The Philosophy and Politics of Aesthetic Experience
The Philosophy and Politics of Aesthetic Experience

Author: Nathan Ross

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-04-07

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 331952304X

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This book develops a philosophy of aesthetic experience through two socially significant philosophical movements: early German Romanticism and early critical theory. In examining the relationship between these two closely intertwined movements, we see that aesthetic experience is not merely a passive response to art—it is the capacity to cultivate true personal autonomy, and to critique the social and political context of our lives. Art is political for these thinkers, not only when it paints a picture of society, but even more when it makes us aware of our deeply ingrained forms of experience in a transformative way. Ultimately, the book argues that we have to think of art as a form of truth that is not reducible to communicative rationality or scientific knowledge, and from which philosophy and politics can learn valuable lessons.

Politics and Aesthetics
Politics and Aesthetics

Author: Jacques Rancière

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2019-08-14

Total Pages: 120

ISBN-13: 1509538143

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In this book the influential philosopher Jacques Rancière, in discussion with Peter Engelmann, explores the enduring connection between politics and aesthetics, arguing that aesthetics forms the fundamental basis for social and political upheaval. Beginning from his rejection of structuralist Marxism, Rancière outlines the development of his thought from his early studies on workers’ emancipation to his recent work on literature, film and visual art. Rather than discussing aesthetics within narrow terms of how we contemplate art or beauty, Rancière argues that aesthetics underpins our entire ‘regime of experience’. He shows how political relations develop from sensual experience, as individual feelings and perceptions become the concern of the community as a whole. Since politics emerges from the ‘division of the sensual’, aesthetic experience becomes a radically emancipatory and egalitarian means to disrupt this order and transform political reality. Investigating new forms of emancipatory politics arising from current art practices and social movements, this short book will appeal to anyone interested in contemporary art, aesthetics, philosophy and political theory.

Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception
Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception

Author: Bence Nanay

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 0199658447

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Bence Nanay explores how many influential debates in aesthetics look very different, and may be easier to tackle, if we clarify the assumptions they make about perception and experience. He focuses on the ways in which the distinction between distributed and focused attention can help us re-evaluate various key concepts and debates in aesthetics.

Aesthetic Experience
Aesthetic Experience

Author: Richard Shusterman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2010-09-28

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1134182872

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In this volume, a team of internationally respected contributors theorize the concept of aesthetic experience and its value. Exposing and expanding our restricted cultural and intellectual presuppositions of what constitutes aesthetic experience, the book aims to re-explore and affirm the place of aesthetic experience--in its evaluative, phenomenological and transformational sense--not only in relation to art and artists but to our inner and spiritual lives.

Sensibility and Sense
Sensibility and Sense

Author: Arnold Berleant

Publisher: Andrews UK Limited

Published: 2011-11-28

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1845402936

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Aesthetic sensibility rests on perceptual experience and characterizes not only our experience of the arts but our experience of the world. Sensibility and Sense offers a philosophically comprehensive account of humans' social and cultural embeddedness encountered, recognized, and fulfilled as an aesthetic mode of experience. Extending the range of aesthetic experience from the stone of the earth's surface to the celestial sphere, the book focuses on the aesthetic as a dimension of social experience. The guiding idea of pervasive interconnectedness, both social and environmental, leads to an aesthetic critique of the urban environment, the environment of daily life, and of terrorism, and has profound implications for grounding social and political values. The aesthetic emerges as a powerful critical tool for appraising urban culture and political practice.

Dissensus
Dissensus

Author: Jacques Ranciere

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2010-03-17

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1847064450

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A brand new collection of Jacques Rancière's writings on art and politics.

Our Sense of the Real
Our Sense of the Real

Author: Kimberley Curtis

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-10-18

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1501723634

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This bold and persuasive study rereads the works of Hannah Arendt to recuperate her relevance to contemporary politics and to show that her deepest concerns are oriented by her ontology. Kimberley Curtis interprets Arendt's earlier work through the lenses of The Life of the Mind, elucidating what Curtis calls an "aesthetic sensibility of tragic pleasure" as a way out of the enclave politics of late modernity.Arguing that oblivion and radical forgetfulness of others are among the most ethically troubling features of our political landscape, Curtis shows that Arendt's aesthetic account of politics offers us an idiom in which to name and resist the depravations and dangers of our political condition. Curtis also elucidates Arendt's debt to phenomenology and argues that our sense of reality is born through highly charged sensuous provocation and mutual responsiveness. Arendt's innovation is to recognize that this countenancing of others is an aesthetic experience that creates the political world.Curtis plumbs the relevance of this work in current issues such as gated communities for the privileged and prisons for the disenfranchised, and in the extraordinary relationship between a black civil rights leader and a Ku Klux Klan officer. Our Sense of the Real is a poetic invocation of Arendt's politics, at once lively, passionate, and crucial.

Feeling Beauty
Feeling Beauty

Author: G. Gabrielle Starr

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2013-07-19

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0262019310

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A theory of the neural bases of aesthetic experience across the arts, which draws on the tools of both cognitive neuroscience and traditional humanist inquiry. In Feeling Beauty, G. Gabrielle Starr argues that understanding the neural underpinnings of aesthetic experience can reshape our conceptions of aesthetics and the arts. Drawing on the tools of both cognitive neuroscience and traditional humanist inquiry, Starr shows that neuroaesthetics offers a new model for understanding the dynamic and changing features of aesthetic life, the relationships among the arts, and how individual differences in aesthetic judgment shape the varieties of aesthetic experience. Starr, a scholar of the humanities and a researcher in the neuroscience of aesthetics, proposes that aesthetic experience relies on a distributed neural architecture—a set of brain areas involved in emotion, perception, imagery, memory, and language. More important, it emerges from networked interactions, intricately connected and coordinated brain systems that together form a flexible architecture enabling us to develop new arts and to see the world around us differently. Focusing on the "sister arts" of poetry, painting, and music, Starr builds and tests a neural model of aesthetic experience valid across all the arts. Asking why works that address different senses using different means seem to produce the same set of feelings, she examines particular works of art in a range of media, including a poem by Keats, a painting by van Gogh, a sculpture by Bernini, and Beethoven's Diabelli Variations. Starr's innovative, interdisciplinary analysis is true to the complexities of both the physical instantiation of aesthetics and the realities of artistic representation.

Aesthetic Disinterestedness
Aesthetic Disinterestedness

Author: Thomas Hilgers

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-01

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 1317444884

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The notion of disinterestedness is often conceived of as antiquated or ideological. In spite of this, Hilgers argues that one cannot reject it if one wishes to understand the nature of art. He claims that an artwork typically asks a person to adopt a disinterested attitude towards what it shows, and that the effect of such an adoption is that it makes the person temporarily lose the sense of herself, while enabling her to gain a sense of the other. Due to an artwork’s particular wealth, multiperspectivity, and dialecticity, the engagement with it cannot culminate in the construction of world-views, but must initiate a process of self-critical thinking, which is a precondition of real self-determination. Ultimately, then, the aesthetic experience of art consists of a dynamic process of losing the sense of oneself, while gaining a sense of the other, and of achieving selfhood. In his book, Hilgers spells out the nature of this process by means of rethinking Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theories in light of more recent developments in philosophy–specifically in hermeneutics, critical theory, and analytic philosophy–and within the arts themselves–specifically within film and performance art.