ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a phenomenological account of aesthetics. The aesthetic is intimately entangled with the social, with issues of taste, culture, and the social networks in which an individual resides. It is inseparable from the cultural circumstances that attended both its creation and its subsequent appreciation. There is a subtle danger of slipping into the mode of treating it as an identity category. It is a matter of phenomenology, a conscious intentionality, a state of being. It is a consciousness built on a foundation of unconsciousness. It is impossible to understand aesthetics without understanding how the brain functions. The neuroscience substantiates the clinical assertion that aesthetic experience is self-organizing. Aesthetic experience or aesthetic being thus brings together and reorganizes disparate and anatomically distant parts of the mind/brain. Such reorganization disrupts previous dysfunctional organizations that are attended by pain, suffering, anxiety, or depression.
