The Seba library treats Aesthetic Ontology in 8 passages, across 4 authors (including Hillman, James, Plotinus, Menninghaus, Winfried).
a psychology that does not start in aesthetics — as Psyche’s tale starts in beauty and as Aphrodite is the psyché tou kosmou or soul in all things — cannot claim to be truly psychology since it omits this essential trait of the soul’s nature.
Hillman argues that the soul’s nature is irreducibly aesthetic, so that depth psychology without an aesthetic ontology is structurally incomplete.
, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, 1992thesis
beauty cannot be made to depe… the Idea primal, immaterial, firmly a unity — is not Beauty. If material extension were in itself the ground of beauty, then the creating principle, being without extension, could not be beautiful.
Plotinus grounds beauty ontologically in the immaterial Idea rather than in matter or extension, establishing the metaphysical foundation that aesthetic value belongs to a real immaterial order.
, The Six Enneads, 270thesis
archetypal psychology uses ‘universal’ as an adjective, declaring a substantive perduring value, which ontology states as a hypostasis.
Hillman aligns archetypal psychology’s treatment of images with ontological categories, asserting that aesthetic-psychological universals have the standing of real, perduring forms.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983supporting
archetypal psychology uses ‘universal’ as an adjective, declaring a substantive perduring value, which ontology states as a hypostasis.
Identical to the parallel passage: the universality of archetypal images is asserted as ontological hypostasis, grounding aesthetic response in a trans-empirical order of being.
, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983supporting
the time has come in psychotherapy for working out the archetypal root of the discipline. When this has been done, the term ‘lay analysis’ will fall away because the analyst will no longer be considered, nor consider himself, from alien points of view.
Hillman calls for an ontology of analysis grounded in archetypal foundations, an early statement of the need to ground depth-psychological practice in its own proper being.
, Suicide and the Soul, 1964supporting
aesthetic emotions were attributed the power to evaluate, in a largely intuitive way, phenomena that by definition partially defy a strictly conceptual derivation — namely, the aesthetic virtues of individual objects or performances in all their richness and individuality.
Menninghaus locates aesthetic evaluation in an irreducibly intuitive, emotion-laden faculty, implicitly resisting any reduction of aesthetic experience to purely conceptual or ontology-neutral cognition.
, What Are Aesthetic Emotions?, 2015supporting
it is the first and foremost characteristic of aesthetic emotions to make a direct contribution to aesthetic evaluation/appreciation. Each aesthetic emotion is tuned to a special type of perceived aesthetic appeal.
Menninghaus defines aesthetic emotions by their evaluative function rather than their ontological ground, providing the empirical-psychological counterpoint to depth-psychology’s ontological claims.
, What Are Aesthetic Emotions?, 2015aside
the distinction that we have been proposing throughout these essays between identity as sameness and identity as selfhood should authorize us, if not to ignore the biologic argument, at least to dissociate it from the underlying substantialist ontology.
Ricoeur’s critique of substantialist ontology opens conceptual space for a non-reductive account of the self that bears indirectly on how aesthetic experience may be situated within a broader ontology of selfhood.
, Oneself as Another, 1992aside