Listening: “imaginative experience” :

Tchaikovsky Symphony no. 6, 1st movement

“The Creation” : Genesis 1:1

(write just an adjective or two) for screen-sharing

CLIVE BELL

“significant form”

Metaphysical thesis : “art’s power to communicate ‘essential reality’”

A.K.Coomaraswamy: described as “one of those great Hindus working for the union of Eastern and western thought”

Rasa: more than aesthetic emotion/aesthetic enjoyment: “on a new level altogether as compared with other feelings.

What is the nature of this aesthetic experience?

Indian thinker dissociate this experience from utility, mere agreeableness and moral satisfaction. Self-forgetfulness belongs to it.

Rasa or ‘beauty’ is not ‘subjective’ or ‘relative.’ It is not a property of objects but is nevertheless a dimension of reality, ‘true reality experienced through feeling rather than cognition or religious devotion. Because the ‘object’ of aesthetic experience is the same as that of religious experience, “we are justified in identifying beauty with God or Brahman.” Far from being “personal,” such experience is possible only for someone who “forgets himself and identifies with the monistic whole which true reality, Brahman, is.” “A work of art, by depicting certain ‘permanent moods,’ like wonder and terror, induces a sense of this reality. Rasa: it emerges as experience; in that experience the distinction between subject and object , between individual and Brahman (true reality) is transcended.”

Assignment: [St Thomas Aquinas: on “beauty”]

Submission: Monday, May 11, 2026, 10:00 p.m.

Im Rhein, im heiligen Strome
Dichter (poet): Heinrich Heine

Im Rhein, im heiligen Strome,
Da spiegelt sich in den Well’n
Mit seinem grossen Dome,
Das grosse, heilige Köln.

Im Dom da steht ein Bildnis,
Auf gold’nem Leder gemalt;
In meines Lebens Wildnis
Hat’s freundlich hineingestrahlt.

Es schweben Blumen und Eng’lein
Um unsre liebe Frau;
Die Augen, die Lippen, die Wäng’lein,
Die gleichen der Liebsten genau.