The aim of this article is to point out that attentional practices don’t simply overlap with control and action/reaction dynamics; they are also strictly connected to non-productivity, non-instrumentality, disinterestedness, contemplation as performative inactivity. Disinterested attention (a definition formulated by Bence Nanay) and free-floating attention help to better understand the apparently seamless and unproblematic transition from passive spectator to active participant/agent of contemporary art. If considering attention in relation to executive functions (planning and organizing our experience in (...) the world we live in) could be persuasive, a self-evident definition of attention strictly considered as “selection for action” is less convincing, and the weakness of this connection becomes clear when goal-oriented attitude is pushed into the background. Attention is often researched into to improve our performances and to overcome the inevitable “blind spots”: experiencing art is about a different way of paying attention, that is fluctuating, “suspended,” fragmented. (shrink)

There are a number of problems associated with the classic notion of beauty understood as an experience of perceptual form. These problems are that there is an apparent incompatibility between beauty’s objectivity and subjectivity; and an incompatibility between the two self-evident theses that (i) there are no principles of beauty and (ii) there are genuine judgements of beauty. There is also the problem of explaining the possibility of a disinterested pleasure. To solve these problems I draw upon the work (...) of Glyn Humphreys & Dietmar Heinke (1998) according to whom the processing of ‘between-object’ relations draws upon view-dependent primitives and the processing of ‘within-object’ relations draws upon view-invariant primitives. I argue that if what we experience as aesthetic form or beauty is some kind of play on the processes involved in processing within-object-relations during the course of perceiving certain objects, then the apparent problems of beauty would be resolved. I speculate that perhaps the perception of certain objects employs perceptual principles in an unprecedented way or in a way which epitomizes their normal operation. The idea is that when perception is employed in such a way that our attention is drawn from the object recognized to the experience of perception as something like a solution to a problem (that is, to the experience of the construction of within-object relations), then we experience what we know of as aesthetic form and beauty. (shrink)

Aesthetic attitude theories suggest we must attend disinterestedly to the properties of objects to experience aesthetic delight in them: we view them without regard to their use for us. Bence Nanay’s recent revival of the concept explains it through the distribution of our attention over the many properties of individual objects. While agreeing with Nanay’s approach, I argue such perception presupposes certain intentionality towards the object in the Fregean-Husserlian sense. Whether we see the same object as informative (...) or aesthetically gratifying depends on whether we understand it as, say, a map or as a work of design or art. Furthermore, intending an object as aesthetic means we treat it as internally coherent: its properties are defined in relation to one another, rather than the purposes of a subject. This, I conclude, even affects the presentation of historical or moral values that obviously originate outside the object of aesthetic appreciation. (shrink)

Human beings engage works of the arts in many different ways: they sing songs while working, they kiss icons, they create and dedicate memorials. Yet almost all philosophers of art of the modern period have ignored this variety and focused entirely on just one mode of engagement, namely, disinterested attention. Nicholas Wolterstorff asks why this might be, and proposes that almost all philosophers have accepted the grand narrative concerning art in the modern world. It is generally agreed that (...) in the early modern period, members of the middle class in Western Europe increasingly engaged works of the arts as objects of disinterested attention. The grand narrative claims that this change represented the arts coming into their own, and that works of art, so engaged, are socially other and transcendent. Wolterstorff rejects this claim, and offers an alternative framework for thinking about the arts. Central to his alternative framework are the idea of the arts as social practices and the idea of works of the arts as having different meaning in different practices. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Demise of the Aesthetic in Literary StudyEugene GoodheartAnumber of years ago at an MLA convention I was on a search committee interviewing candidates for a position in Victorian literature in our department. One of the candidates had done a dissertation on Christina Rossetti in which “Goblin Market” played a prominent role. As I recall, the candidate was putting forth a New Historicist or feminist argument about the (...) poem, when one of my colleagues on the committee interrupted her with the question: “But is it a good poem?” The question took me by surprise, for I didn’t remember such a question having been asked of students in years. It dumbfounded the candidate. She had apparently never considered the question. The poem was there as an occasion for... I was about to write interpretation or analysis, but it would be more accurate to say: a placement in a particular discourse—historicist, feminist, deconstructionist, ideological. The candidate’s fluency about the poem came to a halt. She spluttered a few phrases about the power of the poem. She was unprepared to answer the question, having never been asked or taught to ask it by her teachers of any poem or novel or play that she had read.We may not have been fair in our judgment of her. If we had been consistent and asked the same question of all the candidates, I don’t think we would have met with greater success. Our candidate’s disability was, indeed still is, built into the profession of literary studies at the present time. That aesthetic judgment is not one of the current professional practices is clear not only from its absence in the content of literary study but from the styles of the discoursers. No longer written [End Page 139] in a vernacular style, criticism has become a species of sociological prose once held in contempt by literary scholars: ponderous, abstract, obscure, ungainly, jargonish. There are practitioners of New Historicism, ideology critique, and deconstruction who write well, but who seem to regard their own gifts of expression as incidental, and are not in the least discomfited by the bad writing of others.Style is not an incidental matter. Orwell made a compelling case for its political and moral significance. In his classic essay “Politics and the English Language,” he preaches the virtues of plain speech, the transparent and elegant style as a mark of self-honesty. (Transparency makes it difficult to conceal your ideas from yourself.) In Writing Degree Zero and subsequent writings, Barthes deconstructed, so to speak, the Enlightenment myth of transparency as a guarantor of honesty and truth. Reality was not as perspicuous to “natural” plain writing as the Enlightenment believed. Barthes’s own style (rich, inventive, personal, alternately perspicuous, and obscure) is that of an imaginative writer. I don’t want to adjudicate the differences between Orwell and Barthes, but I should note what may not be obvious: they have a shared aesthetic concern with style, a concern that has virtually disappeared from academic discourse.It has become almost an embarrassment to speak in behalf of aesthetic value in the academy. One of the few unembarrassed exceptions is the voice of Harold Bloom whose jeremiad The Western Canon begins defiantly with an affirmation of the aesthetic against its demystifiers. “‘Aesthetic value’ is sometimes regarded as a suggestion of Immanuel Kant’s rather than an actuality, but that has not been my experience during a lifetime of reading.” 1 I take it that Bloom is saying that aesthetic value is an experience and not a theory. Indeed, if we insist on a theoretical justification of the aesthetic, we will end up speaking as does Barbara Herrnstein Smith of its contingent and subjective status (it is in the eye of the beholder and every beholder sees things differently) or we may find that the aesthetic is inescapably contaminated by political, moral, and philosophical interests. “Contaminated” perhaps, but as Bloom says, not reducible to these interests. It is useful to remember that aesthetics has been traditionally associated with the idea of disinterestedness. As Jerome Stolnitz remarks, we perceive beauty when it is the object of a “disinterested and sympathetic attention... (shrink)

Readers of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) have understandably been stumped trying to decipher Kant’s views on the relation between beauty and art.1 At §43 Kant ends his discussion of “free natural” beauties such as flowers and birds of paradise and begins to formulate a theory of fine art, according to which fine art has as its purpose the expression of “aesthetic ideas.” This theory of fine art, perhaps because it is saddled with examples of second-rate art (including a (...) poem by “the great king” Frederick) and is sketchier than the theory of beauty, has not been given the attention accorded the four “moments”. However, Kant’s theory of fine art is not as “unsophisticated” and “unenlightening” as one commentator thinks.2 It is rough and unfinished, but even so, it lays claim to being, along with Aristotle’s account of the “philosophical” implications of literature, one of the great pre-Hegelian statements on the capacity of art to express ideas. At least, the fact that the Critique of Judgment contains such a theory should stand as a warning to those who blame Kant for “neutering” the capacity of art to have any practical effect by reducing art to a contrivance for producing an enemic “disinterested” pleasure.3 On the contrary: Kant himself may in fact have thought his theory of fine art the capstone of his aesthetics. For at §51 he writes, “We may in general call beauty (whether natural or artistic) the expression of aesthetic ideas.” And here is where the puzzle begins, for it is not at all clear how or why beauty should even apply to the expression of aesthetic ideas — let alone apply in a way such that “we may in general call beauty … the expression of aesthetic ideas.”. (shrink)

The subject of the study is the aesthetics of early Friedrich Schlegel. In his aesthetics, Schlegel continues the traditions of German classical philosophy, focusing special attention on the principles of the beautiful and sublime in art. Schlegel considers beauty, like morality, to be inherently inherent in a person who, along with the moral, has an "aesthetic imperative". As a "transcendental factor", beauty is based on disinterested pleasure and represents an ideal that ancient Greek art approached at one (...) time, and the aspiration for which modern art lacks so much. The highest beauty is organic like nature; two main "elements" make up the essence of beauty: "phenomenon" and "good". The beautiful in its broad sense also encompasses the sublime. Schlegel pays special attention to the ugly as an aesthetic category opposed to the beautiful and sublime, and gives an outline of the future theory of the ugly. He connects the ugly with the animal nature of man and shows that it is based on the disgusting, painful, monstrous, "beggarly chaos" of being, manifesting an absolute denial.  The central aesthetic principles – the beautiful and the sublime – are opposed by two types of the ugly: the own ugly and the "sublimely ugly". Schelling considers art to be one of the main components of culture as a humanitarian factor and sees three types of culture: natural, organically growing on the basis of mythology, artificial, created on the basis of reason according to aesthetic laws and aesthetic, which means a special emphasis in culture on aesthetic essence, on artistry. Schlegel is convinced that further positive development of culture and art is possible only under the guidance of the "correct" aesthetic theory, the beginnings of which he learns from his contemporaries. (shrink)

In this essay, Amy Voss Farris and Pratim Sengupta argue that a democratic approach to children's computing education in a science class must focus on the aesthetics of children's experience. In Democracy and Education, Dewey links “democracy” with a distinctive understanding of “experience.” For Dewey, the value of educational experiences lies in “the unity or integrity of experience.” In Art as Experience, Dewey presents aesthetic experience as the fundamental form of human experience that undergirds all other forms of experiences (...) and that can bring together multiple forms of experiences, locating this form of experience in the work of artists. Particularly relevant to the focus of this essay, computational literacy, Dewey calls the process through which a person transforms a material into an expressive medium an aesthetic experience. Farris and Sengupta argue that the kind of experience that is appropriate for a democratic education in the context of children's computational science is essentially aesthetic in nature. Given that aesthetics has received relatively little attention in STEM education research, the authors' purpose here is to highlight the power of Deweyan aesthetic experience in making computational thinking available and attractive to all children, including those who are disinterested in computing, and especially those who are likely to be discounted by virtue of location, gender, or race. (shrink)

On a widely held view in aesthetics, appreciation requires disinterested attention. George Dickie famously criticized a version of this view championed by the aesthetic attitude theorists. I revisit his criticisms and extract an overlooked challenge for accounts that seek to characterize appreciative engagement in terms of distinctive motivation: at minimum, the motivational profile such accounts propose must make a difference to how appreciative episodes unfold over time. I then develop a proposal to meet this challenge by drawing (...) an analogy between how attention is guided in appreciation and how practical action is guided in ‘striving play’—a mode of game play recently foregrounded in the philosophy of games. On the resulting account, appreciation involves an ‘inverted’ motivational structure: the appreciating agent's attention is guided by cognitive goals taken up instrumentally, for the sake of the cognitive activity that results from attending under the guidance of those goals. (shrink)

Contemporary Anglophone philosophy of music has eschewed traditional philosophical concerns about the place of music in human affairs, concentrating instead on a more restricted domain of musical meaning related to aesthetic considerations which are ultimately tied to the concept of disinterested aesthetic experience. I argue that this emphasis needs to be supplemented by an attention to the “instrumentality” of music, understanding music in relation to questions of the social and cultural purposes that music might serve and (...) thereby broadening the idea of what it is to count as a musical practice. I illustrate how this re-orientation might proceed with reference to the case of musical improvisation. (shrink)

The article considers the trend characteristic of contemporary aesthetic practices, which is connected with the shift of attention to the subject’s corporeality and its mutual influence with the environment, to performativity and active involvement of the subject. The purpose of this review is to analyze the highlighted trend from the perspective of phenomenological philosophy. This will require showing the initial closeness of aesthetic experience to the phenomenological method and the ontological and epistemological grounds for it. The paper (...) will consider the transition from the traditional Kantian understanding of aesthetics as “disinterested” contemplation and the corresponding reflection of this process in the theory of cognition to another model. For this purpose, it is proposed to turn to the theory of “performative turn” proposed by Fischer-Lichte, which demonstrates the irrelevance of hermeneutic and semiotic approach for analyzing aesthetic experience in the modern sense. The article considers the phenomenological approach of J.-L. Marion in its applicability to the analysis of modern aesthetic practices oriented to the radical transformation of the subject. It also suggests tracing the line of criticism of “opticocentrism” in film studies. The cinematic experience is analyzed on the basis of its multisensoriality, as well as the embodiment of the subject and its placement in the environment. For this purpose, the author of the article refers to the theory of M. Merleau-Ponty and its further development in the theory of enactivism. It is concluded that the search for a strategy to reduce the distance between subject and object can be realized in the aesthetic experience, in which subject realizes one's own incorporation to the world. The phenomenological method becomes a tool for analyzing this experience. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to give a new account of the way we exercise our attention in some paradigmatic cases of aesthetic experience. I treat aesthetic experience as a specific kind of experience and like in the case of other kinds of experiences, attention plays an important role in determining its phenomenal character. I argue that an important feature of at least some of our aesthetic experiences is that we exercise our attention (...) in a specific, distributed, manner: our attention is focused on one perceptual object, but it is distributed among the various properties of this object. I argue that this way of exercising one’s attention is very different from the way we attend most of the time and it fits very well with some important features of paradigmatic examples of aesthetic experience. (shrink)

Kantian disinterest is the view that aesthetic judgement is constituted (at least in part) by a form of perceptual contemplation that is divorced from concerns of practical action. That view, which continues to be defended to this day, is challenged here on the basis that it is unduly spectator-focussed, ignoring important facets of art-making and its motivations. Beauty moves us, not necessarily to tears or rapt contemplation, but to practical action; crucially, it may do so as part and parcel (...) of its appreciation. This claim is defended via reflection on (i) the art of photography, (ii) the concepts of ‘attentional salience’ and ‘experienced mandates’, and (iii) a virtue-based account of aesthetic value. (shrink)

The main claim of the paper is that, on Kant's account, aesthetic pleasure is an exercise of rational agency insofar as, when proper, it has the following two features: (1) It is an affective responsiveness to the question: “what is to be felt disinterestedly”? As such, it involves consciousness of its ground (the reasons for having it) and thus of itself as properly responsive to its object. (2) Its actuality depends on endorsement: actually feeling it involves its endorsement as (...) an attitude to have. I claim that seeing that nature of aesthetic pleasure requires that we divest ourselves of the following dilemma: either feelings are the non-cognitive, passive ways through which we are affected by objects; or they are cognitive states by virtue of the theoretical beliefs they necessarily involve. On my reading of Kant, this dilemma is false. Aesthetic pleasure is neither passive, nor theoretically cognitive, and yet, it is an exercise of rational agency by virtue of belonging to a domain of rationality that is largely overlooked in the history of philosophy, but that deserves, I argue following Kant, our close attention: aesthetic rationality. In the first section, I explain this nature of aesthetic pleasure, and in the second section, I respond to a charge of “over-intellectualism.". (shrink)

Nanay (2015; 2016) revives manner or attitude accounts of aesthetic experience. While manner-based accounts are promising, Nanay's claim that certain kinds of aesthetic experiences require attention to be focused on one object, but distributed across many properties of that object, that 'aesthetic attention' is necessary for 'Proustian experience', is false. Attention to objects of aesthetic experience frequently involves attention to intra-objects, objects that are proper perceptual parts of the attended objects.

In this paper, I examine the role of attention in Kant’s aesthetic theory in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. While broadly Kantian aestheticians have defended the claim that there is a distinct way that we attend to objects in aesthetic experience, Kant himself is not usually acknowledged as offering an account of aesthetic attention. On the basis of Kant’s more general account of attention in other texts and his remarks on attention (...) in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, I reconstruct Kant’s account of aesthetic attention. On this account, aesthetic attention is simultaneously directed at the form of an object and at the judging subject’s own mental states as she attends to the object. In the experience of beauty, we specifically attend to the harmonious relation between the faculties of imagination and understanding. (shrink)

This article puts forward an hypothesis on the aesthetic use of attention. Some artistic situations favour such a use of attention and may contribute to the conscious access to cognitive and emotional contents and effects, as well as to their discussion in the public sphere.

For Kant, experiences of beauty, including experiences of beautiful art, are based on the feeling of disinterested pleasure. At first glance, garden-variety emotions don’t seem to play a constitutive role for beauty in art. In this paper I argue that they can. Drawing on Kant’s notion of aesthetic ideas, I will show that garden-variety emotions can function as a driving force for the free use of the imagination: they can enhance the beholder’s activity of freely associating and thus (...) contribute crucially to the free play of the faculties. In doing so, I will develop a more emotion-oriented view of art than is commonly attributed to Kant. I will also argue that there is a lesson to be learned for contemporary aesthetics: emotions not only help us to understand some works of art and to direct our attention, but they also make us engage imaginatively with artworks and make our experiences of art more vivid. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.1 (2001) 1-20 [Access article in PDF] On the Hegelian Sublime: Paul de Man's Judgment Call Martin Donougho In recent years, the sublime has become a focus of renewed interest in philosophy and literary theory, despite being (perhaps in part because it is) "the most confused and confusing notion of the time" (Honour 1977, 145). 1 Much of the interest has been directed at the Kantian (...) account and the long tradition stemming from it. By contrast, little attention has been paid to G. W. F. Hegel's version of the sublime, whether of the phenomenon itself or of its conceptualization. That is natural enough, it might be thought, given the marginal place accorded the sublime in Hegel's scheme of things--he simply was not interested. Yet, that very marginality is of interest, if we follow the lead of the subtlest of commentators, Paul de Man, in his essay "Hegel on the Sublime" (1983). As de Man reads and diagnoses it, Hegel's marginalizing of the sublime (much as with the section on symbolics or, indeed, aesthetics tout court) serves the interests of an aesthetic ideology. The gesture of putting the sublime aside in fact reveals more about the philosopher's system than is found in his express doctrine, de Man insists. The sublime, like Hegel's allegory, should then be read symptomatically, as the "defective cornerstone" of the entire system. 2 In this essay, I have two aims: besides explicating Hegel's theory of the sublime on its own terms, I try to assess de Man's reading of Hegel's rhetorical strategies.Even if de Man's charges fail--as I argue they do--his approach to Hegel remains, I think, full of insights. The sublime, it might well be thought, betokens the same penetration of an objective field by subjective theory that (for Heidegger and others) is at issue with Western metaphysics as a whole; a prime instance of this would be Hegel's own allegedly masterful project, including his attempt at an aesthetic system. So understood, "on the sublime" would translate as over the sublime, that is, in a bid to enframe and control discourse about "the most high" or "great writing" (see Longinus). 3 And then we might ask, for example, what Hegel is doing [End Page 1] when he consigns the sublime to a minor role, or when he instead gives the classical Ideal star billing. How exactly does he stage his discourse about art?Oddly enough, Hegel's sublime is not at all part of the main theoretical line stemming (if only in retrospect) from Immanuel Kant. That line might be dubbed "the Romantic sublime"--the title of an influential book by Thomas Weiskel, which appeared posthumously in 1976--or, alternatively, "the Yale sublime," in honor of an entire group (which includes Geoffrey Hartman and Harold Bloom) who wrote about the tendency of Romantics such as William Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson to invest themselves in their topic. 4 Kant himself points to a possible illusory move he labels subreption. Here--to apply a useful distinction Peter de Bolla (1989) draws--we have not just a discourse on, but also a discourse of the sublime. 5 The discourse of the sublime produces the very category it is meant to analyze, hence providing a space for "experience" of the sublime. A boot-strapping process induces a "subject-effect," calls forth a subject position. The remarkable thing is that--although he is said at sixteen to have made a translation of Longinus 6 and although he was, of course, familiar with the whole Kantian approach, which in many respects should have been congenial to him--Hegel stands apart from this "Romantic," or "hermeneutic," sublime. He does not at all give the appearance of staging readings in the manner sketched above, but instead adopts a distanced, disinterested perspective on the phenomenon.Even so, his aesthetic system might be accused of framing a discourse on the sublime, which, through seeking dialectical profit on its investment, shades into a discourse of the sublime. Thus, de... (shrink)

There are various authors who discussed the nature and manner of the existence of aesthetic values and the characterisation of aesthetic experience, among others, Thomas Acquinas, Roman Ingarden, Władyslaw Tatarkiewicz, Stanisław Ossowski, and Mieczysław Wallis. Taking into consideration their positions, the author claims that, potentially, each object as a coincidence of respective qualities is suitable for an aesthetic attitude. It may appear aesthetically somewhat, such that it alone may move (with its contents), i.e. it may draw (...) class='Hi'>attention, stir, delight, arouse fancy, affect strongly. All this may be done ..disinterestedly\", therefore without any reference to the practical sphere (to the sphere of usefulness, profit), nor should this object be a source of pleasure (,,cause good composition\"). (shrink)

This paper critically analyses a recent attempt to account for what is special about aesthetic experiences in terms of how one deploys one's attentional resources, i.e. how so-called aesthetic attention is exercised. While the paper defends this general framework of thinking about aesthetic experiences, it argues that the specific characterization of aesthetic attention that has been proposed is unsatisfactory, since it is incompatible with recent empirical findings on how the allocation of attention works. (...) The major aim of this paper is to explore empirically plausible ways of attending, and to determine what scientifically legitimate kind of attention could account for at least some of the distinctive features of aesthetic experiences. The paper argues that the rapid sequential reallocation of the focus of attention to different properties of a single object plays a crucial role in this context. (shrink)

Presently we are experiencing a world where distributed information reshapes human modes of expression and being. The avalanche of images presented to us daily shifts our attention between numerous contexts and systems of meaning. Faced with the intensity of this broadcast, one tends to turn to abbreviations and flattening of the message. Jacques Rancier talks about aesthetics as a form of disconnected experience, which operates as a disinterested gaze. The disconnection serves as a coping mechanism allowing one to (...) function within the informational deluge. On the other hand, this flattening of an image does not represent the whole truth. Behind every image one senses a depth of meanings, which gives rise to a particular manifestation. In this article, I propose that image hides a being, which through that image individuates itself. While the acquisition of specific qualities constitutes this process of individuation, the being is the motion and agency enabling the process. Culture can be seen as technology and prosthesis, which facilitates memory of our mortality and forces us to individuate. Following this logic, image as part of culture is a technology of being. (shrink)

In this essay, the author intends to show the reasons for the interest on the Critique of Judgment, and especially to aesthetic judgment of taste within thephenomenological context. The study is divided into four sections: at first the concept of aesthetic reflective judgment will be introduced, highlighting the crucial role it assumes within the Kantian critical project as a whole. In a second step the specificity of the judgment of taste will be studied with particular attention on (...) its character of Zweckmässigkeit and its universal voice. In the third section it will be shown how the judgment of taste introduces a new paradigmatic articulation of the relationship between feeling and thinking, which is further explained through a critical comparison with the interpretations of Jean-Francois Lyotard and Marc Richir of aesthetic judgment. In the last and more extended section, the affinity of the disinterested character of the judgment of taste with the phenomenological attitude will be at the center of the research. (shrink)

When we talk about making the everyday world more aesthetically pleasing, we generally mean all attempts to enrich daily life with art, design and aesthetic aspects. But there also is a certain aesthetic dimension to the banality of daily life. In the first part of the essay, I suggest that two aspects dominate aesthetics in daily life: Beauty is in everyday life either short-term and peripheral or is that to which we are used and which is omnipresent. Either (...) it is surprising but ungraspable or it is always with us but has long since lost its allure. In both cases it does not result in a strong aesthetic experience but in short-term aesthetic sensitivities that alternate between excitement and boredom, interest and disinterest, attention and ignorance. In the second part of the essay I examine what it means if demanding aesthetic and artistic concepts are confronted with everyday life. Art can either be seen as interrupting daily life or can be integrated into the ordinary. Then art must follow the rules of the ordinary and can only be perceived as peripheral. Still, beauty emerges as a decisive category in the aesthetics of everyday living. (shrink)

In this issue, our contributors demonstrate how art in the city, art “about” the city, art compared to the city, can bring to attention the insidious forces underlying every city’s gleaming, wide-awake veneer.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dewey's Art as ExperienceThe Psychological BackgroundRichard Shusterman (bio)IThe year 2009 marks the 150th anniversary of John Dewey's birth and also the 75th anniversary of the publication of his aesthetic masterpiece Art as Experience—a book that has been extremely influential within the field of aesthetics, not only in philosophical aesthetics and aesthetic education but also in the arts themselves.1 I am honored to commemorate this double Deweyan anniversary (...) with an essay that reexamines Art as Experience by briefly tracing some of its major themes and clarifying its generative context of production and philosophical roots, while also suggesting, in passing, how some of these themes and roots contribute to its continuing philosophical relevance. Before going further, I should offer two preliminary cautions. First, Dewey's aesthetic magnum opus is obviously too rich and masterful in ideas and influence for any brief commemorative essay to hope to do it sufficient justice. Second, as Dewey defined philosophy as "a criticism of criticisms," so my remarks will include a critical dimension.2 This in no way denies my immense admiration for Dewey's achievement in Art as Experience, just as my noting of some formative influences on this work is in no way meant to diminish the impressive originality of his contribution.Dewey's Art as Experience first established pragmatist aesthetics on the philosophical map, yet his text makes no mention of pragmatism. There are good reasons for Dewey's reluctance to highlight the term. The pragmatic is closely linked to the practical, precisely the idea against which the aesthetic has, since Kant, been traditionally contrasted and often oppositionally defined as purposeless and disinterested. To describe his new aesthetic [End Page 26] explicitly as pragmatist might have aroused too much skepticism to insure Dewey's views a fair hearing. Moreover, the pragmatist movement did not yet have a real tradition of philosophical aesthetics on which Dewey could securely rely, a suspicious lack that encouraged the presumption that pragmatism had nothing worthwhile to offer the arts and no real interest in them. Neither C. S. Peirce (who first conceived and baptized pragmatism) nor William James (who made it an internationally famous movement and converted Dewey to it) provided any treatises on aesthetics in their voluminous and wide-ranging writings.It would be wrong to conclude, however, that these first prophets of pragmatism dismissed the aesthetic dimension as unimportant and that they contributed nothing to our understanding of art and criticism. As the originator of semiotics, Peirce significantly advanced the theory of symbols and interpretation in ways that enrich aesthetics. Appreciative of the role of play in creative expression and thought (which he tried to capture through an intriguing concept he called "musement"), Peirce also emphasized the immediately felt quality of experience (so crucial to aesthetics) as his first category of consciousness or "Firstness." Finally, Peirce urged the continuity and collaboration of aesthetics and ethics, even going so far as "making Ethics dependent upon Esthetics" and treating "the morally good … as a particular species of the esthetically good." If "Ethics is the science of the method of bringing Self-Control to bear to gain" what we desire, "what one ought to desire … will be to make [one's] life beautiful, admirable. Now the science of the Admirable is true Esthetics."3William James, whose keen aesthetic taste, wide culture, and love of art inspired his first career choice for painting, offered almost no theorizing in philosophical aesthetics because he was convinced that its abstract formal principles and discursive definitions necessarily failed to capture (and even tended to obscure) the crucial nameless subtleties of art that make all the difference in actual aesthetic experience. But James held the aesthetic dimension of experience (its immediately and distinctively felt but nameless qualities and the appeal that such qualities exercised on our minds and behavior) to be extremely important, well beyond the field of fine art. Maintaining that such aesthetic considerations deeply pervaded one's ethical and philosophical perspective, he even argued that contentions between rival worldviews rested largely on "aesthetic" discords or conflicting temperaments.4 James also devoted specific attention to the aesthetic emotions as "subtler emotions" (along with intellectual and moral... (shrink)

The Cambridge Platonists mark an important juncture in Western intellectual history. Benjamin Whichcote, Ralph Cudworth, Henry More and John Smith helped shape the modern idea of selfhood and the contemporary culture of autonomy, toleration, and rights. Not only do they represent one of the great phases of the Platonic tradition, but also this group of Cambridge thinkers arguably represent a ‘Copernican revolution’ in Western moral philosophy. Attention has also been drawn to their impact on women thinkers such as Anne (...) Conway, Damaris Masham, Catharine Macaulay, and Mary Wollstonecraft. The key aesthetic notion of ‘disinterested pleasure’ can be traced back to Cambridge Platonist influence on Shaftesbury, and their concept of Plastic Nature shaped the modern concepts of artistic creativity and genius. There is, however, a striking neglect of Cambridge Platonism in contemporary research, and there is also disagreement about the application and even the legitimacy of the category ‘Cambridge Platonism’ itself. We maintain however that ‘Cambridge Platonism’ is nevertheless a helpful category for exploring the intellectual milieu or constellation of these thinkers. This is not to say that all of the figures included in this volume belong to a tightly defined group of ‘Platonists’, but a distinctive early modern transformation of Platonism is at work among these writers, and a better understanding of the networks, intellectual and personal, of these figures is the aim of the volume. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.2 (2001) 265-279 [Access article in PDF] The Physiological Sublime: Burke's Critique of Reason Vanessa L. Ryan The eighteenth-century discussion of the sublime is primarily concerned not with works of art but with how a particular experience of being moved impacts the self. The discussion of the sublime most fully explores the question of how we make sense of our experience: "Why and (...) how does this object move me?" Focusing on the perceiving subject, most critics cast the British discussion of the sublime as reflecting a gradual shift towards a Kantian focus not on the object judged, but on the judging mind. Certainly, eighteenth-century thinkers move away from understanding the sublime as a set of qualities that are presumed to be internal to a given object, and shift their attention to the mental effects of those objects. Yet the increasing interest in the perceiving subject in eighteenth-century British thought should not be understood as necessarily anticipating a Kantian perspective. In his classic work on the sublime Samuel H. Monk claims that this aspect of the British debate provides a preliminary discussion of the Kantian "autonomy of the subject" and that it constitutes a movement towards the "subjectivism of Kant." 1 This reading of British aesthetics exclusively in [End Page 265] terms of a preparation for the Kantian description of the subject obscures the differences between the British and the German traditions. It thereby fails to accommodate the reluctance of British thinkers to give up the social and ethical when faced with the sublime: instead of explaining the commonality of the aesthetic experience by positing a "disinterested" and "autonomous" subject, thinkers such as Adam Smith, John Dennis, and Edmund Burke subordinate the freedom of the individual subject in an attempt to reconcile the aesthetic affect with moral conduct.The teleological and Kantian understanding of British eighteenth-century aesthetic theory is largely the result of the central position that has been given to its most famous theorist, Edmund Burke. Although Burke's conception of the sublime differs in some points markedly from that of his British contemporaries, his treatment of the sublime in the Philosophical Enquiry (1757) has come to represent eighteenth-century British thought, and as such it is routinely compared to Kant's analytic of the sublime. Yet at the point where the British tradition seems to come closest to the Kantian, namely, in the writings of Burke, it also most clearly marks its distance from it. Burke is in some ways the least Kantian of eighteenth-century British thinkers. Whereas Kant holds that the sublime allows us to intuit our rational capacity, Burke's physiological version of the sublime involves a critique of reason. The sublime for Burke is a question not of the subject's increasing self-awareness but of the subject's sense of limitation and of the ultimate value of that experience within a social and ethical context.One of the most intransigent problems in distinguishing the strains of thought on the sublime is that the relationship between the object and its sublime effect--between the object taken to arouse heightened response and the affective quality of such a response--is so variously conceived. The sublime experience is seen as leading, on the one hand, to an overpowering of the self and, on the other hand, to an intense self-presence and exaltation, sometimes even to self-transcendence. The central question is thus not to what extent the sublime is located in the subject, but in what way the experience of the sublime affects the perceiving subject: Does the sublime enlarge us, or diminish us? 2 Does the sublime annihilate our sense of self, or does it affirm and heighten our sense of identity? These two opposing views of the effect of the sublime on the self can be seen in the contrast between Kant and Longinus, whose theories exerted an enormous influence in Britain, especially on Burke. Whereas Longinus emphasizes that the sublime overpowers and dominates the self, Kant holds that the feeling of... (shrink)

Contribution to a Book Forum on Bence Nanay's Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception (includes Nanay's response).

In this paper I want to scrutinize one of the key ideas within modern Western aesthetics. Beauty is often considered to derive from a virtuous disinterested attitude towards nature. This kind of view has been advocated by thinkers such as Shaftesbury and Kant in the beginning of the so-called aesthetic turn in philosophy. The problem with this view is that it presupposes that nature exists by itself before human intervention in a kind of ideal pristine state. My hypothesis (...) is that this ideal of pristine nature constitutes one of the underlying problems of many contemporary environmental discourses. (shrink)

Material acquisition—buying, inheriting, being given—and nonmaterial—learning a word, assimilating a form—have been likened, and in both, meaningful acquisition cannot take place without a taxonomy, a scheme of categories into which the acquired element can be fitted. Then with these elements—both material and nonmaterial—we create a world or build and project a self, the painter and the interior decorator equally manipulating the elements in a vocabulary. The coarseness of such an outlook seems to bludgeon away long-established fine distinctions. We need not (...) deny, however, that there may be a kind of "indifference" in regard to "the real existence of the thing" which allows us "to play the part of judge in matters of taste," as Kant would have it,1 we need not deny the existence of an "aesthetic attitude: it is just that such indifference and such an attitude probably don't have much to do with our day-to-day experience of artifacts and perhaps needn't. The "aesthetic attitude" was not long ago defined by Jerome Stolnitz as "disinterested and sympathetic attention to and contemplation of any object of awareness whatever, for its own sake alone."2 Stolnitz is at pains to distinguish the aesthetic attitude from "interests" with which it may be preferable to confuse it. "One of them," he writes, "is the interest in owning a work of art for the sake of pride or prestige". And again, "Another nonaesthetic interest is the 'cognitive,' i.e., the interest in gaining knowledge about an object". Both these interests sound rather acquisitive, and let us consider the "aesthetic attitude" as somehow tied in everyday practice to the bundle of "acquiring" activities. · 1. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith, p. 43.· 2. Jerome Stolnitz, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art Criticism, excerpted in Introductory Readings in Aesthetics, ed. John Hospers, p. 19; all further citations in text. Hiram W. Woodward, Jr. is a lecturer in the department of the history of art at the University of Michigan. He is editor of Eighty Works in the University of Michigan Museum of Art: A Handbook and coeditor of Barabudur: History and Significance of a Buddhist Monument. (shrink)

The present paper has the purpose of analyzing the notion of disinterest in Kant’s aesthetics. The first part focuses on Shaftesbury’s and Schopenhauer’s aesthetic approaches, wherein the presence of disinterest in relation to the appraisal of beauty is highlighted –albeit, as will be seen, in very different senses than the one proposed by Kant. The second part approaches the Analytics of beauty, around which some reflections about disinterest will be attempted in order to pay attention to disinterest as (...) proposed by Kant, not only as a negative element, but also with an open, positive, connotation that enables a relationship with the world different than usual. (shrink)

The conception of disinterested pleasure is not only central to Kant’s theory of beauty but also highly influential in contemporary philosophical discourse about beauty. However, it remains unclear, what exactly disinterested pleasure is and what role it plays in experiences of beauty. This volume sheds new light on the conception of disinterested pleasure from the perspectives of both Kant scholarship and contemporary aesthetics. In the first part, the focus is on Kant’s theory of beauty as grounded on (...) the conception of disinterested pleasure. In the second part, disinterested pleasure is investigated in the light of contemporary debates on beauty. The third part is dedicated to the relation of theories of disinterested pleasure to the meta-aesthetical debate between realism and anti-realism. The volume clarifies the meaning, role, and implications of one of the most influential conceptions in traditional as well as contemporary approaches to beauty. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 22–28. Jeroen Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene twice. First, in 2005, when he became a strong presence on the nascent Dutch poetry blogosphere overnight as he embarked on his critical project Dichtersalfabet (Poet’s Alphabet). And again in 2011, when to great critical acclaim (and some bafflement) his complete writings were published – almost five years after his far too early death. 2005 was the year in which Dutch poetry blogging exploded. That year saw the foundation (...) of the influential, polemical, and populistically inclined weblog De Contrabas (The Double Bass), which became a strong force for internet poetry in Dutch in the years to follow. In the summer of that year, a lively debate raged in the aftermath of Bas Belleman’s article “ Doet poëzie er nu eindelijk toe ?” (“Does poetry finally matter now?”), on a blog specifically devoted to this question. Up to that point, the poetical debate in the Netherlands had largely been confined to literary reviews (which were often subsidized), having become mostly marginalized in more mainstream media, where poetry could be covered by only a small number of so-called authorities. As a result, literary debate had acquired a rather placid quality. Though a variety of camps with different aesthetics could be discerned, most poetical positions shared a general acceptance of poetry as a form of art somewhat apart from fundamental political concerns. Late modernists would pursue subtlety and density of reference. Others would insist poetry was best understood as a form of entertainment that should ideally be accessible and work well on the stage. Still others would insist that poetry is mostly a play with forms. Linguistically disruptive strategies were valued highly by some, but mostly for their aesthetic effect. Values of disinterested playfulness reigned supreme everywhere. Any idea that poetry could be a field in which one confronts politics and the world was decidedly marginal. This led to a climate in which most attempts at polemics were DOA, often based on far too superficial positioning and analysis. The greatest polemical debates were revolving around the question of whether poetry should be difficult or easy, with both camps defining their ideas of difficulty and accessibility in ways that were so utterly shallow as to make the entire point moot. Debates were performed, rather than engaged with. It was a postmodern hell of underarticulated poetics. Half-consciously, people were yearning for new forms of criticism that could put the oomph back into poetry. Weblogs provided for ways to explore debate directly outside of the clotted older channels of the reviews and the newspapers. Belleman’s essay and the resulting online activity had shown that there was a widespread eagerness to take poetry more seriously as a social art form. It was in this environment that Mettes started his remarkable project Dichtersalfabet . At that moment, Mettes was active mostly in academic circles, having become noted at Leiden University as a particularly gifted student of literary theory. Within the Netherlands, the field of literary theory has a very odd relationship to literature as it is practiced in the country. Academic theory tends to have a mostly international view and engage with international debates of cultural criticism, literary theory, and philosophy, with academics often publishing in English and attending conferences around the world. Literature itself however is much more concerned with domestic traditions. Consequently, in the Netherlands, there exists a language gap between academic theoretical practice (as it is studied in the literary theory departments) and literary practice (which, academically, gets studied in specialized departments of Dutch literature). The Dichtersalfabet can be seen as Mettes’s attempt to close this gap. It is also an attempt to bridge the divide between theory and practice, in which he could apply his theoretical knowledge in a very unorthodox and unacademic critical mode that moreover could reach far beyond the domain of conventional criticism. Mettes’s goal was to trace a diagonal through Dutch poetic culture, to “strangle” what he perceived to be its dominant oppressive traditions of agreeable irrelevance, in order to see whatever might be able to survive his critical assaults. But he could only do so by means of a very serious engagement with poetry itself. To this end, he would go systematically through the poetry bookshelf of the Verwijs bookshop (part of a mainstream chain of booksellers) in The Hague, buying one publication per blog item, starting from A and working his way through the alphabet, reading whatever he might encounter that way in the restaurant of the HEMA store (another big commercial chain in the country). He would subsequently write down his reading experiences, refraining however from trying to write a nuanced book review. Rather, he would write about anything that caught his attention and sparked his critical interest. This way of working would yield vast, at times somewhat rambling, dense, lively, and generally brilliant essays, in which he held no punches. He never hesitated to pull out his entire arsenal of concepts from the international theory traditions, while never degenerating into mere academic exercise and pointless intertextualities. The attempt was rather to live the poetry that he read, and to engage it with the full range of political, academic, cultural, and personal references that he had at his disposal—all that composed the individual named Jeroen Mettes as a reader. Often what he wrote would not be according to the standards of what we usually think of as a critical review of a book of poetry. Sometimes he would even be a little sloppy in his judgments of poets or representations of the books he read, for example by basing an entire essay on the blurb of a book rather than its poetry content. But what he did was always brilliant writing nonetheless—virtuoso riffs on poetic fragments randomly found within capitalist society, exposing an incisive and insistent poetical sensibility. Mettes read poetry for political reasons, to see whether poetry could offer him a way to deal with a political world he detested. The right-wing horrors of the Bush years, the Iraq war, and the turn of Dutch public opinion towards ever more conservative, narrow-minded, and xenophobic views alongside a complete failure of the political left to present any credible alternative, were weighing heavily on the times in which Mettes reported on his reading. Poetry was to measure this world, diagram it, to lay bare its inconsistencies and faults, to indicate where lines of flight might be found. Amid the ruins of a world wrecked by imperialist policies, corporate capitalism, and doctrinal neoliberalism it would have to show the possibility of a new community. And it was, through its rhythmical workings, to release the reading subject from his confinement to ideologically conditioned individuality and lead him into the immanent paradise of reading. The stakes were high. Much higher than anything Dutch poetry had seen for many years. Mettes’s blog was widely read from the start. His posts sparked lively debates. Some of these subsequently led to the publication of extensive essays on a few key poets in some literary journals, particularly Parmentier and the Flemish journal yang , for which Mettes would become a member of the editorial board, a few months after starting the Dichtersalfabet . This could have been the start of a brilliant career, but this was not to be. The initial manic energy that fueled the blog gradually subsided. The Alfabet was updated less and less regularly. Mettes sometimes just disappeared for many weeks, then suddenly returning with a brilliant essay. Until, on September 21, 2006, he posted his final blogpost, consisting of no text whatsoever. That night I learned from his mentor at Leiden University that he had committed suicide. Mettes and I had had some fruitful exchanges on poetry, rhythm, music, and form, mostly on the blogs, but also by email. Three weeks before his death was the last time I heard from him: a very sudden, uncharacteristically curt note saying “My old new sentence epic.” Attached to that message I found a DOC-file of a work so major that I felt intimidated. This was N30 , a text he had been working on for over five years. After his death, it took me a long time before I dared to read it in its entirety. In the meantime, the work of preparing the manuscript for publication was entrusted by his relatives to his colleagues at yang magazine. It took them a few years to brush up the text and to edit the Dichtersalfabet -blog (which, apart from the Alphabet project itself, incorporated many other fragments of political, polemical, and theoretical writing) into book form along with the essays. The result of this labor was finally published in 2011 as a two-book set, and Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene for the second time. The work was widely reviewed, on blogs, in journals, magazines, and newspapers. Many critics who had not followed the blogs in 2005 showed themselves surprised, baffled even, by the intensity of Mettes’s critical writing. But for those who had read the blog, the main surprise was in the poetry. During Mettes’s lifetime, some of his poems had already been published in Parmentier . Although these were strong texts by themselves, in no way did they prepare readers for N30 . Nothing like it had been written in Dutch before. Instead, N30 explicitly follows the American tradition of Language Writing, directly referencing Ron Silliman and his concept of The New Sentence. However, it would seem that much of the poetical thinking around his use of this technique puts him closer to a writer such as Bruce Andrews. For Mettes, using non sequiturs as a unit of poetic construction was not only a way of reinventing formal textual construction, but it was another way of finding the fault lines in the social fabric. From the perspective of the Language tradition, one may put N30 somewhere between Silliman and Andrews. N30 shares an autobiographical element with Silliman’s New Sentence projects, and as in Andrews, there is a concern for mapping out social totality within text—what Mettes refers to as a “textual world civil war.” Again this shows a formal textual strategy for allowing the person “Jeroen Mettes” to be absorbed by the world, which here appears as a whirlwind of demotic and demonic chatter, full of violence, humor, intensity, beauty, disgust, sex, commerce, and strife. Influenced as it may by American precursors, Mettes’s tone and form end up quite different from his American counterparts, consistently referencing a world that is Dutch, all too Dutch, taking on the oppressive orderliness of Dutch society with its endemic penchant for consensus by introducing chaos into its daily life and laying bare its implicit aggressions. The work’s 31 chapters each have a different feel and rhythmical outline, but none of them follow a predetermined pattern. Rather, Mettes would consistently edit and reedit the text, randomly rewriting parts of it, as he explains in his poetical creed Politieke Poëzie (Political Poetry). N30 – referring to the 1999 antiglobalist protest in Seattle – was to be the first text of a trilogy. The work itself was written “in the mode of the present.” A second text was to be written in the mode of the future, and a third one, in the mode of the past, was going to be an epic poem about the Paris Commune, and to form an alternative poetic constitution for the European project. I still deeply regret that Jeroen Mettes never got to complete those projects, just as I would be very keen on knowing what he might have had to say about more recent political developments. Instead, in 2006, he remained stuck in the horrors of the present, that ended up consuming him completely. He left Dutch literature with some of its most piercing criticism and its most profoundly moving, exciting and powerful poetry. Excerpts from N30 Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "N30." In N30+ . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. Chapter 1 1999. A day is a space too. And another man, who had chained himself, had his ribs crushed, and a motor has driven over somebody’s legs. Dutch health care system spends ±145 million guilders per year on worriers. A spiderweb vibrates as I pass by. Randstad renovating. She slaps her bag against her ass: “Hurry up!” OPINION IS TRUE FRIENDSHIP Your skin. It doesn’t express anything. “But the use of the sword, that’s what I learned, and you’ll need nothing more for the moment.” Just try to interrogate a guy like that. Gullit in Sierra Leone. Codes silently lying all around. But that’s simply what belongs to “that it’s just allowed”: that sigh of “world” (a word expressing that the trees are now standing along the water like black men with white bags in their hair); that’s nothing else right? And you see how everything has to move, and first of all what cannot do so. Without Elysium and without savings, barbarians lashing out, horny for an enemy, staring across the water, staring into the air—staring to get out of it. “You’ve never showed me more than the mall,” she said. All those “dreams” in the end—and now? It was lying on the stairway, so I picked it up and took it upstairs. Chapter 3 “You know what?” Telecommunication. For love… I don’t really like that cheap cultural pessimism, but… The holy city is on pilgrimage in the earthly bodies of the faithful until the time of the heavenly kingdom has come. The end of an exhausting autumn day behind the computer, my eyes filled with tears of fatigue. KITCHEN / INSTALLATION / SPECIALIST. Network integration. In the sun, stretched out on a sheet. (…) I don’t believe what I’m reading, because I want to believe something else. An illusion? Suits me. There’s a variety of shapes and tastes… “So what?” you may think. 102 dalmatians can’t be wrong. But I want more, dear… A feel good movie. I’m smashing the burned body. So what? We continue to save the European civilization. What’s there to win? Plato with poets = Stalin without gulag? Ball against the crossbar. No wonder. She comes straight to her point. She’s standing in the kitchen eating an apple. (…) The godless Napoleon had used her as a stable and wanted to have her taken down. “Our” Rutger Hauer. Ready or not here I come. Psst… are you also wearing a string? Nobody understands our desire. Cliffs breaking the waves and shattering the sunset. I used to be a real romantic (as a poet). A typical fantasy used to be the one in which I brutally raped mother and daughter Seaver from the sitcom Growing Pains . Nevertheless you only contain bad words. Eyelashes. Automatic or manual? That your skin always in the afternoon. Integration. The air is empty. Too bad! Hand in hand on their lonely way. Alaska! Chapter 12 May 5, 2001 [10:00-10:30] A dust cloud on a hill. Globe. Indian (British) (tie) / pope. Damascus. Rape. We’re carrying the ayatollah’s portrait through the streets. At the moment the girl is mostly suede jacket with white ribbons on her sleeves. A small explosion flares up/impact. Camouflage. Close up. We’re analyzing the situation. He’s dead right? Dead dead. Dead. Everything without, these, and only with the body. Indices signal death. Dollar bills are printed in factories. Holes. Light patch. Globe in a box. Microphone. What’s the situation? Grey impact on a green hill (field?). The water is blue. He has no lips. Interns on the background with skirts that are too long. This is an example of a sonnet. An Islamic woman pushes against the door of an electronics shop. Arrows (percentages (prices)). Is this what awaits the American? Touch screen interface. The word, an island, can only be a sign in that situation. We pull up a chair, join in on the fun. On the shelves only books about computers. One glance in the distance is enough to lighten up a luna park in the distance. She’s really desperate, especially when she laughs. Click. Ah. Next. And now it’s raining, but that’s ok. Yellow stains sliding over the south. Shallow caves light: clothes, boots, electrical equipment. 45. 22:10. Nothing gives you the right to eat more than people starving to death. The Hague. Slam dunk. Traffic light. Two H’s, one L (standing for the L (little prick)). We’re happy to say something. Clouds, small suns, temperatures, cities. The truth is never an excuse. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Green. Yellow. Will you email me? Skeleton: “No.” Ex-nerds in brand-new and brightly red sport cars. $$$. I love. Shihab. Hooves in the sand. Skinny senior with over-sized sunglasses; old jockey (cap, trophy) smiling in slow motion. And there I am again, flashback, crying with my head in between my hands. Sometimes I’ve got the feeling that cannibals. Eyes: blue. Cancer. Why would I wait until tomorrow? Golden beams protruding from the lifted/lit earth. May 5, 2001 [11:30-12:45] You’ll remember this for the rest of your life. Graphs, diagrams. Bu$ine$$. Blue shirt, white collar, no neck (porn star). A name lights up. I’m hysteric. Will you join us? Letters falling in their words. Fingers set up a tent and start to dance. Young entrepreneurs from poor neighborhoods (read: black) guided by Microsoft. Kinda makes me happy, that sort of kitsch. A sense of exhaustion/impotence to see anything but the present. (…) Wouldn’t you like to? Orange explosion in an industrial zone. YOU’RE DOING THIS FOR AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL. Would you. A familiar face. Clouds and blossom. Sunflowers. Supermodels. Mountainous area in a rectangle: shades of brown, from dark to beige, more green toward the south. Tents and next to them (it’s all a blur) people. Plane. Stadium. Geometrical block of people. No, I ain’t crying. I don’t speak no more. I just want. Quote + photo. (Positive:) screaming crowd. Three-piece suit, seen from the back, before entering the arena. On the back: “Daddy abused me.” Oh, bummer. State of emergency has been declared and everyone has to cooperate. She’s cut her wrists. What we do know (…) is that there’s never been a unique word, an imperative name, nor will there ever be. [Click here for work that suits you.] Barefooted children are watching it (coherent pieces revelation of what’s lying below). Who knows how she’s changed during those two years. “Everything used to be better” + sigh. And here we are. An empty field of parquet. A city lying behind it. Explosion. Blue. A rain drop falling in my coffee. May 5, 2001 [14:30-15:30] A young Arafat on video speaking with raised finger. “I’m calling from my convertible.” Names on walls, victims, numbers… Tourists. Yellow. Yellow. “Your own child! Really, what kind of human are you?” I don’t want to hear it no more. A woman jumping out of the water in a yellow bikini against a background of fireworks and the Cheops pyramid. Thy sorrow shall become good fortune, thy complaints laudation. All planets will float and wander. Wo die Welt zum Bild wird, kommt das System (…) zur Herrschaft. It is something, but is it? May 5, 2001 [18:30-19:00] Iris. Leaves. NASDAQ. Open / and white and. For the one who’s doing nothing, just waiting. (…) NO DEFEAT is made entirely up of defeat -- since / the world it opens is always a place / formerly / unsuspected. October 2002. “Jeroen, I’m leaving for the cemetery, byeeee.” The rise of the middle class. My entire oeuvre is an ode to the. My entire head is a fight against the. God always demands what you cannot sacrifice. You may take that the easy way, but… “The state hasn’t made us, but we make the state” (Hitler). A stork exits the elevator. Skeletons of. Moscow. Helsinki. Palermo. Paris. Chapter 30 Like your paradises: nothing. United Desire, as only remaining superpower. And even though the sea is now calmer and the wind is blowing pleasantly in my face… Heart! Who determines whether a tradition is “alive”? The yellow leaf or the white branch? Mars. This sentence is a typical example. Most Dutch people are happy. No consolation. When I see a girl sitting at a table with a book, a notepad, a pen, a bottle of mineral water, her hand writing in the light—then I consider that one thing. “Presents,” “poetry,” “classics.” We are what we cannot make from ourselves. “Left”: mendicant orders, missionaries. Saint-Just: “A republic is founded on the destruction of its enemies.” She crosses the street with a banana peel between her fingers. (…) We chose our own wardens, torturers, it was us who called all this insanity upon ourselves, we created this nightmare… But “no”? Girl (just like a beach ball) talking rapid Spanish (Portuguese?) in a mobile phone. Do I have a chance now that her boyfriend is getting bold? CLIO, horny bitch. What else do you want? An old woman, between the doors of the C1000, is suddenly unable to go on; her husband stretches out his hand, speaking a few encouraging words. Selection from. Der Führer schenkt den Jüden ein Stadt. How can it reach us if we haven’t been already reached somehow? It doesn’t “speak.” No problem. Each word she uses is a small miracle, as if she doesn’t belong to it, to language, but wanders around with a pocket light looking for the exit; she’s never desperate (maybe a little nervous), lighting up heavy words from the inside. But indeed, we’re free. But the predicate is not an attribute, but an event, and the subject is not a subject, but a shell. That’s why also samurai, knights, and warriors raised the blossom as emblem: they knew how to die. Locked up in a baby carriage with a McDonald’s balloon. Blue helicopter, the blue sky. Whether you want to refer? The point is. How / Motherfucker can I sing a sad song / When I remember Zion? You’ll feel so miserable and worthless that you think: “If only I were dead!,” or: “Just put an end to it!” “So you’re an economist?” Her card—two little birds building a nest, her handwriting shaking—is still on the mantelpiece. Guevara: “No, a communist.” A straw fire, such was our life: rapidly it flared up, rapidly it passed. I’m fleeing, coming from nowhere. (…) Eazy-E drinking coffee with the American president. If I’d scream, would that be an event? Drown it: the cleaner it will rise up from the depths. No! The night, so fast… As if there’s something opened up in that face. Come on, we may not curse life. He shows me his methadone: “If you drink that all at once, you’ll die instantly.” The last one dictates how we should behave to deserve happiness. One shine / above the earth. “I want to go to Bosnia,” I said bluntly. I don’t even know the name of the current mayor. Let’s despise our success! “There is no future; this is the future. Hope is a weakness that we've overcome. We have found happiness!” Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I feel like a bomb about to explode at any moment. Makes a difference for the reconstruction right? The decor moves forward. Daughter of Nereus, you nymphs of the sea, and you Thetis, you should have kept his tired head above the waves! Alas! This sentence has been written wearing a green cap. I receive my orders from the future. A frog jumps into it. Her husband has turned the Intifada, which he follows daily on CCN, into his hobby, “to forget that he doesn’t have his driver’s license yet." Suddenly the sun slides over the crosswalk. Her (his?) foot is playing with the slipper under the table. Is this how I’m writing this book now? I’m not a fellow man. I hate you and I want to hurt you. These are my people. Their screaming doesn’t rise above the constantly wailing sirens which we've learned to ignore. My whole body became warm and suddenly started to tremble. Unfortunate is he who is standing on the threshold of the most beautiful time, but awaits a better one. Arafat’s “removal” is contrary to American interests. Jeep drives into boy. What you can do alone, you should do alone. A food gift from the people of the United States of America. Two seagulls. [...]. (shrink)

Psychopaths are the bugbears of moral philosophy. They are often used as examples of perfectly rational people who are nonetheless willing to do great moral wrong without regret; hence the disorder has received the epithet “moral insanity” (Pritchard 1835). But whereas philosophers have had a great deal to say about psychopaths’ glaring and often horrifying lack of moral conscience, their aesthetic capacities have received hardly any attention, and are generally assumed to be intact or even enhanced. Popular culture (...) often portrays psychopaths in ways that suggest a great gap between their amorality and their aesthetic sensitivity. In The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), Hannibal Lecter appreciates fine art, fashion, and wine, while he eats his way through his enemies. His real-life counterparts, however, do not demonstrate the same sensitivities. There is no evidence that psychopaths are capable of real aesthetic appreciation, and some evidence that they are not. In this paper, we set out the limited evidence for the psychopath’s deficient aesthetic sensitivity. The best explanations of what the psychopath lacks turn out to implicate abilities that are also thought to be central to moral thought and action: an impaired capacity for empathizing with others and deficient ability to take a disinterested attitude towards things (socalled distance). We endorse the latter explanation. Thinking about what underlies the psychopath’s deficient aesthetic understanding turns out to throw light on a difficult problem: the connection between ethics and aesthetics. (shrink)

In this article, I aim to interpret and contextualize Heidegger’s short interpretation of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement. I provide a more accurate picture of Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant, showing that his reading is both appreciative and original, if speculative. I argue that Heidegger’s analysis of Kant’s aesthetics is surprisingly at odds with his general characterization and criticism of modern aesthetics. The latter can be captured by two basic theses—art is determined by a subject’s experience and art reveals (...) metaphysical truth—but neither of these theses applies to Heidegger’s Kant. Instead, Heidegger understands Kant and the third Critique’s notions of disinterestedness and purposiveness as sources of insight, offering an interpretation of Kantian disinterestedness as analogous to his own notion of ‘letting be’. The seeming inconsistency between Heidegger’s general story and his interpretation of Kant is revealing of Heidegger’s twofold use of history, as allowing for a diagnosis of the present, as well as positive inspiration for a future aesthetics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Context Building and Educating Imaginative EngagementDavid E. W. Fenner (bio)IntroductionIn my experience—with students, colleagues, friends, myself—I find that most people view aesthetic objects and art objects (which sometimes overlap but not always) through a variety of "lenses": subjectively located, psychologically based perspectives or "contexts" through which the object is viewed, considered, appreciated, and many times even criticized. I believe that many times the depth and richness of (...) class='Hi'>aesthetic reward depends on the perspective through which the subject attends to an object or event. While a part of aesthetic perspectival context is objective—such as the physical conditions surrounding and history concerning the aesthetic object—the majority of it is subjective, and I want to take another step and say that the majority is psychological.1 Aesthetic attenders bring to aesthetic experiences thick sets of background beliefs, personal associations, taste preferences, attitudes, and values—and this is not to mention the more temporal items like how they feel on the day or whether they are attending alongside friends, relatives, or colleagues. Hundreds of psychological factors result in differences in aesthetic experience; this is most likely true of all experiences, but it is even more the case in aesthetic experience and those kinds of experiences that set the occasions for attenders to think, feel, consider, spend time with, introspect, and be in a relationship—subject and object—that is distinct from the ordinary and the routine.Attenders can employ a single lens or multiple ones. It is entirely possible to attend in the absence of the employment of any lens—a purely disinterested or purely formalist perspective would be such a thing—but the vast majority of aesthetic attenders bring with them layers of lenses through which they naturally, nontheoretically (which is not to say noncognitively) view objects. On different occasions, given particular objects and particular subjects, the subject may view an aesthetic object from an art historical [End Page 109] perspective (whether or not the object is an art object); a moral perspective; a cultural, political, or national perspective; a social, class, race, ethnic, or gender perspective; a religious or spiritual point of view; an emotional point of view; a point of view colored by personal associations, personal history, personal identification, personal preference; and on and on.2 Sometimes the employment of lenses is distracting, and sometimes the experience is less than positive given such employment. But (1) many times—I want to say most times—the employment of such lenses results in a richer and more meaningful experience, and (2) it is the natural stance. Adopting a noncontextualized perspective requires conscious volitional effort. Seeing through particular psychological lenses is the default.I want to focus in this paper on a kind of perspective, a kind of psychological context, that has not been much discussed: I will call it aesthetic engagement preparation. Essentially, this has to do with the level of readiness that the subject possesses for engaging with particular objects aesthetically. To engage in a way that will provide a good return on her investment of attention, the subject must be open to the object, must be comfortable with the objective context, must be ready to enter into a relationship with the object—a relationship that may be psychologically associational in all sorts of ways (affectively, cognitively, and so forth)—and must be ready to employ a range of lenses, like the ones described above, to get the most out of her experience. Again, those who advocate noncontextualized (disinterested or formalist) approaches—Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Addison, Kant, Schopenhauer, Wilde, Whistler, Wimsatt, Greenberg, Brooks, Wolfflin, Bell, Moore, Bullough, Hanslick, Ortega y Gassett, Fry, Hampshire, Stolnitz, and Zangwill, just to name a few—will find aesthetic engagement preparation not only unnecessary but counterproductive. However, given its efficacy for enhancing actual aesthetic experience, I take this as a sign that these noncontextualists may have been on the wrong path. But of course this is an empirical question, and certainly there are cases—though rare, I claim—where employment of aesthetic lenses results in a less positive experience than otherwise.What I will try to do in this paper is to demonstrate (1) the scope of aesthetic engagement preparation on... (shrink)

In their prevailing conceptions, business is interested, whereas the humanities provoke disinterested attention in value for its own sake. Applying Danto’s and/as/of structure to Freeman’s documentary film, Leadership and Theater, this paper outlines the business of the humanities (economic value), depicts the value of the humanities to business ethics education (ethical value), and asks how cultivating an attitude of business as a humanity (aesthetic value) might influence our students’ views of business and business ethics. Regarding business disinterestedly (...) could mean challenging whether interestedness is an essential characteristic of business. The humanities can cultivate an appreciation for what is valuable in itself, in spite of the potential absence of measurableeconomic value. (shrink)

The book examines the discourse on attention emerging in the European Enlightenment (1650-1780) with a focus on German philosophy and literature. It argues that this discourse influenced the formation of aesthetic philosophy in the eighteenth century. Notable figures discussed include René Descartes, G.W.F. Leibniz, Christian Wolff, and Alexander Baumgarten.

Among the infinitude of nature’s various forms, precisely what should we aesthetically appreciate? And supposing we come to achieve such discernment, how should we properly appreciate the aesthetic qualities we thereby find? To address these questions, Carlson has argued that the aesthetic appreciation of nature ought to be guided by scientific insight. In response, non-cognitivists have levelled criticism and suggested alternatives, yet Carlson’s (2009) scientific cognitivism remains the best-argued approach to nature appreciation in the field. One non-cognitivist position (...) that Carlson rejects—although much too quickly—is Berleant’s (1985) engagement model. The purpose of this paper is to modify and revive that model. Specifically, I will argue that genuine engagement requires a particular form of disinterest. The result is a non-cognitivist approach to the aesthetic appreciation of nature, stronger than the extant alternatives. (shrink)

There is a sustained phenomenological tradition of describing the character of photographic pictorial experience to consist in part of a feeling of contact with the subject of the photograph. Philosophers disagree, however, about the exact cause of the ‘contact phenomenon’ and whether there is a difference in the phenomenal character between the pictorial experiences of photographs and handmade pictures so that, if a viewer mistakes the type that a token image belongs to, their sense of contact can alter. I argue (...) that the contact phenomenon is contingent upon, and triggered by, the viewer’s perceptual experience of the image, which may be subject to change depending upon how a viewer attends to an image. I develop a hybrid account to resolve how the perceptual and cognitive aspects of a viewer’s experience interact and produce the complex phenomenology, including conflicting mental states, that a viewer can undergo during the described experiences. (shrink)

As early as 1905, Husserl made clear that, when it comes to aesthetic consideration, our “interest” is not directed toward the existence of the object as such, but rather toward the object’s way of appearance. Husserl’s famous letter to Hofmannsthal (1907) goes as far as to suggest that any existential concerns are potentially even a menace to the purity of aesthetic experience. This position clearly echoes Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment presented in the third Critique, notably as (...) regards the notion of disinterestedness. However, this is not tantamount to claiming that aesthetic attitude implies the suspension of all interest: this paper aims to show that it would be more appropriate to discuss it in terms of a change of interest: from an existential interest to an axiological one. (shrink)

In Critique of Judgment, Kant introduces a foundational theme in modern aesthetics by identifying the judgment of taste as a particular mode of attention. In distinction to the mode of attention in mundane experience that works by determining how an intuition can be subsumed under a concept, aesthetic attention celebrates the pleasure associated with the “unison in the play of the powers of the mind” confronted with “the manifold in a thing.” Aesthetic attention, in (...) other words, is an aesthetic subject’s attention to itself and to the pleasures derived from flexing the power of imagination. In this respect, Kant’s aesthetics reaffirms its cartesian core, the primordial positing of the thinking and reflective I as the necessary preposition for experience. This strict distribution of attention toward the secure epistemological architecture of object and subject seems to vacillate, however, in Kant’s brief discussion of artworks as purveyors of “aesthetic ideas.” This article discusses the de-limitation of attention instigated by the aesthetic idea. The aesthetic idea is associated with the artwork as an object, but it immediately transgresses the limits of the object through an array of analogical instantiations of “spirit.” On the other hand, aesthetic ideas are subjectively appreciated, but this appreciation similarly transgresses subjective cognition in an inexhaustible ramification of associative thinking. Developing these characteristics of the “aesthetic idea,” the article proposes to excavate from Critique of Judgment a mode of aesthetic sensibility that eventually challenges the Cartesian architecture of subject and object and thus reposits aesthetics in a field of relational interdependency. (shrink)

We are capable of engaging in different kinds of relations with objects and situations we meet. Any relation is, in principle singular and thus einmalig, unique. Still, certain general types of relationality do exist. Relations may be established with focus (“attention”) on usability, truth, ethics, power, authenticity—and of course, on “beauty,” on aesthetic value. This differentiation is an invention of the Modern world and in itself subject to historical change. In terms of “discursive areas” it has been theorized (...) in varying keys—including quite many universalist ones. We are free to choose our modes of attention. Still, institutionalized discourses in practice pre-configure these modes. Especially when it comes to art and Modernity’s “great divide” between poiesis and aesthesis, the conditions for attentional approaches appear largely pre-figured. The article discusses this pre-configuration and the institutionalized “freedoms” of art and its audience, respectively—including current calls to abolish such differentiations and to transgress the discursive boundaries of art. (shrink)

The article suggests a conceptualization of the interrelationship between attention, affect, and aesthetic experience. It supplements classical aesthetic theory by integrating knowledge from neurophysiology, developmental psychology, and psychoanalysis. Furthermore, the article proposes a distinction between a variety of types of affect that are discussed with a view to their potential contribution to elaborating the concept of aesthetic experience in the Kantian tradition and to reflecting different qualities of attention.

Journal of Chinese Philosophy, EarlyView.