Lonergan states, "Art is the objectification of a purely experiential pattern" (363).
When Lonergan speaks of a pure pattern he means "the exclusion of alien patterns that instrumentalize experience" (365).
"First, our senses can be an apparatus for receiving and transmitting signals" (365). An example, a signal light that turns green.
"Secondly, one's senses can be at the service of scientific intelligence" (365). An example would be a botanist looking at a flower.
"Thirdly, one's sensitive experience can be reshaped by a psychological or epistemological theory" (366). One can experience the senses through "a notion of sense data and a notion of objectivity which can make one try to apprehend according to the dictates of the theory" (366).
Next, "the pattern is purely experiential" (366). It is experiencing it through the senses. It is "accompanied by a retinue of associations, affects, emotions, incipient tendencies that are part of one, that arise spontaneously and naturally from the person" (366-367).
He also describes it as a release. Lonergan writes, "When experience is in a purely experiential pattern, it is not curtailed ... It is allowed its full complement of feelings. Experience falls into its own proper pattern and takes its own line of expansion, development, organization, fulfillment. It is not dictated to by the world of science, the world of inquiry, the world of information, the world of theories about what experience should be, or by utilitarian motives. It is." (367)
The purely experiential pattern has an "elemental" meaning. Lonergan explains this elemental meaning: "It is, first of all, a transformation of one's world. When experience slips into a purely experiential pattern, one is out of the ready-made world of one's everyday living. One's experience is not being instrumentalized to one's functions in society, to one's job, to one's task, to all the things one has to do. It is on its own. One's experience is a component in one's apprehension of reality ... It is an opening of the horizon" (368).
Art transforms not only the object, but also the subject.
Art is an example of "withdrawl for return ... It is a withdrawl from practical living to explore possibilities of fuller living in richer world ... But in fact the life we are living is a product of artistic creation. We ourselves are products of artistic creation in our concrete living" (369).
Lonergan states that the experience "not only is unknown to other people, it is not fully known even to the one who does experience it" (370).
"The purely experiential pattern becomes objectivied, expressed, in a work of art. The process of objectifying introduces, so to speak, a psychic distance. No longer is one simply experiencing. Objectification involves a separation, a distinction, a detachment, between oneself and one's experience" (370).
The artist uses symbols to communicate meaning. The symbol has multiple meanings.
"Art, whether by an illusion or a fiction or a contrivance, presents the beauty, the splendor, the glory, the majesty, the plus that is in things and that drops out when you say that the moon is just earth and the clouds are just water" (374).
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