Abstract
Contemporary aestheticians face a question that has troubled writers since the Enlightenment: What is the role of the arts, when scientific rationalism and empirical understanding undermine our belief in the autonomy of each person? One reply consists of two familiar moves: the reiteration of dangerous effects caused by the hegemony of empirical thinking, and the affirmation that artworks serve as instruments for an emancipatory contact with some pre-objective domain. It is our challenging task to find an interpretation that upholds both of these moves, without linking aesthetic practices to the outmoded notion of a human subjectivity that is wholly disembodied, abstract and detached from actual life.
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Notes
Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity,” in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970 ), pp. 6–7.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, “The Concept of Enlightenment,” Ecology, ed. Carolyn Merchant (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press International, 1994 ), pp. 44–47.
Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Critique and Power, Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, ed. Michael Kelly ( Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994 ), pp. 22–23.
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1984); and Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension ( Boston: Beacon Press, 1978 ).
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968); and “Eye and Mind,” The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen Johnson, trans. ed. Michael Smith ( Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993 ).
Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement (The Hague: Kluwer, 1982), pp. 576–579; Galen Johnson, “Ontology and Painting,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 37, 47; Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 69; Patrick Burke, “Listening at the Abyss,” and Monika Langer, “Merleau-Ponty and Deep Ecology,” in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty,eds. Galen Johnson and Michael Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990), pp. 82, 96, 126.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” p. 121.
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory,p. 342.
Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension,pp. 6, 7, 37.
Theodor Adorno, The Aesthetic Dimension,pp. 343, 350. In a similar fashion, Clive Bell states that art is an “immediate means to the good” which transports us far from human interests, ideas, facts, and activities, toward peaks of exhalation. See Clive Bell, “The Aesthetic Hypothesis: Significant Form and Aesthetic Emotion,” The Philosophy of the Visual Parts,P. Alperson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 122–23, 125–26.
Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension,p. 54.
Ibid., pp. 9, 13.
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory,pp. 343, 351.
Herbert Marcuse, Aesthetic Dimension,p. 39.
Karl Marx, The German Ideology,in Karl Marx Selected Readings,ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 160. This reading of “praxis” still circulates within some materialist philosophies today, even when empirical discourse is described, more appropriately, as petite and as a means for tactical intervention.
To observe the visible flesh of one’s own body, it is sufficient to look at the duck-rabbit figure, which is often mentioned in philosophical discussions of human perception. The visible aspect of one’s own surroundings persists across the breaks in perception that occur, as one shifts back and forth between consciousness of a duck-shape and the recognition of a rabbit-shape.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible,p. 135.
Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” in Karl Marx Selected Readings,p. 94. Empirical knowledge is dependent upon sensuous human activity, and sensuous activity marks the human individual’s living contact with nature; hence, science tells us about real, actual people. In such passages, sensuous activity is not yet discussed wholly in terms of the objective knowledge which science offers concerning human conditions.
Iris Young, “Women Recovering Our Clothes,” Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory ( Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990 ), p. 186.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible,p. 3.
See Walter Stace, “The Nature of Mysticism,” in Philosophy of Religion,eds. William Rowe and William Wainwright (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998), pp. 366–367: the extrovertive mystic is said to advance by means of the senses toward “the apprehension of an ultimate non-sensuous unity in all things.”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” p. 145.
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Brubaker, D. (2000). Art and the Reenchantment of Sensuous Human Activity. In: Kronegger, M., Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Aesthetics of Enchantment in the Fine Arts. Analecta Husserliana, vol 65. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3234-5_9
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