Aesthetic principles, the arts, and the interpretation of culture

Culture is symbolism. Symbols allow a distance between perception and interpretation and create space for intentional action. Science, the arts, and religions are different cultural strategies to transcend sensual perception and open up the search and representation of structures and relations in and yet beyond sensual experience. The arts demonstrate, interpret, and invent such connectivities. Knowing, feeling, and representing hidden structures influence the very ways of perception, which are categorized in theories of perception called aesthetics. The processual and non-dual character of perception can be modeled not only on the basis of the well-known distinctions in European epistemologies (based on Platonic and Aristotelian modes of thinking) but on the Buddhist theory of skandhas, which might be able to transcend the dualism of matter and mind. The dynamics of perception will be explained on this basis using the categories of beauty and sublime and veiling and revealing (unveiling). The central category of aesthetic processes is similarity or variation, being expressed in fractal proportions and relationships in the processes of knowing and feeling.