Many modes of religious expression and experience have a markedly aesthetic component, even though aesthetic delight itself often appears to be free of moral or religious interests. In this ground-breaking work, Frank Burch Brown shows how aesthetics, no less than ethics, can play a central role in the study of religion and in the practice of theology.

Name der Zeitschrift: Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook Jahrgang: 2017 Heft: 1 Seiten: 145-174.

This paper discusses the notion of disimagination a translation of the German word Entbildung, which was devised by Meister Eckhart as a reinterpretation of the Neoplatonic categories of abstraction (aphairesis) and negation (apophasis)in connection with Nishitani Keiji's standpoint of emptiness. Nishitani proposes a nonsubjective, nonrepresentational, and nonconceptual type of knowledge to avoid the problem of representation implied in the modern subjective self-consciousness that prevents our access to the reality of things. It is argued that what he calls a knowing of (...) non-knowing can be understood as a transposition of the problematics of aphairesis to a new context, that of the formless form. The ontology of images in the creative process, both cosmic and artistic, is examined from Nishitani's identification of likeness and suchness on the field of emptiness. It is suggested that the resulting denial of the traditional distinction between being and appearance approaches a critique closer to postfoundational metaphysics and, like disimagination, aims at an ascetic movement of self-negation and detachment from words and images that leads, in turn, to a creative and playful use of language free of representation. (shrink)

This essay examines the particular contributions of three communities of women religious for the ways in which they incorporated concerns for the moral formation of their students together with a focus on beauty. These communities not only provided a basic “Catholic moral education” but also aimed to develop persons who saw their responsibility as building a better world that was not only good but also beautiful. Given recent attention to the relationship between ethics and aesthetics, this essay shows (...) how the work of women religious makes a significant contribution to this field. (shrink)

The various ethnic groups in the East entered the civilization period relatively early, but the process of development and change was very slow. The Eastern ethnic groups have inherited and continued the production methods, customs, social structures, ethical systems, and religious and cultural beliefs of the primitive period, while primitive thinking has a certain degree of decisive role in the aesthetic and artistic creation of Eastern art. This article aims to trace the origin of Eastern art, enhance the understanding (...) and cognition of the aesthetic characteristics, aesthetic identification, and artistic presentation characteristics of Eastern art history. Only by correctly understanding and recognizing the dialectical relationship between Eastern art aesthetics and artistic presentation can Western scholars correct their misreading of the development of Eastern art history. At the same time, it can strengthen the rational cognition and inheritance of Eastern ethnic groups towards their own artistic culture, and promote the active construction of the national characteristics of Eastern art. (shrink)

Jonathan Edwards and Ralph Waldo Emerson remain central voices in North American spiritual traditions. This article is an attempt to contextualize a major vein of the north American theological and spiritual tradition concerning the intersection of aesthetics and the human experience of God. As will be argued below, both Edwards and Emerson were deeply involved in these conversations and to a large extent offer novel approaches to the tensions between the individual and community as it relates to the experience (...) of God. To that end, this essay begins with an analysis of Edwards's view of religious experience and its normative relation to human experience as a whole. I will argue that... (shrink)

In this paper I intend to show that the differences between the aesthetic experience and the religious experience do not “close” the dialogue between the aesthetic man and the religious man. Although these two types of experience are distinguished by “the way in which everyone understands its object” —there is a similarity between aesthetic experience and religious experience which resides in the fact that “towards their object, both are in an attitude of contemplation”.

This study delves into the porcelain calligraphy and painting of the Ming and Qing dynasties, aiming to uncover the spiritual and cultural narratives encapsulated in these artistic expressions. During these eras, marked by the zenith of Chinese porcelain artistry, the incorporation of religious motifs was not merely decorative but a profound reflection of the prevailing religious beliefs, cultural norms, and aesthetic inclinations of the time. This paper conducts a deep analysis of the religious elements manifested in Ming (...) and Qing dynasty porcelain artworks, exploring how these elements articulate religious devotion, mirror cultural practices, and influence artistic transformations. Through detailed appreciation and interpretation of three exemplary cases—Yongle blue and white entwined flowers, Jiajing blue and white road Fu Yunhe large plate, and a blue and white seawater river cliff pattern three-legged furnace—this study reveals how these works serve as conduits for spiritual reflection and cultural transmission. Each piece not only embodies the religious and philosophical zeitgeist of its era but also highlights the dynamic interplay between art and societal evolution, thus underscoring the multifaceted roles ancient religious art plays in perpetuating cultural heritage, enchanting viewers with its artistic allure, and reflecting broader social transformations. (shrink)

This is a tricentennial riff on the Edwardsean idea that beauty is both the first principle of being and the distinguishing perfection of God. What is really distinctive about Edwards's view of beauty is that it is an ontological reality and consists in joyfully bestowing being and beauty more than in being beautiful, in creative and beautifying activity more than in being beautiful. Edwards was also a pioneer in the way he envisaged a lively universe created by God, not out (...) of nothing or out of something, but out of the very fullness of God's own life overflowing into a world as a self-enlargement of the divine life. Edwards dares to offer a vision of God as the animating soul of the universe who governs the universe by the attractive and creative power of God's own beautifying life. What might it mean for religious ethics to take this as a description of the context for its work? The answer, in part and in brief, is that a life of true virtue, grounded in the heartfelt piety of holy affections, is a beautifying life. My aim in spinning out some Edwardsean themes is to encourage the reader to think about religious ethics outside the box within which beauty and beautifying activity play no part in defining the agenda of religious ethics. Inspired by themes unique and central to Edwards in his time, we may learn things of importance to religious ethics in our time that Edwards neither knew nor believed. (shrink)

William James catalogued an amazing diversity of religious experiences. Yet even the pluralistic James was able to find a nucleus, consisting of an uneasiness and its solution, ‘1. The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand. 2. The solution is a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers.’ But by stressing the moral factor, James seems to exclude (...) those who stress rather the sense of mystery stemming from man's theoretical limitations. Einstein, for example, writes: ‘The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious side of life. It is the deep feeling which is at the cradle of all true art and science. In this sense, and only in this sense, I count myself amongst the most deeply religious people.’ For Einstein as for Pascal : ‘The last proceeding of reason is to recognise that there is an infinity of things which are beyond it.’ Thus I propose the following revision of James' conception of the nucleus of the religious experience: uneasy awareness of the limitations of man's moral or theoretical powers, especially when reality is restricted to sense data and natural objects; awe-full awareness of a further reality—beyond or behind or within; conviction that participation with this further reality is of supreme importance. (shrink)

In 1938 Wittgenstein delivered a short course of lectures on aesthetics to a small group of students at Cambridge. The present volume has been compiled from notes taken down at the time by three of the students: Rush Rhees, Yorick Smythies, and James Taylor. They have been supplemented by notes of conversations on Freud (to whom reference was made in the course on aesthetics) between Wittgenstein and Rush Rhees, and by notes of some lectures on religious belief. (...) As very little is known of Wittgenstein's views on these subjects from his published works, these notes should be of considerable interest to students of contemporary philosophy. Further, their fresh and informal style should recommend Wittgenstein to those who find his Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations a little formidable. (shrink)

In this article I reflect upon the problem of the aesthetic intelligibility of the world in connection with an aesthetic approach to religious naturalism. Taking the work of R.W. Hepburn as conversation partner, I bring it into relation to the work of Charles Peirce and Michael Polanyi. Admitting the ambiguous nature of their own religious commitments, I try to sketch, with no claim to completeness, how they help to illuminate just what would be entailed in beginning the process (...) of translating religious forms of attending into aesthetic forms and what would be gained and what would be lost in doing so. (shrink)

When art develops to a certain extent, it is bound to be mixed with traces of religion, and art influenced by religion occupies an important position in the entire history of art development. Looking at the development history of Chinese and Western painting art, we can find that there are indeed many connections between religion and art. The spiritual transmission of religion is carried out using intuition through painting art, and its vital role is reflected in the long history of (...) human civilization. This paper studies the relationship between the philosophical fusion of the original aesthetics of Chinese and Western religious painting and contemporary painting by studying the development and characteristics of religious painting in China and the West. This paper studies the differences between Chinese and Western religious doctrines and how religious figure painting embodies divinity and secularized humanity in terms of painting methods and forms of expression. The study of the philosophical fusion of the original aesthetics of Chinese and Western religious paintings and its influence on contemporary paintings fills the gap in this aspect. (shrink)

Cultural factors are operating in the aesthetic experience of pictorial realism, occurring in a transcultural manner, and their effects are salient in beholder’s affective reaction correlated with perceptual-cognitive operation. This paper aims to demonstrate this hypothesis, by developing two analytical tools that might explain the anti-hedonic valence of Hong Taeyong, an eighteenth-century Korean literatus’ aesthetic experience of a Western religious fresco depicting the Lamentation of Christ in a Jesuit Catholic church in Beijing. First, a complex multifold conflict between «actual (...) affect» and culturally modeled «ideal affect», operating simultaneously in his visual experience, might be translated into a highly negative valence of his global affective state. Second, the variance of processing fluencies at different levels would have made his global processing operation less fluid, and it might play a role in his negative affective valence, since the affect is inherent in processing fluency signal. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Note of Interpretation: Theistic Finitism as an Aesthetics of Religious NaturalismAndrew Stone Porter (bio)In our cosmological construction we are, therefore, left with the final opposites, joy and sorrow, good and evil, disjunction and conjunction—that is to say, the many in one—flux and permanence, greatness and triviality, freedom and necessity, God and the World. In this list, the pairs of opposites are in experience with a certain (...) ultimate directness of intuition, except in the case of the last pair. God and the World introduce the note of interpretation.—Alfred North Whitehead1Theistic finitism, the position that God is not omnipotent, is the most tenable solution to the problem of evil—but it also necessitates a slide toward immanence. Among the ranks of the finitists we find philosophers such as William James,2 process thinkers such as Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne,3 theological personalists such as Edgar Brightman (and, Rufus Burrow argues, his pupil Martin Luther King, Jr.),4 feminist disability theologians like Julia Watts Belser,5 and popular religion writers such as Harold Kushner.6 Like many others, Kushner found in finitism not an answer to an abstract theological puzzle, but an existentially necessary salve for the despair that nearly overtook him when his three year-old son was diagnosed with a terminal degenerative disease. No loving, all-knowing, all-powerful creator would ever allow such [End Page 70] a thing to happen, Kushner reasoned. If God is not all-powerful, then God need not be the author of our pain, but a friend who hurts with us as we bear it. Rather than sadistic puppeteer, a finite God becomes “the fellow-sufferer who understands.”7 As Jürgen Moltmann put it, “the one who cannot suffer cannot love either. So [God] is also a loveless being.”8 Or, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer reflected as he awaited execution in a Nazi concentration camp, “Only the suffering God can help.”9However, when one strips away divine omnipotence, one must also bid adieu either to God’s omniscience or creator-hood: for an omniscient creator, crafting the world with full knowledge of how everything would unfold, would be ipso facto omnipotent. We are left, then, with the following alternatives: we could posit a God who pressed the “create world” button not knowing what would happen (which seems irresponsible, calling into question God’s goodness)—as Tim Bayne puts it, “If future contingents fall outside the scope of God’s knowledge, then creation was a massive gamble.”10 We may share Albert Einstein’s famous distaste for a God who plays dice with the universe. The other alternative is that God’s knowledge and power are partial, that the Divine is merely one being/force among many. But if God is “just a stranger on the bus, trying to make his way home,”11 then in what sense can we say that God is God at all?This paper offers a construal of theistic finitism as a form of religious naturalism with an aesthetics of empathetic solidarity. That is, when we relinquish belief in God’s omnipotence, instead imagining that God is struggling and suffering along with us, we relinquish as well belief in an overbearing “supernatural realm” or “order” governing/underlying all things. To see God in this way, as Whitehead says, is to “introduce the note of interpretation.” And that note, I suggest, is a musical note, specifically a blues note.12 To call the loving [End Page 71] friendship we experience “God” is an aesthetic choice, an informed way of interpreting life in order to move through it with companionship, tenderness and care. A naturalistic religiosity, in Carol Wayne White’s phrasing, “can be a mode of reflecting on, experiencing, and envisioning one’s relationality with all that is.”13 In this way theology becomes, as Belser puts it, “a grammar of the imagination.”14 As a blues aesthetics of empathetic solidarity, theistic finitism may be considered a form of religious naturalism particularly well-suited to our present moment, mired as it is in cascading crises and careening into catastrophe. I suggest that, as young spiritual seekers exit churches in search of more meaningful community... (shrink)

This article explores John's Muir's writings in order to construct a Muirian environmental aesthetics. To this end, I draw out three key features. First is the aesthetic category of sublimity as it emerges in his explorations of Yosemite. Second, a distinctive, pluralistic environmental aesthetics is found through his interweaving of aesthetic, religious, and scientific ideas. Third, his journals from the Thousand‐Mile Walk reveal an active and situated aesthetics, shaped by his practice of exploring and communing with (...) nature. Together, these features support a perspective that is quite contemporary, in tune with environmental and everyday aesthetics, as well as with recent work in environmental ethics. (shrink)

The Seducer's Diary. By Søren Kierkegaard, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) xv + 214 pp. $12.95, £9.95 paper. Christian Discourses: The Crisis and A Crisis in the Life of an Actress. By Søren Kierkegaard, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) xvii + 489 pp. $55.00, £39.50 cloth. Without Authority. By Søren Kierkegaard, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna Hong (...) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) xix + 317 pp. $42.50, £35.00 cloth. (shrink)

Ecological Prospects addresses pressing issues that will shape ecological awareness and activism into the next century. From a variety of perspectives, the book explores topics such as how ecological insight can serve as a management model for appropriate economic development, the possible categories that can be used to determine land use priorities, working models for environmental activism, potential paradigms for spiritually attuned environmentalism, and the role of aesthetic appreciation in the development of one's sensitivity to the environment.

The report brought to the section members’ notice issues consideration of the major tendencies of religious and aesthetic medium transformation laying the emphasis on the major factors of this transformation together with its socio-cultural basis. Based on the comparison of the processes taking place within Catholicism, Protestantism and Orthodoxy the report marks the concurrency of religious and aesthetic processes present within the named confessions which challenges the idea of absolute uniqueness of religious and aesthetic experience of the (...) orthodox in Russia nowadays. The syncretism in the first place and dialectical unity of fundamentalism and modernism in the second, can be considered as the leading tendencies of transformation of religious and aesthetic medium of modern Christianity. (shrink)

In the world of globalization religious-artistic works remain a phenomenon study of which allows to observe the main tendencies of socio-cultural dynamics taking into account complicated and multi-plan contexts of its realization. Methodological peculiarities of the suggested approach base on philosophic comparative study and interdisciplinary method, which allow neutralizing negative consequences of scientist approach based on physiological–ideological projectivity. In this case correlation of sacral and aesthetic works as crossing of “vertical” and “horizontal” dimensions which opens “the second derivative” of (...) thecreative process – its Stereological orientation. At the threshold of the second decade of the 21 century it is expedient to activate comparative analysis of the problem of creation through the prism of cultures of various types at the specific material. This will allow us to understand more fully opportunities of global strategy of unity of the humanity on the basis of great achievements of culture having determined its boundaries and perspectives. (shrink)

This paper attempts to investigate Kierkegaard’s thought through the category of mimesis. First, two meanings of the word are distinguished and analyzed: the archaic meaning that links it to the concept of re-enactment, and the traditional meaning that links it to the aesthetic field of art. These two meanings are then considered in relation to Kierkegaard’s opus, showing the oscillation of mimesis as corresponding to that between the aesthetic, which lives in fantasy and in the unfulfilled possibility, and the (...) class='Hi'>religious, which finds its identity in the imitation of Christ and in the transparent relationship to God. (shrink)

This paper provides an analysis of Rudolph Otto's understanding of the structures of human consciousness making possible the appropriation of revelation. Already in his dissertation on Luther's understanding of the Holy Spirit, Otto was preoccupied with how the " outer " of revelation could be united to these inner structures. Later, in his groundbreaking Idea of the Holy, Otto would explore the category of the numinous, an element of religious experience tied to the irrational element of the holy. This (...) paper first provides a brief account of Otto's account of the holy, especially its numinous, irrational elements. Second, the paper analyzes Otto's understanding of the structures of consciousness grounding the experience of the numinous and allowing the irrational element to be " schematized " by the rational element. Otto's exposition of these structures is heavily influenced by his reception of Kant's analysis of the two stems of human cognition, namely understanding and sensibility, and their possible relation to a common root, which Otto identified with what the mystics called the ground of the soul. Yet it is in Otto's reception of Kant's Critique of Judgment that all of these ideas find their completion, and it is here where we must look to understand the relation between the religious a priori and Otto's category of the numinous. Kant's aesthetic idea is a singular representation given in intuition; it is infinitely saturated and as such intimates the ideas of God, the soul, and the world as a whole. I show how Otto appropriates Kant's aesthetic idea and its relation to ideas of reason in order to make sense of how an empirically given revelation, for instance, an experience of the numinous, can connect with the inner structures of consciousness and thereby have the singular import that it does. (shrink)

To what extent do aesthetic taste and our interest in the arts constitute who we are? In this paper, we present a series of empirical findings that suggest anAesthetic Self Effectsupporting the claim that our aesthetic engagements are a central component of our identity. Counterfactual changes in aesthetic preferences, for example, moving from liking classical music to liking pop, are perceived as altering us as a person. The Aesthetic Self Effect is as strong as the impact of moral changes, such (...) as altering political partisanship or religious orientation, and significantly stronger than for other categories of taste, such as food preferences (Study 1). Using a multidimensional scaling technique to map perceived aesthetic similarities among musical genres, we determined that aesthetic distances between genres correlate highly with the perceived difference in identity (Study 2). Further studies generalize the Aesthetic Self Effect beyond the musical domain: general changes in visual art preferences, for example from more traditional to abstract art, also elicited a strong Self Effect (Study 3). Exploring the breadth of this effect we also found anAnaesthetic Self Effect.That is, hypothetical changes from aesthetic indifference to caring about music, art, or beauty are judged to have a significant impact on identity. This effect on identity is stronger for aesthetic fields compared to leisure activities, such as hiking or playing video games (Study 4). Across our studies, the Anaesthetic Self Effect turns out to be stronger than the Aesthetic Self Effect. Taken together, we found evidence for a link between aesthetics and identity: we are aesthetic selves. When our tastes in music and the arts or our aesthetic interests change we take these to be transformative changes. (shrink)

Soren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling is one of the most widely read works of Continental philosophy and the philosophy of religion. While several commentaries and critical editions exist, Jeffrey Hanson offers a distinctive approach to this crucial text. Hanson gives equal weight and attention to all three of Kierkegaard’s "problems," dealing with Fear and Trembling as part of the entire corpus of Kierkegaard's production and putting all parts into relation with each other. Additionally, he offers a distinctive analysis of the (...) Abraham story and other biblical texts, giving particular attention to questions of poetics, language, and philosophy, especially as each relates to the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. Presented in a thoughtful, well-informed, and fresh manner, Hanson’s claims are original and edifying. This new reading of Kierkegaard will stimulate fruitful dialogue on well-traveled philosophical ground. (shrink)

In 1938 Wittgenstein delivered a short course of lectures on aesthetics to a small group of students at Cambridge. The present volume has been compiled from notes taken down at the time by three of the students: Rush Rhees, Yorick Smythies, and James Taylor. They have been supplemented by notes of conversations on Freud between Wittgenstein and Rush Rhees, and by notes of some lectures on religious belief. As very little is known of Wittgenstein's views on these subjects (...) from his published works, these notes should be of considerable interest to students of contemporary philosophy. Further, their fresh and informal style should recommend Wittgenstein to those who find his _Tractatus_ and _Philosophical Investigations_ a little formidable. (shrink)

ABSTRACT George Berkeley is usually not discussed in the canonical histories of modern aesthetics. Similarly, Berkeley scholars do not seem to have paid attention to his possible contribution to modern aesthetics. Berkeley exploited certain theoretical potentials of the emerging aesthetic experience that was invented and formulated especially by his contemporaries like Joseph Addison, Richard Steele and Lord Shaftesbury. He applied these elements in shaping a theologico-aesthetic language in the very same period when Francis Hutcheson and Alexander Baumgarten wrote (...) their widely acclaimed first aesthetic theories in Europe. At the same time, Berkeley advances the linguistic and religious aspects of the modern aesthetic experience not in his theoretical, but in his pragmatical and popularizing writings. Instead of relying on a purely rational theology or a negative theology, he offers an ‘aesthetic’ one based on the model of the beautiful and the sublime. Aesthetically, this meant a re-interpretation and re-configuration of the duality of the beautiful and the sublime – decades before Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry. (shrink)

This slender volume contains notes, kept by some of those who were present, of lectures on aesthetics and religious belief, and of conversations with Rush Rhees concerning Freud. The lectures were given informally by Wittgenstein at Cambridge in 1938; the conversations took place between 1942 and 1946. Wittgenstein neither wrote down nor saw the material here presented, but the editor reports that the versions of lecture notes by different students agree to a remarkable extent.Despite the varying authorships and (...) intervals of time during which these Lectures and Conversations took place, the book is a surprisingly integrated whole and not simply a miscellany. What seems to unite its three topics and their treatment is Wittgenstein's examination of the kind of evidence upon which each of the three disciplines have tended to rely—his argument being that 1) Psychoanalysis has tended to rest on insufficient evidence; 2) Aesthetics on the wrong kind of evidence; and 3) Religious Belief on the false notion that it is a matter of evidence when this is not at all the case. (shrink)

This essay discusses how the aesthetics of body movements contributes to cultivating other-regarding moral virtues, such as respect and care. The moral and aesthetic assessment of body movements is commonly regarded as a matter of etiquette and manners, which is considered to be nothing more than a superficial convention or a means of maintaining social hierarchy. I argue instead that body movements often facilitate an aesthetic communication of social virtues. As such, body aesthetics is an indispensable ingredient of (...) a good society. The Japanese aesthetic tradition offers a particularly rich legacy of developing the moral character of a person through bodily practices in the artistic, religious, and everyday realms. I will present and analyze various examples from Japanese cultural tradition to illustrate the significance of body aesthetics as a vehicle of cultivating moral virtues. (shrink)

In 1938 Wittgenstein delivered a short course of lectures on aesthetics to a small group of students at Cambridge. The present volume has been compiled from notes taken down at the time by three of the students: Rush Rhees, Yorick Smythies, and James Taylor. They have been supplemented by notes of conversations on Freud between Wittgenstein and Rush Rhees, and by notes of some lectures on religious belief. As very little is known of Wittgenstein's views on these subjects (...) from his published works, these notes should be of considerable interest to students of contemporary philosophy. Further, their fresh and informal style should recommend Wittgenstein to those who find his _Tractatus_ and _Philosophical Investigations_ a little formidable. (shrink)