Chaosmosis Stills

4. The Three Kinds of Delight

There are three varieties of delight in these works which relate to: percepts, affects and concepts.

The aesthetic moment relates to the percepts.

It is the moment of contemplation of the forms, independent of what they might produce or suggest in one’s mind. As Augustine remarked, that’s "the delight of the senses". It is just the moment of the pleasing and delight of the eye.

"Pulchra enim dicuntur ea quae visa placent." Aquinas.(We call that beautiful which pleases the sight. Joyce’s translation.)

The sensitive moment of emotions relates to the affects.

That’s the moment when the percepts float towards the mind and have an impact regarding what they produce as emotions and sensations. As Augustine clarified, that’s the "delight through the senses."

The intellectual moment of reason relates to the concepts.

This is the moment whereby senses have produced emotions and sensations, but further dwell in the mind so as to produce thoughts and ideas. It is the moment when one grasps the conceptual part of the work, the moment when the mind becomes the theater of meanings, making and unmaking themselves out of the delightful interplay of intuitive and deductive, thought which reside before and after language.