The article’s central theme is Vladimír Borecký’s “theory of the obscure,” which is viewed and interpreted from several points of view. Firstly, it is compared from the point of view of philosophical ...pragmatism, especially from the search for continuity overcoming the dualism of art and life. Secondly, the attention is focused on the dual character of mirroring in Borecký’s key concept. Subsequently, the network of standards, norms, and criteria that a rational critical debate about the meaning and value of the work of these extraordinary figures always presupposes is described. Finally, the author conceptualizes the nature of “strange works” in terms of one of the contemporary definitions of art, the American philosopher Alva Noë’s concept of artworks as “strange tools.”
In this essay the author argues that there is a close compatibility between John Dewey’s social philosophy of art and Alfred North Whitehead’s thinking about the relationship between art and life. ...First, the author outlines the opposition between isolationism and contextualism as two main tendencies in the field of aesthetic theory. He draws on Melvin Rader’s explanation of the chief difference between the two: an isolationist theory insists that art is distinct or even separate from the rest of life, whereas a contextualist theory maintains the integrality of art and life. The author then argues that both tendencies are implausible if considered separately, and that – despite the manifest conflict between these tendencies – both Dewey and Whitehead were able to use them to good purpose in their theories. In the second part of the essay, the author points out the similarities between Dewey’s and Whitehead’s ideas about the rootedness of art in everyday life, revealing the usually not so apparent contextualist, or social, side of Whitehead’s conception of art. Finally, in the third part, the author argues that we can usefully trace these similarities and convergences to more fundamental parts of the thinking of both philosophers, especially to their critiques of the dualisms inherent in the constitution of modern thought in general.
After identifying the processes that have led to the separation of art and life, John Dewey, in Art as Experience, proposed a way to re-establish continuity between the two. His pragmatic process ...philosophy offers answers to three questions: Why is it necessary to conceive of the production and the perception of works of art in terms of a dynamic proces instead of the objectified result, such as a building, a book, or a painting? How do these processes relate to the broader context of social and natural events? And how does this model of ‘process aesthetics’ relate to traditional assumptions of modern aesthetics? In this article, the author presents Dewey’s answers to these questions. In the first part, he introduces, from a more contemporary point of view, a problem that Dewey was able to diagnose much earlier, and in the second part, he outlines Dewey’s main intention and its consequences. The third part of the article focuses on Richard Shusterman’s influential reading of Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics in order to localize one of the apparently central points of Dewey’s reconstruction of modern aesthetics, that is, the idea of disinterestedness. Finally, the author offers an alternative reading, based on the claim that Dewey does not neglect this idea, but deliberately uses it to retain two apparently contrasting features in his theory: the continuity between life and art and the distinctive quality of being completed, which makes a work of art stand apart from the events of everyday life.
Reading jingjie through atmosphere and other related contemporary aesthetic concepts reveals how creatively Wang Guowei in his Renjian cihua naturalized German philosophy within the Chinese literary ...discourse. It is an original attempt to formulate with the help of the innovative concept of jingjie a new theory of art within the space of philosophical inquiry into the nature of aesthetic experience, which Wang discovered through Kant. In doing so, he formulated ideas similar to those explored much later by Gernot Böhme in his elaborations on atmosphere and by Bence Nanay in his theory of distributed attention.
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This article is concerned with the question of how two obvious but apparently antithetical features of aesthetic experience – distance and immersion – can be integrated into one theory. The author ...criticizes the contemporary neglect of the first feature (distance or disinterestedness), and argues for a more dialectical notion of aesthetic experience which would include both of them. To this end, the article starts, in section one, by re-examining the main points in the evolution of phenomenological aesthetics, which some authors consider a chief source of this neglect. The presence of two questions is emphasized: (1) the idea of a distinctive perception which we traditionally call aesthetic and can trace back to Kantian roots and (2) the process of breaking with the subject-object model of experience. In the end of this section, the question is raised whether the successful elimination of the latter means the necessary rejection of the former. In section two, the author argues for a negative answer to this question, and a candidate for a ‘new paradigm’ of aesthetics is considered – the idea of the environment. As the conclusion to this section, the compatibility of the idea of the aesthetic mode of perception in the traditional sense, together with the original sense of the idea of environment, is defended. Lastly, in section three, these findings are made more specific and confirmed by turning to Jan Patočka’s analyses of the experience of space.
A review of Allen Carlson’s and Sheila Lintott’s (eds) Nature, Aesthetics, and Environmentalism: From Beauty to Duty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008, 458 pp. ISBN 9780231138864)
In this essay the author argues that there is a close compatibility between John Dewey’s social philosophy of art and Alfred North Whitehead’s thinking about the relationship between art and life. ...First, the author outlines the opposition between isolationism and contextualism as two main tendencies in the field of aesthetic theory. He draws on Melvin Rader’s explanation of the chief difference between the two: an isolationist theory insists that art is distinct or even separate from the rest of life, whereas a contextualist theory maintains the integrality of art and life. The author then argues that both tendencies are implausible if considered separately, and that – despite the manifest conflict between these tendencies – both Dewey and Whitehead were able to use them to good purpose in their theories. In the second part of the essay, the author points out the similarities between Dewey’s and Whitehead’s ideas about the rootedness of art in everyday life, revealing the usually not so apparent contextualist, or social, side of Whitehead’s conception of art. Finally, in the third part, the author argues that we can usefully trace these similarities and convergences to more fundamental parts of the thinking of both philosophers, especially to their critiques of the dualisms inherent in the constitution of modern thought in general.
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