CHiPS IX
CHiPS IX: Grounding Aesthetics
The listing of abstracts is in alphabetical order after the keynote address. Click on the author to reach the abstract. Papers, when available, can be reached from hyperlinked titles. They are unedited pdf files.
Apprehending African Diaspora Aesthetics through Voduisant Art of Transformation
Nkiru Nzegwu
In the last ten years, the Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA) has undertaken the monumental task of “Shifting the Geography of Reason.” Essentially, it has raised and considered the sorts of philosophical issues that arise if conceptions of reason, gender, religion, conditions of rationality, and articulations of the self are located in a Caribbean center of discourse. Engaged in a similar project since the 1980s, African art historians and culture studies specialists have argued that any meaningful conceptual shift must substantively reshape the character and language of theoretical production. This means recognizing that, owing to obvious ontological and cultural differences, traditional African art and aesthetics would not necessarily conform to what art and aesthetics are in the West. Because aesthetic categories and assumptions emerge from the artistic and cultural practices of societies, conceptualizations and discussions of African aesthetic categories must reflect this conceptual dynamic. Extending this insight to the African diaspora of the Caribbean, and connecting it to the CPA project of “shifting the geography of reason,” it is necessary to focus on a category of creative expression that is influenced by African religions in the Caribbean such as Vodun, Obeah, Lucumi, and Candomblé. In this lecture, I will focus on one artist whose work reflects voduisant aesthetics, and whose creations should properly be referred to as “voduisant art.” To begin the examination, I will conceptually restructure the Atlantic to situate the African belief system at the center of discourse. I will then draw on Haitian and African metaphysics and metanarratives to examine the assumptions and presuppositions of voduisant art and aesthetics of transformation. The goal is to illumine the aesthetic categories of this genre of African Caribbean art and to see how it speaks to a particular notion of space and self.
Are you a Person: Ideologies of Personhood in the Fashion Industry
Sherry Asgill
[No abstract received.]
The Ethics of Work in the Music of Sholla Allyson Obaniyi
Lawrence O. Bamikole
Philosophers disagree as to whether the two axiological disciplines, ethics and aesthetics are related. Plato had advocated for an intimate connection between the good and the beautiful thereby drawing substantive implications for how human beings ought to live. On the other hand, Kennick (1965) held that there is no logical symmetry between moral judgments and aesthetic judgments, given the fact that ethics has a standard of evaluation while aesthetics does not. This paper will argue that the denial of a logical symmetry between ethics and aesthetics does not tell the whole story about the relationship between the two axiological disciplines. It is the contention of the paper that a meaningful inquiry into the relationship between ethics and aesthetics is better undertaken by considering their existential symmetry given the fact that both disciplines are concerned about explicating and unraveling issues that border on the human condition. The paper will argue that aesthetical expressions are, in most cases, reflective of ethical realities. Thus within the Yoruba (African) philosophy, artistic expressions like music, poem, oratory are indeed media for reflecting and conveying messages on ethical matters. In this paper, the music of Sholla Allison Obaniyi will be used to illustrate how a song (aesthetic form) expresses the Yoruba philosophical conception of the ethics of work.
The twain shall not meet: Afro-Caribbean cultural values at logger heads with economic interests over human sexuality
Tunde Bewaji
n this essay, I examine Caribbean axiology, with a view to eliciting the fundamental influences of Euro-American and Asiatic-Arabic imperial cultural ideas on Jamaican cultural consciousness about sexuality. I attempt this being very mindful of the problematic of distilling a uniform Jamaican consciousness, given the myriad of cultural beliefs and adherences of peoples of different ethnicities which make up the country and the larger Caribbean; yet there is no difficulty in my mind that most people Jamaicans of African descent would embrace filial orientations that are more in accord with the natural understanding of sexuality as an amorous interface between opposing genders. We note that with the internationalization of spontaneous information dissemination on a globalized format, instantaneously from direct source and unmediated by any apparent control mechanisms, there is a sense in which events and incidents in any part of the world become consumption information items everywhere in the world immediately. This has brought with it unequal cultural/ethical interfaces in the realms of human interactions, thereby making unpredictable the various tropes for reacting to these exchanges and coping mechanisms for mediating the divergences to prevent perpetual discord.
The area of human sexuality has been one in which, because of the awkwardness and intimateness of the issues involved, there have been reprobate, degenerate, subliminal and patronizing reactions on various cultural fronts to different cultural practices contesting for universal validity and acceptance. This is even more remarkable in the Africana-Caribbean setting, where the indigenous traditions and practices have become tools for idolization and/or demonization, at the same time, of practices which speak to human sexuality within these indigenous or traditional cultural spaces. Thus, spaces of human personal and cultural beauty, genital treatment, procreation and pleasure have become centers of unnecessarily stressful contestations, impositions of views external to domestic cultural ideas and ideals, while at the same time reifying to absolutist truisms ideas from external sources which are backed by socio-epistemic metaphysics alien to the indigenous peoples being imposed on. In light of the foregoing, it has become very difficult not to find divergences of beliefs and conceptions of ideals being the victims of intolerant affront by those who have the technological, financial and political power to impose (and have imposed) their own culturally evolved positions on the rest of humanity.
In view of the above, we argue, in this essay, even if contrary to received orthodoxies, that human culture largely dictates differences in how human beings from different parts of the world relate to similar or identical experiences, often imposing standards of acceptability and prohibitions, backed by reward mechanisms and sanctions. In the light of this, one may wonder why there is no uniformity in the ideas and dictates of cultures regarding human behaviour at large. What this implicates is that where there are clashes of cultures, those who have had the capacity to enforce their own views have been the ones setting the standards of right and wrong. Human sexuality is not any different, except that imposing some positions on the rest of humanity raises the questions why not other positions which we currently disagree with?
Beauty, Hunger, and the Palate
Andrea Borghini
Can the palate provide an education to fine beauty? Some courted a negative answer. To Kant, for instance, "everyone has his own taste (that of sense). The beautiful stands on a quite different footing;" and, in the Phaedo, Socrates asks Simmias: “Do you think that the philosopher ought to care about the pleasures – if they are to be called pleasures – of eating and drinking? – Certainly not." On the other hand, to portray an ordinary experience of the beautiful, Dewey (1934) describes a fine dining experience in a Paris restaurant. This paper defends the aesthetic worth of gastronomic experiences by integrating a broadly pragmatist perspective with a philosophical reflection on hunger.
The first part of the paper examines the philosophical centrality of hunger (often employed as a metaphor also by Plato), succinctly rendered by Levinas (1978): “It is not really true to say that we eat in order to live, we eat because we are hungry.” Hunger typically does not fall under scrutiny: one is born hungry and has been hungry well before she can remember being alive. On the other hand, hunger is a landmark of the longing for that which one is not and its satisfaction is one of the most complex ecological relationships we part take. Being hungry is not an automatic bodily mechanism, such as that performed by lungs. One can resist hunger, can train to contain it, or can make an effort to become hungry. Managing hunger is a prototypical learning process, involving the struggle between the senses and reason. Although a philosophy of hunger is yet to be developed, hunger is arguably even more fundamental than pleasure and it seems plausible to imagine a view according to which at the root of our existence there is hunger.
The second part of the paper introduces a threefold encounter between art and food. (i) Food in art. The etiquette comprises visual works of art that make use of food, yet in which the gustatory properties of food do not contribute artistic significance to what is witnessed, or at least do so only to a minor and more accidental degree. (ii) On the other hand, foods can showcase skills borrowed from other forms of art, such as fruit carvings, architecturally sophisticated cakes, fancily decorated eggs. These are examples of art in food, where skills that are applied to foods could have been applied to non-edible mediums (marble, wood, stone, etc.). (iii) Food as art. Finally, we have experiences in which the palate takes central stage to uplift, transform, or challenge a person in a way that is typical of artistic objects. Think, for instance, of the movie Babette’s Feast or to the gastronomic experience once offered at El Bulli.
Taking stock of the two preceding parts, the third argues that the palate can educate to beauty when the gustatory conversation between farmers, producers, chefs, on one hand, and diners on the other embeds a savvy confrontation with hunger.
Sublimity, Negativity, and Architecture: An Essay on Negative Architecture through Kant to Adorno
Stephen Bourque
Architecture defines and consumes people. It exposes them to a multitude of varieties of different aesthetic engagements. Architecture becomes a lived experience. However, this lived experience is always caught in the inner workings of the social and more specifically within cultural ideology. In modern capitalism, culture pervades every aspect of our lives. It shows its presence everywhere from our own homes to the public streets. Culture is everywhere, and architecture is a tool used for both the benefit and detriment of the 'culture industry.’
Kant speaks of the sublime as a profound moment of reason realizing its ability to overcome its own limits. In this experience is it possible to be completely ravaged and descend into hades and melancholy? Is there a beauty in this descent? More specifically, can architecture become banal or pedestrian, uplifting or depressing?
According to Theodor Adorno, our subjectivity is defined by the constant dialectical struggle between freedom and unfreedom (among other things). It is realizing our freedom in the face of our unfreedom that makes us truly able to attain some form of resistance. The sublime experience can be transformed into a spirit of revelation and beautifully allow us to in a way resist the one-dimensional tendencies of modern capitalism. Architecture, which is immersed in our societal being and contributes to many of our own subjective unfreedoms, comes to define our lives as inhabited space. When does architecture produce a sublime experience? Can architecture’s authentic ‘aura’ stand out amongst the reproduced city and produce a sublime feeling that can be a form of resistance against the culture industry? Does Grand Central Terminal provide the key to an architecturally sublime experience?
Using dialectical experience and examining the sublime feeling (in a critique of the Kantian sublime) as the key to breaking through the culture industry’s banal architectural hold on our subjectivity, this essay will examine the experience of the sublime as a key to unfolding resistance in the face of the banality of modern architecture in the city and opening our minds to the Great Refusal through the exploration of Grand Central Terminal.
Bob Kaufman and the Language of Emancipation
Jeremy Breningstall
Today if you say the name Bob Kaufman few will recognize it. He was born in 1925 of a marriage between a German Jew and a black Caribbean Catholic. He acquired a love for literature during years at sea in the Merchant Marine. In New York, he met Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and other pivotal figures of the Beat Generation and he became politically active in the 1950s and early 60s. His talent equaled or exceeded his Beat peers but he did not attain (or seek) fame during his lifetime and did not find it after his death- you will not find Hollywood movies detailing his life or college courses with his name in the title. In fact, one would be hard-pressed to find more than a token entry of his work, if any, in modern poetry anthologies.
Nevertheless, Kaufman is a key literary figure whose work is worth exploring, both for its philosophical significance and its artistic majesty. Bob Kaufman's writing blended a jazz tempo and hipster phraseology with surrealist images that delved into metaphysical questions about God and the universe. His symbolic narratives are keenly aware of the interplay between art and history and navigate a vocabulary of questioning and introspection. For the purpose of this essay I will describe his writings as a language of emancipation. This deserves qualification.
What kind of emancipation could be offered to an individual who unquestionably suffered during his lifetime, both from his fate as a black man in a racist America and his tormented conscious as a politically aware individual? His material existence was also less than ideal. Kaufman’s contemporary A.D. Winans describes his late years: “walking the streets of North Beach twitching, blinking, and mostly unspeaking, the victim of an ailing liver, and a brain diminished by drugs and forced shock treatments undergone at Bellevue Hospital.” Kaufman himself wrote, “My body is a torn mattress… I have shot myself with my eyes but death refused by advances.”
Kaufman’s poems qualify as emancipatory because of three characteristics: 1) The use of humor and parable to invert reality. In “Song of the Broken Giraffe,” Kaufman mixes talk of personal frustrations and pressing social problems in an absurd surrealist haze that belies deeper probing questions about fate and justice. He writes, “I continue to love despite all the traffic-light difficulties… We waited in vain for the forest fire, but the bus was late. All night we baked the government into a big mud pie. Not one century passed without Shakespeare calling me dirty names.”
2) The acknowledgement of the inevitability of suffering paired with an incessent quest for meaning. Kaufman starts one poem, “A terror is more certain than all the rare desirable popular songs I know. “ In another, written during one of many stints in jail, he wrote, “God, make me a sky on my glass ceiling. I need stars now/ To lead through this atmosphere of shrieks and private hells.” In “Camus, I want to know,” he fires off a series of burning metaphysical questions toward the (then) recently deceased novelist.
3) Kaufman gives poetry an anchoring role as an interrogator for justice amidst the stormy tides of history. In “To my son Parker, asleep in the next room,” Kaufman recites to his young boy a kaleidoscope of labor-related imagery canvassing landscapes from Tasmania to ancient Assyria. Then he concludes: “On this shore, we shall raise our monuments… secure in this avowed truth, that no man is our master, nor can every be, any any time in time to come.”
If Coleridge’s pronouncement that, "No man was ever yet a great poet without being at the same time a great philosopher” is easily overstated, with Kaufman it rings true. Through the use of dream-like imagery combined with concrete historical references, Kaufman illuminates social realities in a way that would not be possible without poetry, thus attaining a transcendent freedom.
The Body, Art, and Identity
Roxanne Burton
Though it has been discounted in much of traditional western philosophy, the body, it can be argued, plays as important a role as cognition in the shaping of personal identity and a sense of self. The phenomenological turn in the discipline has led to more serious consideration being given (as it had been done in other philosophical traditions) to the role of the body in the process of meaning giving and meaning acquisition. By wholeheartedly taking the role of the body into account, there is a greater scope for understanding the interplay between one’s social, cultural and geographical location and identity. This interplay can be clearly seen is the way in which the body serves as a basis for demarcation of persons into distinct categories, which in turn affect how the individual sees oneself. It is also present in the varying interpretations that can be given to ways in which the body is adorned, decorated or beautified based on cultural and other underlying assumptions about beauty and the body. The aim of this presentation is to examine some of the assumptions that are made about the different ways in which the human body is used for artistic representation, and about cultural, racial and gender differences (and superiority in some cases) about bodies and body presentations. It will also interrogate the ways in which the body as an artistic canvass can be used as a location through which the development of a strong positive sense of self can be facilitated, and how it can hamper the same.
Aesthetic Horizons: A Phenomenological Critique of Zuidervaart
Eric Chelstrom
One of the more ambitious and yet fruitful attempts in recent years to untangle general questions about the nature of aesthetic phenomena and their socially constituted nature rests in Lambert Zuidervaart’s critical hermeneutic theory of artistic truth. Zuidervaart follows Adorno in accepting that aesthetic critique should include critique of non-aesthetic institutions, e.g. economic and cultural institutions. (Zuidervaart 2005, 56) In this paper, I explore one part of Zuidervaart’s project, namely his conception of “aesthetic validity as a horizon of imaginative cogency” (ibid, 9). I seek to develop Zuidervaart’s conception by bringing his thesis into dialogue with phenomenological analyses of “horizon” and the collective intentional approach to institutional and social objects, both projects that I have been at work on elsewhere.
The phenomenological analysis of horizon should serve to add content to the idea of horizon. Zuidervaart relies primarily on Gadamer’s view of horizon, but does not offer very much by way of clarification as to exactly what a horizon is. Gadamer’s view of horizon is developed in response to that of Husserl. It is my contention that the Husserlian notion is both more informative and has more utility for Zuidervaart’s project. Of course, he might contend that the phenomenological project is too focused on individual experiences and lacks sufficient resources for understanding social phenomena. (ibid.) This view of phenomenology and its resources, I have argued, relies on an insufficient understanding of the scope and nature of phenomenological analysis. (Chelstrom 2012) Hermeneutics isn’t new to phenomenology with Heidegger and Gadamer, just accentuated.
The collective intentional approach to institutions offers a framework for interpreting social phenomena that is both congenial to phenomenological analysis and which offers a way to preserve subjectivity while addressing intersubjective phenomena. Such an approach was already embedded in a close reading of Husserl’s controversial Fifth Cartesian Meditation (Husserl 1999), though critics have long charged him with solipsism. However, those critics fail to appreciate the nature of Husserl’s concern. In brief, after recognizing the intersubjectively rich nature of everyday life, Husserl asks what’s left over if one brackets those layers of meaning constitution relative to a given phenomenon. It is one issue to argue that there would be nothing left over, though that is a far harder challenge than critics often acknowledge, it is a separate issue to argue that Husserl is thereby solipsistic – a claim that is clearly misguided if the issue is bracketing socially constituted elements of one’s experience.
The promise for aesthetics on this approach is that it acknowledges both the individual’s and their culture(s)’s influences on their experiences and evaluations while also being able to account for Frankfurt School type concerns about the effects of institutions on our judgments. At the same time, this approach will allow one to clarify why naïve relativisms in aesthetics are mistaken.
To Bear Witness to Life: On Deleuze's Critique of Judgment
Grant Dempsey
Deleuze’s critique of judgment concerns both the aesthetic and the ethical dimensions of judgment in such ways that especially reveal the inseparability of those dimensions. In this paper, a close and creative interrogation of the opposed concepts of the judge and the witness in Deleuze’s philosophy, especially attendant to Brian Massumi’s articulation of the notion of immanent critique, provides occasion for the elaboration of a fresh conceptualization of compassion—of feeling-together—in specifically affective terms and the importance of such in critical thought. This concept of compassion is grounded in Deleuze’s distinction of the virtual and the actual, insofar as the act of bearing witness, which cannot properly be committed alongside the act of judging, has, in part, the result of a fusion of powers, a fusion of potentials or virtual dimensions, through the opening of subjects to pre- and extra-subjective fields. It is compassion that allows one to bear witness to life in this way, for compassion is the always singular tendency to pursue an event by means of the hard achievement of a true and creative openness towards it. Articulation of the implications of this concept of compassion suggests that the proper spread and spirit of aesthetic thought is to be opposed to the cultural framework that has the concept of judgment at and as its heart.
The Representation of Justice in Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter
Erin Flynn
he paper argues that Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter (1973) presents an evolution of an aesthetic representation of justice common to certain westerns. That representation depicts justice as determined by a moral or natural law that prefigures and grounds the authority and legitimacy of the civil order. Furthermore, the law tends to be depicted as one that cannot be properly known or determined by political discourse or perhaps any communicative or discursive actions of persons. It rather depends on a moral sense or intuition that is as likely to be obscured as clarified by deliberation..
The first part of the paper sketches this common representation of justice as it appears in High Noon (Zinnemann, 1952), a film clearly in the background of High Plains Drifter. The paper then turns to a synopsis and brief analysis of High Plains Drifter. The upshot of this analysis is that in High Plains Drifter justice is aesthetically represented as a divine law, the Stranger (Eastwood) as a kind of divine emissary. The paper then argues that this representation in some sense follows or unfolds from the elements of the common representation of justice. It is itself a product of the conceptual features defining that representation..
That claim is defended both in terms of the analysis of those elements as they appear in High Plains Drifter as well as earlier westerns, and also in terms of the No Name persona that Eastwood created in the Leone pictures. In a sense, we may say that Leone’s self-conscious revision of certain aspects of the western forced Eastwood to restore the No Name persona to the common representation of justice by means of the aesthetic representation of justice as divine..
The paper concludes that Eastwood’s reclamation of the common representation of justice in the western bears a sort of awareness that a common western attitude toward the civil order, and in particular toward political and legal authority within that order, creates out of itself a need for transcendent retribution. Though the claim will not be defended here, that fact can usefully inform our understanding of themes in later Eastwood westerns, particularly Pale Rider (1985) and Unforgiven (1992).
Du Bois, Foucault, and Self-Torsion: Criterion of Imprisoned Art
Joshua Hall
This presentation takes its practical orientation from my experiences in a philosophy reading group on death row in Nashville, Tennessee, and its theoretical orientation from W. E. B. Du Bois’ understanding of the battle for aesthetics as essential in the war against racial oppression and social injustice. In outline, after a careful reading of Du Bois' essay "Criteria of Death Row Art," I will explore several of Michel Foucault's writings on imprisonment, subjectivity and self-creation, foregrounding the important interconnections among these three phenomena in order to illuminate the conditions of prison artists in a way that offers a productive challenge to contemporary aesthetics.
More specifically, in my first section, I will show how Du Bois' analyses, from "Criteria of Negro Art," remain relevant today, in large part because of the continuing non-white majority in contemporary U.S. prison populations. Building on Du Bois’ most famous claim here essay—namely, that “all art is, or should be, propaganda”—I will then offer a "propagandized" reading of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish that connects his analyses of the prison system his conception of the “art of living” or “aesthetics of self-creation” in the Hellenistic and early Roman eras, from the lectures edited and translated into English as Hermeneutics of the Subject.
The upshot of this presentation, then, will be that one result of trying to aesthetically create oneself (which includes artistic production) within a literal prison (itself within the Panopticon of contemporary Western society) is a kind of “self-torsion,” as illustrated in the attempts by my death row classmates/prison artists to cultivate themselves in an environment that continually undermines and distorts those very attempts. My privileged example here will be an artist who uses toilet paper rolls to create miniature furniture—the collection of which rolls, incidentally, was recently the catalyst for his arbitrary removal to solitary confinement.
In summary, then, I wish to shed light on a dimension of the “souls” (in Du Bois’ sense) of death row inmates that most people would be surprised to learn exists—namely that they, too, can be artists. Moreover, if those of us outside prison walls better understand these death row artists, and the conditions which structure their work (such as what I call “self-torsion”), then perhaps this enhanced understanding will inspire a greater enthusiasm on our part for ending death row imprisonment. In fact, and in conclusion, I will suggest that this should be a primary goal of contemporary aesthetics, particularly insofar as it attempts to reach beyond its conventional institutional and cultural comfort zones.
Aesthetics In Architectural Design, Renovation And Restoration
Mark Hiorns
As we enter a period of increased awareness of Architecture and our environment in Barbados, stimulated by the recent UN World Heritage Inscription, it becomes evident that there will be a need for increased understanding of aesthetics as it applies in particular to the design, renovation and restoration of buildings.
The first part of the talk will be about the identification of the criteria affecting a person’s ability to “see” and evaluate a building from an aesthetic point of view. Illustrations will be provided in the form of a power point presentation along with a more detailed description of the ways that our culture, music , fine art and awareness of art forms of other cultures can affect how we “see” and what we like.
Having established a framework of reference to assist in this understanding, further examples of buildings will be shown, which clearly illustrate the successes and failures of the aesthetic intent. Arising from will be the proposal of design guide, which will suggest solutions to particular issues as they relate to renovation and restoration in Barbados.
Aesthetic considerations are not normally considered during the evaluation of a planning application for a building. However, there will be special issues and requirements relating in particular to applications for the restoration of known historic (listed) buildings. This talk is an attempt to identify the challenges, and look for possible aesthetic solutions for Architects involved in work in sensitive buildings and locations.
How Can Fiction Teach us about Facts?
Todd Jones
Literary theorists often discuss what we can learn from this or that work of fiction. But there is quite minimal discussion in either literary studies or philosophy of the fundamental question of how it is at all possible that we learn anything at all from fictional events. Information we get from our senses is largely trustworthy because there are evolutionary pressures for it to be veritical. Information we get from expert and even ordinary testimony tends to be largely trustworthy because of social norms of honesty and accuracy. But fiction writers do not have these pressures. They are charged with telling interesting stories about events that contain more suspense surprise and mysteriousness than real life events. In this talk, I will discuss the systematic obstacles to coming to have justified true beliefs based on depictions of fictional events. I do believe that, ultimately, we can learn about factual situations from fictional ones. But a thorough understanding of what the obstacles to doing so are, and how they can be overcome should be a central part of our understanding of how fiction can teach us about the world.
Art, Aesthetic Value, and Inclusivity
David Killoren
An art object is a type of object made by human beings. An aesthetic property, such as beauty, is a property that imbues its bearer with positive or negative aesthetic value. Art objects typically have aesthetic properties, but so do other objects (e.g., mountain ranges, human bodies, etc.).
Philosophical aesthetics in the (broadly) analytic tradition has focused on two questions (in addition to others):
- The Art Question: What is (and isn’t) art? (Is art necessarily representational? Is art necessarily conceptual? Can an art object have a strictly utilitarian purpose? Etc.)
- The Value Question: What is aesthetic value? (Does aesthetic appreciation of an object confer or discover aesthetic value? If the latter, what is the source of aesthetic value? Etc.)
This paper is about the way that attention to these questions can affect the treatment of unfamiliar cultures within analytic aesthetics.
First, I argue that a focus on the Art Question has the tendency to marginalize cultures unfamiliar to most analytic philosophers, while a focus on the Value Question has the potential to produce a genuinely inclusive philosophical aesthetics. My argument, in a nutshell, is that (1) the two most philosophically seductive analyses of art—the institutionalist theory and the representationalist theory—tend to exclude the unfamiliar, whereas (2) the two most philosophically seductive analyses of aesthetic value—aesthetic constructivism and aesthetic realism—are intrinsically disposed to include the unfamiliar.
Second, I distinguish between activist philosophy (which aims to do good in the world) and theoretical philosophy (which proceeds without regard for its effects). I argue that good philosophy is theoretical philosophy, and therefore that philosophers should not explicitly set out to produce a more inclusive philosophical aesthetics.
Third, I argue that even from the perspective of purely theoretical philosophy, the Value Question is simply more interesting than the Art Question. I argue that whatever the nature of art turns out to be, it is fixed by arbitrary linguistic conventions—whereas this is not the case with respect to the nature of aesthetic value. Thus, I argue on purely theoretical grounds that philosophers ought to focus on the Value Question and ought to mainly disregard the Art Question. This suggestion has the beneficial side-effect of producing a more inclusive philosophical aesthetics.
Representation of Resistance in the Francophone Writings of Africa and the Caribbean
Kahiudi Mabana
Violence covers a series of phenomena: feelings, sentiments, body or physical, killing, crimes, aggressions and war, arts and culture, etc by which one expresses one’s reaction to as situation or imposes one’s will to others. The aim of this paper is to show how violence is expressed and represented in the Francophone writings of Africa and the Caribbean. It can take the shape of the grotesque or even self-mutilation; it can also involve a fantastic universe in which only the sacrifice of blood softens the anger of gods. In African and Caribbean Francophone literature, one notices that the appropriation of self in the process of liberation is very important. Every writer uses his basic temperament to express or acquire it. The four writers – Aimé Césaire, Mongo Beti, Sony Labou Tansi and Patrick Chamoiseau – I have chosen at random confirm obviously an initial perception of how self-conquest is represented in literary works. In Césaire’s work verbal violence is about letting the voice of the oppressed heard throughout the world, it’s a real conquest of space. Mongo Beti continues in the same vain by radicalizing it even after the occurrence of independence. Sony Labou Tansi puts it to the level of the unsolved, the foolishness by exploring all the senses possible or exploiting the topic of resitance to the powerful leadership. Tansi goes beyond Césaire and Beti’s attempts and breaches all linguistics rules. The same kind of dementia or verbal delira is also illustrated by Chamoiseau in his attempt to put the foundation of a Creole discourse. I hope to come out with a sound synthesis on the subject. In the end the discussions of resistance/violence/identity will bring us to address the relationships between art and morality. What is it telling us when apparently the only route for someone to become themselves is through violence or delirium?
Art, Imagination and Moral Understanding
Roger Marples
The paper endorses the view articulated by, amongst others, Iris Murdoch and Martha Nusssbaum, that some novels are ‘irreplaceably works of moral philosophy’. While narrative literature provides countless opportunities for the acquisition of phenomenal knowledge (or knowledge by acquaintance) the paper shows how other art forms – including music, film, dance, architecture and painting – have the capacity to contribute to moral insight and understanding by means other than merely descriptive. Works of art are shown to provide knowledge other than propositional (with its concern for truth) in ways that are radically different from that provided by the study of ethics, science, history or psychology, for example. The paper is critical of those who, wedded to an adherence of propositional knowledge as paradigmatic, would deny that art is a source of knowledge and understanding in general, and moral knowledge and understanding in particular. Art, through the opportunities it affords for imaginative insights, can show us how to feel and respond, as well as what it is, or might be like, to be subject to experiences in a world very different from that which is familiar and parochial. It is argued that art also has the potential to enhance our understanding of what is/is not appropriate to feel and do in response to a given situation.
Artworks are shown to be invaluable tools for promoting moral understanding in relation to what is of ultimate significance, and why certain goals are worthy of aspiration, by providing insights into both what we already know, as well as other admirable (and reprehensible) ways of life. Art is not only instrumental in refining our moral concepts; it also has a unique capacity to provide the requisite insights for self-knowledge and self-understanding. The paper tries to demonstrate not only how art provides such understanding, but also the kinds of thing that are understood as a result of engaging with it. It is argued that works of art have the potential to refine what is salient from the moral point of view, as well as providing opportunities for the education of the emotions and the enlargement of our emotional repertoire, including a range of imaginative insights upon which moral sensitivity, perception and judgment depends, in ways that are unique and otherwise unobtainable. Artworks thereby, have the potential to improve our ‘moral vision’, especially in terms of how and when principles are applicable to specific states of affairs.
Although the paper is not directly concerned with recent debates relating to the merits or otherwise of ‘autonomism’ (or ‘aestheticism’) – according to which moral considerations are deemed irrelevant to the value of a work of art, and does not directly engage with ‘ethicism’, whereby a work of art is thought to be aesthetically flawed in virtue of being, in some sense, morally repugnant, it concludes by exploring the extent to which moral understanding may well be advanced not only in spite of, but because of the morally problematic or even immoral status of a particular work, such as, for example, Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and Nabakov’s Lolita.
African Aesthetics and the Problem of Rhythm: Mediocrity or Excellence?
Charley Ejede Mejame
The importance of rhythm in Negro-African aesthetics has been emphasized by several African thinkers (Lufuluabo 1975; Mabona 1975; S.B. Diagne 2007). Also, aesthetics is connected with African cultural unity (Towa in: Smet 1976). This aesthetics is that of feeling and communion.Senghor makes out of this rhythm the psychological focus of the African. For Senghor, Descartes’ ‘’Je pense donc Je suis’’ (I think therefore I am) becomes ‘’Je danse donc Je suis’’ (I dance therefore I am).
But the question here is: what is the real significance of this sense of rhythm in the life of the African? The rhythm that is prevalent in the existence of the African is one of participation in life. As a rule, submission to this rhythm ought to instill in man a discipline of the body and mind that determines self-mastery and, the African would thus gain a degree of freedom.
I argue thus that the rhythmic existence of the African does not bring to him a more self-mastery.The presence of art in the form of rhythm and dance in the daily life of the African has not hitherto contributed to making out of the African a more free being.
Music as an Experiential Mirror: An Essay on the Self-reflexive Nature of Musical Performance
Tyler Olsson
Looking at the overlapping ideas between early twentieth century American pragmatism and German phenomenology, this paper extrapolates a notion of experience from Dewey, James, and Heidegger that is orthogonal to traditional modern metaphysics (which, in using the word ‘experience’, refers to the perceptual content of a subjects mind) and explicates ‘experience’ as a lived composition of phenomenal events that is determined between the temporal points of beginning and end. With this particular notion of experience in place, the structural conditions of such an experience are drawn out to the purpose of then arguing that these structural conditions are analogously similar to the phenomenal structure of music and are therefore embodied by music, that is, built into music insofar as music is, unlike some other visual arts, a temporalized material product created by a human being (Dasein), emerging as the objectification of a particular kind of experience—the aesthetic experience of musical performance. The real time production of music, say as one is playing the guitar, is doubled sided in the sense that the person plucking strings to create a sound (producer) can also be a person hearing those sounds as they are made (contemplator). In other words, as a “musical performer”, one gets to simultaneously experience both producing the music and contemplating the music. If music embodies the structure of the experience that produces it, then the insight we are left with is: the aesthetic experience of musical performance has the potential to be self-reflexive. That is, the explicit phenomenal structure of music as a worldly entity can act as a mirror which reflects onto the experiencer the implicit ontological structure of their Self as an existing entity. Understood as such, an examination of aesthetic experience as that which gives rise to the possibility of the semi-religious experience of loss of self in intense performance or meditation chanting is suggested as a topic for further research.
Music and the Embodied Ear: Against Musical Purism
Brandon Polite
Much Philosophy of Music in the analytic tradition is interested in isolating what is essentially musical in our experiences of music. Toward this end, philosophers of music usually examine the experience of music under an austere set of parameters that imaginatively abstracts away from how we normally experience music. The music experienced is pure instrumental music in the Western classical tradition. The listener attends exclusively to the aesthetic properties of the sounds resulting from the performers’ actions—all other sense organs, along with the rest of the body, are effectively switched off. And the listener is detached from the cultural (social, political, etc.) contexts in which the music was originally composed and is presently being performed.
The listener who results from this imaginative abstraction is purported to have “pure” or “purely” musical experiences. She is undistracted by the presence of words or dramatic action; by extraneous sensory input, such as the sight of the performers or her fellow concertgoers; by the urge to tap her feet, dance, or hum along; by interest in the composer’s purpose for writing the piece or the (sort of) venue or occasion they wrote it for; and so on. The listener whose experiences are taken to be paradigmatically musical, in other words, is little more than a disembodied ear for whom only the music exists—an individual whose ordinary human concerns, considerations, and situation have been wholly bracketed.
While the account of musical purism just sketched may seem exaggerated, many central figures in the Philosophy of Music, including Peter Kivy, Jerrold Levinson, Roger Scruton, and Nick Zangwill, exhibit its symptoms. The problem that musical purism, and any such attempt to reduce a phenomenon to its essence, faces is in translating the results back into the rest of lived experience. While this is of central concern to Kivy and Levinson, Scruton and Zangwill reject its very possibility, not just on descriptive grounds, but on normative ones as well. That is, both believe not only that only pure experiences are genuinely musical, but also that only listeners who experience music purely are worthy of philosophical consideration. “Listening to music,” Zangwill contends, “is an isolated and lonely encounter with another world, a disembodied world of beautiful sound, far from the world of human life.”[1] Genuine experiences of music (qua music), he concludes, are necessarily amoral, apolitical, and radically private.
In this paper I resist Zangwill’s position by challenging both the essentialist assumptions it shares with other philosophers of music and the specific consequences he draws from them. Building off of recent work by others,[2] I argue that some of music’s most salient aesthetic properties are not available to hearing alone, but are instead co-constituted by hearing, the listener’s other senses, and her material and cultural situation. As a consequence, I further argue that humming along, tapping one’s toes, dancing with others, etc., can be genuine ways of attending to music’s aesthetic properties. In short, I argue that music is irreducibly human.
[1] Nick Zangwill, “Listening to Music Together”, British Journal of Aesthetics 52 (2012): 379–89, p. 389.
[2] Including Tom Cochrane, “Joint Attention to Music”, British Journal of Aesthetics 49 (2009): 59–73; Vincent Bergeron and Dominic McIver Lopes, “Hearing and Seeing Musical Expression”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 78 (2009): 1–16; David Byrne, How Music Works (San Francisco: McSweeny’s, 2012); and Chia-Jung Tsay, “Sight over sound in the judgment of music performance”, PNAS Early Edition (2013), doi:10.1073/pnas.1221454110.
Beauty as Symbol in the Heart of the Beholder
Martin Schade
Perhaps the most controversial issue in the philosophy of beauty is whether it is subjective, as stated in familiar phrase, “Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder”, or whether it is objective, in that beauty is a feature of external beautiful things. A pure version of either of these positions seems implausible. This paper will synthesize both and offer an understanding of beauty as dialectical, in which the “essence of beauty is unity in variety” (William Somerset Maugham)..
This dialectical nature of beauty will first be explained by understanding beauty as symbol. Karl Rahner explains how symbol “must realize itself through a plurality in unity.” Beauty is symbol because it possesses itself in its own integrity while at the same time it represents and points beyond itself to something which is other than itself and makes that other present. Beauty as symbol is a unity in plurality; it expresses the ontology of something more than itself..
In that beauty is neither subjective nor objective, the dialectical nature of beauty necessitates a synthesis. Beauty is neither in the mind nor an objective body, because beauty is “in the heart of the beholder” (H.G. Wells). .
This dialectical perspective of beauty is similar to what Crispin Sartwell states in his book Six Names of Beauty (2004), which attributes beauty as neither exclusively subjective nor objective, but is in the relation between the two, and also to the situation or environment in which they are both embedded. He too understands beauty as a “unity in variety”..
The “subjectivity” or the “objectivity” of beauty serves merely as a “condition of the possibility” to grasp beauty as symbol in the heart of those who experience it. It is this discovery of beauty in which Helen Keller testifies by saying that the “most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched, they must be felt with the heart.”.
In that beauty is in the heart of the beholder, beauty is related to love. Beauty is therefore a harmonious love found in the unity within the variety of all things. In summary, this paper will therefore examine beauty in its dialectical, symbolic nature of harmonious love as it is experienced in the heart of the beholder. This is beauty as it is understood in a philosophy of Incarnation which is the One Love, One Heart of all reality.
Dena Shottenkirke
In this paper (which is a working chapter of a larger book project for the University of Chicago) I argue that the making of art is the construction of cognitive systems that form our way of parsing reality. In other words, art is a kind of epistemology – a kind of knowledge acquisition. It is an epistemic practice that allows us to construct a world in the face of a bombardment of vast amounts of sense data, as well as to the associated mental responses to that data. And, as an epistemic experience that maintains our identity as embodied subjects, art is, importantly, one of the main ways we get our bearings in that world; one of the main ways we “cope with” the world.
In this, I argue for an ontology that emphasizes a reality unparsed. The artist (and I am here using examples of visual art, though I would apply this view across the disciplines of art) understands the world by selecting and editing from all the plethora of data that each of us experience as embodied beings, and by simultaneously presenting that data within a certain attitudinal framework, the artist essentially hands that vision over to others so that they may similarly experience what the artist experienced.
Perhaps a more accurate word would be “transducing” instead of “selecting and editing” as some information is not only selected out but is converted into another form e.g., the symbolic object called “art”. In this process an artist takes a certain subset of the ontological data and re-presents it within the format of the artwork. The viewer, then, in turn, takes that particular selection of data – which is, to repeat, presented within its own attitudinal framework – and re-transduces and re-experiences the world in terms of that new scrim. With this new construction of an experienced object, the viewer’s notion of reality has been literally enlarged by the experience. Thus, aesthetic transduction both parses reality and is, at the same time, constituent parts of an ever-shifting reality.
It is a view of art that argues that art is not merely a pleasant leisure activity, not merely a search for beauty, but one of the important ways that we construct and understand our world. Art tells us what to see, how to parse the selected data into useful entities, and thus how to chunk, so to speak, the ontological world. Much is left out in that process, and all of it is open for valuation – to care or not care about what we choose. Thus, art doesn’t only make a sub-set of the data legible and meaningful, it also tells how to value that ontology: what to care about, and how to relate that to other things that we care about. It gives us the world we value.
Man and Aesthetics: Correlations
Kouroupakis Stylianos and Anna Nikolaidis
This paper is based on the notion of aesthetics as well as the notion of man as social creature. Aesthetics: its etymology comes from the Greek word aesthesthai = perceive via the senses therefore a theory of the nature of beauty or art and its creation and appreciation.Goal of aesthetics: its goal is to succeed in showing a humanistic mission, in showing what the intellectual man can do as an artist-this refers to a human side of life, which is also purifying for the recipient-. Man is also the expression of ethics as Wittgenstein said ‘’Στο έσχατο βάθος η αισθητική και η πολιτική συμπίπτουν’’. (in the uttermost, aesthetics and politics coincide). In beauty there is an ethical aspect, a kind of morality given in any artistic work or masterpiece. All artists try to show through their work new models of life to all people, new ways of behavior, new values of life, responsible for man’s well being and society’s influence as a whole. Although an artistic work does not always contain real elements, a correlation that could be extracted would be of the point of view of ethical value in the same artistic work such as notion of labour, or even obligation aiming at an aesthetic play, at the joy of mind and body as well as the public weal.
Social aesthetics consists of aesthetic care to groups of people who cannot assist classes of aesthetics for different reasons such as social, economic, psychological ones. Social aesthetics as a sector tries to ensure an improvement of the psychological state of persons rather than their appearance. What happens is that volunteers offer services of aesthetics to mentally ill people or to nursing homes full of old people –they usually use cosmetics donated by large multinational firms in favour of old people, by massaging them over the face and body, which has tremendously good results in their sanity and well-being. Using this method, not only these people manage to feel beautiful but also to accept messages of life, of capacity for a normal social life etc.
Conclusion: The present paper would try to play a constructive role on behalf of man and aesthetics by presenting benefits for the first such as development of social consciousness, commonweal, expression of a common language uniting people, since aesthetics provides models and values of ethics, solidarity, dignity, parity.
A Bridge over the Limits of Contemporary Aesthetic
Marco Viscomi
The gap between the common understanding of what in philosophy is called "aesthetic" and the speculation increasingly technical, to the limit of the esoteric, that about it continues to develop, is getting bigger. Not only the term in question went to meet a progressive change, but also the average perception of the aesthetic categories has become jagged, as a result of the endless advancing contemporary and post-modern avant-garde. The prevalence of the monetary value of the economical title of the work of art on his aesthetic character, it slips further the problem from the plane of glossy reflection to that of free market competition. Another logic, this one, which feeds itself with the gap mentioned above, as an incentive to increase the public value of something, directing it to the game of buying and selling.
Filling the abyss, that is this gap, is not an operation that can take place in a simple speaking in a conference. My attempt is rather to throw a bridge between these two terms, between the mainstream and the "esoteric" conceptions of the aesthetic thought. If that one can be a key of interpretation of the aesthetic thought as such, however, this one has to draw those guidelines over which the aesthetic as such can evolve beyond its current limitations. The reason scours within its limits those practical borders, which is task of the will (the will of people united in community) to pursue and to implement in new projects. They are these which, falling beyond the borders of the reason, give to the speculation of this new research fields: the displacement of his limitations and the perennial tension to overcome them, these are precisely what distinguishes the human being himself.
In order to make communicating and communicative the two poles just mentioned, the purpose that I propose to myself is articulated in a route. I intend to resume the philosophical-aesthetic category of Martin Heidegger about the work of art, the poetic word and the poet as a human entity. Contextualizing these issues as part of his ontological thought, we can arrive to understanding what it represents, in an authentic way, the work of art and the specific work within the aesthetic. For this philosopher, authenticity is synonymous with appropriation (see the two key terms of Eigentlichkeit and Ereignis, the root of which has the word "eigen", "own"): only in the authentic work of the artist is incarnate what Heidegger enucleates as "dichterisches Denken". It is the thought that authentically can think without dying out in the endless cycle of rationalization. It succeeds to break this vicious and to jump into the project of the event of the authentic being. This event is not the result of a deduction conducted on a paper, but the light of that beautiful every time wonderful, that each aesthetic and every esthete, everyone in his own way, attempts to steal, to contemplate and celebrate.
Aesthetics and Utopia
Nathan Wood
The concepts of beauty and justice have been entwined ever since Plato brought them together underneath the form of the Good. Through the passage of time the connection has only become stronger with the direct involvement between artists and politics. During the Renaissance the papal political authorities would consistently use the works of art to glorify and legitimize their empires. Works of art have valorized ancient battles and been used as visual rhetoric to the marching of military feet in step. If utopias could be given any substance, then it was through the human imagination splattered upon works of art and given breath with literature. But these are not the connections between politics and art that I am interested in. Of all the ways that art and politics appear to work in tandem they come into great tension in one respect. The central problem that motivates this essay can best be approached by asking a question; if a perfect political society could be created (a utopia), what kind of art would it have? My answer to this question is that it would not have meaningful art. Contrary to what many would view as central to an educated and politically just world where human growth and development was available for every citizen, it would be a society devoid of artwork that held any other purpose than pure entertainment value. The thesis that I will defend in this paper is that because all utopias, by definition, contain the least amount of suffering possible the need as well as the possibility for meaningful art is proportionally compromised. While the question is posed in regard to utopias, I will argue that the infection cannot be amputated by suggesting that we discard the idea of utopias. It is the very pursuit of social and political justice that minimizes the possibility of meaningful art. After explaining the problem I will also discuss some possible responses to this conflict and further questions this raises for both politics and aesthetics.