Interaction is the human being’s inborn fate. Man cannot get away from interaction, just as he cannot get away from activity. Once interaction is given up, human activity in fact stops; life is over. Interaction is not only the nature of man as a social being; it is, plainly, the human being’s instinctual need. Maxim Gorky, in his story “Old Izergil,” tells the tale of “The Son of the Eagle.” “The Son of the Eagle,” Larra, was so proud and willful: spoiled, he chased the girls of the steppe at will and cast them aside as he pleased, never meeting refusal. One time, when a girl, afraid, pushed away his embrace, the Son of the Eagle cruelly stamped her to death. The people of the steppe, enraged, bound him up. But in the end they did not kill him; they gave him another punishment — they gave him freedom. They drove him out of the tribe and exiled him forever; he could never again come close to people, never again be in interaction with them.
To strip a man of the right of interaction is the harshest punishment of all — even harsher than to strip him of his life. Between death and being barred from interaction, the Son of the Eagle would rather choose death. But he cannot; even death does not welcome him. He can only live forever alone, drifting like a shadow on the steppe. He has been parted forever from the joy of life. His name “Larra” means “the cast-off,” “the exiled.” Man is born free, and freedom is human nature. Yet when the Son of the Eagle regains freedom only at the cost of losing interaction, freedom turns into the very thing he hates and curses.
Freedom, in its most basic sense, is freedom of interaction. Freedom without interaction is not human freedom; it is exile. Man does not merely hate it — he flees it as one flees the plague, as one flees being possessed by a demon. Man cannot live without interaction; yet real interaction always restricts his freedom, always casts on freedom some loose noose, some headstall. Man is forever caught between these two.
The hermit life of ancient China is one form of mediation. The hermit “hides” without giving up interaction; his is a selective interaction. He flees the more unfree, alienating interaction of officialdom and chooses the relatively free interaction of mountain stream, forest spring, river, lake, grass, and meadow.
I have found a hidden dwelling that pleases my wild nature; the whole year through there is no one to see off, no one to welcome. Sometimes I climb straight to a lonely peak and, under the moon, parting the clouds, give one laugh.
(Li Ao) To live freely with nature and to open an unbound interaction with nature is the ideal life of the official-scholar who has grown weary of officialdom. By it he can flee the lurking dangers of office and shake off the elaborate, false ritual that represses and twists human nature. Yet seclusion cannot finally dissolve the contradiction. Compared with the highly unfree interaction of officialdom — the alienating interaction of which it has been said,
after holding office for a year or two, one becomes smooth in bearing, low and circling in speech, with no more of the air of the wild mountains, [1]
seclusion does give man, for a little while, the feeling of being just out from under a heavy weight. But in fact it is only an entry once more into normal — and far from free — real interaction.
The “porcupine-style” interaction of the English gentleman is another sort of mediation: not no interaction, but a distanced interaction, an attempt to combine interaction with one’s own independence. Yet the “porcupine-style” is only an outer ceremonial — a polite, false interaction, not a heart-to-heart one; in fact, not a truly human interaction. It has no collision of soul with soul, much less the joy of two hearts in tune.
In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius writes:
Men seek for themselves places of refuge — building houses in the country, by the sea, on the high mountains . . . But this is in all things only a common outer mark; for the human being, in his own power, may at any time choose to retreat into himself, seeking refuge. For when he meets setbacks, there is no place where he can feel as quiet and as free as when he goes back into his own soul. [2]
To stop social interaction and to fall back into the heart leads only to solitude. Yet even in solitude, mankind does not give up all interaction. Man cannot bear the complete solitude of having no interaction at all. Solitude drives man to lean on God, and so he comes to interact with the figures the heart has cast; solitude weaves daydreams for man, and so he gains an illusory world in which he can live freely and freely interact — and this is just what the writer and the artist create. One must say: the creation of the writer and the artist is first of all the building, for himself, of an illusory world in which he can freely interact — a work — and only then is it the writer’s interacting, through the work, with others. Flaubert, in a letter to Louise Colet, writes:
The life I lead, on its surface, is one without joy, monotonous and dull. What keeps me alive is only the unceasing groan that comes out of my heart — a groan that sometimes, in helplessness, breaks forth. Were it not for the people I imagine and the world I imagine to talk to, I could not live a day. [3]
Flaubert here lays bare the inner secret of literary and artistic creation: it is to build for oneself, in solitude, a free world of interaction. Writing is the joy of solitude. The created world is the writer’s soul-companion, and at the same time becomes the medium through which the writer and the reader interact. As Jin Shengtan said:
The book I have written I do not write for myself alone; I write also for those who read with me. [4]
In writing, the writer escapes the loneliness of real life and re-enters interaction: he interacts with his own work, with his characters, and with the readers who will come after him. Hence Martin Buber says:
All real living is meeting. [5]
Aesthetic interaction is the ideal mode of meeting.
*
Why is the everyday interaction of man with his fellow man unfree? At root it is because, in everyday life, men do not face one another as full subjects but as bearers of roles, of functions, of utility. Each is at once subject and object — bound by the role given by society, the role given by the others. Within this network of role-relations, no man can fully be “himself.” He is forever fitted to others, forever wearing the “mask” of role. As Curt John Ducasse puts it:
Each role gives only a partial image of the human being; only in art does the full human being come forward. [6]
In everyday utilitarian life, the “I” must always treat the other as the “he” or the “she,” as a means or as an obstacle, and so the relation is at root a relation of utility. The full human being is hidden, and what comes forward is only a fragment, a role-image. Only when this utilitarian standing is set aside, when the relation of utility-tool is lifted, when the “I” faces the full “you” as a subject — only then does true interaction arise.
Aesthetic interaction is the very form in which this lifting takes place. In the field of aesthetic interaction, the relation of utility is suspended; the role is hung up; “I” and “you” stand as full subjects, free to meet, free to address each other. This relation is what Martin Buber calls the “I — Thou.” He writes:
One must utter the primal word “I — Thou” with the whole fullness of one’s being.
And:
The relation with Thou is direct and unmediated; no system of concept, no innate good sense, no dream-imagination stands between “I” and “Thou.” [5]
Aesthetic interaction at its core is just this kind of meeting: the meeting in which “I” and “you” fully open up to one another, free of the network of utility-roles.
*
Looking at the history of the relations between man and the world, one can trace a process: from the early relation of mingled chaos, in which man and world were not yet fully distinguished; through the “man-spirit / man-god” relation, in which the world is treated as the divine other to be revered; through the “man-thing” relation, in which the world is treated as object and tool; and finally to the “I — Thou” relation, in which the world is the free other met as equal subject. Only the last is the relation in which aesthetic interaction is truly possible.
In the primal age,
Tai began Hun-tun. Hun-tun had no shape. [7]
With the development of practice, man came gradually to separate himself from nature, and at last man became man. Yet this distinction of man from nature was still tentative and unstable. For primal man, the things of the world grew, at the same time, clearer and yet inter-soaked. Between man and thing, between thing and thing, there held a mysterious bond. This is what Lévy-Bruhl calls the “law of participation” of primal thinking:
In the collective representations of primal thinking, objects, beings, and phenomena are, in a way unthinkable to us, at once themselves and also something else. They give out and receive, in much the same unthinkable way, the mysterious powers, capacities, qualities, and actions that are felt beyond them and that go on dwelling within them. [8]
This is the transitional stage in which humankind goes from chaos toward clarity, from dimness toward wisdom. Through his own practice, especially through the creation of language, man at last stood out of nature and rose above the animal kingdom. Yet, like a newborn child who has just left the womb and uttered his first cry, the primal man could only nestle in nature’s arm. He had to lean on nature, to commune with nature and with the ten thousand things, to inter-permeate with them. Man was at once separated from nature and yet, as if, still joined to it. The primal rock-paintings and primal dance of that age did not yet carry aesthetic activity; they were only the embodiment of the mysterious “participation” between man and the things of nature. Man painted the hunt on the rock, danced for the harvest, and so tried to secure the actual hunt and harvest.
When the field of human practice kept enlarging, when the distinction between man and nature grew clear, and when man at last became an independent being, then man for the first time felt his own weakness and felt the homeless fear of having left the womb. He projected his own image into nature and the ten thousand things, then was struck by the spirit of those things, and went on to view them as gods. The vastness and mystery of nature made man feel his own smallness; the sudden changes of natural phenomenon made him stand in awe. Nature ruled the fate of primal man; its peace or its anger decided his fortune. So man fell prostrate before the gods of nature and worshiped them with devotion. This is an unequal interaction between man and nature. At the very moment of his birth, man was overawed by nature and stood in the “man-god” relation. Within this unequal relation, no aesthetic in the true sense could yet arise.
The “man-god” relation is strengthened in religious activity. Art and religion are bound closely together, and often it is by the force of religion that art develops. Yet when man comes to enjoy the gods with the freedom of the aesthetic, rather than to bow to them in awe, he is already setting aside the unequal relation, has put himself face-to-face with the gods. The devout believer kneels forever before the gods; he looks up at the unknowable god of fate wrapped in numinous light. The god is the Other, the high one who reigns; man only meekly bears the whip of his rebuke. In fact, only when man has shaken off worship and grown into an independent being does he gain the power of independent creation; only then can he make the “beautiful god,” and only then do art and religion truly drive one another — even if behind that mutual using there is, at root, a deep opposition. One may say: when religious art is most splendid, it announces the growth of human independence, announces the doubt and the shaking of the place of the gods, and foretells the decline of religion.
Burckhardt, speaking of the relation of religion and Renaissance spirit, writes:
These men of the modern age, the representatives of Italian culture, were born with the religious instinct of other medieval Europeans. But their strong personality made them, in religion as in everything else, wholly subjective; and the great magic that the discovery of the inner world and of the outer world worked in them inclined them especially toward the secular. [9]
The great men of the Renaissance carried the religious instinct of their forebears and at the same time bore strong personality, subjectivity, and a tendency toward the secular. In them one sees plainly the contradiction of the late religious age: the personality that leans toward the subjective is the revolt against the religious instinct; and the tendency toward the secular is a direct challenge to religious loftiness — not only the pursuit of one’s own secular life but also the bringing-down of belief into the real, the pulling of heaven into the human, the calling-back of the lofty god to the place of an ordinary man. It is just this change of the man-god relation that is one of the chief grounds for the birth of a generation of cultural giants and their artistic masterpieces.
Religion and art are closely linked and have many common points. Yet on the very point of aesthetic spirit they collide:
On the surface, the music used in church services seems to be one of religion’s ornaments. In fact it is a replacement and a critique of religion. The collective choral singing is, at the same time, a stepping-back from the meaning of the religious word. Here the word has no longer the last word or the deciding word. A religion that follows the saying “do not change the meaning of the word” may well turn this very “liberating element” into an “oppressive instrument.” So religious words call for critique, and that critique is finally completed by music. The more the proclaiming of religious doctrine is forced by music, the more it carries the savor of the human. [10]
The aesthetic is a free spiritual interaction; it resists every authority, every compulsion, every inequality, and calls for a new inter-subjective relation.
*
Survival, as the first need of humankind, forces all human activity to unfold around the self’s survival and teaches man to look at the world with a “utilitarian” eye. When the radiance of the gods recedes, the gods do not descend to the human ground to become an “other kind” equal to man; they become man’s object — become things. The “all things have spirit” age is over, and the gods of nature have likewise been demoted. Nature turns into the object of human plunder, the tool of human service. The “man-thing” relation and the “man-tool” relation are the inversion of the “man-god” relation. Man enthrones himself as “god”; the ten thousand things become objects to be owned, used, modified, controlled — become thing and tool. The same relation has soaked human society too: in the human world there is now either the “god-man” relation or the “man-tool/slave” relation. So man strains to fancy himself the god above all beings, and pushes others down into being his slave and tool.
Within the “man-thing” or “man-tool” relation, no aesthetic in the true sense can exist either. When the world has fallen into being object, into being thing, into being tool, it has closed itself to man. Apart from “utility,” the rich inner content and savor of nature and the ten thousand things have all been covered up and have fled. The stone is no longer a stone; it has become a conceptual husk. Whether man views nature as god, the other as god, or himself as god, what is lost is freedom. Between man and world, between man and man, there is mutual contention, conquest, overthrow. Every man faces the danger of being enslaved; every man falls into the predicament of existence. So the harmonious primal blending of man and nature becomes an ideal state of being that cannot be found in the real, a beautiful memory that haunts the soul. Yet once man is born, he can never return to the womb. So man preserves for himself a hidden path of remembrance — aesthetic interaction.
In aesthetic interaction, man and nature, man and the ten thousand things, man and man all stand in what Martin Buber calls the “I — Thou” relation. Both I and you are independent subjects, and yet a free, full-feeling exchange opens between us. Nature, things, and man himself all open up in this interaction, and together they enter the great harmony in which thing and self forget one another and inter-fuse without seam.
Martin Buber calls “I — Thou” the primal word and treats the “I — Thou” relation as the primal relation. He writes:
In the beginning is relation. It is the category of being, the joyful act, the form of understanding; it is the root of the soul; it is the a priori root of relation, the a priori “Thou.” [5]
From an objective view, the source of the world is just the relation of being. But before man becomes an independent individual, this relation cannot be experienced as the “I — Thou” relation — indeed, cannot be experienced as relation at all, for man and nature were originally blended into chaos with no distinction. So the “I — Thou” relation in aesthetic interaction is not, as Buber says, a return to the primal relation; it is the remembrance and longing for the blended relation — an idealization and beautification of the primal relation that comes only after the subject has been fully developed, has become an independent individual, and has thereby tasted the loneliness of being a self and the pain of the broken relation. As a lonely human being who has been thrown out of nature’s embrace into the world, man cannot help but build dreamscapes for himself — an ageless dream of primal harmony.
Because aesthetic interaction takes shape through the differentiation of human interactive activity, its forms are rich and various.
Aesthetic interaction is most typically embodied in the aesthetic activity of beauty (graceful beauty). Beauty is harmony; this shows not only in the harmony of the object itself but also in the harmony of the relation between man and object. Between man and beautiful object there is no alienating, opposing factor; there is no barrier. The two draw each other and inter-fuse, manifesting an ideal interaction.
Tragedy is similar. One important aesthetic feature of tragedy is tragic sympathy. Without sympathy, no tragedy. This calls for the appreciator to build an equal “I — Thou” relation with the object — to build a relation of aesthetic interaction.
The aesthetic of the sublime is different. The sublime is first of all an object above man; it shocks and presses on man, and at the same time it stirs man, lifts him up. Only when man has the power to raise himself to a position over against the sublime does the sublime at last become an aesthetic object. In substance, the aesthetic process of the sublime unfolds as the transition from the “god-man” relation to the “I — Thou” relation. As Kant said, the feeling of the sublime turns from suppression to elation, from pain to pleasure. Humankind, for a very long period, stood in the “god-man” relation with the world; only when man has the spiritual force to convert this relation into the “I — Thou” relation does the aesthetic of the sublime come to be. Just because this conversion is needed, Bosanquet calls the sublime “the difficult beauty” (aspero pulchrum). From a genetic angle, then, man’s grasp of the sublime comes after his grasp of graceful beauty. Only after a harmonious “I — Thou” relation has been built between man and world, and only when this relation has cultivated the spiritual force of the human being, does man at last have the power to bring about the conversion.
The experience of the comic is the conversion from the “man-thing” relation to the “I — Thou” relation. In Aristotle’s view, comedy imitates persons inferior to the average — that is, man looks at the comic object from above. In substance, this relation is a derivative of the “man-thing” relation. Yet if the comic object cannot be converted into the “you” of an “I — Thou” relation, if no sympathy is poured into it, the comic object cannot become an aesthetic object either. This is just why Aristotle says that the object of comedy is “the ugly” and not “the wicked.” So the manifold forms of aesthetic interaction are the fruit of the development, differentiation, inter-penetration, and conversion of human interactive activity.
*
Aesthetic interaction is an ideal interaction that opens up the self while removing the threat of self-alienation. As Fromm puts it:
The most essential question of human existence is expressed in a form of art and drama. The audience — not, in the modern sense, the consumer-style audience — takes part in this dramatic performance; he is led out of his everyday habituated range of life, and links himself to himself as a human being and to the essence of his existence. His feet stand again on solid ground; and in this process, because he is led back to himself, he regains strength. [11]
Literary art is a fictional world set apart from everyday habituated life; it has its own laws. Here the real-life role-norms have become unbinding fictions. When the appreciator interacts with the work and its characters, he does not have to follow any role-norm. He is throughout a free, autonomous subject and stands from the self, meeting the object with the nature of the self. The role-mask he could not get rid of in everyday life now falls off of itself; aesthetic interaction lets him realize the “phenomenological reduction,” return to himself, and link himself to his own essence. This aesthetic appreciative activity, setting out from the human being’s own nature, at once fully opening up the self and not giving up the self, is an important existential dimension that resists real alienation and preserves the authentic being of man.
In aesthetic interaction, every life-experience of the character or the figure-object turns into the appreciator’s own experience. So long as the appreciator catches every fine ripple of feeling in the character, every fleeting flash of the unconscious, he is, in fact, discovering and widening his own inner world more deeply. Because the object of aesthetic interaction is also jointly created by the appreciator together with the writer, the two sides of the interaction do not feel — and do not need — any externally imposed standard or norm. This is a fully free and equal interaction; it develops the human being and does not repress him. It keeps deepening and extending human nature, never going against it.
Ágnes Heller writes:
Art is the self-consciousness of humankind. The artwork is always the bearer of “for-itself” human essence. This shows itself in many ways. The artwork is always inward: it depicts the world as the human world, as the world made by man. Its scale of value reflects the development of human value, and at the peak of the artistic value-scale we find those individuals — individuals’ feeling, individuals’ stance — who have most fully entered the process of the flourishing of human essence. [12]
The aesthetic is a world that belongs to the human. With human value, it resists the various “utility values”; with human feeling, with human stance, with human ideal, it gathers again the fragments of the human being who has been chopped up by various roles into a whole; with the equal, free interaction of individual and individual, it restores the individual — alienated by an alienating society — to himself.
If everyday interaction must follow social norms, then aesthetic interaction follows the law of beauty. And the law of beauty proceeds from human nature itself; it is man’s inner measure, his life-rhythm, embodying his freedom and the perfection of the good. So aesthetic interaction is, in fact, to follow one’s own species-essence (Gattungswesen), to call for man’s return to his own species-essence, and to point out the road on which man is to develop along his own nature. When man has returned to his species-essence, when he opens his interactive activity in accordance with that essence, what he experiences is human freedom, fullness, and harmony.
Of course, aesthetic interaction cannot take the place of interaction in real society; and the experience that aesthetic interaction gives to the individual, owing to its virtual character, often shows itself, in real interaction, to be of no practical use and is often broken by reality. Yet the human nature and the heart-of-the-child that aesthetic interaction nurtures are precisely man’s strength to resist alienation. Aesthetic interaction is always interaction set out from the species-essence and from the individual self; it keeps strengthening the individual’s self-identity. When the man returns to real life, he may in real interaction keep his independence and at the same time develop the self by widely receiving and assimilating outer things. So aesthetic interaction is always an indispensable activity for human development.
Aesthetic interaction is also a creative interaction. Without imagination and creative force, one cannot enter aesthetic interaction. One may say: the depth of the heart determines the depth of the interaction; the boundary of imagination and creative force is the boundary of the aesthetic world with which one can interact. Only by widening imagination and creative force can aesthetic interaction enter a wholly new realm. Imagination and creation are the starting-point of aesthetic interaction, and aesthetic interaction in turn awakens and develops the human being’s imagination and creative force. It is in aesthetic interaction that the human creative potential is fully unfolded. Borev writes:
Because artistic culture lets the human spirit always carry creative force, it has become, as it were, the motive source of the extended reproduction of culture. [13]
Of course, the creative spirit fostered by aesthetic interaction is not only the motive force of cultural reproduction; more importantly, it opens up the self, drives the development of the self, and so becomes the great motive force of human development. Aesthetic interaction is a realm open to the limitless. Once man enters aesthetic interaction, a new world opens before him, and he raises himself into a new realm.
Aesthetic interaction also has the feature of transcendence. It dissolves the determinacy and the time-space limit of real interaction. It lets man shake off the bondage of contingency, widens the time-space field of interaction without end, makes interaction an exchange not restricted by time and space — an interaction that one can choose at will, an interaction open to incomparably wide fields and to limitlessly various forms.
In aesthetic interaction, the fixed physical time-space of the real no longer exists. The experience of time and of space gives way wholly to the experience of creation, gauged by the intensity of the creative interactive activity. So when man throws himself fully into aesthetic interaction and is steeped in the joy of creation, he experiences eternity and infinity — the eternity and infinity of being. If the creative feature of aesthetic interaction lets man experience the infinite, the eternal, the full, then the experience of the infinite, the eternal, the full in turn becomes the motive force for the human pursuit of infinite, eternal, full creative activity, driving man forever open to the future. George Santayana writes:
The more we can shake off the earthly garments that accident has put on us, the more open and pure the spirit that endures through ten thousand calamities; the more its superiority and its sameness reach perfection, the more boundless is its joy. At that time, what is left within us is not much earthly dust, only the pure essence of the rational, which a few great philosophers have called the eternal essence one with divinity. [14]
Man has no determinate form gained once for all. He is forever in flow and development, forever seeking himself. Aesthetic interaction offers man the image of his earthly self and at the same time foretells the image of his future self; and it promises to humankind the “eternal essence one with divinity.”
*
The need for interaction is closely tied to eros. One may say: eros is the ground of the need for interaction. Eros drives the interaction between the two sexes and lets humankind multiply. Just as the family is the cell of society, sexual interaction driven by eros forms, to a certain degree, the foundation of social interaction. Yet once sexual interaction widens out into social interaction, the latter transcends the former and takes on its own independent character and meaning. This produces a qualitative difference between the need for interaction and eros: eros belongs to the biological instinct; interaction has become a social “instinct.” The satisfaction of eros yields physical pleasure; the satisfaction of the need for interaction yields spiritual joy. Because aesthetic pleasure comes from aesthetic interaction, it must be spiritual and social.
In Freud’s view, however, artistic creation is the creator’s “daydream”: because the human sexual instinct is repressed and cannot be released, it has to disguise itself in the deformed mode of daydream, and so dissolve inner tension, gain substitute satisfaction, and produce pleasure. The reader’s pleasure in reading the work is
because the writer lets us enjoy our own daydream from the work without self-blame or shame. [15]
In sum: aesthetic pleasure is finally reduced to eros — to the satisfaction of the sexual instinct.
Vygotsky cast off Freud’s one-sided emphasis on the sexual instinct and attributed aesthetic pleasure to the release and exhaustion of nervous energy. He held that
art, in its direct action, goes against the principle of economy of force; the structure of artistic form follows the opposite principle. Our aesthetic response, first of all, appears to us as a response that destroys rather than preserves our nervous energy. It is like an explosion, not a thrifty calculation.
The more the release and exhaustion of nervous energy,
the more art makes a person’s heart pound. [16]
And so aesthetic pleasure is more intense. Although Vygotsky did not agree with Freud, he also explored the source of aesthetic pleasure from the physiological side; this is bound to demote aesthetic spiritual joy into a kind of bodily pleasure.
Aesthetic pleasure is a complex, multi-layered experience and of course contains bodily pleasure within it. Yet it is first of all the experience of an ideal aesthetic interaction; the spiritual joy that arises from this experience is its core. Bodily pleasure is only a lower-layer experience; it cannot replace aesthetic pleasure. Aesthetic pleasure, as spiritual joy, can only be the result of spirit meeting spirit, of spirit striking against spirit. Even in interaction with nature, only when nature is soaked through with human feeling and permeated by human spirit and so becomes a spiritual object can it stir aesthetic pleasure in man.
Although aesthetic interaction is tied to eros, it has, in essence, transcended eros as individual instinct and has become a special human social activity, a social need embodied in the human being. So aesthetic interaction is not only individual but social. Within its individual features there sediment social features. The shared character of aesthetic taste among individuals, the shared standards of aesthetic judgment in a particular age, a particular people, a particular society, are precisely the products of aesthetic interaction. More than that: even the historical evolution of aesthetic taste and the rise of aesthetic fashion can be explained only within aesthetic interaction. This is not only because the need for spiritual interaction is closely tied to the social-historical situation but also because it is only through aesthetic interaction that aesthetic taste keeps changing, differentiating, fusing, colliding, and developing. To examine aesthetic activity within the bounds of the physiological alone is to lose a whole series of questions in a five-mile mist. Escarpit writes:
To read a book as an original work of creation, and not as a practical tool meant to satisfy some need, requires the reader to go to another person’s house, to seek help from another person — and so to come out of his own. [17]
The reader stepping out of “his own house” and into “another’s house” is just aesthetic interaction. Interaction lets the human being’s aesthetic taste and aesthetic capacity blend and integrate, lets the individual cast off his narrowness and one-sidedness and enter a higher spiritual interaction. So,
when we “appreciate” a work of art, we are, like the writer, raised to the level of the species-essence. [12]
The work-world is the medium of the spiritual interaction between appreciator and creator. When the creator builds for himself a world he can dwell in and interact with, he has already shaken off the limits of his own self and the bondage of various desires; with aesthetic creation he raises himself to the level of the species-essence and pours that essence into the work. The appreciator, to appreciate the work and to enjoy it fully, must likewise raise himself into a realm in which he can interact and dialogue with the work; through this interaction he deepens his own species-essence. This is what Gadamer calls the “fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung),” or more precisely, the “fusion of souls.” Whether consciousness or the unconscious, intellect or feeling — all are reshaped in aesthetic interaction. Aesthetic pleasure is precisely the precious gift humankind receives within this aesthetic interaction, within this fusion and elevation of souls.