1. Pre-modern period (Plato, Aristotle) 2. Early Modern period (Hume, Kant) - The rise of science turns aesthetics to subjective experience - Not only identify through, but also with subjective experience th 3. 19 and early 20th century (Lebens-philosophies) - Experience as basic epistemological concept Trend: Religion replaced by art as the spirituality in the material world Aesthetic experience became the island of freedom, beauty, and idealistic meaning in an otherwise coldly materialistic and lawdetermined world Four dimensions of aesthetic experience: evaluative, phenomenological, semantic and demarcational-definitional
II.
Continental critique of aesthetic experience
1. Phenomenological immediacy 2. Radical differentiation from ungodly reality Adorno (member of the Frankfurt School, proponent of Critical theory) -
Its claim to pleasure is not the ideological contamination of
bourgeois hedonism, instead it is valuable, crucial and meaningful self-abnegation and submission --- > transformative, emancipation (culture industry: cultivation of false psychological needs that can only be met and satisfied by the products of capitalism) blind to the ideological features structuring the artwork immanent Verstehen to external critique of the artworks ideological meaning and the socio-historical conditions that shaped it for no work in its immediate facticity portrays its meaning adequately or can be understood in itself changes in the nonaesthetic world affect our very sensibilities and capacity for experience, aesthetic experience cannot be a fixe natural kind (also as a central theme for Benjamin)
Benjamin (closely related to Frankfurt School)
-
fragmentation and shocks of modern life
Our immediate experience of things no longer forms a meaningful, coherent whole but is rather a welter of fragmentary, unintegrated sensations something simply lived through rather than meaningfully experienced. --- > better to have temporally cumulative accretion modernization and technology eroded aesthetic experience aesthetic experience comes to pervade the everyday world of popular culture and even politics, low art Vs high art contrast with Adorno, potentially emancipatory does not deny the importance of aesthetic experience, only its pure immediacy of meaning and isolation from the rest of life
Gadamer (prominent figure in Hermeneutics, student of
Heidegger) -
conceptual link between immediacy and differentiation, do
no justice to its meaning and lasting impact Heidegger: art is by nature a distinctive way in which truth comes into being, that is becomes historical assembled achievements of the human mind as it has realized itself historically, it is necessary to adopt an attitude that corresponds to the historical reality of man, relation to the world and its claims to truth cognitive dimension of aesthetic experience: what one experiences in a work of art and what one is directed towards is rather how true it is, i.e. to what extent one knows and recognizes something and oneself instead experience + understanding as a game plays its players, submits those who wish to understand it to the rigors of its structure
Derrida and Barthes (deconstructionism)
-
rejects experiential unity and stability
again challenges the radical differentiation and immediacy without dismissing its importance and power of jouissance.
essentialist fallacy (e.g. people are essentially evil)
product of historical invention, results of reciprocally reinforcing dimensions of arts institutional field and
inculcated habits of aesthetic contemplation. --- > takes
time and depends on the wider social field Two main thrusts of the continental critique -
III.
aesthetic experience requires more than mere
phenomenological immediacy to achieve its full meaning --- > poor and mistaken immediate reaction --- > priming of experience - Aesthetic experience cannot be convinced as an unchanging concept narrowly identified with fine arts purely autonomous reception --- > impoverished --- > extends to nature? --- > conditioned by the world - However, the claim that aesthetic experience must involve more than immediacy and takes time does not entail that such immediate feeling is not crucial to aesthetic experience. --- > e.g. wine-tasting? - decline of aesthetic experience stems from that false inference and confusions arising from the diverse and changing role of it. The analytic trend 1. Three axes of contrast: evaluative Vs descriptive, phenomenological vs semantic, transformational Vs demarcational 2. Claim: from Dewey to Danto, Anglo-American aesthetics moves from the former poles to the latter poles --- > The fact that aesthetic experience is still useful for other purposes has been ignored Dewey -
diverge from analytic aesthetics and accommodate themes
of continental aesthetics central theme: naturalism, grounding aesthetics in the natural needs, constitution, and activities of the embodied human organism recovering the continuity of its esthetic experience with the normal processes of living , greater integration between live and art target against the museum conception of art & art as high art privileging dynamic aesthetic experience over the physical object aesthetic experience is experience in which the whole creature is alive, all experience to be coherent and
meaningful, requires the germ of aesthetic unity and
development --- > manifold arts of living an experience , immediate, phenomenological feeling also as a definition of arts --- > bad arts? sunset?