Experience is a unifying function of human cognizance because it brings together two psycho-emotional attributes of existence: Desire and Value.  Socrates described desire as what man wants and does not possess: "… what he neither has nor himself is—that which he lacks—this is what he wants and desires."  If Socrates was right, then the object of desire—the thing wanted—represents the desire's value.  When that object is a substantive thing or commodity, like a piece of cake or a dollar bill, and we consume it, our 'wanting' is provisionally gratified but the object does not lose its value to us.  It is numbered among the material things in our experience that are called desiderata.  That is to say, whether at a given time we experience the desire for a dollar bill or a piece of cake or not, we will always realize their value.

Of course most of the things that we realize as valuable are not commodities or physical things but, rather, attributes or conditions of our awareness.  Beauty, Freedom, Security, Justice, Peace, and Happiness, for example, are all desirable and have value for us, even though we're unable to consume them in the way that a piece of cake or a dollar bill is consumed.  Such sensed experiences are usually classed as intellectual or esthetic desiderata, and the exact nature of such value is a subject of considerable debate among philosophers.

In philosophy, esthetics is the study of beauty and taste, whether in the form of the comic, the tragic or the sublime.  Esthetics has traditionally been part of other philosophical pursuits like the investigation of epistemology or ethics.  However, it began to come into its own as a more independent pursuit under Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher who saw esthetics as a unitary and self-sufficient type of human experience.  Those who care about esthetic experience do so because of the belief that they are providers of something of great value to human beings.  Similarly, those who debunk the esthetic as a valid concept claim that it is socially constructed, important only to a particular class at a particular period in history and as a means of maintaining their special social status.

Esthetic value can be realized everywhere—in works of art and natural objects, but also in many everyday things, such as the design of our clothes and other adornments, the decoration of our living spaces, everyday artifacts from toasters to automobile bodies, packaging, even the appearance of our own physiognomy, in the artificial environments we create, the food we eat, and so on.  In the narrower view of the estheticians, it is found primarily in art and is applied to other items by courtesy of sharing some of the properties that make works of art esthetically valuable.

Umberto Eco, novelist, semiotician, and cultural critic extraordinaire, published an illustrated volume titled "History of Beauty" in which he poses the leading question: "Is beauty something ontologically self-subsistent, which gives pleasure when it is apprehended?  Or is it rather the case that a thing appears beautiful only when someone apprehends it in such a way as to experience a certain type of pleasure?"  Augustine had offered his own answer to Eco's question centuries before when he wrote: "If I were to ask first whether things are beautiful because they give pleasure, or give pleasure because they are beautiful, I have no doubt that I will be given the answer that they give pleasure because they are beautiful."

Although philosopher David Hume believed that "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," this remains a highly contentious view in philosophical esthetics.  Immanuel Kant had maintained that beauty is not an objective quality.  When we make a judgment of taste such as 'X is beautiful', he said, we speak as if beauty was a quality of the object.  According to Kant, the universality of the judgment does not mean that all will agree but only that there is justification for the expectation that all will agree.  Our individual judgment is not empirical, and not arrived at through consensus.  In other words, my judgment call has subjective universality based on one instance—me !  Its validity is based in my perception of some object, not in taking a vote, thus rebuking the estheticians' "standard of taste".

The expression "esthetic concept" is closely associated with the influential writings of the British philosopher and esthetician Frank Sibley.  For Sibley an esthetic concept is a type of property that plays the pivotal role in esthetic judgments or evaluations, such concepts, for example, as the properties of being graceful, elegant, vivid, and balanced.  Most important esthetic concepts can be defined in terms of the meanings of expressions that result when the word 'esthetic' is coupled with another word, such as  esthetic value, esthetic judgment, esthetic experience, esthetic property, and so on.  Sibley argued that for the application of non-esthetic terms we merely need correctly working senses, whereas for the esthetic terms we also need taste.  Of course, this is only the first step, the next being: 'What is taste?', which is usually defined as an acquired sense of discrimination. The importance of Sibley's approach is that he distinguishes between the types of properties based on our cognitive faculties.

Much critical work in the area of esthetics attempts to show the objectivity or inter-subjectivity  of our valuistic judgments.  It is the perception of esthetic value as subjective preference that has led to epistemological controversy.  For example, if art appreciation is an exercise of taste, how can art be criticized?  Pleasures and displeasures are ultimately personal responses, and my response can hardly be a basis for saying that the object is good or bad.  How then can taste generate standards for criticism?  And why is a "trained taste" better than "untrained taste"?

The ontology of Essentialism directs these questions back to the Source.  What is Value, and how does it arise?  Is value intrinsic to the object experienced or the observing subject?  At the beginning of this discussion I said that experience is a "unifying function".  That should provide a clue to resolving the esthetic enigma.  For the Essentialist existence is the incremental reunification of the two primary essents—awareness and otherness.  The paradigm of creation is the splitting off of finite awareness as a negate (nothingness) so that its essence can be valued as an "other".  The mode of awareness is relational experience in space/time, and the content of awareness is the beingness negated from otherness by the observer's intellect together with the value realized (or affirmed) by its negation.

The dynamics of intellection, which actually "construct" the being of experience, resist our best efforts to explain them, mainly because they seem to challenge common sense.  Hegel had much the same problem trying to define appearance as the result of a double negation.  He posited a formidable ontology, nonetheless, and if we focus on the value aspects, the other elements may be seen to fall into place.

Essentialists hold that being is our differentiated representation of what remains of otherness (the non-sentient essent) when value is extracted from it in the process of experience.  In this world, awareness is value-sensibility without Essence; one can only experience one's essential complement as something desired or, in the case of fear or revulsion, something to be avoided.  Between these two extremes lies a range of perceived values which are specific to proprietary awareness, the individual subject and choicemaker of existence.  When we experience objects, we negate their beingness from the essent, but the value of the experience remains.  What must be understood here is a principle that is as fundamental to metaphysics as Einstein's theory of the conservation of energy is to physical science.  Just as Einstein theorized that energy cannot be lost in the universe, Essentialism asserts that the Value of Essence cannot be lost.

What this means is that Essential Value is omnipresent, that it exists even in the empirical nothingness negated by Essence as individuated awareness.  Value is "shared property" of the observing subject and the experienced object.  It is the individual's finite sense of Essence and, like Essence itself, is ubiquitous.  Therefore, everything experienced  is valuistic, whether the phenomenon observed is substantive or esthetic, good or bad.  Likewise, all awareness is valuistic, except that the value realized in the relational mode of awareness is limited to the particular quality or thing experienced.  The source of this relational value is not just the biological organism by which the individual identifies himself to the world, but all of the other beingness that constitutes his or her space/time existence.

So that what we confront is a provisional scenario called existence in which the proprietary awareness that is separated from its essential source experiences it relationally as discrete objects and events.  The objectivization of the negated otherness into finite beingness is a secondary negation, causing the value equivalent of the observed being to be realized along with its appearance as a thing.  The important thing is to remember is that we are all part of Essential Value.  Your individual value complement is restored to its absolute status upon the completion of your individual life-experience.  In Essence, value is never divided or made a contingency of relations.  Such a contingency only occurs in the actualization of Essence, which is the appearance of differentiated existence.

But because Essence is the unified source of all that is, and beingness is only a passing appearance observed by a virtual non-entity, nothing is lost in this ontological scheme.  Something is gained, however: the experiential values with which you freely identify in life are your esthetic contribution to Essence.  In a relational sense, this external perspective of the Whole that is your life-experience represents your unique "value equivalent" in the Oneness of Essence.

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--HP     

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