ABSTRACT
Whilst it is easy to fall back on the view that “we’ll know it when we encounter it!”, beauty has proven stubbornly elusive to explain. In this penultimate chapter I begin by asking what beauty feels like; how valuable it is, and how we attend to it. Returning to our “first” aesthetic experience, attention is drawn to the “transitional” and “transformational” experience of being between self and other, subject and object, knowledge and reality, actual and potential. The concept of “constellation(ality)” is brought into play to help us account for the “mutuality” of subject and object at an ontological level. I conceptualise beauty as the intensely experienced energisation of behaviour by, or the direction of behaviour “toward” The Space that Separates. Such experience of constellational identity is both an emergent experience and an experience of emergence.
