Early on in Terry Eagleton's The Ideology of the Aesthetic, he shows how the move from Kantian aesthetics to Friedrich Schiller's theory of "taste" shows the way the rising bourgeoisie treated the aesthetic experience as a force greater than the moral law. Participation in the aesthetic experience becomes the source of solidarity among the bourgeois, where "taste rules", in Schiller's words.
Far too often we surrender to the shallow notion of the aesthetic experience as something far too "subjective" or "personal" to communicate to others. At the beginning of the Enlightenment, Kant insisted that, while individuated, nonetheless we must come to apply our experience of the aesthetic "like a rule" in the way we subsume our lives under the moral law. If the mundane claim of extreme subjectivity were true, not only Kant's view, but any real communication of the beautiful, even the experience of the beautiful itself, would be impossible.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, the late Swiss theologian who was rewarded for certain services at the end of his life by being raised as a Prince of the Roman Church, attempted to use a certain understanding of "beauty" as a hermeneutical key to unpacking the Christian experience of wonder and awe. Through seven volumes entitled The Glory of the Lord, Balthasar examines the history of what had formerly been understood under the heading of "numinous".
At the heart of these two very different ways of understanding the human experience of beauty lies the fundamental reality that, opposed to simple-minded notions of "subjectivity", the aesthetic experience is one that is communal, transporting individuals out of the realm of the personal, and offering a glimpse of something greater. This is the mystery of transcendence - passing beyond the mundane, the imperfect, to those moments when, it seems, we encounter something that in and of and for itself points beyond itself, and yet subsists completely in a way that so much else does not.
My own experience has been musical (well, and also religio-mystical, but that isn't the subject at the moment). They are rare, but with the help of reflections such as these, I understand that they are not just my own experiences. Indeed, if they were just my experiences, not only would I not be able to communicate them; there would be no point for common reference. That is to say, if, as the superficial understanding has it, beauty is something which cannot be understood, only experienced, we are left with the sad fact that, really, it can't even be experienced. If something cannot be shared, if an experience, either of awe or of the sublime or of the beautiful, somehow escapes our ability to communicate to others what it is, it is also quite impossible to communicate that it is. At the heart of the experience of the beautiful we realize it is a shared, communal experience.
The very first time I experienced this in a way that I knew I was in the presence of something powerful, that I was filled with awe before a sound I was hearing, I was fifteen years old. Jeff Beck had just released the song "Star Cycle" which got moderate rotation on my local radio station. In the first chorus after the statement of the melody, Beck turns his guitar up to ten and unloads a fiery solo over Jan Hammer's pulsing synthesizer. There are just a few measures of that solo, where Beck takes the listener up through a quick build-up of tension to a release that made me sit up, jaw gaping. It's been thirty years, and my reaction to that moment is still the same.
Similarly, there is a moment in Spock's Beard's "June", the last move from verse to chorus, where all the elements - instruments and voices, harmony and melody - come together in a swelling tide that suddenly overwhelms the listener. Again, it is that moment of release after the slow build-up of tension that makes the sum of the various parts far greater than simple addition.
The first of Ed Wynne's guitar solos on Ozric Tentacles' "Jurassic Shift". Like the previous two, this is a release - the sheer volume of Wynne's guitar, combined with phase-shifting effects give the guitar a wash across the rest of the music, like waves crashing on a beach - that made me, the first time I heard it, go, "Ahh".
On Friday, I purchased Porcupine Tree's live DVD, Anaesthetize, a film of a show in Tilburg in The Netherlands from 2008. On the second song in the first set, "My Ashes", the chorus vocals are performed by touring guitarist and back-up singer John Wesley (and how could I, a United Methodist, not like that name?), because he has a beautiful, soaring Jon Andersonesque high tenor. I heard it for the first time on Sunday, and still cannot believe that single moment is so beautiful, so perfect.
What is important to note about these is the simple reality that these are not my subjective experiences. My reaction - hearing a moment of transcendent beauty in the midst of these songs - may be unique, or not. Yet, it is a shared experience. There are the musicians who composed and arranged the pieces. The engineers and mixers who took the elements and, along with the performers, ensured they were constructed properly. There is the audience, disparate or gathered, who hear these moments and react to them.
This solidarity in transcendence is the aestethic experience. It is also, as von Balthasar rightly understood, the heart of the religious experience. At its best, these moments are rare, fleeting, hardly encompassing entire compositions or multiple performances; rather, they are momentary - in music a measure or two - yet precisely because they are transcendent, their fleeting existence is belied by that sense that they seem to last forever. The relationship between the aesthetic experience and the religious experience, between the beautiful as being more than simple human creative act and life as more than the mundane run of days, lies in our shared joy together. We turn to one another and say, "Wow!" Whether it is God or just a bunch of musicians, we find ourselves gathered together, basing in the beauty of the moment that lasts forever.
