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Samvega is the Pali word denoting the shock or wonder felt when a work of art becomes a serious perceptual experience. It implies a change from a "state of distress" involving awareness of the "eight emotional themes" (birth, old age, sickness, death, and four kinds of suffering) to a state of enlightened gladness, involving awareness of the Buddha, Eternal Law, and Communion or community. The idea of aesthetic shock seems useful for an understanding of aesthetic experience and the experience of insight that occurs within the context of clinical psychoanalysis.
It will not, then, surprise us to find that it is not only in connection with natural objects (such as the dewdrop) or events (such as death) but also in connection with works of art, and in fact whenever or wherever perception (aisthesis) leads to a serious experience, that we are really shaken [Coomaraswamy, 1977, p. 182].
Art is like a plenipotentiary of a type of praxis that is better than the prevailing praxis of society, dominated as it is by brutal self-interest. This is what art criticizes. It gives the lie to the notion that production for production's sake is necessary, by opting for a mode of praxis beyond labour. Art's promesse du bonheur, then, has an even more emphatically critical meaning: it not only expresses the idea that current praxis denies happiness, but also carries the connotation that happiness is something beyond praxis [Adorno, 1984, p. 17].
Subjective aesthetic pleasure in the true sense of the word would be a state of release from the empirical totality of being-for-other. Schopenhauer may have been the first to realize this. Happiness in the presence of works of art is a feeling of having made an abrupt escape [Adorno, 1984, p. 22].
Art and bliss alike are rightly suspected of infantility [Adorno, 1984, p. 465].
Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception ... Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the "beginning was the word."...