Close Encounters of the Third Kind : On the Question of the Relationship between the Narrative and Ambient Dimensions of Aesthetic Value
Abstract
At the end of the nineties of the last century, the American philosopher Cheryl Foster tried to oppose the prevailing cognitivist understanding of the aesthetic value of nature and thus emphasize the perceptual aspect of knowledge present in the aesthetic experience of the natural environment. (Foster 1998) She not only pointed out the dichotomous and polarized nature of the then-debate about the aesthetic experience of the natural world but also offered her own two-dimensional model of the aesthetic experience of nature, including the ambient dimension complementing the (generally) preferred narrative dimension. She thus drew attention to this neglected, conceptually harder-to-grasp dimension of aesthetic experience and called for its further theoretical reflection.
Based on its distinction, it was possible to formulate a general account of aesthetic experience based on strong complementarity or the tense relationship between the two opposing dimensions present in every aesthetic experience. (Dadejík-Zuska 2010) The paper tries to develop and test the concept of aesthetic experience based on the relationship of both dimensions not only through theories moving in a similar direction (Gernot Böhme, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, theory of metaphor, especially Paul Ricoeur) but also through examples of natural and artistic aesthetic experiences. The main goal of the contribution is to capture the initial energy source of every aesthetic experience, consisting of the impulse arising from the felt potentiality of narrative syntheses that have not yet been formulated explicitly, emerging precisely from the tension mentioned above formed by both dimensions, whether the occasion for evoking this tension is a natural phenomenon, an artifact, or even an artistic work.