 1914, and are printed with hardly any alteration.

      I must appear unfortunate in having laid so much stress on “feeling,” just when high authorities are expressing a doubt whether the word has any meaning at all (see Croce’s Aesthetic, and Professor J. A. Smith’s discussion in Aristotelian Proceedings for 1913-1914). I can only say here that the first and main thing which the word suggests to me is the concernment of the whole “body-and-mind” (cp. p. 7, note), as Plato puts it in building up his account of psychical unity on the simple sentence, “The man has a pain in his finger” (Republic, 462 D). It is the whole man, the “body-and-mind,” who has the pain, and ​in it is one, though it is referred to the finger and localised there. When a “body-and-mind” is, as a whole, in any experience, that is the chief feature, I believe, of what we mean by feeling. Think of him as he sings, or loves, or fights. When he is as one, I believe it is always through feeling, whatever distinctions may supervene upon it. That unity, at all events, is the main thing the word conveys to me.

      I have not attempted to do justice to the sources of my ideas, for in the limits I had to observe my jus would have become injuria. Besides, I was trying my level best to talk straight and not learnedly to my audience; and now I want to preserve the same attitude towards my possible readers.

      BERNARD BOSANQUET.

      Oxshott, January 1915.