Aesthetics

    Aesthetics is a powerful driving factor in the enactment of a journey. We as humans are drawn to aesthetically attractive things. The beauty of land dappled by the sun, the draw of good smelling/tasting food, a beautiful person's company, even knowledge or the aesthetic of achieving perceived goals. These things have incited journey, but they can also be impediments to the journey. The way that one perceives a journey at the beginning is often quite different to how the journey truly proceeds. What one believes to be beautiful they believe to be good, in fact there is a psychological principle that describes this called the halo effect. Now this perceived good may act as an inciting incident for journeys undertaken willingly or unwittingly, they act as the goal. But, in undertaking the journey to reach them or be alongside them, more experiences are encountered. Experience is quintessential to the effect of a journey, without it, journeys are merely touristic meanderings. If one's sights are set solely on the aesthetically pleasing, the less immediately pleasing experiences that can be found along the way can and will be left behind, leaving the pilgrim bereft of that which would give them purpose and turning them into a tourist. In the temporary or total abandonment of the aesthetic goal, experience can be found. While at the time it may feel as a distraction from the previously desired "goal" of the beautiful things, many experiences are more important than the mere end of the journey. The aesthetically pleasing functions as a locus amoenus (American Camino pg 44), a safe space, somewhere known, but journeys take place in the unknown liminal spaces, because they find what isn't known to the pilgrim. The liminal spaces holding the experiences change the framing of what a pilgrim sees to be beauty, it goes from something concrete and created in a societal intersubjective lens, to something more abstract, subjective, or even objective. 






Minor notes for ideas, ignore.

the beautiful and the good

                                an abstraction

attraction in the path on the journey to making meaning, in the path or the making of the path?

objective vs. intersubjective (is it, or the acceptation of everyone that a thing is beautiful)

Want of a submerging and relationship with the beautiful

I-thou (intimate and sharing, where the I meets the thou, a coming together)

I-it (I=ego, a centering on oneself, egotistic)

Idols vs. Icons (idol is a portray of the godly which is merely the reflection of the one looking, Icons are like windows from the transcendent (god) looking at you.) (mirrors vs. sympathetic outer viewing)

Ontology-the study of what is/being/existence

sub-metaphysics

Epitsemology-study of knowledge

sub-truth

Axiology-study of morals/values/ethics

Transformativity-framing something outside of the beauty to see it as beautiful

Dancing, music, the flamenco, submersion in the beauty, drunkenness in the flow of being in and around beauty

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