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Structures of Wonder in Aesthetic Experience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2010

Homer Hogan
Homer Hogan
Affiliation:
Department of English, University of Guelph
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Extract

In his recent article, “A Philosophy of Wonder”, Howard Parsons launched an investigation into the nature of wonder, a subject that is of the highest importance, not only for making philosophy relevant to the present condition of man and society, but also for expanding and integrating philosophic disciplines. With care and sensitivity, he marked out the main sources of evidence for understanding wonder as a phenomenon, distinguished some of its leading features, and most important, showed that analysis of this essential structure of consciousness might illuminate a host of other phenomena in psychology, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, politics, and religion.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , June 1972 , pp. 224 - 240
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1972

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References

1 Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (XXX: September, 1969), pp. 84–101.

2 P. 109. In ordinary English, “intention” and “purpose” are synonymous. One might suppose, then, that the word “intentionality” necessarily refers to some form or degree of “purposing.” Throughout Art and Existentialism, Fallico seems inadvertently to make this supposition. But in Husserl's phenomenology, which Fallico presumably accepts as a starting point, “intentionality” refers to the tendency of consciousness to be of something, and deliberation, choice, or purposing are only advanced stages of this tendency that may not necessarily take place. Nor would Husserl admit Fallico's easy equation of “spontaneity” with “the act itself of purposing.” The first is an essential feature of consciousness, the second, a modification. See Ideas, trans. Gibson, W. (New York, 1962), pp. 315–317.Google Scholar

3 The Aims of Phenomenology (New York, 1966), p. 104.

4 Cf. Fallico, p. 109.

5 Critique of Judgement (Akademie edition), p. 220.

6 Fallico, p. 21.

7 See Natanson, Maurice, “Existentialism and Theory of Literature,” Literature, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences (The Hague, 1962), pp. 107–112CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fallico Art and Existentialism, pp. 86–91.

8 Cf. Aristotle's Poetics, XI; XVI, 8.

9 Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, trans. Mairet, Philip (London, 1962), p. 57.Google Scholar

10 Ibid., p. 80. Sartre insists that emotion does in fact constitute the world it lives, but not being aware of this, is caught by its own construction. I state my reservations about that thesis later in this paper.

11 Ibid., pp. 61, 77–79.

12 Husserl maintains that “every intentional experience has its ‘intentional object’, i.e., its objective meaning” (Ideas, trans. Gibson, W. [New York, 1962], p. 241Google Scholar), and that such intentional experiences include all “acts of pleasure, feeling and will” (Ibid., p. 303). In his view, what defines this objective meaning of an emotion or any other act of intentionality is the “circumstance … that the non-existence (or the being persuaded of the non-existence) of the presented or ideally constructed object in its plain and simple sense cannot steal the presented object as such from the relevant presentation (and so from the existing intentional experience generally).…” In short, it is the presentation rather than the existence of the object which carries “meaning” and so in principle we should be able to recognize the objective meaning of an emotion whenever we recall or imagine the object that called it forth. This observation helps to explain the possibility of criticism. Reviewing its experiences, wonder discovers which objective presentations really “hold,” and which are inadequate or illusory meanings for the structures of care.

13 Sartre, pp. 65, 67, 73, 75, 76.

14 The experience of wonder as discovery also warrants a serious revision of Husserl's doctrine that objectivity is “constituted” by the subjective source. I refer, for example, to his statement that “all acts generally—even the acts of feeling and will—are ‘objectifying” acts, original factors in the ‘constituting” of objects, the necessary sources of different regions of being and of the ontologies that belong therewith.” Ideas, p. 306.