2/29/2024 0 Comments Feeling of harmony in artKant does not support this view, and neither do a great many other theorists of aesthetics before and after him. Why must the aesthetic and the non- (or extra-) aesthetic compete? The view that they must and do strikes me as highly problematic as well as historically false. I want to suggest that assumptions like these not only constrain the boundaries of aesthetics but also constrain and impoverish the language of aesthetic description itself. From it follow a number of assumptions, most of them attributed to the eighteenth century, all of them questionable: the view that art and the aesthetic capture experiences that are autonomous from other regions of human activity, severed from all instrumental, moral, political, or practical thinking that art and aesthetics are opposed to cognition that aesthetics and utility are distinct, while the latter is subordinated to the requirements of life-in a word, that the aesthetic and the nonaesthetic are distinct realms separated by a conceptual and practical chasm. I think we are all vulnerable to this kind of understanding to a greater or lesser degree. A museum removes us from day-to-day reality reading is like daydreaming, not thinking, and certainly not like solving an equation nature, taken in aesthetically, gives rise to reveries, not to scientific speculations art relieves us of the banalities of the ordinary and introduces us to the extraordinary. In doing aesthetics we are taking up a particular stance on the world, giving it a special kind of attention, if not adopting an “aesthetic attitude” (a much controverted notion): we are engaging in the world by disengaging the world from itself and by isolating objects of a particular kind of value. What could an aesthetics of life possibly mean? When we “do” aesthetics in the classical sense, we are supposed to be doing a particular thing or a set of particular things: looking at a painting, listening to music, enjoying a landscape (optimally, as though it were a work of art rather than as a geological site or a place on which to build a house or a city), or, more generally, interpreting an artifact, but in a particular way, say, by attending to its form, its formal or sensuous properties, or its emotional impact. ![]() When we do so, we seem to be trying to delimit a sphere of experience or a set of properties (sometimes an attitude) that can be treated as a realm apart, distinct from our other activities in the world. ![]() We speak about aesthetic perceptions, reflection, judgment, and value. After all, aesthetics is a field of inquiry that we normally associate, since Kant, with art and literature. My topic is what I call “the aesthetics of life.” The phrase may occasion some puzzlement.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |