1 - 107 - 11511 - 8 - Beauty and Sublimity : A Cognitive Aesthetics of Literature and the Arts

The topic of this book is beauty and sublimity – or, rather, the subjective experience of beauty and sublimity. The opening chapter draws a fundamental distinction between what we judge to be “beautiful in itself” – what I call “public beauty” – and what we experience as beautiful, more or less what Palmer and colleagues refer to as “feelings that would elicit verbal expressions such as, ‘Oh wow! That’s great! I love it!’” (189). This is roughly the difference between works of art that we acknowledge are aesthetic masterpieces and works of art the affect us aesthetically. In his memoir, Youth, J. M. Coetzee explains that he stood for fifteen minutes “before a Jackson Pollock, giving it a chance to penetrate him.” But it did no good: the painting “means nothing to him.” In contrast, spying Robert Motherwell’s Homage to the Spanish Republic 24 in the next room, “He is transfixed” (92). Given the resonances of Motherwell’s title, and the “Menacing” quality of the work, it is probably better to say that Coetzee experienced it as sublime rather than beautiful, but the same point holds. Both the Pollock and the Motherwell might be publically sublime, but only the Motherwell was personally sublime for Coetzee.1 The focus of this book is on describing and explaining experiential or “personal” beauty. In that description and explanation, it draws on two primary sources: first, empirical research in cognitive and affective