What can Art Teach Us about Experience?

Art has a special place in human culture. We all get great joy out of engaging with art and it is the joy we get from appreciating something of beauty. Art inspires awe, wonder, and amazement. It thrills and stupefies us. It raises us to a higher level of experience where we are able to appreciate the artworks with the purest and most exquisite attention. I think our appreciation of art can teach us a lot about how we should experience the world generally. A well known philosopher Edward Bullough gives an useful insight into what we can learn from our appreciation of art.

Bullough uses the example of a heavy fog at sea to illustrate his point. To be on a ship that is in dense fog can be a distinctly unpleasant experience for both seamen and landlubbers. One can imagine the fog engendering anxiety and fear over the possibility of hidden dangers and as such being a “dreaded terror” of the seas. The fog contains the possibility of numerous hazards. Perceived as such it is only natural that one’s experience of it be negative. But as Bullough points out so eloquently “a fog at sea can be an intense source of relish and enjoyment.”[1] It seems that the anxiety and fear exists only as long as the desire for self-preservation gets in the way.

What the subject needs to do is detach himself from his desire for self-preservation to open up the possibility of the perception of the fog itself. He needs to detach himself from the habitual and utilitarian perception of the fog, in accordance with which the fog represents nothing but a threat to his desire for self-preservation, where after what is left is an awe worthy appreciation of the fog itself and the number of profound and pleasant features that objectively constitute the phenomenon. Bullough says of the fog at sea…

“It is apt to produce feelings of peculiar anxiety, fears of invisible dangers, strains of watching and listening for distant and unlocalised signals… and that special, expectant, tacit anxiety and nervousness, always associated with this experience, make a fog the dreaded terror of the sea…

Nevertheless, a fog can be a source of intense relish and enjoyment. Absrtact from the experience of the sea fog, for the moment, its danger and practical unpleasantness… Direct your attention to the features objectively constituting the phenomenon – the veil surrounding you with an opaqueness as of transparent milk, blurring the outline of things and distorting their shapes into weird grotesqueness; observe the carrying power of the air, producing the impression as if you could touch some far off siren by merely putting out your hand and letting it lose itself behind that white wall; note the curious creamy smoothness of the water, hypocritically denying as it were any suggestion of danger; and, above all the strange solitude and remoteness from the world, as it can be found only on the highest mountain tops: and the experience may acquire, in its uncanny mingling of repose and terror, a flavour of such concentrated poignancy and delight as to contrast sharply with the blind and distempered anxiety of its other aspects.”[2]

The three eloquent passages of philosophical writing of which the above quotation forms a part seems to highlight with impressive clarity the possibility of two seemingly contrary experiences of the same phenomenon, the first fearful and the second appreciative.

I take it that the point of the example is that the experiences alluded to above are differentiated by the manner in which the fog is perceived. In the first instance the fog was perceived as the harbinger of danger. The fog itself was not in fact perceived at all, rather what was perceived was a utilitarian construct manifesting out of the desire for self-preservation projected onto the fog. In the second instance the fog itself is perceived whereupon the sublime and awe inspiring characteristics which objectively constitute the fog reveal themselves.

Bullough notes[3] that the authentic experience of the fog itself, the aesthetic experience of the fog, is only possible if the individual puts the phenomenon ‘out of gear’ with their practical self.[4]

This means that there must be a distance between the self and the affections. Bullough uses the term “affections” in its broadest sense to mean anything that “affects our being, bodily or spiritually, e.g. as sensation, perception, emotional state or idea.”[5]

When putting a phenomenon out of gear with the practical self one allows the phenomenon to stand outside the context of one’s personal needs, ends and pragmatic agenda. Bullough calls the this psychological standpoint Psychical Distance.

We should remember that much of our life is conducted from a practical and habitual perspective. From within this perspective of habitual perception we are selective in our perception, retaining only that which contributes to our action in the world. This habitual perspective or psychological standpoint hides from us the world as it truly is.[6] Psychical Distance, as Bullough articulates it, involves a radical transformation of our relationship to the world.

This transformation entails a suspension of the practical psychological standpoint. Our pragmatic attitude must be cut out of our apprehension of the world.[7] To become Distanced is to adopt a psychological standpoint of “pure” attention in which the world is revealed as it is and not as it is useful.

There is thus a sense in which Distance involves a pursuit of objectivity. It is not however the objectivity that is required in the scientific realm. The scientific realm requires the removal of the subject from the equation. Science involves the elimination of perception. Science reduces the world by both mathematical and technological means to its quantifiable aspects.[8] The aesthetic attitude is different in that it does not attempt to do away with the subjective but rather attempts to clarify it.

Psychical Distance makes us aware that it is the world we are perceiving, it reveals the world itself as it authentically manifests in lived human experience. The focus is still the nature of the experience but importantly the experience is not tainted by the perception of the possibility of frustrated ends. This illustrates the important sense in which Psychical objectifies phenomenon. It does not objectify objects it instead objectifies experiences. This objectivity of experience is gained through the removal of the practical interests of the self.

Thus Psychical Distance is a standpoint of the removal of the practical from everyday experience. It is the removal of what is not objectively contained in experience and is instead imposed on experience by the practical habitual standpoint.

Should we not endeavor as much as possible to experience the world in the manner allowed us by Psychical Distance? For experience to truly attain its fullest poignancy and sharpness we should view the world as a work of art and not as a resource. For some thoughts related to the cultivation of Psychical Distance see “How Should We Pay Attention?” by Etsko Schuitema