Art and Experience, Utrecht, © 1996. All rights reserved

Experiential dimension. Meant is the aspect of having an experience, not of understanding one. If Peter is sad and acting like it (we all know how that is) then an onlooker might easily provide an understanding of the sadness that his Peter's acts, gestures and face express that can compete with Peter's own understanding of it. As such most mental events are available to a third-person, descriptive approach. Nevertheless, Peter is the one experiencing the sadness from a first-person point of view. We cannot understand Peter's sadness from a first-person position, because it would then be our sadness, not his. We can, however, empathize with it--that is, in a normal moral context we can be in a second-person communicative acquaintance with Peter. If, however, our perception is of a representation of Peter, and is, therefore, partly disembodied we shall have to constitute the relevant moral dimension by way of our empathetic imagination. Art by representing (intimating) an event's experiential dimension provides us with a second-person acquaintance. Cf. Baumgarten (I:8; V:1; VI; VII:4; VIII).