Embracing the Aesthetic Attitude: Finding Balance in Art, Life, and Therapy

 

Art teaches us how to relate to ourselves and our experiences with the right mixture of mattering and not mattering. The beauty of a painting or the empathy evoked by a sculpture teaches us to recognize and cultivate a feeling, but then, rather than organize our lives around the beauty or set aside a period of mourning for the evocative figure, we learn to pursue beauty and to visit empathy and move on. We care about the characters in a well-written novel, we learn from their mistakes and successes, and then we move on. Caring for yourself with the same attitude with which you care for a literary character is, in my opinion, healthy.  

We have to zoom in close enough to experience to get engrossed in events and enjoy them, and we have to zoom out far enough from experience that we are living on a trajectory that has meaning to us, and not merely reacting to things. The most profound aesthetic experiences involve a refined liking, often described as awe or feeling the sublime, where one is lifted beyond utilitarian desires and everyday concerns and, in fact, lifted beyond oneself. 

Essential to living a good life is maintaining an aesthetic attitude. Roger Fry defined the aesthetic attitude as not having to react, not having to consider the function of a situation. Fry noted that the Cinema could present an image of a train heading toward you, but you could observe the train without (after a bit of getting used to the experience) having to react to it.

Bearing an aesthetic attitude toward an object is a matter of attending to it disinterestedly and sympathetically. Disinterestedness does not indicate complete lack of interest (finding something uninteresting), but a lack of personal investment or goal-directed interest. And to attend to it sympathetically is to “accept it on its own terms,” allowing it, and not one’s own preconceptions, to guide one’s attention of it.

You can learn what it’s like to be experienced aesthetically by a good therapist. Therapists, like parents, can spoil, neglect, and even abuse their charges, but good therapists find the aesthetic balance that includes emotional engagement and a comedic shrug; zooming in the right amount while retaining the ability to zoom out again. It’s expressed in every session when the therapist demonstrates empathy but still starts and ends on time.