What is better-- to live a short and glorious life, or to live a long and easy one; a short life of stunning achievments which are talked about well into history-- or La dolce vita?
I am preparing to start work on a new translation project for a philosophy professor I have worked with for several years now at a larg national university here in Japan. Going through some of the supplementary papers he wanted me to read, I discovered Wolfgang Welsch.
A philosophy professor at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Welsch works in aesthetics and is somewhat well-known in Japan (perhaps even more than in the US where his books are harder to find).
I am reading Chapter 1 of his Book, Undoing Aesthetics. The chapter is particularly interesting in light of my recent recollections of Heidegger and our Post-Modern paradigm. You will recall, that in my last Post, I began by laying out Heidegger's concept of "the clearing" -- or the history of the various understandings of being that have characterized Western European civilization. From heroes and saints to Kantian maturity and post-modern resources, Heidegger paints the history of the West in terms of cultural paradigms which he thinks have served as the background social practices that inform behavior and thinking.
Reading Welsch, I believe he would not disagree with this. However, he wants to stress the aesthetic dimension to this. Based on Nietzshe (who gets this from Kant), Welsch writes that
Nietzshe showed that our representations of reality not only contain fundamental aesthetic elements but are wholly aesthetic in nature. Reality is a construct which we produce, like artisans with fictional means-- through forms of intuition, projections, ohantasms, pictures and so on. Cognition is fondationally a metaphorical activity. The human is animal fingens. (22)
Animal fingens.
Like artists or virtuostic constructors we create forms of orientation, which must be as movably and elastically constituted as reality itself is fluid and changeaful. All our forms of orientation are aesthetic in a threefold sense: they are produced poetically, structured with fictional means, and in their whole mode of being of that floating anf fragile nature which had traditionally been attested only to aestheticc phenomena and had only been considered possible with these (22).
Now, my Professor in Hiroshima is interested in this expanded notion of aesthetics as it will help him, he believes, get beyond the narrow understanding of arts and aesthetics (specifically that of "the fine arts") that has held sway (dominated) the field of art history for a century or more in Japan. Indeed, the Western concept of fine arts versus crafts was totally alien to the Japanese and runs counter-intuitive to the traditional view of the arts that have informed Japanese thought on the subject for centuries.
I am also very interested in this topic, but more I am interested in the way Welsch is characterizing the manner in which human beings construct their various understandings of being as something which is fundamentally aesthetic in quality. I think it is an interesting point.
However, what I am having a bit less success in understanding is his idea that our Post modern situation can be viewed in terms of an "aestheticization process." This sounds like a good thing-- as if everything is becoming more beautiful or pleasant (in the sense of a Disneylandification) but that is not necessarily all that Welsch is talking about.
In what he calls surface aestheticization , Welsch describes contemporary life as being concerned with the aestheticization of urban spaces ("a program to further the kitsch"); aestheticization of our bodies and even the aestheticization of own psychological states (or "the aesthetic spiritualization of our souls"). Hence, prettified store fronts, hard bodies, beautiful noses and meditation retreats in Colorado as he describes it.
Tying in to my long post yesterday about Philistinism, Welsch sees this as focusing our cultural practices so that:
In surface aestheticization the most superficial aesthetic aesthitic value dominates: pleasure, amusement, enjoyment without consequence. This animatory trend today reaches far beyond the aesthetic enshroudment of individual everyday items-- beyond the styling of objects and experience-loaded ambiances. It is increasingly determining the form of our culture as a whole. Experience and entertainment have become the guidelines in recent years. A society of leisure and experience is served by an expanding culture of festivals and fun. And whilst some of the all too strident offshoots of aestheticization, or singular aspects of the cosmetics of reality, might raise a smile, with its extension to culture as a whole, this is no longer a laughing matter.
Both Heidegger and Welsch seem to be describing similar phenemomena-- and neither, it seems are happy about what they see. I guess my main problem with Welsch is while I am interested in his seeing the aesthetic aspect of epistemology (the fictive elements or aesthetic foundations of things like scientificic theory or world-view constructing), still I am not convinced that we have become homo aestheticus.
The ancient Greeks, after all, were also very focused on beauty. Beautiful bodies, beautiful clothing and jewelry, the finest harpists and choruses, gorgeous theater and pagentry, banquets and love affairs. The Odyssey is intoxicatingly full of references to craftsmanship and finery...
Welsch is desribing a different kind of aesthetic focus I think, which is not completely clear to me. But he insists that everything is being "aestheticized."
He is best, I think, in his essay, Sport as Art, in which he traces the manner in which sports has moved from being conceived ethically (ie, Mathew Arnold's famous conception of "sport builds character") to that of an aestheticized form of amusement. Interestingly, though I'm not very sporty, still I think I still see sports in the older light, as something that should be "good for you"-- mind over matter, etc. Welsch does a really fine job, however, tracing the way sports is no longer viewed as an edifying practice which is an essential part of a proper education. Now, he says, "Sport has become a show for the amusmement of the entertainment society."
Yes, la dolche vita.
Still across Adonis' empire-- whether East or West, I am not necessarily seeing a rule of taste in the manner in which he is describing exactly. A hedonism yes. A philistinism, absolutely. At the same time, however, I would posit something quite different, and that is that our imaginative and creative powers and aesthetic sense is actually diminishing, and even what he describes as being an aesthicization is more like a useful prettification or efficient standardization of form and type....
Self-creation and Richard Rorty's poeticized culture? ( see this) It is also interesting in terms of Shusterman's thinking on modern aesthetics, body focus (somaaesthetics: see this) and pragmatism... Yes, the pragmatists-- they remain impossible to ignore.
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