O impulso metafísico na experiência estética. Itinerário da fenomenologia “afectiva” de Mikel Dufrenne

Author(s):  
Carlos Bizarro Morais

This research will focus on the works of Mikel Dufrenne devoted to aesthetic reflection, especially on those where the author elucidates more systematically his notion of aesthetic experience. It is our intention to find out whether, inside the limits of this conception, he admits the possibility of a metaphysical dimension within the processivity of an aesthetic experience, and on what philosophical foundations he establishes that possibility. Being a controversial hypothesis, we hope to modestly contribute to the critical enhancement of the philosophical legacy that Mikel Dufrenne left us through his thought-provoking work as we are celebrating the first centenary of his birth and fifteen years of his death (1910-1995). More broadly, it is our purpose - through the clues given by the author - to bring back to the core of aesthetic debate the instances of ontological and metaphysical reflection that have been underestimated, since the waves of postmodern relativism invaded the cultural and philosophical debate. We will follow the author in setting up a phenomenological version of the Aesthetics in order to stress that, already in that conceptual project, it is possible to find methodological and systematic original choices, which point to the presence of a "surge" that breaks off the categorical boundaries of the experienced. The thematic alignment that we propose on chapters two and three aims at consolidating the image of an aesthetic experience that evolves gradually to more intense and profound levels of experience, and which scope of phenomenological, anthropological and ontological implications strengthens the conviction that we are in the presence of a metaphysical sap that nurtures it. However, we are aware that Dufrenne hesitated long enough when it came to translate philosophically this horizon of metaphysical meaning of the aesthetic experience. This fact also has probably led other researchers to formulate interpretations that are significantly discrepant from the one that we propose. Nevertheless, as we intend to show in the last chapter, it is not this lack of explicitness that prevents us from finding the aesthetic and emotional, spiritual and intellectual fruits coming from the aesthetic experience, fluidized by a metaphysical openness to the absolute. As we present those conclusions, we are convinced that the path taken by Mikel Dufrenne, while phenomenologist, became even more comprehensive and credible.

1986 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 531-539 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonard Zusne

A reconceptualization of some of the ideas associated with the aesthetic experience is proposed. The problems that arise in defining the terms ‘beautiful’ and ‘perfect’ may be overcome by substituting the term ‘fittingness.’ The core of the aesthetic experience is the experience of some degree of fit between the specimen (the aesthetic object or event) and the corresponding standard. The degree of fit determines the intensity of the experience. The essential element of the aesthetic experience is the process of collation between specimen and standard, but the nature of the experience must be sought in the realm of motivation. To every instance of an extrinsive motive that begins with a deficiency, stimulation, or conflict and ends in homeostasis, there corresponds an intrinsic motive that is self-reinforcing. Cognitive conflicts lead to cognitive dissonance, and cognitive equilibrium is achieved by various cognitive means. There is also a state of cognitive consonance, which is sought for its own sake. The aesthetic experience is the experience of cognitive reinforcement that occurs upon the realization that the aesthetic specimen approximates or fits the model of perfection currently held by the individual. This reinforcing experience of cognitive consonance is the core of the aesthetic experience. This view is compared with Berlyne's theory.


2012 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 98-110
Author(s):  
Fabian Dorsch

In den letzten Jahren ist es recht populär geworden, traditionelle Fragen der philosophischen Ästhetik – wie zum Beispiel die nach der Natur und Rechtfertigung ästhetischer Beurteilungen – mithilfe empirischer Forschungsergebnisse zu beantworten zu versuchen. Diesem empiristisch geprägten Ansatz möchte ich gerne eine rationalistisch orientierte Auffassung der ästhetischen Erfahrung und Bewertung von Kunstwerken entgegensetzen. Insbesondere möchte ich die ästhetische Relevanz dreier verschiedener Arten empirischer Studien kritisch diskutieren: solcher, die einzelne Kunstwerke unter Einsatz der Natur- oder Geschichtswissenschaften erforschen; solcher, die sich der empirischen Methoden der Psychologie und der Soziologie bedienen, um unsere ästhetischen Beurteilungen einzelner Werke oder Werkgruppen zu untersuchen; und schließlich solcher, die unser allgemeines ästhetisches Urteilsvermögen einer kognitionswissenschaftlichen Überprüfung unterziehen.<br><br>In recent years, it has become rather popular to rely on the results of empirical studies in trying to answer some of the traditional questions in philosophical aesthetics, such as the one concerning the nature and justification of aesthetic evaluation. In opposition to this very empiricist approach, I would like to put forward a more rationalist picture of the aesthetic experience and evaluation of artworks. More specifically, I aim to critically discuss the aesthetic relevance of three kinds of empirical studies: of those that examine particular artworks by means of scientific or historical investigations; of those that use the empirical methods of psychology and sociology in order to examine our aesthetic evaluations of single works or groups of work; and finally of those that scrutinize our general faculty for aesthetic judgement by means of the cognitive sciences.


Author(s):  
Allen Carlson

Environmental aesthetics is one of the major new areas of aesthetics to have emerged in the last part of the twentieth century. It focuses on philosophical issues concerning appreciation of the world at large as it is constituted not simply by particular objects but also by environments themselves. In this way environmental aesthetics goes beyond the appreciation of art to the aesthetic appreciation of both natural and human environments. Its development has been influenced by eighteenth-century landscape aesthetics as well as by two recent factors: the exclusive focus of twentieth-century philosophical aesthetics on art, and the public concern for the aesthetic condition of environments that developed in the second half of that century. Both factors broadened the scope of environmental aesthetics beyond that of traditional aesthetics, and both helped to set the central philosophical issue of the field, which is due in large measure to the differences between the nature of the object of appreciation of environmental aesthetics, the world at large and the nature of art. These differences are so marked that environmental aesthetics must begin with basic questions, such as ‘what’ and ‘how’ to appreciate. These questions have generated a number of different philosophical positions, two of which are the engagement and the cognitive approaches. The first holds that appreciators must transcend traditional dichotomies, such as subject/object, and diminish the distance between themselves and objects of appreciation, aiming at multi-sensory immersion of the former within the latter. By contrast, the second contends that appreciation must be guided by the nature of objects of appreciation and that knowledge about their origins, types and properties is necessary for serious, appropriate aesthetic appreciation. Each approach has certain strengths and weaknesses. However, although different in emphasis, they are not in direct conflict. When conjoined, they advocate bringing together feeling and knowing, which is the core of serious aesthetic experience and which, when achieved in aesthetic appreciation of different environments of the world at large, shows just how rewarding such appreciation can be.


2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 6207-6213
Author(s):  
Gaybullaev Otabek Muhammadievich

In today's era of globalization, the presence of national values ​​in the aesthetic education of the individual is important.  In the era of globalization, the inculcation of national values ​​in the aesthetic culture of the individual as an integral feature of the spiritual culture of the Uzbek people is the ideology, worldview, and values ​​of all nations and peoples living in the country.  Raising the aesthetic culture of the individual in Uzbekistan is the core of the spiritual culture, morals, and psyche of all nations and peoples.  This article describes the philosophical foundations of the inculcation of national values ​​in the aesthetic culture of the individual.


Kepes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (24) ◽  
pp. 197-231
Author(s):  
Miguel A. Romero-Ramírez ◽  
Duncan Reyburn

This article proposes to resolve an internal ambiguity in the subdiscipline called Everyday Aesthetics (EA), systematized by the researcher Horacio Pérez-Henao, according to whom the extension of aesthetics to the everyday has been done, on the one hand, by means of a consideration of an expansive object and subject according to aesthesis itself, as mainly proposed by Katya Mandoki, and, on the other hand, by means of a restrictive object and subject according to the parameters of an authentic aesthetic experience, a theory headed by John Dewey. Methodology: To resolve this tension, a hermeneutic methodology known as the fourfold sense of being, related to Hegelian dialectic, albeit with important modifications supplied by William Desmond was used. This methodology allows a suitable way to explore and discuss different approaches in everyday aesthetics epitomized by Mandoki and Dewey, and makes possible the proposal of a third way, epitomized by G. K. Chesterton. Results: Bearing in mind the original intention of EA—according to which the everyday must be revitalized from an aesthetic perspective, as explained by Joseph Kupfer, it is argued that the two alternate positions of Mandoki and Dewey are unsatisfactory; an attempt is therefore made to respond to this through the analysis of the aesthetic approach of G. K. Chesterton. From his aesthetic reflections, it can be ascertained that to revitalize daily life, the object must be expansive and the subject, restrictive, from a certain méthodos and according to patterns that qualify an everyday aesthetic experience. All of this seeks to pave the way for subsequent investigations of EA being both expansive and restrictive. Finally, it is argued that this Chestertonian EA converges with and extends the aesthetics of design of Jane Forsey, and thus shows that design itself can be revitalized in keeping with a restrictiveexpansive approach to everyday aesthetics. Conclusion: aesthetics should be expansive every day, in that it should concern itself with any aspect of daily life, and restrictive, in that it should set certain limits on the self and its intentions with regard to the possibilities of aesthetic experience.


Author(s):  
Allen Carlson

Environmental aesthetics is one of the major new areas of aesthetics to have emerged in the last part of the twentieth century. It focuses on philosophical issues concerning appreciation of the world at large as it is constituted not simply by particular objects but also by environments themselves. In this way environmental aesthetics goes beyond the appreciation of art to the aesthetic appreciation of both natural and human environments. The development of environmental aesthetics has been influenced by eighteenth-century landscape aesthetics as well as by two recent factors: the exclusive focus of twentieth-century philosophical aesthetics on art and the public concern for the aesthetic condition of environments that developed in the second half of that century. Both factors have broadened the scope of environmental aesthetics beyond that of traditional aesthetics, and both have helped to set the central philosophical issues of the field, which are due in large measure to the differences between the nature of the object of appreciation of environmental aesthetics, the world at large, and the nature of art. These differences are so marked that environmental aesthetics must begin with most basic questions, such as ‘what’ and ‘how’ to appreciate. These questions have generated a number of different philosophical positions, which are typically classified as either noncognitive or cognitive approaches. Positions of the first type stress various kinds of emotional and feeling-related states and responses, which are taken to be the more noncognitive dimensions of aesthetic experience. By contrast, positions of the second type contend that appreciation must be guided by the nature of objects of appreciation and thus that knowledge about their origins, types and properties is necessary for serious, appropriate aesthetic appreciation. Each of these two kinds of approach has certain strengths and weaknesses. However, recent work in environmental aesthetics, especially in the aesthetics of human environments and everyday life, demonstrates that although different in emphasis, they are not in direct conflict. When conjoined, they advocate bringing together feeling and knowing, which is the core of serious aesthetic experience and which, when achieved in aesthetic appreciation of different environments of the world at large, demonstrates just how rewarding such appreciation can be.


Author(s):  
Fernando Fogliano ◽  
Hosana Celeste Oliveira

This paper presents some considerations regarding the aesthetic experience from a neuroaesthetic point of view. The approach proposed here can take the discussions beyond the field of art allowing the aesthetic experience to be considered as a key aspect of subjectivity and interactions in the world. A reflection on the roles of emotion and language as fundamental aspects of the aesthetic experience is presented. Based on this reflection, some assumptions that are at the core of culture are made and re-framed here considering the postmodern turn.


Author(s):  
Johannes Riquet

Drawing on (post-)phenomenological and geopoetic perspectives, the introduction explains the book’s interest in considering islands at the intersection of material and poetic production on the one hand, and aesthetic experience of the phenomenal world on the other. It suggests that the modern experience of islands in the age of discovery went hand in hand with a disintegration of received models of understanding global space, and that fictional and non-fictional representations of islands negotiate these perceptual challenges. It thereby explains how The Aesthetic of Island Space complicates the common account of islands as discrete shapes, geometrical abstractions, and easily understandable images. Instead, it foregrounds the importance of water, mobility, and a range of dynamic geo(morpho)logical and poetic processes in the figuration of islands. The introduction ends by discussing the significance of considering islands in relation to an ‘aesthetics of the earth’ (DeLoughrey and Handley) and a poetics of the material world.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 2
Author(s):  
Clément Canonne

Is there something peculiar in our appreciation of improvised music? How does knowing that the music we are listening to is improvised affect our experience? As a first step in answering these questions, I have conducted an experiment in which an audio recording of the very same piece of music – a saxophone/clarinet freely improvised duet – was presented to 16 listeners, either as an improvisation ("IMPRO" condition), or as the live performance of a composition for saxophone and clarinet ("COMPO" condition). Listeners were encouraged both to reflect on their listening experience and to describe in their own words the music they heard. First, evaluative judgments were strongly different in the two listening conditions: listeners approached the piece with specific sets of values in mind, by relying on different features or different kinds of criteria (aesthetic ones in the COMPO condition vs ethical ones in the IMPRO condition) to ground their appreciative judgments. Second, and maybe more importantly, listening experiences were quite different in the two conditions: in the COMPO condition, the piece was more commonly experienced as a sonic product, with listeners paying great attention to the various acoustical effects achieved by the musicians and to the overall structure (or lack thereof); in the IMPRO condition, the music was often described as a kind of communicational or relational process, with descriptions that largely interweaved music-specific terms and more broadly social terms. Overall, this experiment shows that our listening experience can be dramatically affected by modal considerations, i.e., by how we think the music was produced. More specifically, it sheds some light on what constitutes the core of the aesthetic experience of improvisation by exhibiting what is centrally at play (and what is not) when we listen to collectively improvised music.


2016 ◽  
Vol 106 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Ábel Tamás

ABSTRACTThis article argues for a ‘reciprocal intertextuality’ between Catullus 64 and Lucretius anticipating the poetic interplays of Augustan poets with theDe Rerum Natura. Catullus’ wedding guests (proto-readers), Ariadne (proto-Narcissus), and Aegeus (proto-Dido) are interpreted here aserrantesin the Lucretian sense: through their erroneous gazes presented in Poem 64, they all exemplify hownotto gaze at the structure of the universe. In the Lucretio-Catullan intertextual space — generated, as it seems, by the Catullan text — a reciprocal way of reading emerges: while, on the one hand, ‘Catullus’ uses ‘Lucretius’ to show that the aesthetic experience he offers is dependent upon an erroneous, unLucretian gaze/reading which deprives us of the external spectator position, ‘Lucretius’, on the other hand, uses ‘Catullan’ characters as deterrent examples in order to teach us hownotto submerge in ‘Catullus’ poetics of illusion’.


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