A leap of faith occurs as the participant assumes the values of the incorporating culture. The art object becomes a symbol that speaks active cultural mythology. It has meaning by virtue of the encounter. When the viewer relates aesthetic bearing to life, or the theorist relates the experience to the historical dialogue, it is a secondary procedure. While the experience does not circumvent the perceptual veil of the ego as it was once believed, the myths we live by are recast during these experiences.
Aesthetic bearing is inspired by a catalytic symbol.
The symbol incorporates an unknown, an enigma, a mystery on the verge of resolution, recognized as the ineffable content of the experience. The event transcends the class of symbol recognition utilized in discursive language and becomes the latest entry in a complex set of integrating experiences that shapes the individual and gives culture its ontological ground. Aesthetic bearing provides substantiating truth and subjective experience as foundations for abstract knowledge. It is irrelevant for art s purposes that the perception of truth is not absolute. The logocentric mind exists in a profane world.