Not the fruit of experience but experience itself is the end.  The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation.  Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face, some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight of intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us, for that moment only.  A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life.  How may we see in them all that is to be seen by the finest senses?  How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.  In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike.  While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend.  Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.  With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch.  What we have to do is be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. According to Victor Hugo, "We are all condamnés."  We are all under the sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve, les hommes sont tous condamnés à mort avec des sursis indéfinis: we have an interval and then our place knows us no more.  Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the children of this world," in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time.  Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which comes naturally to many of us.  Only be sure it is passion, that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most.  For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake. 

On the Mona Lisa: The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years man had come to desire.  Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the eyelids are a little weary.  It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions.  Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed?  All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and molded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the Middle Ages with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the pagan world, the sins of the Borgias.  She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Hellen of Troy, and, as Saint-Ann, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has molded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.  The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life.  Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modem idea.   (Walter Pater 1868)

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If the process of seeing is always dependent upon the apprehension of wholeness, beauty may be described as a necessary dimension of wholeness.  Inner coherence [of an object] and its contextual fitness invariably convey a sense of justice, or rather bring a moment when our moral consciousness expands beyond human affairs and into nature and the full arena of cognition.  To the religious, natural beauty suggests divine wisdom; to the scientific, natural beauty suggests a pattern of nesting symmetries, at once global and profound, inhering both spatially and temporally.  To some, these symmetries may in turn imply a natural justice, which at once validates human morality and transcends it. If beauty results from our insight into the integrity of fitness of phenomena, what are the effects of such insight?  We may describe two sorts of effect: pleasure and love. Pleasure is the passive effect of beauty, the receptive sensation that, at the moment of insight or recognition, expresses itself, complete with adrenal burst, in wonder or laughter or tears.  Love is the active effect of beauty: the will to repeat or increase pleasure by participating in beauty as fully as possible.  Thus the people who are most capable of insight are most avid in their pursuit of chances to exercise it. More, perhaps, than by social reward, they are drawn into challenging careers by the sheer beauty that attends every discovery, by the innocent and undiluted pleasure of seeing. In short, anyone who performs difficult tasks inventively, justly, and with humane expressiveness works in the presence of beauty.  We cannot understand beauty without participating in it, or participate in it without subsuming its principles. The almost universal relevance of beauty has philosophical implications as well.  Since beauty is an aspect of all accurate perception, regardless of field, we may see it as a bond connecting all fields and revealing, beneath apparent distinctions the latent unity of thought.  Those who recognize the aesthetic dimension of all inquiry better understand the ways in which all fields and studies are part of an integral human project, an enterprise coherent in its standards and goals.  They realize that the aesthetic values that inhere in all disciplines also inhere, on a different level, to the philosophical relations between the disciplines, to the political contexts in which the disciplines operate, and to the historical matrix in which they have developed. Aesthetics, in other words, can assist us in uncovering links not only between mind and nature, but also between the scientific, humanistic and political professions, between past, present, and future. As a kind of intellectual eroticism, moreover, the enjoyment of beauty implies a  unison of reason and emotion.  When we experience beauty, reason and emotion operate reciprocally, conscious thought producing an emotional delight, which in turn impels it further.  Properly developed, the sense of beauty imposes neither priorities nor distinctions between emotional and intellective impulses, but rather is open to both as partners in the search for form.  By extension, we might characterize the insightful mind as a government that realizes that the quest for order (reason) is impossible without the guarantee of freedom (emotion).., The process by which art renders life important, communal, and coherent is celebration, both the primitive religious function of art as ritual and the secular role of art as a medium of delight. The sense of the word meant here is one of a ritual whose pleasure is derived from the idea of doing justice to an otherwise elusive or oppressive reality.  The experience of doing justice is conversely the experience of being relieved of a burden, and, as Aristotle taught, the sense of unburdenment is pleasurable whether it is achieved through laughter or through tears. Truly celebratory art maintains, as part of its emotive power, an analytic and inquiring faculty that opens the artist to inspiration and discovery.  Art does not dignify the routine so much as reveal the remarkable: the hidden wonder that persists in all great human events and in the rituals that surround them.  Society must celebrate life in order to accept life and succeed at life.  Society cannot celebrate life effectively unless its means of celebration conveys knowledge of the ideas behind life and provokes the passionate experience of beauty.   (Robert Grudin  1989)

Art best conquers time, and therefore the nemo.  It constitutes that timeless world of the full intellect (Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere) where each artefact is contemporary, and as nearly immortal as an object in a cosmos without immortality can be. We enter the noosphere by creating, whereby we constitute it, or by experiencing, whereby we exist in it.  Both functions are in communion; 'actors' and 'audience', 'celebrants' and 'congregation'.  For experiencing art is experiencing, among other things, that others have existed as we exist, and still exist in this creation of their existing. The noosphere is equally created, of course, by great achievements in science. But the important distinction between the artefact and what we may call the scientifact is that the former, unlike the latter, can never be proved wrong.  An artefact, however poor artistically, is an object in a contest where proof and disproof do not exist. This is why the artefact is so much more resistant to time; the cosmogonies of ancient Mesopotamia make very little impression and have very little interest for us.  They are disproved scientifacts.  On the other hand the artefacts of ancient Mesopotamia retain both interest and immediacy.  The great test of a scientifact is its utility now; of course utility-now is of vital importance to us and explains the priority we accord science in our world now.  But disproved scientifacts, those that no longer have this utitlity, become mere items of interest in the history of science and the development of the human mind, items that we tend to judge by increasingly aesthetic standards; for their neatness of exposition, style, form and so forth. They become, in fact, disguised artefacts, though far less free of time and therefore less immediate and important to us than true artefacts. This timelessness of the artefact has a quantitative aspect; it is of course illogical and ungrammatical to speak of one object as being more timeless than another.  But our eagerness to conquer time, or to see time conquered, does lead us into this illogic.  We have to be very ruthless, suppress all our intuitive feeling, to find worthless ugliness in an artefact of over a few hundred years' age.  It is true that the passage of time often constitutes a kind of selection committee; objects of beauty stand a better chance of being preserved than ugly ones.  But in many cases, such as archaeological finds, we know that there was no selection committee.  Ugly objects in their own age survive side by side with beautiful ones; and yet we find beauty in them all. Time, the length of survival of an artefact, becomes a factor in its beauty.  The aesthetic value of the object becomes confused with its value as witness, or carrier of information from far places.  Its beauty merges into its usefulness as a piece of human communication; and this will plainly vary according to our need of (previous lack of) communication from the particular source. The older an artefact the nearer it is to the timeless; the newer the artefact the further away.  Because it is new, yearless, it has none of the beauty or utility of having survived in time; but it may have the beauty or utility of being likely to survive time.  Some artefacts are likely to survive because the future can use them as evidence against the age that produced them; and others as evidence for.  Official art requires only the second kind. Monuments, not testaments. Though this prejudice in favour of what is old or likely to become old affects our judgement of artefacts, and even our attitude to such things as fossils, it does not normally affect our judgement of other objects.  In the stone, the mere enduringness of matter; in the artefact, the enduringness of man; of a name or of a nameless human existence; the thumb-mark below the handle of a Minoan pot. An aged artefact is both what could not be created today and what still exists today; we admire in it the number of nows survived.  It is doubly present; both survivant and now.  This explains the long vogue of the antique.  As organisms aware that we shall die, we are in one way nearer the oldest artefact than the newest natural object. Since the normal standard by which we judge artefacts is their worthiness to survive, it is only to be expected that a contrary kind of artefact should on occasion appeal to us: that is, the ephemeral artefact. A whole host of minor arts are, in themselves and by their natures, banned from the noosphere: for example, the arts of gardening, coiffure, haute cuisine, pyrotechnics.  If they get into the noosphere, it is by chance, by happening to be made items in some greater art.  It is true that the camera and the cinecamera, the tape recorder and the tin can, counter the intrinsic ephemerality of these sub-arts; and it is sometimes possible to reconstitute them be recipe.  But it is precisely a part of our pleasure that the direct experience of these arts is essentially ephermeral and not shared by others. The parallel with man: we also pass like fireworks, like flowers, like fine food and fine wine.  We feel a kinship with these ephemeral arts, these manifestations of human skill that are born after and die before us; that may be come and gone in a few seconds.  Unrecorded performances in music, on the stage and on the sports field fall into the same category. So there are two kinds of artefact: those we admire, and perhaps envy, because they survive us and those we like, and perhaps pity, because they do not. Both kinds are aspects of feeling about time. All art both generalizes and particularizes; that is, tries to flower in all time, but is rooted in one time. An archaic statue, an abstract painting, a twelve-tone sequence may mainly generalize (all time); a Holbein portrait, a haiku, a flamenco song may mainly particularize (one time).  But in the portrait of Ann Cresacre by Holbein I see one sixeenth-century woman and yet all young women of a certain kind; in this austere and totally unrooted concatenation of notes by Western I hear nontheless the expression of one particular early twentieth-century mind. This balance between particularization and generalization that the artist struggles to achieve, nature achieves without struggle. This butterfly is unique and universal; it is both itself and exactly like any other butterfly of its species.  This nightingale sings to me as it sang to my grandfather, and his grandfather; and to Homer's grandfather; it is the same nightingale and not the same nightingale.  It is now and it is ever.  Through the voice I hear, and Keats heard, this passing night I enter reality two ways; and at the centre meet my richer self. How we see a natural object depends on us, whether we see it vertically, in this one moment, now, or horizontally, in all its past; or both together; and so in art we try to say both in the one statement.  Always these complex factors of time are inherent in the seeing and the saying. The first two artistic purposes, representational and outer-feeling, were the main ones until at least the Renaissance; and the third purpose, inner-feeling, has been triumphant only during the last century or so. There are two principal reasons for this.  The first is that the development of better means of exact representation than art has made purely descriptive realistic art seem largely mischanneled.  The second reason for the triumph of inner-feeling art is the rise of the importance of self in the existence of each as a result of nemo-creating conditions. (The ominous innumerability of our world, the endless repetition of triviality, breeds the nemo.) Art has to provide today what ignorance and social and physical conditions provided in the past: insecurity, violence and hazard.  This is a perversion of its true function. The true primary function of art is not to remedy the faults and deficiencies of society, to provide salt for the ordinary; but in conjunction with science to occupy the cestral position in human existence. The artefacts of a genius are distinguished by rich human content, for which he forges new images and new techniques, creates new styles.  He sees himself  as a unique eruption in the desert of the banal.  He feels himself mysteriously inspired or posessed (of that instantaneous force that through the green fuse drives the flower).  The craftsman, on the other hand, is content to use the traditional materials and techniques.  The more self-possessed he is, the better craftsman he will be.  What pleases him is skill of execution.  He is very concerned with his contemporary success, his market value.  If a certain kind of social or political commitment is fashionable, he may be committed; but out of fashion, not conviction.  The genius, of course, is largely indifferent to contemporary success; and his commitment to his ideals, both artistic and political, is profoundly indifferent to their contemporary popularity. Artists are the only true pharoahs left; so let them be their own celebratory masons, and return to the self, abandon all the work on the other tombs and monuments.   (John Fowles)