The notion of beauty as a point of transit between the sensuous and the ideal is well-established in the history of Western philosophy. Describing this transition and seeking to rethink the ways in which humans understand the things they find beautiful in life, Harry Underwood’s The Experience of Beauty approaches the notion of beauty through the insights of major but distinctively individual philosophers and artists. In seven essays and a dialogue, Underwood considers the principal instances of (...) beauty as it reveals itself in everyday experience, as a concept in the mind of the philosopher, as the artist’s vision, and as the shining image of the ideal. Considering the perspectives of many notable figures in the Western canon of philosophy and literature for whom beauty and the imagination have mattered, including Plato, Nietzsche, Auden, Coleridge, Proust, and Iris Murdoch, Underwood draws out a rounded sense of beauty. It is shown, on one view, to be inherent in a perceptible order and, on another, to be an expression of the will to confer meaning on a meaningless world. In art, beauty reveals itself to be both perceived and created, and a world-disclosing, truth-relaying force. As a final matter, Underwood asks what it means to embrace your own vision of beauty and apply it to your life’s work. A quietly provocative meditation on the mystery of beauty, this collection of essays contends that beauty serves life as an inspiration, not merely as an ornament. (shrink)

This is a reflection on the gift of beauty and the passion of being in light of the fact that today we often meet an ambiguous attitude to beauty. Beauty seems bland and lacks the more visceral thrill of the ugly, indeed the excremental. We crave what disrupts and provokes us. Bland beauty seems to be the death of originality. How then be open at all to beauty as gift? In fact, we often are disturbed (...) paradoxically by beauty: both taken out of ourselves, hence disquieted, yet awakened to our being at home with beauty. Beauty arouses enigmatic joy in us, and we enjoy an elemental rapport with it as other. Surprised by beauty, our breath is taken away; we are more truly there with the beautiful yet taken outside of ourselves: both at home with ourselves and not at home, in being beyond ourselves. We are first receivers of the gift of surprise and only then perceivers and conceivers. My attention to the passion of being stresses a patience, a receptivity to what is other. What happens is not first our construction. Our being disarmed by the beautiful I hold to be in tune with our being as marked most deeply by what I call a primal ‘porosity’ to being. Beauty sensuously communicates in and through this awakened porosity. We are a patience of being before we are an endeavour to be. In modern aesthetics and culture, originating receptivity tends to be downplayed as a depreciation of our claims to creative power. The predominant stress often falls on human autonomy, such that we love only what we construct ourselves, not what we receive. By contrast, I argue there is something of the godsend in what is truly beautiful. This might not be a fashionable way of talking but the vocation of the philosopher is not to be fashionable but to be true. (shrink)

Plato conceived of the Form of Beauty as quite distinct from the Form of the Good. Beauty was a means to the Good. The ascent theory of the Symposium has suggested to some commentators that Plato envisaged two kinds of beauty, the sensuous and the intellectual, and that to reach the Good we must transcend our sensuous desires and cultivate an appreciation of intellectual beauty. However, in the Laws Plato presents us with a third (...) notion of beauty, which is neither sensuous nor intellectual. To experience beauty we need to cultivate our pleasure in harmonious forms. This is where we find a theory of beauty that resonates in Kant’s aesthetic theory. According to the latter, the feeling for beauty is a feeling for harmony that takes us beyond the confines of a world marked out by self-interest. I conclude that Plato’s aesthetic theory anticipates the role that aesthetic judgment would play in Immanuel Kant’s system of the mind. (shrink)

For Kant the definitive end of art is the expression of aesthetic ideas that are sensible counterparts of rational ideas. But there is another type of aesthetic idea: ‘Beauty can in general be called the _expression_ of aesthetic ideas: only in beautiful nature the mere reflection on a given intuition, without a concept of what the object ought to be, is sufficient for arousing and communicating the idea of which that object is considered as the _expression_.’ What are these (...) aesthetic ideas? I argue that Kant is drawing on the idealist conception of art, associated with Vasari, Bellori and Winckelmann, as presenting idealized spatial forms characteristic of natural kinds. He incorporates this conception into his analysis of the beauty of nature and adds that we have non-conceptual access to it. These idealized forms he names aesthetic normal ideas of natural species. §51 of Kant’s Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment opens with an unexpected claim, described by readers as ‘puzzling’, ‘perplexing’ and even as a ‘notorious mystery’.1 1 Beauty can in general be called the _expression_ of aesthetic ideas: only in beautiful art this idea must be occasioned by a concept of the object, but in beautiful nature the mere reflection on a given intuition, without a concept of what the object ought to be, is sufficient for arousing and communicating the idea of which that object is considered as the _expression_. 2 2 I will argue that, in this passage, Kant states that there are two types of aesthetic ideas—namely, aesthetic ideas expressed in beautiful art and aesthetic ideas expressed by beautiful nature. This distinction is surprising for, before this juncture, there is no explicit claim that there are different types of aesthetic ideas. In fact, although Kant offers several seemingly general characterizations of aesthetic ideas, in none of them does he indicate that there is a subdivision of the genus. Noteworthy, too, is the claim that the distinct pleasure we take in beautiful nature is independent of concepts; for strikingly, it can be considered as the expression of what the passage above expressly calls ideas. In his analysis of fine art, Kant draws the distinction between natural and artistic beauty—a distinction that is succinctly repeated in the passage above.3 3 But when he goes on to explicate the notion of an aesthetic idea, he refers only to aesthetic ideas expressed in art. This fact is taken to support the assumption that aesthetic ideas are connected solely to art. This is the heart of the mystery of the passage, for in it, Kant explicitly talks about aesthetic ideas expressed by beautiful nature. This raises a crucial question: Does the explication of aesthetic ideas in the sections on art apply to aesthetic ideas of beautiful nature?I maintain that the answer is negative. Although, in the passage above, Kant uses the same term in relation to both kinds of beauty, he has a clear distinction in mind: Beauty in art is an aesthetically or sensuously unified expression of the conceptual richness of an idea of reason; beauty in nature is an expression of a purely aesthetically or sensuously unified richness. Obviously, this distinction is connected to other significant differences between the two kinds of beauty. But it is important to point out at the outset that the two types of aesthetic ideas have in common only the quality of being a sensuously unified richness. It is in this sense that they are both species of a single genus. But what more precisely does Kant mean by aesthetic ideas expressed by beautiful nature, and what unified richness do they express and how precisely do they express it? It is to the historical genealogy of this notion of aesthetic ideas of beautiful nature and its implications for Kant’s theory of beauty that this paper is devoted. This historical genealogy will reveal a sense of the notion of aesthetic ideas that we easily overlook but would have been familiar to Kant and his contemporaries. (shrink)

This review essay develops Gordon Bearn's interpretation of Deleuze's philosophy as an aesthetic existential indicative of the creative practice of life drawing. Life drawing requires moving beyond various forms of representation that stultify the movement of becoming and limit our ability to appreciate sensuous singularity and intensive pluralities. Sholtz offers an original account of the singularity of sensual existence, amplifying the tenuous relationship between beauty and suffering, or the intensification of life, which Bearn courageously explores. The article addresses (...) several important themes which are used to carve out a new aesthetico-ethical path of existing: beauty as imperfection, affirmation of pointlessness, the disarticulation of the aesthetic from the formal realm of art, the existential recognition of the eliminable multiplicity of possible paths, and the indeterminate nature of a true event. (shrink)

Derived from Heidegger's interpretation of attractive force with a high volume of inspired beauty care and a master not only the followers. And in order to maintain this special, he followed the great classical psychologists: Ferdinand learning. He also won in the traditional school psychology professor at the certificate, but his real motive is not subject to the ancient hope臘Heidegger was carried out by the interpretation of the full amount of impact force. Nevertheless, Heidegger's classic is still up to (...) the United States: "true management and methods" to maintain significant influence over. Up to the United States as a major interpreter of Heidegger's thinking, and faithful friend. In about two more people, I turned to introduce three other in Heidegger, Gadamer's major research on the influence of the philosopher: Park Latin chart, sub-km Aristotle and Hegel. First we look at the future Park Latin chart, I think the focus on conversation and dialogue up to the United States and the "dialectic dialogue" concept. The relative importance of making it true, so true that people with reasonable doubt and dialogue. Although there are many plans to pull up to the United States Park effect, but I make up as two points and a U.S. interlocutor's talent and try to prove. I have given up by the United States with three coming from Aristotle's concept of sub-km: wise , mimetic and tragedy. Wise is to predict the results of practical wisdom for the rational, he does not see a formula-based learning, as can be, but based on life experience. That mimic the Department of Aristotle in the sub-km only copy, and is reasonable in real life, the ultimate communicator. Finally, the tragedy is not the only sub-km Aristotle considers the six parts of the structure, but compassion and fear the experience of change in the audience angle of view, it is up to the United States in view of the viewer's experience of understanding and application, is a kind of tragedy action meaningful participation and experience. Beneficiary of up to U.S. history in Hegel's awareness of personal, Hegel's dialectic, as well as their knowledge to the arts is the current acceptance of the senses. He does not agree with Hegel referred to the "art of the past things," Hegel explains how this point. Shortly we will be able to see the remarkable work of art as a nervous balcony. Let me give you a visit in Heidelberg, Heidegger's experience in the United States up to the lecture, he objected to clarify and to hide his own dialectic and Hegel's dialectic with links, because at the end of Hegel's philosophy of total abstraction knowledge. In the second part of this lecture, I turned to the analysis of Gadamer's thesis on the art of "the relevance of the United States," and Heidegger in this direction is the famous "Art works of origin> thesis compared. In the late writings, Heidegger shows that there is not his main independent and self-study will be presented in the art of the earth and the world as a tension. In Gadamer's thesis in art, he follows Heidegger in the hope臘by establishing the art of human culture, learn the origin of works of art ontology analysis. He discussed all the cultural roots of the game , the difference between symbolic meaning and religious ceremonies. But he formed an art theory of the problem to analyze, it also clarifies the classical art and contemporary abstract art. In these three elements: the game, symbols and festivals, art up to the United States to find a structure is more deep cultural roots. As in the early hope臘ceremony, dance performances and tragedy. Gadamer's encounter with the magnetic force of Heidegger's interpretations made him cautious not to become simply a follower of the great master. To maintain his independence, he studied with Paul Friedländer, the great classical philologist. He attained certification in classical philology to teach in the secondary schools, but his true motive was to be able to resist the powerful interpretations of Greek philosophy put forward by Heidegger. Nevertheless, Heidegger remained a major leavening influence on Gadamer's classic, Truth and Method, and Gadamer became a major interpreter of Heidegger's thought, and a constant friend. After a few comparisons between them, I turn to three major philosophers other than Heidegger who contributed concepts to Gadamer's masterwork: Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel. Regarding Plato, I point to the emphasis in Gadamer on dialogue and conversation and the concept of eumeneis elenchoi, the respect the opponent that recognizes that he could be right, so they join together in dialogue in quest of the truth. Although there are many other debts to Plato in Gadamer, I point to these two and testify to Gadamer's gifts as a conversationalist and debater. I single out three concepts of Aristotle that Gadamer used: phronesis, mimesis, and tragedy. Phronesis is the practical wisdom that goes beyond calculative reason. It is based not on formulas that can be learned but on experience of life . Mimesis in Aristotle is not just copying, but on a recognition that ultimately conveyed truth about life. Finally, tragedy for Aristotle is not just a structure with six parts but an experience of pity and terror that transformed the perspective of the viewer. This was important in the hermeneutics of Gadamer that looked at the viewer's experience of recognition and application, a participatory experience of the meaning of the action of the tragedy. Gadamer is indebted to Hegel for the historical character of consciousness, the Hegelian dialectic, and the recognition that that art is a sensuous representation of the real. He did not agree with Hegel that art was a thing of the past, and also explained what Hegel meant by this: we no longer saw art as a disclosure of the divine. I mention an experience I had of Heidegger's visit to Heidelberg, where he spoke after Gadamer's lecture rejecting his effort to connect his dialect of clearing and concealing with Hegelian dialectic, because Hegel's philosophy always ended in absolute knowledge. For the second major part of the lecture, I turn to an analysis of Gadamer's essay on art, The Relevance of the Beautiful , comparable in a way to Heidegger's famous lectures on The Origin of the Work of Art . In the latter work, Heidegger declares his independence of his masterwork and presents art in terms of the tension between earth and world. In Gadamer's essay on art, he goes beyond the Heideggerian emphasis on the ontology of the artwork by seeking to establish the anthropological roots of art in Greek culture. He discusses the roots of all culture in play, the significance of the symbol, and the meaning of religious festivals. But he begins with an analysis of the problem of formulating a theory of art that does justice both to classical art and contemporary nonrepresentational art. In all three elements, play, symbol, and festival, Gadamer finds a foundation for art in the deep roots of our culture as found in the ritual, dance, and tragic plays of ancient Greece. (shrink)

This paper aims to pay tribute to Figal’s comprehensive and innovative analysis of the artwork and beauty, while challenging both his realist position on the immediacy of meaning and his monist stance that reduces sublimity to beauty. To enquire into the origin of aesthetic feelings and sense, and thus, to break the hermeneutic circle, we first trace the origin of this reduction to the reception of Burke’s concept of the sublime by Mendelssohn and Kant. We then recur to (...) Husserl and Dufrenne to trace the origin of the sense of the feeling of sublimity in the realm of affectivity or sensuousness. This genesis takes place in passive experience, where we identify an excess of sensuous sense over categorial meaning that is constitutive of the affective sense that our bodily sensations give to hyletic material. It is argued that this sensuous excess evokes a sublime experience in the phenomenological sense, involving an affective and disruptive bodily experience and an endless process of sense formation. Affective or sensuous sense is thus an event that irreversibly affects the bodily surface. To elucidate this phenomenon, we draw on the theoretical framework of Breton and Bataille, positing it as a form-transgressive ‘convulsive’ sublime, which we then illustrate in the architectural works of Tschumi and Eisenman. In short, we have retrieved the origin of aesthetic experience and redefined the feeling of the sublime as a phenomenological ‘convulsive’ sublimity. (shrink)

This paper aims to pay tribute to Figal’s comprehensive and innovative analysis of the artwork and beauty, while challenging both his realist position on the immediacy of meaning and his monist stance that reduces sublimity to beauty. To enquire into the origin of aesthetic feelings and sense, and thus, to break the hermeneutic circle, we first trace the origin of this reduction to the reception of Burke’s concept of the sublime by Mendelssohn and Kant. We then recur to (...) Husserl and Dufrenne to trace the origin of the sense of the feeling of sublimity in the realm of affectivity or sensuousness. This genesis takes place in passive experience, where we identify an excess of sensuous sense over categorial meaning that is constitutive of the affective sense that our bodily sensations give to hyletic material. It is argued that this sensuous excess evokes a sublime experience in the phenomenological sense, involving an affective and disruptive bodily experience and an endless process of sense formation. Affective or sensuous sense is thus an event that irreversibly affects the bodily surface. To elucidate this phenomenon, we draw on the theoretical framework of Breton and Bataille, positing it as a form-transgressive ‘convulsive’ sublime, which we then illustrate in the architectural works of Tschumi and Eisenman. In short, we have retrieved the origin of aesthetic experience and redefined the feeling of the sublime as a phenomenological ‘convulsive’ sublimity. (shrink)

The volume enquires into the relationship between philosophy and aesthetics in Late Antiquity. Is the sensuous beauty of art a medium for the highest thinkable truth?

Perched on the ramparts of Volterra last July, I gaze over i dolci colli toscani, the sweet hills of Tuscany, drenched in summer sun. Warm, content and at peace, I am bemused at how much at home I feel in this strange land. I have felt this way since 1991 when I returned for the first time to la bell' Italia thirty-seven years after having lived in Rome as a young child in a Foreign Service family. In its sensuous (...) beauty and riotous disorder, Rome was stunning. My wife Eileen and I explored old childhood haunts, including the Embassy apartment residences on viale villa Graziole where my family had lived for four years in Rome—two consecutive two-year posts—in the 1950s. Memory cells exploding, I was assailed by vivid images from childhood. Once when I was five or six, my brother David and I accompanied our housemaid Marcella to her simple country home and joined villagers in the fields as they all turned out—men, women, and children—to harvest the bean crop. As dusk set in, fires were lit, simple musical instruments appeared with the wine, and the feasting and dancing began. Bonfires were soon aglow for miles up and down the sweet rolling hills. (shrink)

In this essay I explore the relationship of sport to art. I do not intend to argue that sport is one of the arts. I will rather argue that sport and art have a commonality, in that both are alienated philosophy. This is to propose – in an argument that has its roots in Hegel's aesthetics – that sport and art may both be interpreted as a way of reflecting upon metaphysical and normative issues, albeit in media that are alien (...) to philosophy's conceptual language. The medium of art is the manipulation of sensuous materials, such as stone, paint, or sound. The medium of sport is the pursuit of a physical challenge, at which the athlete may fail. I will develop this argument by borrowing from the philosophy of art of Arthur C. Danto. In particular, I will suggest that a parallel to his concept of ‘artworld’ can be seen in a ‘sportworld’. As the artworld is an ‘atmosphere of theory’ and a ‘knowledge of history’ through which an event is interpreted and thereby constituted as art, so a sportworld is the atmosphere of theory through which an event is constituted as sport. I will argue that much of the existing discussion of the relationship between sport and art is grounded in an ill-conceived aesthetics. In order to be appreciated and appropriately interpreted, sport must be understood within a modernist aesthetics and hermeneutics. As such, the core issue of an aesthetics of sport is not that of beauty, but rather of the meaning of the sport, and what I shall call the capacity of sport to ‘speak as a world’ – to bring to consciousness through play the taken-for-granted cultural conditions through which our social lives are constituted, and within which metaphysical and normative problems are articulated. I will propose that the hermeneutics of music provides a useful model for the interpretation of sport. (shrink)

This article centers on the modes of maintaining an equivalence of the moral and the good that lies behind and within Augustine’s and Aquinas’ understandings of beauty. Beauty, in the medieval experience of it, never derived exclusively from sense impression; it was neither purely pleasure in the sensuous nor a wholly intuitive contemplation of the transcendent occurring exclusively in the mind. Rather, beauty was the intelligible form of some higher reality, the quality of things that reflects (...) their origin in the divine. Beauty, then, like meaning itself, could never be fully present in its material sign, as it appears to us only as a promise of presence through embodied absence, neither fully here and now nor entirely elsewhere and beyond. This, ultimately, may be the very purpose of beauty, a hopeful pull toward the perfect and yet never fully knowable God who is beauty. (shrink)

The ability to think of something not presently perceived, but spatio-temporally real. (2) The ability to think of whatever one acknowledges as possible in the spatio-temporal world. (3) The liability to think of something that the subject believes to be real, but which is not. (4) The ability to think of things that one conceives of as fictional. (5) The ability to entertain mental images. (6) The ability to think of anything at all. (7) The non-rational operations of the mind, (...) that is, those explicable in terms of causes rather than reasons. (8) The ability to form perceptual beliefs about public objects in space and time. (9) The ability to sensuously appreciate works of art or objects of natural beauty without classifying them under concepts or thinking of them as useful. (10) The ability to create works of art that encourage such sensuous appreciation. (11) The ability to appreciate things that are expressive or revelatory of the meaning of human life. (12) The ability to create works of art that express something deep about the meaning of life. (shrink)

Kant and the Unity of Reason is a comprehensive reconstruction and a detailed analysis of Kant's Critique of Judgment. In the light of the third Critique, the book offers a final inter­pretation of the critical project as a whole. It proposes a new reading of Kant's notion of human experience in which domains, as different as knowledge, morality, and the experience of beauty and life, are finally viewed in a unified perspective. The book proposes a reading of Kant's critical (...) project as one of the most sophisticated attempts in the history of philosophy to articulate a complex notion of human "sensi­bility" as an alternative to both eighteenth-century empiricism and rationalism. The fun­damental contribution of rationality to human experience cannot be fully appreciated if the sensuous component of experience is not adequately taken into account. For Kant, "sensibility" includes functions as different as sensation, intuition, perception, emotion, passion, drive, moral feeling, and feeling of pleasure and displeasure. Kant's idea of "reflective" judgment is the peculiar discovery of the third Critique. Re­flective judgment articulates the interplay between sensibility and rationality, the world of nature and the human mind, in order to constitute human experience and the sphere of human intersubjective relationships. In the act of reflection, Kant's philosophy fi­nally comes to reflect upon itself and the meaning of its critical endeavor. (shrink)

I argue that Nietzsche’s criticism of the Kantian theory of disinterested pleasure in beauty reflects his own commitment to claims that closely resemble certain Kantian aesthetic principles, specifically as reinterpreted by Schiller. I show that Schiller takes the experience of beauty to be disinterested both (1) insofar as it involves impassioned ‘play’ rather than desire-driven ‘work’, and (2) insofar as it involves rational-sensuous (‘aesthetic’) play rather than mere physical play. In figures like Nietzsche, Schiller’s generic notion of (...) play—which is itself influenced by Kant’s claim that aesthetic pleasure is orthogonal to desire-satisfaction—becomes decoupled from his (further) Kantian view that aesthetic play essentially involves a harmony of sensuous receptivity and rational spontaneity. The result, I suggest, is a self-standing opposition between desires and passions. This motivates a recognizably Romantic vision of aesthetic disinterestedness, as freedom from desire realized in a state of creative determination by passion. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant's ‘Critique of Judgment’ is often read either in terms of art appreciation or teleology. In this paper however, the object is to examine the ‘Critique of Judgment’, especially the concepts of the Beautiful and the Sublime, in relation to the Kantian version of the Enlightenment. The main theses in the paper are as following: That Beauty can provide us with the sensuous experience of the possibility of the moral law and that the Sublime can provide us (...) with the sensuous experience of the possibility that we as rational beings can effectuate the actual existence of the moral law. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Aesthetics of Representation:Dramatic Texts and Dramatic EngagementKathleen Gallagher (bio)Staking the TerritoryThere are several ways in which aesthetic discourses might be positioned in the field of drama education. While some might locate "aesthetics" in the cognitive or interpretive realm of learning, and others the affective or philosophical realm, I have chosen to speak of the discourses of aesthetics as they relate to both cognitive and embodied responses to the (...) (extra)ordinary events of a drama classroom. I am already unsatisfied with the recognizable distinctions implied in this binary, but I persist in the hope that the relationship between these learning functions will become clear as I proceed with what I have termed the sociology of aesthetics in drama practice. In drama, we attempt—collectively—to represent our lives through art as we come to know the world and our sensuous responses to it.Fenner's brief history of aesthetic experience and aesthetic analysis will further help stake the territory about which we are speaking in a drama classroom.1 Calling aesthetic experiences the "raw data" that aesthetics is meant to explain, he helpfully distinguishes between Kantian understandings of the conditions of aesthetic judgment and the emergence of those thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who began to focus on the psychology of aesthetic experience. Following these thinkers and further developments in the early part of the twentieth century, the work of John Dewey explored the psychological nature of what he called "an experience" in the field of education more generally.2 This article will also privilege the notion of aesthetic experience but will, more specifically, focus on an exploration of ideas borne out of aesthetic experiences that cultivate sociological questions about representation and the nature of cognitive and embodied engagement in classroom drama. Key to my view of dramatic representation is the notion of a provoked imagination. [End Page 82]In the nineteenth century, Archibald Allison claimed that it was the imagination that was responsible for what we term "aesthetic experiences."3 Earlier philosophers of aesthetics had determined that the mere presence of beauty could create an aesthetic experience, but Allison insisted upon the "exercises of the imagination" in his understanding of aesthetic experiences. Contemporary writers in the field of arts education have also favored this more active conception of aesthetic responses, such as the formidable Madeleine Grumet and Maxine Greene. They and others will be cited here in support of a conception of "aesthetic experiences" in the drama classroom as active, selective, and highly framed experiences.Dramatic Texts and Aesthetic Knowing: Framing the ExperiencesOne can hardly discuss the idea of aesthetic exploration without first engaging with the rather unwieldy idea of "creativity." Radford, citing Margaret Boden, puts forward a very helpful notion of creativity as "conceptual space."4 This "conceptual space" is what I will refer to as "the frame" carefully placed around dramatic learning, usually by a highly skilled teacher. Frequently because of this frame, something entirely forgettable to students is shaped into something worth considering. The "frame," therefore, consists of both careful pedagogical planning and, in many cases, a piece of text that ignites the conceptual space and inspires a deliberate probing. This deliberate probing, or what Radford might call creative thought, invites co-creators to "play at the boundaries of sense."5 Bruner speaks about the "creative act" as bringing about a "shock of recognition,"6 or what Radford equally describes as something speaking to something "within us." This idea is particularly helpful in deconstructing what is often at work in a collaborative piece of improvised drama activity in a classroom of young people.To this end, I would like to offer three brief episodes as examples of textual and improvised drama engagement that speak to Bruner's and Radford's ideas of "recognition," or resonance with "something within us," and to my own understanding of how ideas of representation or mimesis are operating in moments of aesthetic knowing for young people. The other principle at work, seemingly at odds with these ideas, is the notion of distance or alienation from an event, in effect a dis-identification. What I would especially hope to demonstrate in the following brief, empirical... (shrink)

The general conceit of Schiller’s aesthetic education is that our experiences with art and beauty set us free from internal and external constraints and allow us to embrace our full humanity as rational and sensuous beings. Experiencing the aesthetic, or the play impulse, puts one in a state of aesthetic determinacy—or rather indeterminacy—that Schiller calls the highest sense of freedom, aesthetic freedom. Gail K. Hart examines Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange as an example of what Schillerian aesthetic education (...) might look like in practice. Though it represents a distortion of Schiller’s aesthetic education, Hart argues that it also reveals an ineradicable element of coercion in aesthetic education. I argue that Burgess’s Ludovico Technique leaves out a key element of Schiller’s conception of aesthetic cultivation—play—and that Hart’s analysis of Schiller’s work likewise lacks a robust analysis of his notion of play. I argue that, when Schiller’s account of the play impulse is taken seriously as a necessary condition for aesthetic cultivation to take place, coercion is by definition made impossible. Aesthetic play is accomplished by the mutual destruction of physical and moral determinations, and this mutual erasure leads to a higher and more expansive freedom. External constraints and coercion cannot induce the aesthetic state, so aesthetic education as Schiller presents it in On the Aesthetic Education of Man cannot contain the element of coercion Hart suspects. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wellspring or Circuit?Commentary on Dewey and the Aesthetic UnconsciousnessFrank X. RyanEditor's note: This article contains material similar to a book review by the same author previously published in The Pluralist, vol. 18, no. 2, pp 114–21. The present article represents a further critical use of this material that we deem worthy of publication.in this vital and splendidly crafted work, Bethany Henning recovers a philosophy of aesthetic wisdom far richer (...) than the narrow epistemological lens dominant today. From its start, American philosophy looked beyond Europe's atomistic empiricism toward a continuity between our thought and nature's aesthetic splendor. Jonathan Edwards found beauty in the structure of being reflected in relations among ideas. For Emerson, each of us is a "transparent eyeball" in which nature's beauty fortifies our moral and spiritual agency. At the apex of this tradition is John Dewey, for whom "aesthetic experience [is] the highest mode of human experience" (Henning 55).Although aesthetic theory is usually associated with the cognitive evaluation of art, Dewey explores a broader non-reflective or unconscious dimension. Henning's appropriation of "unconscious"—the cradle of Freud's infantile id—is intentionally provocative. American culture, reflected in academic thought, has largely resisted appeals to subterranean urges and drives. In doing so, however, we perpetuate a myth of rational and moral exceptionalism masking a history of colonialism, oppression, and crass commercialism. In accepting the unconscious, European thought has taken strides to acknowledge and address such ills. Henning wonders whether America might accept "a dynamic unconscious, were it presented with an alternative mythology" (10) and finds a viable candidate in Dewey's underappreciated notion of qualitative immediacy: an "aesthetic (directly felt) connection between ourselves and [End Page 77] the world" (Henning 5). In affirming the unconscious depth of experience, this American reconfiguration welcomes "aesthetic experience back into our philosophical lives" (Henning 5).When embodied meaning supplements cognitive reflection, we come to champion "the sensuous, lived body" as "the primary reality" of qualitative immediacy—a felt aesthetic unity punctuated by "impulsions" arising from an organism's needs (Henning 69). As "a site of adaptive adjustments," Henning continues, "the body is responsive to the brink of coalescence at the point of contact with the world, in which things that are 'outside of it' belong to it" (71). "To move adeptly into aesthetic experience means to be skilled at loosening focal consciousness" so as to cultivate "the essential porousness of the world" (130).With this, the body-mind relation becomes a problem of normative aesthetics, not epistemology. The Cartesian detachment of intellect from nature perpetuated our cultural alienation from our bodies, our environments, and one another (Henning 81–84). With the re-emergence of the body, however, we can begin to acknowledge and heal this trauma.In tapping the significance of qualitative immediacy, of "having" beyond "knowing," Dewey and the Aesthetic Unconscious strives to recover Dewey's remarkable insight into our essential situatedness in the world. This alone establishes its importance. But Henning's book is equally ambitious in suggesting how Dewey's aesthetic understanding can(1). reconfigure the shadowy daemons of Freud's id;(2). replace the myth of American exceptionalism with authentic relationships rooted in pluralist values;(3). rehabilitate the body as an authentic vehicle of expression and communication;(4). vindicate the bold claim that all unified experience is aesthetic; and(5). identify and promote connections forged in shared human experiences.These aims are of inestimable value. I pledge to do whatever I can to defend and advance them. At the outset, however, I feel we must shore up the relationship between two different approaches to thinking about our situatedness in the world: (1) of organic beings existing in a porous world they dynamically interact with, and (2) a phenomenology of experience wherein nonreflective having is an unanalyzed totality from which thought and thing, subject and object, organism and environment, functionally emerge in what Dewey calls the pattern of inquiry. [End Page 78]The general consensus that Dewey failed to reconcile these two approaches—of existence with experience—was dubbed the "deep crack" in Dewey's thought, by Richard Bernstein in 1961. Bernstein laments Dewey's being caught between (1... (shrink)

This article investigates the notion of sensus communis as being introduced in the Critique of Judgment. I argue that, within the framework of Kant's philo- sophy, the general notion of a sensus communis, that is, a faculty that leads to sensuous and universal results, is paradoxical. An analysis of the theoretical sensus communis, understood as an awareness of the faculties' accord in cases of cognition, reveals that it is unclear why this faculty should amount to a sense. The aesthetic (...) sensus communis is the best candidate for a sensuous and communal faculty. However, I show that the communality of its results, that is, the community of the pleasure in the beautiful as being felt on the occasion of a given object, is insufficiently developed. (shrink)

Whereas the entrance of the monochrome into modern art has typically been understood in light of movements in contemporary art and aesthetic theory following in its wake, this essay seeks to understand the motivations for, and the effect of, the monochrome in the work of Aleksandr Rodchenko in 1921 in reference to Plato's analysis of pure pleasure and absolute beauty in the Philebus . I argue that Rodchenko and Plato were motivated by a shared project to contend with the (...) aesthetic and psychological effects of figurative semblance, or what Socrates calls the phantasm, in order to harmonize human perception with the world of sensuous material objects. It is in this shared project, I contend, that Rodchenko's strategy is to be understood as a kind of materialist Platonism that, when viewed phenomenologically, reveals Plato's objects of absolute beauty to be, in the context of industrial capitalism and the crisis of perception that Benjamin, among others, saw as its consequence, sites of loss and meaninglessness for modern consciousness, yet sites which nonetheless contain emancipatory potential for a social order that has been systematically alienated from itself and its environment. (shrink)

This article defends a formalist interpretation of Wittgenstein’s later thought on music by comparing it with Eduard Hanslick’s musical formalism. In doing so, it returns to a disagreement I have had with Bela Szabados who, in his book Wittgenstein as a Philosophical Tone-Poet, claims that the attribution of formalism obscures the role that music played in the development of Wittgenstein’s thought. The paper scrutinizes the four arguments Szabados presents to defend his claim, pertaining to alleged differences between Wittgenstein and Hanslick (...) on their accounts of theory, beauty, rules, and the broader significance of music. I will argue that in each case the similarities between Wittgenstein’s and Hanslick’s respective views outshine possible differences. Ultimately, I will argue that instead of rendering music a marginal phenomenon suited for mere entertainment, formalism –as presented by Hanslick and Wittgenstein, whom I read as influenced by Kant’s aesthetics– underscores music’s ability to show fundamental features of reality and our relation to it. Music does this precisely by being treated as a sensuous yet structured medium that is irreducible to any conceptually determined domain. (shrink)

In her landmark volume _Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body_, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson argues that the Enlightenment heralded a striking change in the way European and American thinkers conceptualized disability—away from earlier notions of disability as a marvel or wonder, toward a discourse of normalcy and deviance that framed disability as an aberration. Might returning to wonder offer us a path to approach disability differently? This article probes two risks: the way treating disabled people _as_ wondrous can be used to (...) objectify, turning disabled bodies into sites that matter because they spark feeling in others; and the way a call to _experience_ wonder can figure certain feelings or modes of perception as prerequisites for a meaningful life. Considering the way that disabled writers narrate our own experience showcases wonder’s possibilities: new orientations toward beauty, care, interdependence, and a sensuous engagement with the complex present of disabled people’s lives. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.3 (2003) 104-107 [Access article in PDF] Motivating Aesthetics Cynthia C. Rostankowski Humanities Department San Jose State University The territory of philosophical aesthetics remains a conceptual hinterland in the world of academic disciplines. It is not the only hinterland, but in comparison to other disciplines in arts and letters, few scholars engage in the subject professionally, and many people avoid the territory it occupies (...) as a place to visit, let alone to tarry or reside. Why is this? Usually people do not wish to visit places that are uncomfortable in some way. Frozen wastelands, blazing deserts, war zones, and places with nothing to do or see are usually avoided because they are perceived as unpleasant, dangerous, or boring,and the same is very likely true of their conceptual analogs. In what senses might some people perceive aesthetics as analogous to Siberia, Sudan, or central Kansas? I would like to investigate what it is about aesthetics that causes people to shy away from it more often than to flock to it. I have long been fascinated by the responses of students who express amazement or confusion when exposed to the field of aesthetics as a part of an introductory philosophy class, or of arts educators who do not know what to do with aesthetics since it does not seem quite to fit with the rest of what they do, or the responses of some artists or other arts practitioners who are occasionally disdainful of aesthetics. It would be easy to say that aesthetics has merely had bad press or inadequate exposure in the classroom, but I suspect there is more to it than that. I have experienced many of the situations I have just mentioned, and they have usually surprised and sometimes demoralized [End Page 104] me. They have always motivated me to think harder about my beloved field of interest, to try to reveal its attractions to those who do not find it as appealing and engaging as I do, or as you, my reader does. (I am presuming that one who is reading an essay in a journal about aesthetic education has already found his or her comfort zone in the field.) I will also presume to offer some thoughts about motivating an interest in aesthetics among the aesthetically uninterested — why one might want to do it, and what one might do. Please note, I am not speaking of the aesthetically disinterested 1 ; they too have already found their place in the discipline!It is likely that the problem of aesthetics has to do in part with misunderstandings, and those misunderstandings are multi-layered. If one looks up the word "aesthetic" in the Oxford English Dictionary, one finds the following: (F)rom the Greek for perception...and, being pre-occupied;...pertaining to things perceptible by the senses, things material;..."criticism of taste"...the science which treats of the conditions of sensuous perception...of or pertaining to the appreciation or criticism of the beautiful...Recent extravagances in the adoption of a sentimental archaism as the ideal of beauty have still further removed aesthetic and its derivatives from their etymological and purely philosophical meaning. There are varied suggestions about the use of the term, including the mention of its removal in contemporary parlance from its original meanings. If one looks up the keyword "aesthetic" on the Internet, one may find the following sites: skin care, plastic surgery, dentistry, exterior and interior design, tattoos, and some art, art theory, and philosophy among other things. An exemplification in practice of what is suggested in the OED. It is clear that the meaning of the word "aesthetic" has become at best imprecise, at worst confusing in common parlance.So, the first misunderstanding regarding aesthetics is the meaning of the term. What is philosophical aesthetics? It is not what some misconstrue as the imposition of value judgments on society. Unfortunately, some presume that because matters of taste or definitions of beauty are considered in the field, someone must be telling someone what they ought to think is pleasing or beautiful. This is not the focus... (shrink)

The importance of memory as a metaphysical concept throughout the history of thought was first discovered by Plato and elaborated in his famous though controversial doctrine of recollection. Various myths and metaphors in the dialogues Phaedrusand Theaetetus refer to the divine origin of memory and the a priori nature of true ‘scientific’ knowledge, as different from the ‘second-hand’ knowledge acquired from external sources, as well as to the function of earthly beauty, which is to remind the soul of the (...) eternal, transcendent beauty of truth itself. The philosophical practice of recollection aims – as we read in the Phaedo– at turning away the mind from beguiling sensuous appeareances. It is an ascetic self-purification finally culminating in death, which is but the liberation of the soul from the bodily impediment, so that it can fly back to its homeland to be reunited with its divine origin, the transcendent Good. This is the true destiny of mankind. This divine origin is vaguely remembered and longed for, thanks to the divine gift of memory, the metaphysical place where heaven meets the earth and – as Saint Augustine put it – the seeker can find God. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dewey and the Aesthetic Unconsciousness: The Vital Depths of Experience by Bethany HenningFrank X. RyanDewey and the Aesthetic Unconsciousness: The Vital Depths of Experience Bethany Henning. Lexington Books, 2022.In this important and splendidly crafted book, Bethany Henning recovers a philosophy of aesthetic wisdom distinct from the narrow epistemological lens dominant today. Unlike the psychological atomism of European Empiricism, from its outset, American philosophy embraced nature's aesthetic splendor and (...) the continuity between our thought and our world. Jonathan Edwards held that relations among ideas reflect beauty in the structure of being. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, each of us is a "transparent eyeball" where the cultivation of nature's spontaneous beauty fortifies our moral and spiritual agency. At the apex of this tradition is John Dewey, for whom Henning touts "aesthetic experience as the highest mode of human experience" (55).Although the aesthetic is generally associated with the cognitive evaluation of art, of special significance for Dewey is its non-reflective or unconscious dimension. Henning's appropriation of "unconscious"—the cradle of Freud's infantile id—is intentionally provocative. American culture, reflected in academic thought, has largely resisted appeals to subterranean urges and drives. In so doing, however, we perpetuate a myth of rational and moral exceptionalism that masks our history of colonialism, oppression, and crass commercialism. In accepting the unconscious, European thought has taken strides to acknowledge and address such ills. Despite America's disdain for psychoanalysis, Henning wonders whether it "could have accepted a dynamic unconscious, were it presented with an alternative mythology" (10).Dewey's alternative, says Henning, arises from his underappreciated notion of qualitative immediacy. In Henning's interpretation of this, meaning is embodied as a "sense of fulfillment" among accumulated habits—a "coming to terms with the world around us" through an "aesthetic (directly felt) connection between ourselves and the world." As such, to appreciate meaning, we must affirm the tacit, unconscious depth of experience; that is, we must "welcome aesthetic experience back into our philosophical lives" (5).Embodied meaning signifies that "the sensuous, lived body" is "the primary reality" (69). In this reality, qualitative immediacy is a non-reflective, aesthetic unity punctuated by "impulsions" arising from an organism's needs. Such needs are satisfied in organism-environment interactions where, says Dewey, "the epidermis is only in the most superficial way an indication of where an organism ends and its environment begins" (LW 10:61). As "a site of adaptive adjustments," Henning continues, "the body is responsive to the [End Page 114] brink of coalescence at the point of contact with the world, in which things that are 'outside of it' belong to it" (71). As such, the body-mind relation is a problem of aesthetics, not epistemology. For Dewey, as for Merleau-Ponty, the body "is the organic and dynamic condition of my thought" (75). The body is not a thing, however, but a process "always organically involved in exchanges" (86).Following the feminist thought of Susan Bordo, Henning agrees that the ascendance of the body amounts to a kind of philosophical recovery. Seventeenth-century science eviscerated the organic "female" universe of the Middle Ages. But this loss of an integrated world evoked existential fright, which Descartes tried to calm by subjugating feminine vagaries of the body to a masculine cognitive certitude bent upon controlling the whole of nature. In America today, this neurosis perpetuates our cultural alienation from our bodies, our environments, and one another (81–84). With the re-emergence of the body, however, it is possible to acknowledge and address this trauma."Feeling," in Dewey's sense, is unconsciously affective: a constant rhythm of disequilibrium and equilibrium, of need and resolution noticed only when a problem rises to the point of requiring our conscious attention. This affective "charge," this rhythm of sensed need and the desire to overcome it, is Dewey's appropriation of Plato's Erōs. Thomas Alexander casts Dewey's Erōs broadly as humanity's aesthetic investment in our world—our collective effort "to transform a biophysical environment into a world filled with meaning" (Alexander 11). But Henning turns to the more familiar sense of Erōs attuned not to the world at... (shrink)

Schiller’s interests in theology, poetry, and literature influenced the way he responded to the ethics and aesthetics of the British philosopher the Third Earl of Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley-Cooper), and the German philosophers Moses Mendelssohn and Immanuel Kant. Often Schiller’s most significant philosophical contributions are those which represent alternatives to more influential views, such as his rejection of Kant’s understanding of the relation between the sensuous and rationality in the moral person. In what follows, Schiller’s key concepts within their eighteenth-century (...) context are presented, and their significance within this context is discussed by showing how he relates the sensuous to the rational through the following: “pleasure and morality” (Sects. “Introduction”, “Locating Schiller in His Intellectual Milieu” and “Pleasure and Morality”), “form and beauty” (Sect. “Form and Beauty”), and “freedom or nature” (Sects. “Freedom or Nature” and “Concluding Remarks”). (shrink)

The paper discusses the problem of relation of Kierkegaard’s aesthetic conception to the original project of aesthetics of Baumgarten. I demonstrate that Kierkegaard’s aesthetic concep-tion wasn’t inspired by Baumgarten. On the one hand, Kierkegaard wasn’t acquainted with Baumgarten’s texts and he could meet only later interpretations of Baumgarten’s aesthetics as a beautiful science or philosophy of art, if at all; on the other, the conception of aesthetic stage of human existence has nothing to do with epistemic context of Baumgarten’s science (...) of sensitive knowledge. Kierkegaard understands aesthetic as sensuous in the meaning of sensuous immedi-acy that is here a basis of pleasure, not through the satisfaction of carnal desires, but related to the ability to understand beauty and art. So Kierkegaard’s interpretation of aesthetic as sensuous doesn’t originate from Baumgarten’s aesthetics, but, in a sense, leads to it. The reason for this is that Baumgarten’s project of aesthetics not only gave a stimulus for all later philosophical processes called “aesthetics” but also was – though neglected – their invisible distant back-ground. In this perspective, Kierkegaard’s aesthetic conception is interesting as a random un-predictable hint at Baumgarten’s authentic aesthetics already in the 19thcentury. (shrink)

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1987, the Russian-born American poet Joseph Brodsky argued that aesthetics is the mother of ethics. However, there is an ambiguity in his use of the term aesthetics. In the first part of this article, I distinguish between Brodsky’s narrow use of aesthetics, which refers to problems of beauty, and the broader sense, which refers to the cognitive function of sensibility and feeling. I then suggest that good sense can be made of the (...) claim about the origins of ethics only if we employ the broader sense of aesthetics. The second part draws on examples from Brodsky and the American poet Jorie Graham to illustrate the ways in which the feelings generated by human sensuous receptivity transform the world from a meaningless physical system into meaningful sets of life-valuable relationships. The third part sharpens this conclusion by considering the conditions under which the world can appear to be meaningless. In the final section I link Brodsky’s poetic responsiveness to the world to John McMurtry’s philosophical analysis of “the felt side of being.” Poetic evocation and philosophical argument are two approaches to the same problem which, when brought together, provide a comprehensive explanation of why aesthetics is the mother of ethics. (shrink)

Recent scholarship on Johann Georg Hamann has tended to focus on his relation to modernity, specifically the Enlightenment. His critique of rationalism, the obscurity of his style, and his pronounced influence on later figures are just several reasons for reconsidering his historical and literary significance. However, his writings also contain rich and relevant philosophical and theological ideas. This article demonstrates the centrality of Hamann’s concept of creation for both his critique of rationalism as well as his ideas regarding aesthetics. Hamann (...) understands nature as the book of creation. Human sensuousness, as an emergent feature of nature, indicates an intrinsic relationality underlying nature. By way of the senses, human beings discover themselves to be entangled with God through nature. Reason rejects this relationality when it seeks to purify itself from nature or the senses. In contrast, reason that is oriented to this fundamental relationality recognizes the beauty and friendliness that permeates nature. This recognition is an invitation whereby one is called to perpetuate these aesthetic ideals in the world. (shrink)

Preview: Beyond Baumgarten, the modern field of aesthetics can be seen as an attempt to go beyond the limits of older philosophies of beauty, sublimity, and taste in order to engage a much wider domain of qualities and judgments relating to our pleasurable and meaningful experiences of art and nature. The defining strategy of Hegelian aesthetics is to take the essence of aesthetics beyond the limits of nonconceptual sensuous experience and to celebrate instead the idea of art as (...) purveying the very highest spiritual truths, albeit in a somewhat sensuous form. The progressive revolutions of artistic forms and styles that define twentieth-century art similarly reflect the same play of dynamic movement in which art and aesthetics advance by challenging and overcoming the determination of established boundaries posited by prior aesthetic theory and practice. The limit-defying trend in aesthetics is evident in the continuing unsuccessful attempts by analytic philosophy to provide a satisfactory definition of art that will perfectly define its extensional limits by either providing its core essence or some formula that will select all and only those objects that are genuine works of art. Like other Wittgensteinian and pragmatist-inspired philosophers, I have criticized such compartmentalizing definitions of art, not simply for their failures to provide perfect extensional coverage of all the diverse works of art, but also for these theories’ explanatory poverty in explaining art’s meanings, purposes, functions, and values. One of the problems with traditional definitions of art is that they attempt to define something that is not a natural kind but a historically constructed field composed of rather diverse practices. These diverse practices employ a variety of different media and issue in a variety of different works of art that appear to belong to different ontological categories. (shrink)

Andrey Tashchian | : Chez saint Augustin le numerus sert de principe ontologique de la beauté finie en révélant l’ascension métaphysique du sensible vers l’intelligible. De plus, se divisant en sphères objective et subjective, le numerus s’avère être une totalité, « l’idée ». Toutefois, comme une forme de la culture antique, ce concept n’est pas connu comme une contradiction réelle, et ainsi les numeri éternels ne sont pas postulés comme un processus où la subjectivité finie, le moi, deviendrait nécessaire pour (...) la substance infinie. Donc, dans la doctrine de saint Augustin, l’essence de la science de la musique n’a pas la valeur de l’activité humaine consciente de soi. | : In St. Augustine’s doctrine of rhythm numerus manifests the metaphysical ascent from sensuousness to rationality and is the ontological root of finite beauty. Moreover, numerus is differentiated into the objective and subjective spheres, proving to be a totality, the “idea.” Meanwhile, as a formation of antique culture, this concept is not known as a real contradiction, and thereby eternal numeri are not posited as a process in which finite subjectivity, I would be a necessity for the infinite substance. So, in St. Augustine’s doctrine the essence of the science of music has not the value of man’s self-conscious activity. (shrink)

In past decades, the subject atmosphere and mood has gone beyond the physio-meteorological and psychological scopes and become a new direction of aesthetics which concerns two sides of the same phenomenon. As the primary sensuous reality constructed by both the perceiving subject and the perceived object, atmosphere and mood are neither a purely subjective state nor an objective thing. Atmosphere is essentially a quasi-object pervaded by a specific affective quality and a ubiquitous phenomenon forming the foundation of our outer (...) life experiences, while mood is a quasi-subject pervaded by specific objective quality and thus a ubiquitous phenomenon forming the foundation of our inner life experiences. A practical dimension is thereby, from the outset, embedded in the consideration of both concepts. This is mainly characterized by actions and, correspondingly, ethical aspects, which concern the design and creation of atmosphere and thus the triggering of mood through works of art. Here, on the one hand, the process of artistic formation, long neglected in the European tradition, is given prominence as an aesthetic practice, and on the other hand, an interactive dialogue is effectively established between the artist, the work and the viewer. Due to the fact that atmosphere and mood, both as in-between, emphasize the interaction of the perceiver and the perceived from two sides, here the decisive question is: in what kind of environment do we live or participate and in what way do we experience it? The focus of aesthetics is now not on the conventional issue whether the environment is beautiful or gives us a sense of beauty, but on how the environment influences our feeling of being there (Befinden) through our own sensuality. Such an approach would contribute to a critical transformation in aesthetic methodology, namely from the ontological and/or epistemological what to the phenomenological and anthropological how. -/- The tension between atmosphere and mood, as revealed here, opens up a large space for exploring a new understanding of aesthetics. On this basis the special issue pursued to diversify this discussion on an international level. (shrink)

“Artworks are not being but a process of becoming” —Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory In the everyday use of the concept, saying that something is grotesque rarely implies anything other than saying that something is a bit outside of the normal structure of language or meaning – that something is a peculiarity. But in its historical use the concept has often had more far reaching connotations. In different phases of history the grotesque has manifested its forms as a means of (...) subversive resistance against society’s prevailing notions of form and power. What aids this impact and distinguishes two of its basic stylistic features is the grotesque’s dissolution of form and its hyperbole. Such grotesqueries, however, soon solidify into new forms, new structures of meaning, hierarchy and practice, and in this sense the history of the grotesque is, on one hand, a continual opposition and transgression of the prevailing notions of art as well as of God and humanity, while on the other hand it offers continual resistance to its own solidifying process. As such the grotesque will not and cannot be contained in form without it losing the very thing that makes it grotesque. Even though it is somewhat easy to point out certain stylistic features of the grotesque, the sum of those features tell us very little about what is at play within it. Definitions concerned with the grotesque’s content rather than its form faces similar difficulties. Throughout history, expressions relating to the grotesque have been used in defense of a whole host of different social and cultural discourse including, for instance, Catholicism (See Erhard Schön’s Der Teufel mit der Sackpfeife , 1536), Protestantism (See Lucas Cranach’s Der Papstesel , 1523), a material folk culture (see Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World , 1984) and an idealistic romantic structure of meaning (see Wolfgang Kayser’s The Grotesque in Art and Literature , 1957). Thus though the grotesque cannot be reduced to the expression of certain forms or meanings, in order to examine what the grotesque is about one has to try to see how it’s relationship to flow and process and how, by maintaining this relationship, it attempts to avoid solidifying into form and meaning. The process of the grotesque alluded to here revolves around a play between periphery and center, the marginalized and the dominant. Most often this is expressed as a direct negation of the center of power. In the medieval grotesque tradition of the carnival, for example, it is expressed by its emphasis on the nether regions of the body as the center of creation of meaning. Spirit does not come from above, but from the belly, buttocks and genitals, and there is, expressed in this manner, a mockery of the predominant Christian notion of truth and meaning. Such inversions of the sites of meaning most often explicitly express an increased interest in materiality instead of ideal content which comes to the fore through the play between periphery and center. Even in early grotesque Renaissance art (for example in the works of Raphael) the depiction of the mythological or ideal reveals an exploration of the possibilities of the material. The works of art thus explore their own boundaries rather than act as vessels of the divine and in this way the grotesque explores the limits of form and materiality. This in turn brings to the fore a metaphysical dimension in the workings of the grotesque: It is an immanent exploration of its own boundaries. Materiality and metaphysics are joined together, because it is through the awareness of itself as a structuring (dis)order that it places itself in opposition to the prevailing notions of form and power. This way the grotesque expresses an awareness of the division of sign and reality and a search for this reality. It implicitly expresses the awareness that meaning is not something God-given and static, but fluctuating and man-made. In modern explorations of the history of the grotesque it is commonly seen as a form of realism that manifests a shift from the ideal towards the material, freeing art from representing some hidden higher order and instead making the work of art the very site of creation and meaning. Going even further, the grotesque actively opposes the notions of the ideal by marking a shift from an ahistorical view of the world towards the historical. However, this also makes clear why the grotesque has a tendency to solidify into new static forms of meaning, for by establishing itself as a subversive counterforce there is an idea of transgression and emancipation. That is why the grotesque often historicizes and relativizes only to repeat the mistakes of that which it negates: putting itself in the king’s chair. The exploration of the material seems to create new forms and notions of the ideal. The representation of an otherness outside the prevailing notions of meaning and truth becomes a positive manifestation of this otherness as truth itself. Thus the historical “truths” of the grotesque are superseded by history itself. When the expressions of the grotesque solidify into static form and meaning, they become mere objects like anything else in the world. Instead of being this elusive thing of process and flow, it becomes tangible to the existing hierarchy of power as well as history itself. In this way the grotesque can be expunged, included or simply revealed as yet another false notion of truth, which is precisely what has happened with the grotesque throughout the course of history. If from the beginning the expression of the grotesque has not already been in the service of some structure of meaning and truth, it has quickly been included or has quickly included itself in such a structure. But by doing so it rejects its own basis: the tension between periphery and center is replaced by the attempt to create a new center, a new structure of meaning and truth. The doubleness, ambiguity and flow of the grotesque are then rejected by the grotesque itself. THE NON-FORM OF FORM In the critical thinking of Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69) the problem of art, caught between a reductive and prevalent notion of truth and meaning and a peripheral and alienated otherness, is reexamined and reformulated. For Adorno, the instrumental rationality of Enlightenment itself reverts into a new form of mythology which is every bit as static and exclusive as the hierarchies of religion it supersedes. All is excluded that is non-identical to the instrumental mastery of the objects of the world, "For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry." 1 As such the non-identical has been banished from the realm of thought and action, and banished specifically to the realm of art. But the realm of art is not able to provide a decent home for it because even modern art is not something entirely autonomous. While it is excluded from the notions of truth and meaning provided by instrumental rationality, it still originates from society. Just like instrumental rationality art is about mastery, structuring and exclusion. Therefore, the problem for art is that it cannot directly provide a space for the non-identical because its mode of operation is similar to that of instrumental rationality. Even worse, art has very few possibilities to free itself from this. If it becomes l’art pour l’art it is at the same time reduced to the very thing instrumental rationality claims it to be: a subjective judgment of taste.expressionism also stands as an example of this. Conversely, art cannot work within the framework of the identity-thinking of society, because any notion of freedom or emancipation would reproduce the exclusive practices of instrumental rationality. For example: Explicit socialist literature may establish itself in opposition to instrumental rationality while at the same time reproducing it. Its language may seem different, but in reality it merely provides a different set of reductive schematics for human life and experience. The problem for the art of the grotesque was, as I mentioned earlier, that far too often it was merely a symbolic manifestation of a notion of otherness—not otherness itself. Because of this the subversive character of the grotesque ends up shaping and containing otherness instead of providing a space for it. According to Adorno the only way to avoid this is to radicalize the grotesque. In order to avoid solidifying into form the work of art has to be an object which cannot be contained in thought or form—a non-form of form. The work of art has to work in a way that it strives for autonomy but without entirely leaving a discernible reality. In other words, it has to pull in two directions at once. Thus the work of art is a paradox. It is autonomous in the sense that it closes itself off from everything outside of the work of art, trying to shy away from the contaminating influence of the identity thinking of instrumental rationality. At the same time though the work of art is heteronomous in the sense that it originates from a specific historical context and is bound to be what society is not. Autonomy and heteronomy are inseparably intertwined. Unable to display otherness itself, but still trying to be a refuge for it, there is only one option for art: It has to turn against itself and destroy its own logic of form, thereby demonstrating how any representation of otherness is impossible. Art becomes a lamentation of the victims of the identity thinking of instrumental rationality and shows the traces of the otherness that is unable to appear. Adorno’s pessimistic theory of art and history stages art as a negative dialectical process where the work of art closes itself off and rejects everything outside, while the individual elements in the work of art destroys its very own logic of form from within: Artworks synthetize ununifiable, nonidentical elements that grind away at each other; they truly seek the identity of the identical and nonidentical processually because even their unity is only an element and not the magical formula of the whole […]. The resistance to them of otherness, on which they are nevertheless dependent compels them to articulate their own formal language, to leave not the smallest unformed particle as remnant. This reciprocity constitutes art’s dynamic; it is an irresolvable antithesis that is never brought to rest in the state of being. 2 Relative to a traditional understanding of the grotesque, Adorno radicalizes the tension between center and periphery, autonomy and heteronomy. In the traditional understanding of the grotesque, as we find it for example in the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, the grotesque establishes the display of otherness as a new center of meaning and truth. However Adorno rejects such notions and argues instead for a modernism of the grotesque in which both center and periphery are included in a negative dialectical process and continually synthesizing and destabilizing each other’s positions. A modernism of the grotesque works on the inside of the sign or the artwork, continually outlining and questioning the boundaries between materiality and form. This moves the focus away from the relation between the sign or work of art as a conceptual manifestation on one side and the object it refers to on the other side. Instead it implicitly points to the amorphous mass from which the signs and thereby meaning have been carved, the remnants that have been left behind. Modernism of the grotesque does not imply that it is emancipatory or that it reconciles man with nature, and does not represent a new position or a new ideology. It merely remembers and insists on the double nature of man and art: to write or paint yourself or an artwork whole by inscribing meaning in life or by applying form on a canvas is at the same time both creation and destruction. The very signs we use to center meaning in our lives carry its own alienation in them. Meaning surfaces only when process and flow comes to a halt—solidifying, but at the same time excluding parts that do not fit into that particular structure of meaning. NOTHING DONE AND NOTHING UNDONE It has always been difficult for art historians to find a suitable category for the works of the Danish artist Leif Lage (b. 1933). In his paintings the sensitive figuration seems so fragile that it is on the verge of turning into abstraction. Or conversely: the figurative emerges cautiously and hesitantly out of abstraction. As an art critic once wrote, he can almost paint things away. 3 Working in some undefinable space between abstraction and figuration, the Lage’s works shy away from the realm of words, and as a result few critics have been able to write anything meaningful about his works. In fact even fewer have been able to write more than one or two pages. The Danish author and art critic Leif Hjernøe is one of those few, but even he starts off by saying how impossible it is to write about Lage, confessing that his works exist both as process and in a field of in-between which words cannot reach. He writes: Always you find yourself in a place where nothing is done and nothing left undone, and where the elements of the work of art rest in a continuous motion. Always there is the open wound, where infection rather than surgical intervention is considered as an opportunity. And the conflict between matter and antimatter makes all diagnoses uncertain and allows conditions of uncertainty to spread in a place of raw presence. 4 The art works against the diagnosis and the certainty. Words are being eaten up by what is outside the realm of words: tension, process and doubleness. An approach to an understanding of the work of Lage could be to follow his connection to Samuel Beckett (1906-89). One can note, therefore, that Lage has illustrated several of the Danish translations of Beckett’s works. Though one is an author and the other a painter both seek a place where figuration, where the word, erodes. For both this entails an attempt to question and examine and so move in behind the façade of the surface in an exploration of that something or nothing that may be behind representation. At the same time even in the vanishing point of figuration or words, the meaningless words or the disjointed lines still stand as signs of human activity—signs of movement in emptiness. With very few exceptions Lage’s artworks revolve around one motif: Man—most often “en face.” But unlike traditional portraitures Lage’s people are found within. The artworks do not sense the reality of appearances, but rather the existential dimensions within man. As a seismograph they are sensitive to the utmost subjectivity in order to display an objective, sensuous depiction of the very problem of subjectivity. Instead of a static façade of a man, Lage’s “en face” shows the process-character of man. The people in Lage’s paintings are always in process—in the midst of becoming or dissolving. I will take a closer look in the following at the ways in which Lage establishes this sense of being in constant process, of being in-between modes or categories. THE DOUBLENESS OF THE STROKE Lage’s etchings attract attention in particular for the tension conveyed there between the material and the form. The material physically opposes the violence of the needle. But instead of embracing the violence of the needle and the victory over matter—instead of making the artistic creation and figuration express a heroic mastery of the background it is made out of—Lage uses the stroke to express the very tension between stroke and material, figuration and background. In the drypoint etching Untitled from 1983, which illustrated the Danish translation of Beckett’s Ill Seen, Ill Said , the needle tears up the material in long rough lines: Together, the primarily horizontal and vertical lines form a face. Thus the force needed to etch a line in the metal-plate draws attention to itself: It is there in the absence of curves and nuances. Man emerges on the metal-plate after great exertion and in a very simplistic form. This way Lage enhances the nature of the material, as the material’s resistance is not something to overcome. On the contrary the figuration is smitten by its very resistance and as such expresses the violence of its own becoming. Even more pronounced is the fact that the lines do not just show the violence of creation—it actively erases figuration in the same process that creates it. For example the mouth consists of 8-10 horizontal strokes, of which some seem to be connected to each other as if the mouth has been quickly scratched out. The mouth speaks of the inability to speak. In the same way, the eyes are black holes due to a large amount of criss-cross cuts, which together form a dark middle. Those lines, at the same time, form the eyes of the figuration and scratch out the eyes of the figuration. The extroverted aspects of the face—connected to speech and sight—are portrayed as introverted as well. Just as the etchings down into the metal-plate makes something appear. Leif Lage, Untitled , 1983 (etching) The figuration of the etching is connected to creation. It expresses that something is wrought into existence out of nothing by sheer artistic force. However, this force is at the same time presented as a violence of creation, which makes it impossible for form to truly emerge. Herein lies one of the basic principles of Lage’s art, namely that art cannot be that nothing or something behind the realm of words or signs. Without form, art would lose its ability to express anything at all. Form is a necessity if art is to avoid becoming as devoid of expression as the reality is that we cannot reach behind the appearance of things. On the other hand, art cannot raise itself above its own material in joyous celebration of the beauty of form. This would use the material in the manner of an instrument and thus would suppress the otherness it attempts to rescue. When art becomes mere form, any traces of otherness will have dissolved. Then art would be a question of technique, in no way different from the instrumental rationality of society. Therefore art works in a particular space between form and non-form. As Hjernøe says of the works of Lage, it is in the center of the event, in the in-between where things neither are nor are not, "And everything takes place just before it changes character. As the blood just before it coagulates, as the milk just before it separates, as fried egg just before it turns white […]." 5 The precise emphasis on the in-between of Lage’s art points in particular to the work of art as both outside of and in time. The work of art is a singular point in time, but at the same time it is continually in process. In the borderland between form and non-form, between creation and destruction, it shimmers like a fata morgana . The work is done but at the same time undone. It is only there as a cry in response to the inability to come into being. Akin to the etching is the drawing, but while both, of course, use the stroke or line as their main instrument, the paper does not resist the line in the same sense as the metal-plate of the etching. As a result in Lage’s drawings the stroke frolics in a space with almost no tension at all. There is nothing there to keep the pencil stroke at bay, but at the same time this means that there is nothing there to keep it together. One of the more expressive examples of this is found in an untitled drawing from Tegninger og Text ( Drawings and Text ) from 1999. The drawing consists of one unbroken pencil stroke. It is as if the stroke is confused—it darts around on the paper making doodles on the way or gathers itself in more straight lines in the center of the paper. It is in this manner that the semblance of a body is established. A couple of small circles serve as eyes and are the reason that the rest can be read as both face and body instead of pure abstraction. In fact the unbroken stroke serves as both abstraction and figuration as on the one hand it is the stroke that seemingly outlines the shape of a figure, while on the other hand the unbroken stroke dissolves any truly recognizable figuration by continuously, without end or aim, overflowing the boundaries of the figure. Seen again here is a doubleness to the stroke and the act of creation. In the etching it was all about the tension between the resistance of the material which created the doubleness. Here it is the opposite. It is the lack of tension. The stroke is free to do anything, but has no aim: without some kind of resistance, there is nothing to hold figuration together. It threatens to dissolve into nothingness. Conversely, the drawing can also be seen as a process of becoming. Like a form of automatic writing, the pencil darts around until it finds a point of densification. But even in such an interpretation of the drawing, the figuration appears artificial—it points to itself as the result of the artistic act of creation. The stroke is primarily stroke and only secondarily figuration. With its wild movement it calls attention to itself as stroke. Thus the figuration never becomes something in its own right. It points to the basic principle of creation: Someone has drawn me, I am the result of artistic endeavors, and therefore I am not for myself but always overflowing the boundaries that contain me. It is the stroke that in the very same movement creates figuration and dissolves it. Leif Lage, Untitled , 1999 (drawing) THE LIGHTNESS OF COLOR, THE DENSITY OF PAPER Often the watercolor is used as a precursor for larger paintings, because it has an immediacy in which one can quickly paint the main lines of a composition. However, Lage’s watercolors are not temporary points in a process leading to another final painting. They are not sketches, later to be filled with details in another material. For him watercolor is an end in itself. This also implies that he doesn’t try to work against the paper’s absorption of the water color and its tendency to absorb detail. On the contrary, he examines the possibilities inherent in this blurring of the line and absorption of color. As in the previous examples, there are of course recognizable shapes in Lage’s water colors. But these shapes are rarely separable from color, line or even paper. In other words: the figurative and the abstract more or less become one. One of the reasons for this is that Lage often works on wetted paper which means that the paper hungrily absorbs color into its fabric instead of it being on top of the paper. The paper becomes line because it is the absorption of the color which, together with the brush stroke itself, separates the colors from each other. The line is also color and the color is also line, because there is no separation between the different colors other than the colors themselves. At times this results in almost complete abstraction. In such cases Lage add lines with a pencil as if he wants to hold some sort of figuration together. At other times it is the other way around: the strokes of the pencil are a being dissolved by the water color blurring out the figuration. Untitled 1 from 1999 displays various tones of green. The contour of the colors appears unusually rough. Most of all it is reminiscent of a shoreline which has found its form through the work of thousands of years between water and land. Pockets of resistance surface as islands not yet drowned in color—as paper or color not yet consumed by the dominant color. The shape of the colors does not seem created by the hand of the artist, but rather by the inner workings of the watercolor: color against color over time has resulted in this very image, as if it is all a part of a natural process of change and decay. Despite the fact that there are no strong differences in color there seems to be a struggle taking place in the watercolor. For example, inexplicable holes in the dark color, which cover most of the right side of the watercolor, appear as if the underlying color is eating away the dark color, or that the dark color is in the process of covering up the underlying color. The small pockets of resistance demonstrate a process and development that, almost as a happy accident, evokes a couple of small eyes and a large mouth. Behind the colors a few slanted lines can be discerned, but the hand of the artist has long ago disappeared behind the life of the colors. Thus the watercolor seems to be held at precisely the point in time where figuration randomly appears. The small eyes and wide mouth seemingly express the realization of the figuration’s temporality. It is just a moment in time, soon to be consumed again in the life of the colors. The nature, the background it stems from and is part of, moves on undeterred, continuing its everlasting process of creation and decay. In this sense, the watercolor provides an experience of how neither artist nor man is able to transcend the materiality they consist of. The colors of man, the materials man consists of are “becoming” and “progress” but also “decay” and “disappearance”. The artist’s pencil strokes have been eaten up long ago, and the figuration is living on borrowed time. Human or artistic activity is about creating form, transcending mere matter by shaping and applying meaning to it. But Untitled 1 shows the doubleness of such creation: the transience and fragility of human life. Should the figuration come into being, should it rise and transcend the material, which binds it to its temporal existence, it would become nothing because its very existence is conditioned by the life and work of the colors. In the same sense man cannot escape his own temporality. He too, for better or worse, must accept a life in the volatility of sensation. Leif Lage, Untitled 1 , 1999 (watercolor) In most of Lage’s watercolors there seem to be a stronger artistic control than in Untitled 1 . Most often both the arrangement of colors and the technique in which they are painted express the hand of the artist. An example of this is Untitled 2 from 1999. While figuration in Untitled 1 seemed to appear as a happy accident, the figuration is much more “created” in Untitled 2 . Here the most important parts of the figuration, the eyes, the mouth and part of the skull, are colored black and painted on top of the background’s play of colors. The background primarily consists of blue and yellow tones. Only parts of the paper are covered in color, however, which yet again stresses the act of painting: There is a surface which is being filled by color by an artist. The blue tones are concentrated in the figuration, while the yellow tones surround it. All this means that the figuration stands out more clearly in this watercolor. This is also underlined by the fact that the blue and dark tones cover part of the yellow tones as spots here and there. Thus it is not a background which is in the process of consuming figuration, but rather the emerging figuration which blots out the background. Such an understanding is even suggested by how the mouth and eyes are placed in the larger blue color field. The eyes and mouth are in the center of the watercolor, while the blue color field is placed from center out towards the left side. This gives the impression of a face turned slightly to the right and slightly upwards, which again makes the mouth appear to emerge from the paper. It also helps that the mouth cuts the center axis of the watercolor. In other words, the arrangement of the blue and black colors create some depth and perspective which gives the illusion of a figuration, seen partially in profile, emerging from the background. Seen in profile, the eyes and mouth seem extroverted—they almost seem as if they are put on top of the face. But at the same time they are painted as black holes, sucking in the gaze of the onlooker. The watercolor is even more challenging if one follows what may be the faint outline of the skull, which, on the right side of the watercolor, no longer works together with the blue color, but rather alone postulates the outline of the skull. If not the blue color field, but this line, is the outline of the skull, then all of a sudden the face is not in profile but “en face”—staring directly towards the onlooker. Outline and color seemingly work against each other and establish two different expressions. Without the slightly upward tilted expression of the profile, the eyes and mouth do not seem to emerge from the paper. On the contrary, seen “en face,” the eyes and mouth are really gaping pits of darkness. In this sense Untitled 2 is at the same time surface and depth of perspective. The line gives form but at the same time it dissolves the form created by the colors, and vice versa. Leif Lage, Untitled 2 , 1999 (watercolor) As the last example of Lage’s artistic method, I have chosen another untitled work (as indeed nearly all of Lage’s artworks are)—this time from 2000. This is perhaps one of the most figurative watercolors Lage has created, though that doesn’t tell us too much. The painting depicts a human face in blue and green tones on a yellow toned background. The colors create a clear demarcation between the figure and the background, which compensate for the watercolor’s lack of outline. Beneath the face darker tones imply the beginning of the torso, and nuances of color even hint at something which could be a collar. The hair is in even darker tones and its structure is emphasized using pencil strokes on top of the water color. One eye is marked by a brown spot with a darker spot in the middle, while the other eye is added by pencil. The mouth is a round, red dot. In Untitled from 2000 the work between abstraction and figuration is much less pronounced than in the previous examples cited here. Nonetheless the watercolor has a delicacy to it which almost makes the figuration disappear, even as it appears. This has something to do with the fact that all the individual brush strokes have dissolved. The only outlines are those created by the clash of colors. Even the red mouth seems to be more paint than mouth—unable to be formed truly as anything other than a speck of color with some small semblance to a mouth. In contrast to the other watercolors, there is no movement, no progress or decay, just a vibrating standstill. The figure is not emerging or disappearing but embedded in and as surface, and as such it makes the figure seem stuck in its condition rather than freed by the act of giving form: mouth open as a wound. Pencil strokes add detail and life to the hair as an attempt to help the figure emerge. But all this does is create two levels in the watercolor: The pencil strokes are put on top of the figuration rather than being part of it. Thus they end up highlighting the endless distance between the movement and form-giving of the pencil strokes and the static and stuck figure behind these strokes. Leif Lage, Untitled , 2000 (watercolor) MAN AND THE VIEW OF THE ONLOOKER Lage’s works seem at the same time to be an examination of tensions between form and material in art and a display of an image of man full of the same tensions. This is because the people who are emerging in Lage’s images are not just in his works, They are his works. This means that man is not something emerging from a background but is part of this background and vice versa. The art of Lage inscribes man in its surroundings and background. Man is not the ruler of nature. Man does not rise above matter; there is no truly transcendent position for man to occupy in the art of Lage. Instead man is a part of the very matter, it, at the same time, tries to distance itself from in order to distinguish itself from its surroundings. Man emerges in an attempt not to be line, stroke, color. In an attempt to free itself of matter. Should it succeed in this, however, it would turn into nothing. On the other hand, if man fully accepted itself as mere matter it would disappear in it—in instincts, urges and lack of reflection. The appearance of man is thus subject to a state of being in-between. Only in the tension between material and its negation can the outlines of man be traced. However this also means that in the art of Lage man is never something in itself but always in process—on the way to its freedom and its loss. However, Lage’s art is not just about showing the tensions inherent in man but also about showing such tension on the verge of breaking point. In the moment before everything is done, or when nothing yet has been done, the delicate tension between form and material has been stretched to its utmost in such a way that man’s character of process emerges and is contained on the paper or canvas. Therefore, Lage’s art contain traces of human life. Not only is it an autonomous unity of tensions where man is stretched out between its singularity and the surroundings it is a part of. It is also this pulsation between figuration and material which brings about the traces of human endeavor and activity. Even when man almost seems to have disappeared into the material, strokes and lines are still there as a reminder of human activity and potential creative power—as a reminder that hope is still possible and that man is still there. The view of the onlooker seeks out forms and meaning. It seeks outlines and edges. But first and foremost it is the eyes in Lage’s works of art that allow the onlooker to decode the figuration at play. This creates a distinctive relationship between the onlooker and the artwork. The onlooker tries to wrest the enigma from the artwork, tries to reduce it to solid, meaningful form. But the very same moment that hints at such a possibility sees the view of the onlooker confronted with a gaze of its own. The eyes of the figure in the work of art are most often dark pits, as if they were an illustration of the violence committed against the eyes of the onlookers and their search for meaning. Or as if they were a dark reflection of the onlooker’s failed attempts to delineate the traces of life in the artwork to a solid meaningful form. Therefore, the gaze of the figuration speaks not only of its own powerlessness but also of the powerlessness of the onlooker. When the view or sight has trouble finding solid meaningful forms, it has something to do with the fact that the precondition for sight, light, no longer stems from something transcendent. In Lage’s art there is nothing outside the works of art, nothing outside of human life, and as such nothing to shed light on the works of art or human life and reveal solid meaningful forms. All light comes from within. In a western context, light as a medium for sight is central to the understanding of meaning. People speak of the clarity of thought, while knowledge is tied together with enlightenment, and so forth. But the light no longer originates from a divine point of view. It originates from man, who has created himself in the image of God. The problem with this is that light always covers up its own base. Light illuminates something but at the same time it hides itself. 6 While it was previously God who was unknowable, now it is man. It is also problematic that sight and the medium of sight stem from the same place. Following this thought one can posit two final problems. Firstly, the immediacy and presence established by light by making forms and objects accessible to sight is fake. Light is not some independent entity which present things in a neutral manner for the onlooker. It is inextricably tied together with the gaze’s desire after meaning. In other words: Light perverts the appearance of things because it doesn’t originate from some objective entity which allows them to appear as they are. Instead light is based upon and originates from the subject and its conquering gaze, seeking out meaning and form constantly. Secondly, the joining of sight and light makes introspection within human life impossible. Everything can be illuminated by its use value for the subject but only as long as it is separated from the subject, as long as it is an object. But the subject itself cannot be illuminated. Lage’s art tears down such a dividing line between subject and matter, but it does so without reestablishing a divine position from where the light emanates. Therefore, the light in Lage’s art may not illuminate very well. It may not have the certainty presented by modern science or the religions of yesterday. But it does show what such light tries to hide, namely, the subject as it is in its material reality—inscribed in time and death, which are the basic conditions of materiality, but at the same time also full of life in its joy and will to create. For the onlooker the meeting of the gaze in Lage’s works of art is thus also a destruction of the view of the onlooker. The ability to see is challenged in a radical way. Those outlines will not solidify into static form, as if the light was too dim to see. Just as in Lage’s figurations, the view of the onlooker turns to black: turns towards the onlooker in recognition and becoming—or disappearance. NOTES Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment . (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002): 4-5. Theodor W. Adorno. Aesthetic Theory . (London & New York, 2002): 176. Carsten Bach-Nielsen. “Mere glæde end gru.” Kristeligt Dagblad . September 24, 2002. Leif Hjernøe. “Den yderliggående inderlighed.” LEIF LAGE—Retrospektiv udstilling 1983 . (Copenhagen: Brøndum, 1983): 18. Ibid. Maurice Blanchot. The Infinite Conversation . (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993): 162-163. (shrink)

There is a problematique about Buddhist Art. It cannot be deduced directly from the basic tenets of ethical Buddhism. Early Buddhist views forbid art as sensuous luxury. Even when Buddhists employed art for edifying ends it was essentially representative and realistic. With the changes in Buddhist system of beliefs and the rise of Buddhist philosophical schools Buddhist art came to symbolize the ideals of tranquility and Karunā - the Mahāyāna ideals par excellence. The masterpiece of the Gupta art depicting (...) the Master in dharmacakrapravartana mudra at Sarnath or the Bodhisattva Padmapani of the Ajanta murals shows that the beauty of the Buddha image resides not in following models of worldly beauty but rather in the creation of an ideal. The medieval Buddhist art is a continuation of the achievements at Sarnath and Ajanta. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In Search of the Sense and the Senses:Aesthetic Education in Germany and the United StatesAlexandra Kertz-Welzel (bio)The dream that art is able to humanize human beings is very old. One person fascinated by this idea claimed:The creative artist educates and perfects through his work the nation's capacity for appreciation, just as conversely the general feeling for art thus developed and sustained creates the fruitful soil which is the condition (...) for the birth, the growth, and the activity of creative forces.1The author asserted that art has educational power and is able to improve appreciation as well as activate creative energy. Art is a way to transform the individual through its aesthetic power.Although these ideas sound similar to some approaches in arts education, this quotation does not represent the ideas of an art educator or a music educator. It is a quotation from one of the most powerful and most dangerous believers in the transforming power of art and music, in particular—Adolf Hitler (1889-1945). His ideology matched perfectly with the ideas of German music education in the 1930s, and therefore music education was a significant part of the school curriculum during the Third Reich. One of the most tempting ideas for music educators is the claim that music is capable of transforming human beings and their society.The idea of the educational power of music starts at least with Plato. Since the 1950s, aesthetic education has emphasized the aesthetic value and educational power of music. The German and the American concepts of aesthetic education are significantly different, but as a result of historical developments, they also share some similarities.The main intent of this paper is to analyze crucial issues of aesthetic education that exist in Germany and the United States. By comparing the two approaches, some core issues of music education will also be revealed in terms of idealistic dreams that are intent on making the world a better place [End Page 102] through music. This leads to some interesting insights concerning the significance but also the ambiguity of art for societies.The Roots: Ancient Greece, Schiller, and Holistic DreamsThe origin of the term aesthetics can be found in the Greek word aisthesis, which means perception through the senses.2 This meaning of aisthesis is originally not related to art. It concerns all kinds of sensations through seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting. In Greek philosophy, aisthesis as a way of experiencing the world through the senses is opposite to cognition in terms of an intellectual way of realization, the theoria. But given that art is something one can perceive through the various senses, aisthesis also concerns art.Most theories of aesthetic education refer to the ancient Greek idea of music, the musiké, which is a unity of music, dance, and literature. Plato emphasized the educational power of music and its effects on character development: "Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.... "3 Since music is so powerful, the correct use and the correct kind of music are important. According to Plato, art is a way to learn about truth and ideas through beauty. But art is also dangerous, because the senses "lie" and art is only an imitation of truth. For Plato, the senses are not as clear as the intellect.Plato's concerns about the ambivalence of sensorial perception are typical for the way aisthesis and aesthetics have been understood throughout the history of philosophy. The tension between a "true" intellectual approach to knowledge and an inferior approach through the senses is one aspect of the well-known mind-body dichotomy.During the eighteenth century, the era of enlightenment, Alexander Baumgarten (1714-62) introduced the term aesthesis into the philosophical discussion.4 In his book Aesthetica (published in 1750), he attempted to justify sensorial perception and emotions as a unique way of understanding the world. Baumgarten was not interested in the arts at all and tried to establish aesthetics as the science of sensuous cognition in order to improve the sensuous capacity for cognition. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was the... (shrink)

This paper initiates a phenomenological study of the aesthetics of forest and wood in three main phases. First, we consider the modalities of wood’s sensuousness and argue against the formalist tradition that restricts aesthetic appreciation to visual forms. Second, we examine the structural, eidetic features of hand-made wooden objects in the “second life” of trees. Third, we engage in reflections on the communities gathered by the first and second lives of trees. These themes outline an aesthetics of the beautiful, the (...) given, and the gathering. We take philosophical inspiration from Merleau-Ponty throughout, and in the end, also Thoreau. (shrink)

This article aims to dissect Thomas Abbt's (1738–1766) theory of aesthetic patriotism as laid out in his On Dying for the Fatherland (1761) and his prize-essay On Mathematical, Metaphysical and Moral Certainty (1763). Aesthetic idioms, such as the emphasis on the intrinsic pleasure from the order and beauty of virtue, had been invoked throughout the eighteenth century to vindicate the morally optimistic view of humanity against the sceptical vision of an exclusively utility-centred mankind. In the post-Montesquieu debates on the (...) moral foundations of modern politics, German-speaking authors in particular, from both republics (Switzerland) and monarchies (Prussia), appropriated the aesthetic idioms in order to reject those theories which grounded patriotism in some sort of self-interest or proclaimed it redundant in modern society. Thomas Abbt was one of the most prominent representatives of this intellectual position. Combining the general emphasis of Shaftesbury on the role of aesthetic appreciation in moral and political agency with the more specific German Baumgartenian analysis of ‘beauty’ as a central principle in human ‘empirical psychology’, Abbt argued that patriotism in modern monarchies could be grounded in an aesthetic passion of enthusiasm generated through sensuous examples of great virtue. The example of a king fighting for his country on the battlefield could inspire monarchical subjects to follow his example as well as regenerate patriotism among them. Abbt was adamant that patriotism based on aesthetic foundations had to be supported and stabilised by a pervasive patriotic culture of remembrance and emulation of dead heroes through the fine arts, as well as by a system of meritocratic honour in the army. (shrink)

This paper presents the story of an isiXhosa traditional healer, Nomzi Hlathi, as told to the first author. Nomzi was asked about how she came to be an igqirha and the narrative focuses on those aspects of her life story that she understood as relevant to that developmental process. The material was obtained from a series of semi-structured interviews with Nomzi, with some collateral from her cousin, and synthesised into a chronological narrative presented in Nomzi’s own words. The aim of (...) the study was to examine her account of her unfolding experience within three hermeneutic frames. The first is the isiXhosa traditional account of what it is to become an igqirha, a process initiated by intwaso, an illness understood to be a call from the ancestors, and guided by messages from the ancestors in dreams and other symbolic communications. The second is the perspective of Western Clinical Psychology on the cognitive, emotional and behavioural disturbances that characterise intwaso. The third is the perspective of transpersonal psychology on the nature and development of shamanic healing gifts, as understood from observations of such practices in traditional societies across the world. As the narrative of Nomzi’s story is quite long, this paper presents her narrative as well as the methodology which gave rise to it. The interpretative review of the material from each of the three perspectives is presented in a second paper. (shrink)

I argue that an experience’s sensuous elements play an ineliminable role in our being intentionally directed upon an entity through perception. More specifically, I argue that whenever we appreciate a sensuous element in experience, we appreciate an intrinsic and irreducibly phenomenal aspect of experience that I call phenomenal presence – an aspect of experience that I show is central to its presentational character – and that the appreciation of phenomenal presence is necessary for perceptual intentionality. If an experience (...) is to possess intentionality, the experience itself must make an entity available as an object of perceptually-based singular beliefs and the experiencing subject, by virtue of undergoing the experience, must in some sense be able to appreciate that it has done so. Phenomenal presence is necessary for perceptual intentionality because it plays an ineliminable role in making an entity available to its subject in this way. (shrink)

In this response paper I defend an alternative position to both Jennifer McMahon’s neo-Kantian view on the aesthetics of perceptual experience, and the sense-data theory that she rightly repudiates. McMahon argues that sense perception is informed by concepts “all the way out,” and that the empiricist notion of unmediated sensuous access to entities in the world is untenable. She further claims that art is demanding inasmuch as it compels one to engage in an open-ended, cognitive interpretive process with (...) class='Hi'>sensuous phenomena, and that it is this very process that opens up a space for critique of the entrenched representational concepts by which we navigate the world. In contrast, I argue that the sensuous itself is a source of demand. Perceptual objects, in virtue of their material constitution, are inexhaustible plexuses of meaning that demand a kind of sensuous, interpretive response on the part of our bodily posture and orientation. Works of art offer opportunities for critique insofar as they reveal dimensions of sensuous reality hitherto covered over by status quo conceptual distributions. McMahon is right that sensuous objects are never simply given. But, I claim, she is wrong to suggest that it is only by way of conceptual mediation that we make contact with the world. On the contrary, the sensuous self-presentation of things is always at the same time a demand on our sensory apparatus that resists encapsulation by concepts. (shrink)

Imagine a deep philosophical conversation about a beautiful shot by a college player in a Final Four basketball game!

While the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty remained engaged with artistic creation throughout his entire work, which continues to inspire artists today in manifold ways, no systematic and artistically inclusive study of this dimension of his thought has existed so far. Du sensible à l’œuvre fills this gap by offering not only an in-depth study of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthesiology and aesthetics by international Merleau-Ponty scholars spanning three generations, but also a rich selection of essays by art critics and theorists who assess the (...) impact of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy on their own artistic fields, including cinema, music, literature, film, dance, and installation art. (shrink)

Atmospheres are affective, sensory realms, where mood is palpable. Memory landscapes intensify affectivity, amplifying emotion. The senses, especially smell and taste, trigger and heighten memory. There is therefore a potent intersection between landscape, atmospheres, memory, and the senses. These connections present the compelling prospect that atmospheres could be designed, with the intention of enhancing memory landscapes through sensory means. This paper is written from the perspective of landscape architecture, a discipline which designs and shapes landscapes. Landscape architects work within the (...) spatially and temporally fluid context of the landscape, and aligned with this is the prospect of generating and tuning atmospheres. Past traumatic events, losses of people and places, float in atmospheres of melancholy. Two projects are explored here to probe the possibilities of intentionally invoking atmospheres, exploring how the landscape could be sensorially tonalised. The memorial landscape of Pike River where 29 men died in a mine explosion, and Laura Daly’s augmented reality artwork, The Storm Cone, offer insights into the possibilities of atmospheric design. (shrink)

Many people now recognize that the challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss are rooted in how and to what extent humans consume goods in the Anthropocene era. Consumerism has driven natural resource exploitation to its peak, and resource depletion is becoming more common. The beauty and personal care industry has an enormous market and substantial profitability, particularly in the high-income category. However, this benefit comes with the risk of being scrutinized, investigated, and criticized by civil society groups, environmental (...) activists, and consumers. More than anyone else, the industry is aware of the risks of negative society appraisals, notably the consequences of consumer-led boycott activities. In this paper, we suggest that, given the current situation, global beauty firms need to play a proactive role in directing resources toward the development of sustainable uses of biodiversity and agriculture methods. This includes advocating for the wider use of environmentally conscious sourcing of raw materials, avoiding excessive and wasteful packaging, and devoting resources to research and innovation in environmentally friendly manufacturing procedures. The proactiveness would allow them to demonstrate their environmental commitment and actively give customers persuasive evidence of their social responsibility through emission reduction and biodiversity protection actions, gradually building an environmental-healing culture in the beauty industry. (shrink)