Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 9 Number 3, December 2008
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Shusterman Richard, and Tomlin, Adele, Aesthetic Experience, New York, Routledge, 2008. Pp. i-ix, 1-196, ISBN 13 978-0-415-37832-1 (hbk), $100.00.
Reviewed by
The University of North Carolina at Asheville
Early in the introduction to Aesthetic Experience Tomlin writes, "the concept of "aesthetic experience" is not only difficult to define or express but may in fact be impossible to do so with logical language (1)." This, combined with Menke's approving citation of Rorty's dismal description of the place of philosophical aesthetics ("in the US and Great Britain … aesthetics is the most isolated and least respected branch of that which we call philosophy") leaves one wondering what this anthology is expected to accomplish and why.
The rest of the book may be read, indeed, as proof of the first claim. But this conclusion is mightily resisted in many of the articles included in this anthology. For instance, in "Aesthetic Essence," Malcolm Budd not only gives what may be termed a "demarcational theory" of aesthetic experience, but also argues against many other proposed definitions of such experience. His arguments rest upon the idea that terms used in aesthetic discourse are interestingly inter-definable. The same hope of demarcating a clear realm of the aesthetic is true of Crowther's article, but here the idea is constructed along Kantian lines as a type pf pleasure in the freedom of cognition. Gary Iseminger also tries to find necessary and sufficient conditions of aesthetic experience, though he narrows his topic to investigating whether or not an experimental theory of artistic value may or must appeal to the concept of "an aesthetic state of mind."
If one finds that these attempts at demarcating a specific realm of aesthetic experience are ultimately incomplete there are others offered as well. Menke, in "The Dialectic of Aesthetics" argues that aesthetic experience is a mode of self-reflection both complementing and always critiquing philosophical self-reflection. This type of negative dialectic is, for him, important but cannot be fully controlled by philosophical analysis. Martin Seel, in "On the Scope of Aesthetic Experience" aims to define artworks as "presentation events" which generate "consciousness for the openness of presence." And Noel Carroll's article "Aesthetic Experience, Art and Artists," after critiquing most philosophical explications of aesthetic experience as "stunningly uninformative," offers a conception of aesthetics as a realm of historical narrative and tradition. His call to a content-oriented approach emphasizes attention to formal and expressive or otherwise aesthetic properties in the content of such experiences.
Combining Carroll's conception of aesthetic experience with the pluralistic analysis offered by Richard Shusterman in "Aesthetic Experiment: From analysis to Eros," promises a wider realm of aesthetic experience, a realm conceived as defined and practiced for multiple purposes and in various ways. Shusterman nicely investigates multiple ways in which such experiences have been described and analyzed. The list includes a focus upon the intersection of pleasure and value, phenomenological stances, aims of demarcation contrasted with those of transformation, whether the aesthetic brings with it a specific type of perception and/or knowledge and the question of whether or not such experience is best thought of as self-possessed assessment or self-surrendering absorption.
Once such an open-ended analysis is offered, and provisionally accepted, the volume's inclusion of articles attempting to open up the realm of aesthetic experience to experiences and activities traditionally excluded from or unnoticed within the realm makes some sense. For instance, Kathleen Higgins, in "Refined Emotion in Aesthetic Experiment" argues that Western philosophical aesthetics has been impoverished by an incomplete theory of the emotions. For her, investigations of Indian and Japanese aesthetic traditions shows that they exemplify a more refined understanding of emotional experience in the aesthetic realm. And Carolyn Forsmeyer in "Taste, Food and the Limits of Pleasure" argues that looking at the concept of taste (a concept central to many philosophical theories of aesthetic experience") in relationship to food is informative. The argument is that gustatory experience fits within the major conception of aesthetic experience and this, further, entails adopting a cognitivist view of aesthetic experience. Finally, in the genre of expanding the experiences and events allowed into the realm of aesthetic experience one must return to Shusterman's article. Shusterman, after offering his expansive pluralistic analysis of aesthetic experience concludes that sexual experience should be included in the category. I suppose it is hard to argue that there is no aesthetic component to the sexual act. On the other hand, including sexuality in the realm of the aesthetic highlights the very strange nature of the concept as well as some of the motivations behind its acceptance. For example, thinking of sexual activity as characterized by "disinterested interest" and/or "purposive purposelessness" seems purely perverse (not that Shusterman would be happy with either of these as proper characterizations of the aesthetic). So either the concept must be significantly revised or the inclusion of such activity questioned. Further, one starts to question why the "purity" of experience characterized as aesthetic is so often a central claim in the literature. Of course demarcation aims in philosophical analysis look to exclude the unsuitable - and here the question is whether sexual activity is improper to include in the aesthetic. But I would like to highlight the opposite question: might it be improper to put sexual activity into the realm of aesthetic experience because of the ability of such a concept to exclude what else such activity otherwise obviously entails - for instance its direct economic, moral and political implications. In this case, inclusion under such a concept may not be not generically open in results, but actually might result in blindness to important aspects of an experience characterized incompletely because characterized as aesthetic. In other words, including the experience of food under the category of aesthetic experience may expand our understanding of that experience whereas including sexual activity under the very same concept may blind us to other very important implications of the art/experience.
In short, this book is a challenging read. There are strong essays and important issues raised, but it is best read as a dialogue that is unfinished and quite frustrating. If one is not already worked up about the concept of aesthetic experience, though, it might be better to think of the realm as "philosophy of art" as long as the concept of art is read expansively. In other words, my belief is that a content-based approach is better adopted than an aim for bright-line demarcation of a separate realm of aesthetic experience. In this sense, I agree with Cometti's article "Between Being and Doing" when he argues that "the only possible aesthetics is an aesthetics of usages and that pragmatic conditions should always prevail over other conditions (174-175)" or Alex Neill's claim at the end of the book that "rather than thinking in terms of a distinctive species of experience, we should be thinking in terms of what it is to experience particular sorts of things aesthetically (191)."