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XI CONCLUSION I ,   summarize, clarify, and extend my leading contentions , focusing discussion on the interrelation of form and what I am calling the aesthetic center.¹ In so doing, I will rehearse the primary evidences on which I have rested throughout. I have been developing a series of related theses: first, that human nature is culture creating, condemned by its nature to giving form, to shaping by choice, in itself and its offspring, the potential chaos that ontological openness sets on an animal base; second, that the region aesthetics addresses is the heart as the developed center between intellect, will, and sensibility, whose correlate is significant presences; and third, that aesthetic form plays a significant role in shaping that center. As my most fundamental point of departure, I have maintained that the field of experience is by nature bipolar: on the one hand there is the ever present and fully actual field of sensa, which rises up out of our desirous organism in interaction with its environment; on the other hand there is the empty reference to the whole of what is via the all-inclusive notion of being, which sets us at an infinite distance from that environment. That is the founding structure of what Hegel called Subjective Spirit. The distance established by reference to the Whole poses for us by nature a twofold task: linking the biologically given plenum with the emptily given Whole through eidetic description and interpretation, and choosing to act among the possibilities provided by the given and our understanding of it. As interpretations and choices play in relation to the biologically given over time and the empty space between the sensuously manifest Now and the Whole gets filled with what we call culture in the widest sense of the term, felt proclivities develop so that some features in that total field of awareness draw near and become significant presences while others recede into relative indifference. We have come to call the capacity for interpretation intellect , and the capacity for choosing, will, while the region of felt proclivities and significant presences has been named the heart. It is in this latter region that we find the aesthetic. The dominant tradition underscores moral and intellectual development . Most people have emphasized the moral and downplayed the intellectual , while academics have emphasized the intellectual. In theological circles there has been a stress on the primacy of orthodoxy; in the last half of the twentieth century, there has been a counterstress on the primacy of orthopraxy.² However, theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar has called attention to the priority, going back into the Old Covenant and still present centrally in theology until the end of the thirteenth century, of what we might call—following the orthodoxy and orthopraxy emphases—orthoaesthetic , a right sense of things, a right modality of felt presence.³ Orthoaesthetic plays in relationship to both intellectual and practical operations; and, in fact, the intellectual and the practical are, for the most part, rooted in and sustained by the aesthetic. Interestingly enough, in this emphasis theologian Balthasar parallels many of the observations advanced by secularist John Dewey. As we have seen, for Dewey the aesthetic is integral experience . It provides the sensibility that generates moral rules and practices and suggests comprehensive interpretations. It opens out into a sense of the depth of the world surrounding the pragmatic surface of experience.⁴ This region of integral experience is, again, what I am calling the heart. I have attempted to show throughout how the aesthetic operates at the center of the thinkers we have considered. In this conclusion I want to treat the aesthetic at three levels: the sensory field as the primary field for the operation of the arts, the field of culture , which provides the world of meaning brought to expression in the arts, and the all-encompassing field opened up by our reference to the whole. These correspond to Heidegger’s notions of Earth, of World, and of Mystery as they come to presence in the work of art and address the heart.⁵ In my reflections I am following Heidegger’s Schritt zurück, a reflective step back, from philosophy as generally practiced, into “the ground of metaphysics” in our mode of being present to things. And, in the Heideggerian manner, the focus on “the things themselves” has allowed us to mine the tradition of thought in such a way that certain conventional ways of understanding are loosened up by being...

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