Synaesthesis is defined as our readiness “to take any direction we choose”, but in synaesthesis evidently we do not choose. Presumably if we did choose and acted upon that choice, that very fact would indicate that the supposed state of synaesthesis was illusory, not real.
Synaesthesis, says Richards, is the ground-plan of all aesthetic experience. The arts, he admits, do seem “to lift away the burden of existence” and we do seem “to be looking into the heart of things”, but this state of euphoria, he insists, has actually nothing to do with truth. The element constant to all experiences that have the characteristic of beauty, concludes Richards, is synaesthesis – a harmony and equilibrium of our impulses.
Any experience must involve the arousal and interplay of various impulses, but in the experience of beauty Richards contends that our impulses are organized in a peculiar way. In this peculiar organization which constitutes synaesthesis, the rivalry of conflicting impulses is avoided, not by our suppressing the impulses, but, paradoxically, by our giving they free rein.
Richards and his colleagues are confident that the sense of disinterest in the aesthetic experience means, paradoxically that the maximum number of interests is actually involved, and that the feeling of “impersonality” that synaesthesis induces means that the “whole of personality” has been brought into play.
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Some critics consider Richards’s synaesthesis as a further development of Aristotle’s “purgation”, and some others repudiate it as empty rhetoric. However, the concept of synaethesis continues to enjoy the confidence of many critics even today.