Practicing Pragmatist Aesthetics: Critical Perspectives on the Arts [1 ed.] 9789401210812, 9789042038363

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PRACTICING PRAGMATIST AESTHETICS

VIBS Volume 275 Robert Ginsberg Founding Editor Leonidas Donskis Executive Editor Associate Editors G. John M. Abbarno Richard T. Hull George Allan Michael Krausz Gerhold K. Becker Olli Loukola Raymond Angelo Belliotti Mark Letteri Kenneth A. Bryson Vincent L. Luizzi C. Stephen Byrum Hugh P. McDonald Robert A. Delfino Adrianne McEvoy Rem B. Edwards J.D. Mininger Malcolm D. Evans Danielle Poe Roland Faber Peter A. Redpath Andrew Fitz-Gibbon Arleen L. F. Salles Francesc Forn i Argimon John R. Shook Daniel B. Gallagher Eddy Souffrant William C. Gay Tuija Takala Dane R. Gordon Emil Višňovský J. Everet Green Anne Waters Heta Aleksandra Gylling James R. Watson Matti Häyry John R. Welch Brian G. Henning Thomas Woods Steven V. Hicks a volume in Central European Value Studies CEVS Emil Višňovský, Editor

PRACTICING PRAGMATIST AESTHETICS Critical Perspectives on the Arts

Edited by

Wojciech Małecki

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014

The present scholarly publication was funded, in the period of 2012-2014, by a program of the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education under the name of “National Program for the Development of the Humanities. Cover illustration: Louise Bourgeois: Maman, 1999. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Stainless steel, bronze, marble, 927 x 891 x 1023 cm. © John Talbot | Flickr Cover design: Studio Pollmann The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3836-3 E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-1081-2 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014 Printed in the Netherlands

CONTENTS Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction

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Pragmatist Aesthetics: History and Hope WOJCIECH MAŁECKI Part One: RETHINKING (PRAGMATIST) AESTHETICS

ONE

The Invention of Pragmatist Aesthetics: Genealogical Reflections on a Notion and a Name RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

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TWO

The Art of Experience: Dewey on the Aesthetic SCOTT R. STROUD

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THREE

Pragmatic Objectivity and the Grounds of Validity of Aesthetic Judgments ROBERTO FREGA

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FOUR

Understanding, Interpretation, Art, and Neopragmatism ALEXANDER KREMER

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Part Two: RETHINKING THE ARTS FIVE

John Dewey and 20th-Century Art KRYSTYNA WILKOSZEWSKA

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SIX

Writing as Complete Gesture: A Pragmatist View of Creativity 95 GIOVANNI MADDALENA

SEVEN

Wallace Stevens’s Pragmatist Poetics of Plenitude KACPER BARTCZAK

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EIGHT

Pragmatist Aesthetics and Cinematic Experience: Emerson, Dewey, and Shusterman JEROLD J. ABRAMS

127

NINE

Embodied Creation and Perception in Visual Art ELSE MARIE BUKDAHL

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Contents

vi TEN

Practicing Aesthetics among Nonhuman Somas in the Age of Biotech MONIKA BAKKE

153

ELEVEN

Eating as an Aesthetic Experience BARBARA FORMIS

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TWELVE

Somaesthetics and the Art of Eating DOROTA KOCZANOWICZ

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THIRTEEN

Somaesthetics in Japan as Practicing Pragmatist Aesthetics SATOSHI HIGUCHI

203

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

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INDEX

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Acknowledgments This volume is part of the research project Practicing Pragmatist Aesthetics: Art, Politics, Society, funded by a grant from the National Program for the Development of the Humanities (no. 12H11001180). I would like to thank the director of the project, Professor Leszek Koczanowicz, for his cooperation and encouragement, and the Program for its support. Thanks also go to Ms. Aleksandra Mokrzycka, without whom I cannot even imagine the proper functioning of the whole enterprise, nor its getting off the ground in the first place. Needless to say, I owe a special debt of gratitude to the contributors to this volume. This, however, is not only because they agreed to participate in the project and wrote their papers, but also because of the equanimity with which they bore my questions, suggestions, and other forms of editorial pestering. Thanks extend further to David Schauffler, who proofread the manuscript, and Katarzyna Liszka, who edited the endnotes and prepared the index. The book owes a lot to their efforts. That it eventually found a good home at Rodopi is primarily due to Professor Emil Višňovský and Eric van Broekhuizen. They are to be sincerely thanked for their enthusiasm on the one hand and patience on the other. While working on this volume I was fortunate to have the chance to discuss some of its main ideas and to refine my understanding of pragmatist aesthetics in general at several scholarly events: the conference Rethinking Pragmatist Aesthetics, which took place at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, in Wrocław, Poland, in August and September 2012; the International Symposium in Honor of Richard Rorty, hosted in Buenos Aires in May 2013 by the Post-Graduate Center of Studies on Epistemology and History of Science of the Universidad de Tres de Febrero; and the 19th International Congress of Aesthetics, held in July 2013 in Kraków. Finally, in September 2013, I had the opportunity to give a series of talks on pragmatist aesthetics at two institutions in Beijing, Peking University and Capital Normal University. Each of the aforementioned events was an enriching experience, and I am grateful to everybody who contributed to this. In particular, I would like to thank the organizers: Professors Leszek Koczanowicz, Krystyna Wilkoszewska, Federico Penelas, Verónica Tozzi, Peng Feng, Desheng Wang, Shicong Sun, and Ms. Yaqin Wang. Partly because of all the travelling that it has involved, practicing pragmatist aesthetics has sometimes diverted me from practicing family life. It is perhaps the right place to mention that Karolina, Pola, and Antoni bore this with grace that no aesthetic theory can properly capture and that no words of gratitude can do justice to. Wojciech Małecki

Introduction PRAGMATIST AESTHETICS: HISTORY AND HOPE Wojciech Małecki If pragmatism is a philosophy that celebrates historicity, then it is perhaps quite fitting that the present collection of essays was inspired by a concrete historical event—the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Richard Shusterman’s 1992 Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art.1 Since we had long thought of the book as a crucial factor behind the recent resurgence of interest in its titular subject,2 I and a colleague, Professor Leszek Koczanowicz, decided some time before the anniversary that this might be a good occasion to test the potential of pragmatist aesthetics in a more comprehensive way than had been done before. To this end we established a research project, which eventually took the form of assigning an international group of scholars the task of “practicing” pragmatist aesthetics, that is, of using it to study various artistic phenomena. The present volume is one of the fruits of that project, but before the practicing begins, an explanation is in order of how the term “pragmatist aesthetics” is understood here. It is understood, very broadly, as ‘a tradition of aesthetic inquiry pursued from a pragmatist perspective,’ with its extension including relevant parts of the oeuvres of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Alain Locke, Richard Rorty, Richard Shusterman, Joseph Margolis, Nelson Goodman, Donald Davidson, Mark Johnson, Stanley Fish, and other authors3 who can be counted as pragmatists in a general sense.4 Take, for instance, Dewey on art as experience, Rorty on the novel and reading, Davidson on metaphor and literary language, Shusterman on somaesthetics, and the like.5 While the pragmatist aesthetic tradition is rich in important and interesting works, one of them clearly stands out as seminal, judging by its immense influence across disciplines, cultures, and time. This is John Dewey’s 1934 Art as Experience. The basic theme of that book, a theme which has been picked up by numerous other pragmatist aestheticians, is the “privileging” of “dynamic aesthetic experience over the physical objects that conventional dogma identifies and then fetishizes as art.” 6 As Richard Shusterman explains, For Dewey, the essence and value of art are not in such artifacts per se but in the dynamic and developing experiential activity through which

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WOJCIECH MAŁECKI they are created and perceived. He therefore distinguished between the physical “art product” that, once created, can exist “apart from human experience” and “the actual work of art [which] is what the product does with and in experience.”7

But undermining “object fetishism” is not the only goal Dewey’s aesthetic theory was meant to reach, as it was aimed, too, at liberating art “from its confinement to the traditional domain” of beaux arts: Dewey insisted that aesthetic experience could … occur in the pursuit of science and philosophy, in sport, and in haute cuisine, contributing much to the appeal of these practices. Indeed, it could be achieved in virtually any domain of action, since all experience, to be coherent and meaningful, requires the germ of aesthetic unity and development. By rethinking art in terms of aesthetic experience, Dewey hoped we could radically enlarge and democratize the domain of art, integrating it more fully into the real world, which would be greatly improved by the pursuit of such manifold arts of living.8 Since these aspects of Dewey’s theory, as laid out in Art as Experience, are competently discussed in the essays that follow, I will not try to elaborate on them here, turning instead to one pressing problem faced by anyone who wishes to refer to that theory by the name of pragmatist aesthetics. Namely, despite his being a self-declared pragmatist and having intended Art as Experience as a contribution to aesthetics, Dewey himself did not dub this work “pragmatist” or “pragmatic.” More than that, he tried his best to dissuade such authors as Stephen Pepper and Benedetto Croce from calling it so, stressing that he “did not write [the book] as an appendix to or application of [his] pragmatism,” and that he generally rejected the “subjection” of aesthetic theory “to any system of philosophy.”9 What sense does it make, then, to squeeze Art as Experience into the compartment of pragmatist aesthetics? In answering this question let us observe, first, that while in principle one should always pay attention to what authors state about the meaning of their texts, such interpretations need not be automatically seen as the last word in exegetical disputes, in particular those concerning the attribution of the work in question to a given philosophical movement or tradition. After all, a philosopher may simply be wrong on such issues or she may resist a certain classification for reasons that have little to do with whether she actually judges it historically accurate or not. According to Richard Shusterman, the latter is actually the case with Dewey. In his contribution to this volume, Shusterman (who by the way bears much responsibility for today’s custom of putting Art as Experience under the rubric of pragmatist aesthetics) argues that Dewey in fact did mean the book to be an application of his pragmatism in the realm of aesthetics. He further

Introduction

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suggests that if the latter “never explicitly characterized it as ‘pragmatist aesthetics’ nor even mentioned pragmatism” in its pages, this was mainly because of his fear that the reception of the book might be hampered by the preconception, prevalent at the time of its writing, that pragmatism is unfit for theorizing art. On Shusterman’s interpretation, then, what we are dealing with here is a case of repackaging a certain product in order to reach consumers who might reject it out of hand were its provenance clearly marked on the tin. But experts should not be fooled about the origin of Dewey’s Art as Experience. It is good old pragmatism nevertheless, and for this reason granting the label “pragmatist” to the book seems entirely justified. To sum up, from the perspective adopted in this volume, Art as Experience is definitely a work of pragmatist aesthetics, and may even be considered the most important one in that tradition. This, however, should not be read as implying that all “pragmatist aestheticians” agree with the book’s main tenets. Take, for instance, Rorty’s doubts about the notion of experience lying at the core of Dewey’s aesthetic theory, or his skepticism about the very notion of aesthetics as a field of study, which he denounced as a relic of “another of Kant’s bad ideas—of a piece with the bad idea … of splitting culture into three spheres, one for each of the three Critiques.” 10 Given these and other differences between its representatives, it has to be admitted that pragmatist aesthetics, the way it is conceived in the present volume, certainly does not constitute a monolithic theory. Yet it should also be stressed that when one juxtaposes the views on aesthetic matters that are espoused by pragmatists broadly conceived, interesting resemblances begin to emerge, and there seem to be enough such resemblances to treat those authors as belonging to one family, that of pragmatist aesthetics precisely. Some of those resemblances do come to light in the present volume, which, despite its focus on Dewey and Shusterman,11 engages also with the work of Emerson, Peirce, James, Rorty, Margolis, Davidson, and Fish. While the volume’s main goal is to employ pragmatist aesthetics in studying concrete artistic phenomena, its first section is set up to provide a wider background for such studies by sketching the history of pragmatist reflection on the aesthetic and by discussing some of the main positions that this history has produced. Its opening chapter, by Richard Shusterman himself, is a narrative of the peripities of the term and concept of pragmatist aesthetics, which he begins by reconstructing the aesthetic conceptions of Peirce and James and showing what they have in common with Dewey’s views presented in Art as Experience. Then, after providing an account of the latter’s refusal to label that book a work in pragmatist aesthetics, Shusterman explains, with the help of rich empirical data, his own role in making that label stick to it nevertheless and become a recognizable, and recognized, signifier in academic discourse. The second chapter, written by Scott Stroud, provides an overview of the main elements of Dewey’s aesthetics, including the most important of them:

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Dewey’s conception of aesthetic experience. On Stroud’s account, Dewey understands this kind of experience as one that is “consummatory” and possessed of a pervading quality (“a qualitative feeling”) which unifies it structurally while making it both stand out from, and organically connect with, the humdrum of everyday life. Stroud further explains how this conception allows Dewey not only to “extend” the philosophical categories of the aesthetic and the artistic to phenomena that have been traditionally thought to fall outside of their scope (in fact, potentially, “to any activity” of “a living organism”), but also to offer instructive hints on how to make more of our everyday lives aesthetic in quality. The starting point of Roberto Frega’s chapter is Dewey’s views on the objectivity of critical judgments. Frega juxtaposes these views with the theory of interpretation put forward by Joseph Margolis only to observe that each of these positions, while in principle valuable, can and should be corrected by the other. On his reading, the problem with Dewey’s position is that through its reliance on, inter alia, a standard of “normal experience” it “loses most of its grip” when confronted with “contemporary art.” The fault of Margolis’s theory, in turn, is that it programmatically refuses to offer any advice on how to discriminate “between competing interpretations” and on “how the objectivity of interpretation can be effectively vindicated.” What Frega himself eventually argues for is a hybrid position he calls “the DeweyMargolis thesis,” which he summarizes as holding that “objectivity is an immanent potentiality of aesthetic judgment.” Like Frega’s, Alexander Kremer’s contribution is an exercise in comparative philosophy, yet instead of remaining within the circle of pragmatism it brings the latter into dialogue with the philosophical hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer. The dialogue, admittedly, has its tensions, which result mainly from a major theoretical difference Kremer sees between the two Germans on the one hand and some members of the pragmatist family on the other. To be precise, Kremer effectively sets Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s conceptions of understanding and interpretation as a positive standard for distinguishing between those pragmatist theories which, according to him, are unable to sustain a philosophical aesthetics (namely, the conceptions of Rorty and Fish) and those that are quite fit for the task (Dewey’s and Shusterman’s). His point is that, unlike Gadamer, Heidegger, and the two latter pragmatists, Fish and Rorty fail to fully recognize the role of the nondiscursive in our understanding and interpretation of the world (including artworks), and that anyone who is guilty of this error “cannot understand correctly the mode of art’s being, that is, its functioning and effects.” The main section of the book, titled “Rethinking the Arts,” opens with Krystyna Wilkoszewska’s chapter, which aims to reconstruct “Dewey’s attitude to 20th century art going through its subsequent stages and transformations,” including avant-garde and neo avant-garde as well as popular, environmental, and multimedia art. According to Wilkoszewska,

Introduction

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from this confrontation with the 20 th century Dewey emerges triumphant, as a thinker whose Art as Experience provides a rich resource for theorizing not only the art and culture of that period, but also the most recent transformations in the artistic world and beyond. Referring to the initial reception of Dewey’s aesthetic opus magnum, Wilkoszewska finishes her chapter by sharing with us her astonishment at the fact that “a book written in the 1930s has more to say to aestheticians today than it had to say to aestheticians when it was first published.” Giovanni Maddalena’s chapter begins with the observation that while classical pragmatists, including Dewey, “stressed the importance of a kind of reasoning that would broaden knowledge in a synthetic way,” the intellectual instruments they devised for that purpose “remain an analytic way to approach synthetic reasoning,” even though “their [own] researches pointed toward a complete synthetic pattern, where synthesis is achieved through synthetic tools.” According to Maddalena, one particularly powerful tool of this latter kind is pointed out by Peircean semiotics, and he devotes his contribution to explaining how it operates in literary writing. The instrument he has in mind is what he dubs “complete gesture” and defines as a “meaningful action ... that blends together signs [i.e. the three basic kinds of signs Peirce discerns—icons, indices, and symbols] in a certain intentional and equal way.” This definition certainly sounds cryptic, and I could not make it sound significantly less so within the space that the format of editor’s introduction permits. Yet fortunately Maddalena fleshes out his position, illustrating it, moreover, with gripping material taken from the novel Life and Fate by Soviet author Vassily Grossman. Despite Maddalena’s focus on the presence of complete gestures in literary writing, the ultimate lesson his contribution conveys is that they may appear in any meaningful human practice whatsoever and “display the way in which creativity [in general] grasps the too-complicated experience of reality.” The topic of literary writing is followed up in Kacper Bartczak’s chapter, devoted to the trope of metaphor. Its main anchoring point, however, is not Peirce but Davidson, and its chosen literary material comes not from fiction, but from poetry, that of Wallace Stevens. If essays that adopt a philosophical position in reading and theorizing literary texts most often reduce the latter to mere supporting evidence for the former, Bartczak’s does something refreshingly different as it shows how Davidson’s philosophy of language can be augmented by insights drawn from the poetics of Stevens. Put in simplest terms, the lesson is that a poet such as Stevens simply does not know what a novel metaphor that occurs in his or her poem means. He is attracted by a certain “constellation of words,” but the semantic content of the resulting metaphorical utterance remains but a vague promise to him, and as a result he cannot provide any hints on how to interpret his own metaphor. This, as Bartczak sees it, flies in the face of Davidson’s contention that the metaphor is as controlled by the producer’s intentions as other deviations from the communicative convention. And yet, despite this instability, the poet is tied to

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his metaphors. The true Davidsonian insight is that the metaphor is an ongoing commitment which will evolve, revealing to the poet such as Stevens his future selves; that insight, argues Bartczak, can in turn be usefully linked to Richard Shusterman’s aesthetics of self-creation. It has already been mentioned that Dewey vigorously protested against calling his aesthetics “pragmatist” or “pragmatic.” In order to contextualize Jerold J. Abrams’s chapter, it is worth adding that one reason Dewey gave for this is that he reserved the label “pragmatism” for his theory of knowledge, with which, allegedly, his aesthetics did not have much in common.12 Now, what Abrams does is exactly something Dewey denied he himself had ever done, and tried to discourage others from doing, namely, to apply Deweyan epistemological conceptions to aesthetic matters. He looks at cinematic experience from the perspective of Dewey’s critique of the so-called spectator theory of knowledge and of his instrumentalism, whose roots he finds in Aristotle and Emerson and its newest sprouts in Shusterman’s somaesthetics. Whatever Dewey himself might have said about the very idea of such an explicitly instrumentalist approach to film, handled by Abrams it generates an intriguing theory of “cinematic experience,” which, importantly, is perfectly consistent with what Dewey says on aesthetic experience in his 1934 masterpiece. It generates, too, no less intriguing readings of Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr., Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is quite a feat in itself, given how many interpretations these classics have accrued throughout the decades of the hermeneutic wheels of film criticism turning around them. Else Marie Bukdahl’s paper is the first of the several chapters of the book that deal primarily with Shusterman’s somaesthetics, an interdisciplinary field which branched out from his research on pragmatist aesthetics and is “devoted to the critical, ameliorative study of one’s experience and use of one’s body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation (aesthesis) and creative self-fashioning.”13 The task that Bukdahl, an art historian, sets for herself is to show how various theses espoused by Shusterman (e.g., that “The value of ... limit-experiences lies ... in their power to transform us by showing us the limits of our conventional experience”) find confirmation in concrete works of art, and how these latter can be usefully interpreted from a somaesthetic perspective. Among the works she discusses are Jeppe Hein’s “social benches,” Louise Bourgeois’ Maman (“a nine-meter tall spider, modelled in bronze”), and some equally interesting others. If Bukdahl’s essay emphasizes the potential of somaesthetics, then Monika Bakke’s chapter aims to expose and transgress what she takes to be somaesthetics’ fundamental limitation, namely its general anthropocentric approach. Her point is that while Shusterman does recognize, in theory, the importance of non-human bodies for the somaesthetic enterprise, he rarely, if ever, pursues that line of inquiry in practice. Yet, according to Bakke, a closer engagement with those bodies is an inevitability for somaesthetics, as should

Introduction

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become obvious for anyone following its main tenets to their ultimate logical conclusions. Through its relative neglect of the question of non-human bodies, argues Bakke, Shusterman’s work in somaesthetics lags behind not only the life sciences, but also contemporary art, which addresses that question through the works of, for instance, Sonja Bäumel, Beatriz da Costa, Miya Masaoka, and Allison Kudla, all four of whom are discussed in the chapter. Barbara Formis’s contribution aims to present eating as a glaring example of how traditional philosophical aesthetics is limited in its understanding of human practices as aesthetic or artistic in quality. According to Formis, the two main reasons why eating has been “devalued” within that philosophical field are the latter’s reliance on Aristotle’s distinction between poiesis and praxis and its “downgrading” of senses other than sight and hearing.14 It is here that Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics reveals its “critical force”15 since, rejecting the Aristotelian dualism and insisting on the continuity of art and life through its notion of aesthetic experience, it is ready to treat the consumption of food as art indeed. In this respect Dewey’s theory is apparently in accord with contemporary artistic practice, and Formis treats us to a rich menu of alimentative experiments performed by such artists as Alison Knowles and Bengt Af Klintberg. However she concludes by stating that these works also allow us to detect a certain flaw in Dewey’s (otherwise commendable) aesthetics; namely, its reliance, in theorizing aesthetic experience, on “classical conceptions of unity and subjectivity.” Turning to Dorota Koczanowicz’s paper, let me recall that one of the main impulses behind the invention of somaesthetics, at least on Shusterman’s own account, was to provide a “structuring overview or architectonic to integrate … [the] very different, seemingly incommensurable discourses [of contemporary body theory] into a more productively systematic field,” capable of effectively addressing the problems of contemporary body culture.16 Convinced that it has succeeded in this task, Koczanowicz attempts to yoke somaesthetics to alleviating one of the most pressing of these problems, namely that of the pathologies which affect our dietary habits. She argues that many of those stem from our tendency to eat in an insufficiently conscious way, by which she means that not only do we lack “knowledge about our organism’s nutritional needs and knowledge about the products that we consume,” but we also do not pay proper attention to the very act of eating when we perform it. As she attempts to show in her chapter, such deficient dietary consciousness can be corrected with the help of somaesthetics, which can also teach us how to practice eating as an art. With Satoshi Higuchi’s contribution, concerned mostly with “health regimes” and body therapies, not only do we continue moving further beyond the thematics of traditional philosophical aesthetics, but also cross the boundary of Western culture, as the chapter is propelled by the goal of assessing the “difficulties” and “possibilities” of practicing Shusterman’s somaesthetics in Japan. One of the former, for instance, is related to the rigid

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separation in Japanese academic discourse of “theory” and “practice,” which poses a considerable challenge for somaesthetics to the extent that this discipline involves both the theoretical study of the body as locus of aesthesis and engagement in actual physical activities aimed at sharpening our somatic consciousness. However, as Higuchi argues, given the widespread acceptance of that aim in Japan, the popularity enjoyed there by various methods of achieving it (including some of those explicitly recommended by somaesthetics), as well as the country’s “long tradition of placing practice at the center of art,” the somaesthetic project has “tremendous possibilities” to install itself firmly in Japanese academia, and thereby to corrode the aforementioned distinction itself. Now, since the last three chapters may seem to some to stretch the notion of art in a particularly unjustified way, let me return, by way of conclusion, to one of the most fundamental aspects of Dewey’s theory; namely its underlying hope that by “rethinking art in terms of aesthetic experience” one can “radically enlarge and democratize the domain of art, integrating it more fully into the real world which would be greatly improved by the pursuit of such manifold arts of living.” Irrespective of whether Dewey and like-minded pragmatists will eventually be proven right in holding such hopes, it is worth remembering, in assessing their work, that they employ the notion of aesthetic experience not in order to concoct theories and definitions that would match our current understanding of the noun “art,” but rather to modify that understanding itself.17 Pragmatism may celebrate historicity and see itself as its own time held in thought, but this certainly does not condemn it to holding on to the status quo—in aesthetics and otherwise.18

NOTES 1. Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992). Cf. the second, extended edition of the book, published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2000. For a discussion of the historicist dimension of pragmatism, see Colin Koopman, Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 2. Another important book that has had an impact in this respect is Thomas M. Alexander’s John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987). 3. For other attempts at grouping some of the aforementioned authors under the rubric of pragmatist aesthetics, see Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics; “From Natural Roots to Cultural Radicalism: Pragmatist Aesthetics in Alain Locke and John Dewey” and “Pragmatism and Culture: Margolis and Rorty,” Surface and Depth: Dialectics of Criticism and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 123-138, 191-207; “Art in Action, Art Infraction: Goodman, Rap, Pragmatism (New Reality Mix),” Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 131-153. Cf. the papers included in

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“Pragmatist Aesthetics. Art, Experience, and Practices of Art” (ed. Lyubov Bugaeva), Pragmatism Today, 4:1 (2013), pp. 72-126. 4. It needs to be noted that the question of the identity of pragmatism as a philosophical movement is a vexed one, and the broad understanding of pragmatism endorsed in the present volume owes its inspiration to the views of Richard Rorty and Richard Shusterman. See, e.g., Richard Rorty, “Response to Richard Bernstein,” Rorty & Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics, ed. Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995), p. 69; Shusterman, Practicing Philosophy, e.g., p. 7. Cf. Susan Haack, “Pragmatism Old and New,” Contemporary Pragmatism, 1:1 (2004), pp. 1-41; Michael Eldridge, “Adjectival and Generic Pragmatism: Problems and Possibilities,” Human Affairs, 19:1 (2009), pp. 10-18; Cheryl Misak, The American Pragmatists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 5. See John Dewey, Art as Experience, in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 10, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987); Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Donald Davidson, “James Joyce and Humpty Dumpty” and “Locating Literary Language,” Truth, Language, and History (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005), pp. 143-157, 167-181; Richard Shusterman, Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2012). 6. Richard Shusterman, Performing Live: Aesthetic Alternatives for the Ends of Arts (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), p. 22. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. John Dewey, “Comment on Foregoing Criticisms,” The Later Works, 1925-1953, Volume 15, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), p. 98. Cf. Alexander, John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature, p. 6. 10. Rorty, “Response to Richard Shusterman,” Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, ed. Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), p. 156. 11. For more on Shusterman’s work, see, e.g., the essays contained in Barbara Formis (ed.), Penser en Corps: Soma-esthétique, art et philosophie (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009); Dorota Koczanowicz and Wojciech Małecki (eds.), Shusterman’s Pragmatism: Between Literature and Somaesthetics (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2012); and in Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education, 1 (2010), as well as the special symposia devoted to it, published in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 16:1 (2002), pp. iv–38, and in The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 36:4 (2002), pp. 84–115. Cf. Wojciech Małecki, Embodying Pragmatism: Richard Shusterman’s Philosophy and Literary Theory (Frankfurt am Main-New York: Peter Lang, 2010). 12. Dewey, “A Comment on Foregoing Criticisms,” p. 97. 13. Shusterman, Performing Live, p. 138. See also Richard Shusterman, Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Cf. the already vast secondary literature on the subject: e.g., Jerold J. Abrams, “Pragmatism, Artificial Intelligence, and Posthuman Bioethics: Shusterman, Rorty, Foucault,” Human Studies, 27 (2004), pp. 241–258; Peter J. Arnold, “Somaesthetics, Education, and the Art of Dance,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, 39:1 (2005), pp. 48–64; Eric C. Mullis, “Performative Somaesthetics: Principles and Scope,” Journal of Aesthetic

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Education, 40:4 (2006), pp. 114–117; Bryan S. Turner, “Somaesthetics and the Critique of Cartesian Dualism,” Body & Society, 14:3 (2008), pp. 129–133. For Shusterman’s own reflections on the reception of somaesthetics, see, for example, Richard Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and the Revival of Aesthetics,” Filozofski Vestnik, 28:2 (2007), pp. 135–149. 14. Cf. Carolyn Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). 15. Cf. Russell Pryba, “Dewey, Somaesthetics, and the Cultivation of (Gustatory) Taste,” Affect, Aesthetics, and the Body, ed. John Golden and Wojciech Małecki, a special issue of “Pragmatism Today”, 3:2 (2012), pp. 40-49. 16. Shusterman, Performing Live, p. 141. 17. See, e.g., Scott R. Stroud, John Dewey and the Artful Life: Pragmatism, Aesthetics, and Morality (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), p. 91. 18. See Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. ix.

Part One RETHINKING (PRAGMATIST) AESTHETICS

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One THE INVENTION OF PRAGMATIST AESTHETICS: GENEALOGICAL REFLECTIONS ON A NOTION AND A NAME Richard Shusterman I “What’s in a name?” asks Juliet, rhetorically, to bravely argue that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” while urging that Romeo simply “doff” or “deny” his name yet still retain his true identity with all his “dear perfection.” Shakespeare’s play sadly reveals, however, that names (including family names) do have something in them; often possessing enduringly potent meanings and connotations, because they have histories that continue to shape their present referents. If the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet shows just how difficult it is to doff, deny, or escape the troublesome meanings of a name, then contemporary cognitive psychology likewise reveals how a name’s associations even affect our basic sensory perceptions. Learning that a fragrant smell is not a rose scent but carries the name of a poisonous berry, chemical concoction, or rodent secretion will make that smell less sweet. Advertising displays the persuasive power of names; they can attract people to a product or turn them off it. Philosophical ideas, theories, and movements also have names; and their form and fortunes may be significantly influenced by the names they bear. Such names, although the products of prior history, can result in radically reshaping a philosophical tradition. Names can even serve to create a tradition, as William James indeed did with the term “pragmatism”, which he borrowed from C.S. Peirce’s pragmatic principle of meaning and then coupled with older ideas of empiricist pluralism and American reformist meliorism to boldly launch a new philosophical movement. With apparent self-consciousness of the act and power of naming, he titled its first book Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, and he predicted it would be “epoch-making,” creating a movement that would radically transform our culture’s thinking in a way “something quite like the protestant reformation.”1 Though this ambitious prediction has

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yet to be realized, pragmatism has certainly been a powerful player in the culture of the past hundred years, not only in American philosophy but also internationally in diverse cultural fields. Aesthetics is one such field where pragmatism’s impact has recently been most strongly felt. Yet aesthetics was initially a very marginal field for pragmatist philosophy. Neither Peirce nor James wrote any books or articles on this field, and John Dewey turned to it only late in his career, publishing his massive masterpiece, Art as Experience, in 1934, the year he turned seventy-five.2 Though understandably regarded as the founding document of pragmatist aesthetics, Dewey’s book in fact never advances any theory with that name. Not only does Dewey refrain from using the term “pragmatist aesthetics” (or cognate terms like “pragmatic aesthetics” or “aesthetic pragmatism”), he does not even deploy the term “pragmatism” in that book. This omission, as my essay will show, was deliberate, strategic, and sustained. Initially, though I realized Dewey disliked the notion of “pragmatist aesthetics,” I did not fully acknowledge how emphatically he rejected it, when I strategically hailed him as my principal inspiration in formulating a new, explicitly pragmatist theory of art for post-Deweyan contemporary culture in Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art, whose first edition was published in 1992.3 Now, twenty years later, when the term “pragmatist aesthetics” has evidently achieved considerable currency, denoting a stream of thought sufficiently established to generate conferences and research grants as well as articles and books, it makes good sense to inquire how this term and notion originated, gained prevalence, and was retrospectively read back onto Dewey (and other early pragmatist thinkers).4 This essay provides a genealogical inquiry into the name and notion of pragmatist aesthetics. In the next section, I briefly sketch the aesthetic views of pragmatism’s three founding fathers (Peirce, James, and Dewey), suggesting why they never formulated those views in any theory designated by a term like “pragmatist aesthetics.” The essay then examines (in section III) how Dewey’s aesthetics (although the paradigm flower of pragmatist aesthetics avant la lettre) was nonetheless criticized for being not sufficiently pragmatist and how Dewey argued that it indeed was never intended to be a distinctively pragmatist aesthetics. The subsequent section pursues the genealogical question of how the term “pragmatist aesthetics” was established in post-Deweyan times and then applied to Dewey to enlist him for the neopragmatist aesthetic project. By retracing how and why I first came to use this term, this study reveals (to my own retrospective surprise) that my initial steps toward pragmatist aesthetics were not in fact stimulated by Dewey, though he soon became my major inspiration. The essay’s closing section considers the growth of pragmatist aesthetics in the past few decades by providing empirical data on how the term’s usage (and that of cognate terms) has expanded. I do this by examining its usage not only before and after

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Dewey’s Art as Experience, but also, more specifically and significantly, after Pragmatist Aesthetics was published in 1992. II Besides originating pragmatism, C.S. Peirce founded the field of semiotics, and his path-breaking contributions to the logic of symbols and interpretation have considerably impacted aesthetics and literary theory. Peirce, however, never formulated a theory of art or any other sustained analysis of issues in aesthetics. He even described himself as “incompetent” in this philosophical field, although he claimed to have a keen aesthetic appreciation and noted the importance of the aesthetic dimension in at least three ways.5 Appreciative of the role of play in creative expression and thought (which he tried to capture through an intriguing concept he called “musement”), Peirce also highlighted the immediately felt quality of experience as his first category of consciousness or “Firstness”. This immediately felt quality was likewise emphasized and developed by James in The Principles of Psychology and then transformed by Dewey into the key notion of the unifying immediate quality that defines aesthetic experience and indeed art. 6 Peirce, moreover, affirmed aesthetics as ultimately subsuming the normative sciences of logic and ethics because “the logically good is simply a particular species of the morally good” and “the morally good appears as a particular species of the esthetically good.”7 If “Ethics is the science of the method of bringing Self-Control to bear” to gain what we desire, Peirce argued, “what one ought to desire … will be to make [one’s] life beautiful, admirable. Now the science of the Admirable is true Esthetics.”8 Such continuity of the aesthetic with ethical and logical thinking is developed more fully in the pragmatism of James and Dewey. Despite his keen aesthetic taste, wide culture, and early ambition for a career in painting, William James refrained from formulating any treatise in philosophical aesthetics. Indeed, he explicitly condemned the field because he thought that the formal principles and discursive definitions of philosophical aesthetics necessarily fail to capture the crucial nameless subtleties of art that make all the difference in aesthetic experience. The same general definition or verbal category (e.g. novel, symphony, triptych, etc.) could equally apply to a work of genius or a work of mechanical dullness. He believed that the general formulae, abstract principles, and verbal criteria that philosophical aesthetics offers simply cannot do justice to the nameless qualities that make aesthetic experience so powerful and that make works of art so different in value and in spirit, even if these works can be described in similar terms. “The difference between the first- and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition—it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind—yet what miles away in point of preciousness! Absolutely the same verbal formula applies to the supreme success and the thing that just misses it, and yet verbal formulas are all your aesthetics will give.”9 German

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philosophers, renowned for their conceptual systematizations, were especially singled out for ridicule. “Why does the Aesthetik of every German philosopher seem to the artist like the abomination of desolation?” “Think of the German literature of aesthetics, with the preposterousness of such an unaesthetic personage as Immanuel Kant enthroned in its centre!”10 For all his refusal to formulate an aesthetic theory, James (particularly in his Principles of Psychology) repeatedly emphasizes the aesthetic dimension of experience—its specific felt quality and the appeal that such quality exercises on our minds and behavior—as crucial to our cognitive and active life. Aesthetic considerations shape our perceptions of things and what we select as their real properties; they guide us in the choice of theories, even in the general philosophies we espouse. He writes, “The two great aesthetic principles, of richness and of ease, dominate our intellectual as well as our sensuous life.” What we want are theories that are “rich, simple, and harmonious,” which sounds like the classic definition of beauty as unity in variety. “The richness,” James argues, “is got by including all the facts of sense in the scheme; the simplicity, by deducing them out of the smallest possible number of…primordial entities.” Simplicity provides the aesthetic sense of ease because it tends to make things clearer and more “definite,” while complexity strains our limited powers of attention and memory.11 He therefore later explained the contentions between rival philosophies or world views as resting largely on “aesthetic” discords or conflicting temperaments.12 James linked the aesthetic and the pragmatic not only by arguing that perception and cognitive judgment rely heavily on aesthetic as well as practical grounds, he even explained crucial practical criteria (such as simplicity or clarity) in terms of aesthetic grounds. This insistence on the continuity of the aesthetic and practical—a sharp contrast to the dominant Kantian opposition of them—is one of the key dimensions of pragmatist aesthetics, reflected in such central themes as integration of art and life, the recognition that bodily appetites and desires can be aesthetic, and the affirmation that functional values of art and aesthetic experience can also contribute to aesthetic value and appreciation. Four other core themes of pragmatist aesthetics find clear expression in James: First, a somatic naturalism that acknowledges the bodily basis and evolutionary roots of our aesthetic perceptions and pleasures but that equally recognizes how our tastes are shaped by our sociocultural conditions and the habits engendered by those conditions. James, moreover, sees pragmatic continuity between the natural and social aspects of aesthetic experience; art’s communicative power and pleasures, its group dynamics and excitements, build on and satisfy social instincts that lie deep in our embodied, biological nature. Second, James affirms a wide range of legitimate aesthetic satisfactions and artistic forms, ranging from the more primitive to the more refined. Third, he combines this generous pluralism with a strongly democratic aesthetic meliorism. We need, James argues, to overcome the

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limits of our taste, which make us scorn the aesthetic satisfactions of other people (especially those lacking our cultural privileges) and which blind us to the aesthetic values of arts and experiences that they enjoy and that we could also enjoy if we overcame our “ancestral intolerances.” We need a “widening of vision”; for beauty can be found “all about us,” but our “culture is too hidebound to even suspect the fact.”13 James also displays another aspect of aesthetic meliorism in arguing for art’s imaginative power to envision and inspire new ideals for improving our experience, to create “an ideal world, a Utopia,” which current conditions “persist in contradicting, but which we as stubbornly persist in striving to make actual.”14 A fourth important Jamesian theme for pragmatist aesthetics is the crucial role of the unifying quality in constituting coherent experience. James built his philosophy of mind on the notion of a continuous stream of consciousness whose structural unity, coherence, sense of relevance and direction depended on a nameless unifying quality of felt experience whose “psychic overtone or “halo of felt relations” organizes and guides our thought.15 This Jamesian notion of a nameless, immediately felt unifying quality of consciousness provides, as I elsewhere demonstrate, the formative germ of Dewey’s notion of aesthetic experience that essentially constitutes his theory of art.16 Having analyzed Dewey’s aesthetics on many occasions, I will not try to summarize it again here to show how it elaborates all the Jamesian and Peircean pragmatist themes thus far discussed. Instead let me offer a brief sketch of how Dewey came to write his aesthetic masterpiece Art as Experience. Considering the historical situation in which Dewey began to develop his theory, we can understand why he never explicitly characterized it as “pragmatist aesthetics” nor even mentioned pragmatism in that book. First, there was the long-prevailing doxa that the pragmatic is essentially opposed to the aesthetic. Second, there was no established pragmatist tradition in aesthetics, as neither Peirce nor James nor any other renowned pragmatist had provided one. Third, and perhaps most important, was the fact that Dewey’s own pragmatist philosophy (which he often explicitly referred to as “instrumentalism”) had come under sharp attack for being excessively utilitarian and technocratic, so preoccupied with instrumental means and realities that it remained insufficiently sensitive to the imaginative values and rewarding ends of art and aesthetic experience. In fact, Art as Experience was specifically written to answer persistent charges that pragmatism was simply inadequate for aesthetics because these charges—raised by prominent New York intellectuals—increasingly troubled Dewey. Already during World War I, Dewey’s former disciple Randolph Bourne attacked his “philosophy of intelligent control” for its lack of “poetic vision” which sadly subordinated imaginative values and ideals to matters of technique. The attack was renewed in the late 1920s when Lewis Mumford characterized the general philosophy of James and Dewey as “the pragmatic acquiescence” to American capitalist industry and its “utilitarian type of

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personality.” Chiding Dewey for treating art dismissively as just another instrumentality, Mumford condemned what he saw as pragmatism’s “onesided idealization of practical contrivances” without comparable interest in artistic “imagination to project more complete and satisfying ends,” and without any sustained attempt to theorize or realize aesthetic values that are enjoyed for their own sake yet that also ennoble life because they go beyond the workaday instrumentalist mill of practical industry and profit making.17 Dewey realized that after forty-two years of published philosophical work, it was high time to devote a substantive treatise to aesthetics. So when, in 1929, he was invited to give the first William James lectures at Harvard, Dewey quickly decided to make this his topic, expressing his “desire to get into a field I haven’t treated systematically, and art & aesthetics has come to me … [because of] the criticism for neglecting them and the consummatory in general.”18 Dewey also surely realized that it would be counterproductive to label his aesthetic theorizing as distinctively pragmatist or instrumentalist, since the anti-aesthetic prejudice associated with those labels was precisely what he was seeking to overcome. Hence his James lectures were delivered in 1931 under the title “Art and the Aesthetic Experience,” and then revised, expanded, and published in 1934 as Art as Experience. Affirming precisely the point argued by his critics that “there is no test that so surely reveals the one-sided nature of a philosophy as its treatment of art and aesthetic experience,”19 Dewey found the perfect strategy through which he could effectively treat the aesthetic domain while also defending and deepening the essential lines of his philosophy as a whole. The key to his strategy was the potently polysemic concept of experience, which already lay at the heart of Dewey’s pragmatism (as well as that of Peirce and James). An empirical rather than an a priori philosophy (the term “empirical” deriving from the Greek word for experience), pragmatism determines meanings and assesses beliefs in terms of their experiential effects, and is thus committed to the empirical procedures of observation and experimental hypothesis testing that form the core of scientific method. Though Dewey’s fervent advocacy of empirical inquiry and experimental method (even in fields like ethics) earned him in China the title of “Mr. Science,” it likewise prompted (as already noted) repeated criticisms that his philosophy was one-sidedly scientific.20 Yet he shrewdly realized that experience also clearly forms the core of aesthetic appreciation and enjoyment (with its sense of intrinsic value), just as experimentation is central to the innovation of artistic creation. By making experience the heart of his aesthetics, Dewey could deftly show how his empirical pragmatism was not narrowly scientific but instead richly well-rounded, unified, and moreover capable of healing the schisms between the divided and dueling cultures of art and science. Art, as much as science, is the product of intelligent experience, and both fields (whose continuities Dewey emphasized) deploy experience as a test of success and regard improved experience as a key motivating value or aim. While

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recognizing that the aesthetic experience of fine art (as well as natural beauty, ritual, and other things) was often so distinctively intense and gratifying in its unity and consummation that it stood out as “an experience”, Dewey also argued that the most basic form of aesthetic experience—the immediately grasped quality of unity that binds the elements of an experience together— was the necessary foundation for constituting any situation or state of affairs as a coherent, identifiable experience. “To aesthetic experience, then, the philosopher must go to understand what experience is,”21 Dewey concluded, showing (in refutation of the charge that he was an instrumentalist philistine) that the aesthetic lay at the very core of his entire philosophy. In its wide-ranging fullness, the notion of experience can reconcile many dualisms that distort our thinking about art and life. Experience can be cognitive and non-cognitive; it includes both object and subject, involving both the content of experience and the manner in which it is experienced. Experience is both the general flow of conscious life that we hardly notice and also those peak, distinctive moments that stand out from that flow as “an experience.”22 Embracing past, present, and future, experience connotes the accumulated wisdom of tradition so celebrated by conservative thought but also symbolizes the openness to change and experimentation affirmed by progressive theory. Human experience is pervasively situated in historical, social, and political contexts, so defining art as experience insures that these contexts can be given the attention they deserve rather than isolating the aesthetic in a narrow formalism. Existing in English as both a noun and a verb, experience signifies both a completed event and a process, and involves both immediacy and duration. Experience belongs to both life and art, and is essential to both artist and audience. It can be interpreted as something actively generated by the person but also something that the person undergoes or is swept away by, as one can be overcome by aesthetic rapture. The inclusion of this more passive aspect in experience may explain why Dewey ultimately preferred to define art by this concept rather than by the perhaps more distinctively pragmatic concept of practice, which Dewey also occasionally invoked to describe art. The richly multiple meanings of experience also make this concept problematic for philosophies that prize precision. Dewey’s reception suffers from this problem. Analytic philosophers dismissed his aesthetics as “a hodgepodge of conflicting methods and undisciplined speculations.”23 This is a grossly unjust verdict, but it expresses the frustration that many readers feel with respect to Dewey’s style and use of the polysemic concept of experience. As Dewey himself later expressed concerns about the confusions this term tends to arouse, so his neopragmatist champion, Richard Rorty, sharply condemns Dewey’s use of it as a lapse into the foundationalist myth of an experientially immediate, non-linguistic given.24 Even aestheticians who appreciated Dewey’s general pragmatic approach and his emphasis on aesthetic experience found difficulties with his theory of art as experience.

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Stephen Pepper provides a particularly instructive example because he criticizes Dewey’s experiential theory of art as not being pragmatist enough. In his contribution to The Philosophy of John Dewey, published in 1939, Pepper describes how he himself, around 1932, began to construct an account of what a “pragmatic esthetics” would be, based on Dewey’s general pragmatist perspective and Dewey’s “scattered remarks on art and esthetic experience” that had been published before Art as Experience.25 That book, according to Pepper, while containing the pragmatic features he expected, surprised him by affirming views that “an organic idealist” in aesthetics (such as Benedetto Croce) would embrace and that Pepper thought were “contrary to the spirit of pragmatism” Dewey represents.26 Those problematic views involved Dewey’s emphasis on organic unity, on explaining the special value of aesthetic experience in terms of its distinctive coherence and unifying completeness or consummation, and the need for the person enjoying an artwork to recreate in perception and imagination the sort of qualitative unified experience that the artist had in creating the work. In contrast, for Pepper, “a pragmatic esthetics” puts the emphasis less on the unity of experience than on the distinctive immediate “quality” of the experience (including its “extensity, depth and degree of vividness”) and the way that the experience results from an interaction with the environment and can change as the interactional situations or components change; hence the artwork as experience will not have a fixed value but will change with the ways it is differently experienced by different people in different contexts. 27 Dewey, Pepper argues, is convincingly pragmatic in emphasizing experiential interaction and immediate quality but compromises the pragmatic approach by making experiential quality’s defining essence and function the unifying of experienced materials into an organic whole. In other words, citing Dewey, the distinctive “pervasive quality of an experience is that which binds together all the defined elements, the objects of which we are focally aware, making them a whole.”28 In responding to Pepper, Dewey not only displays his continued reluctance to embrace the notion of a distinctive “pragmatic aesthetics” but also reaffirms his strong commitment to unity, coherence, and completion. 29 More importantly, Dewey also explains why he never advanced his aesthetics under the banner of pragmatism. The reason Dewey gives is clearly methodological and could be expressed paradoxically by claiming that a truly pragmatic approach to aesthetics should never aim at developing a pragmatic or pragmatist aesthetics. This is because such an aim would not be adequately empirical (as pragmatism should be) but instead would tend to select and construe the relevant aesthetic subject matter with a bias toward pragmatism (and in terms of pragmatist categories or principles) rather than examining the relevant aesthetic phenomena as they actually are. “I expressly objected to

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typical and to current philosophies of esthetics on the ground that they were not formed by examination of the subject-matter of esthetic and artistic experience but by deducing what the latter must be from antecedent preconceptions,” Dewey explains, implying that it would have been wrong to propound an explicitly “pragmatic esthetics” because that would be precisely the sort of deductive, insufficiently empirical “procedure [he] criticized when it was adopted by others” from other philosophical movements or schools.30 For Dewey, then, the very essence of “pragmatic empiricism” 31 seems to militate against pursuing pragmatist aesthetics as a distinct project or program. If one could speak at all of “an empirical pragmatic esthetics,” its defining feature would be the empirical approach rather than any distinctively pragmatic principle; and an empirical approach, Dewey claims, must “do justice” to the crucial centrality of unity, completion, and integration in aesthetic experience.32 Dewey’s rejection of the notion of pragmatist aesthetics continued to the end of his career. Just four years before his death, we find it powerfully and even peevishly expressed in a response to the famous Italian aesthetician Benedetto Croce, who wrote an article outlining Dewey’s similarities to his own aesthetics of organic idealism while also noting Pepper’s critique of Dewey’s aesthetics for not being sufficiently pragmatist. Dewey responds with uncharacteristic bad temper, claiming that he cannot properly “reply” to Croce because he finds no “common ground” at all between them. 33 The reason for this, Dewey claims, is that Croce assumes Dewey’s aim to be the formulation of a pragmatist theory of aesthetics whereas Dewey has never had such an aim because he confines his pragmatism to the theory of knowledge and does not consider aesthetic subject matter to belong to that epistemic field. “Croce assumes that I have written about art with the intention of bringing it within the scope of pragmatic philosophy. ... The actual fact is that I have consistently treated the pragmatic theory as a theory of knowing, and as confined within the limits of the field of specifically cognitive subject matter. And in addition I have specifically rejected the idea that esthetic subject matter is a form of knowledge, and have held that a prime defect of philosophies of art has been treating subject matter as if it were.” 34 As if this renunciation of the project of pragmatist aesthetics were not already sufficiently clear, Dewey elaborates by insisting that he “did not write Art as Experience as an appendix to or application of [his] pragmatism” because he believes that theorizing in aesthetics should not be conducted in terms of “the categories of some preferred philosophy” but rather “in its own behalf and in its own terms.”35 A case might be made that Dewey’s own arguments in Art as Experience could counter this sharp separation between knowledge and the subject matter of art and aesthetic experience, but I will not develop it here, for it is already suggested in Pragmatist Aesthetics. Dewey’s apparent failure (in Pepper’s and Croce’s eyes) to provide an adequately “pragmatic esthetics,” his own refusal to employ the term, and his

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vehement rejection of the very idea of pursuing such a line of theory should have made other scholars hesitant to use a term like “pragmatist aesthetics” as designating an established, Deweyan theoretical orientation. For if the great John Dewey, the only pragmatist to formulate a substantive aesthetic theory, repeatedly repudiated the notion of pragmatist aesthetics, then how could humbler pragmatists (invariably indebted to his work) counter him by proposing theories bearing that spurned label? The empirical record, as we shall see, shows that the term was indeed very rarely used until neopragmatism began to flourish in the mid-1980s. In fact, I am now convinced that the notion of pragmatist aesthetics (though undeniably inspired by Dewey) is essentially the product of neopragmatist thought, and that the term gained wide, international currency only after it began to be employed and promoted systematically through the publication of my book, Pragmatist Aesthetics (1992) and other writings (beginning in 1988 and continuing up to the present). I suspect now, in retrospect, that my first confident enthusiasm in affirming the project of pragmatist aesthetics (and in claiming Dewey as its founder) derived partly from being rather new to pragmatist scholarship and thus less constrained in creatively reinterpreting Dewey’s ideas, even when those interpretations involved advancing ideas that he himself dismissed—like the very notion of pragmatist aesthetics. My interest in pragmatism began only in the mid-1980s, after I had been trained in analytic philosophy at Oxford and acquired particular expertise in analytic aesthetics. Indeed (as I’ve already noted elsewhere) my first encounter with Dewey’s Art as Experience as an analytically trained young philosopher in the early 1980s left me very unimpressed.36 I found his concepts unclear, his style prolix, his arguments frustratingly lax and unstructured, and his views too confused to be useful for my projects. It was only when I read the book again in 1988 that I began to appreciate its value, and that was because I was already predisposed to applying explicitly pragmatist perspectives—more specifically those of neopragmatism—to aesthetic questions. (Perhaps my initial lack of awe for Dewey’s thinking was even what enabled me to insouciantly propose the project of pragmatist aesthetics that he firmly and repeatedly disdained.) In any case, the original roots of my interest in pragmatist aesthetics do not lie in Dewey but rather in neopragmatist philosophy of language and literary theory. I thus devote the next section to outlining these roots and the path through which they brought me to Dewey and the formulation of pragmatist aesthetics. IV As an analytic philosopher specializing in aesthetics and philosophy of language, I focused especially on literary theory. My first two books were The Object of Literary Criticism and T.S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism.37

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Within literary theory, the question of interpretation constituted one of my chief research interests. When analytic philosophers I admired (such as Richard Rorty and Joseph Margolis) turned toward hermeneutic theory and other forms of continental philosophy in trying to develop a non-foundational post-analytic philosophy of interpretation that eschewed fixed, reified meanings and when they presented their theory under the banner of a renewed pragmatism, I was inspired to follow their lead. Stanley Fish, an extremely influential literary theorist deeply conversant with continental hermeneutics, also began to advance a theory of interpretation that rejected fixed, foundational meanings and that he identified with pragmatism. Besides critically engaging their own neopragmatist texts, I began to read widely in continental hermeneutics and deconstruction, putting those theories in critical dialogue with analytic aesthetics and proposing ways that a new pragmatist approach could integrate the best insights of analytic and continental theory while avoiding their problematic extremes. Pragmatism seemed to offer American theorists a perspective that was adequately philosophical while being sufficiently practical, flexible, and free from the vague, abstruse speculations that gave the whole idea of theory a bad name. Neopragmatism achieved a wide, international influence in literary theory before achieving any status in aesthetics. Its prominence in literary theory (especially on the question of interpretation) can be seen in an important collection published in 1985 under the provocative title Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism.38 As its title indicates, the collection was aimed at literary rather than aesthetic theorists. Including texts by Rorty and Fish, it was focused on the question of how theory could address the meaning and interpretation of texts. Not surprisingly my first writings on pragmatism and the arts focused on issues of interpretation, articulating a pragmatism that could mediate between analytic rigidities and continental excesses. These texts focused neither on Dewey nor on his key aesthetic concept of experience, but rather probed the way neopragmatist approaches to meaning, interpretation, and referential identity could address crucial issues on these topics raised by the likes of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Benedetto Croce, T.S. Eliot, E.D. Hirsch, M.C. Beardsley, G.E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Nelson Goodman, Richard Rorty and Joseph Margolis (the latter two explicitly identifying their work with the new pragmatism).39 This exploratory advocacy of neopragmatist strategies for literary theory spurred me to a more extensive study of pragmatist philosophy and how it could be applied more generally to the arts. That in turn prompted my renewed reading of Dewey’s aesthetics; and the exciting experience of exploring his ideas with my doctoral dance students early in 1988 (a learning experience that included many nocturnal dance adventures) completed my conversion to a pragmatist aesthetics in which the notion of experience finally

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plays a central role, as it does in Dewey. Previously the notion had played no role at all in my theorizing, whether analytic or pragmatist. At that point, in 1988, I decided to write a book on pragmatist aesthetics, developing a comprehensive theory by engaging insights and arguments from the following five sources: Dewey’s experiential aesthetics and reconstructionist vision of philosophy, neopragmatist theories of meaning, interpretation, and identity, Marxian challenges to art’s autonomy and elitist tendencies along with Marxian defenses of these features (by T.W. Adorno and Pierre Bourdieu), constructive research into popular art (including my own efforts of aesthetic analysis of popular music and close readings of hiphop lyrics), and postmodernist visions of ethics as an art of living suggested in Michel Foucault and Rorty.40 On the basis of a short proposal outlining this book project, Basil Blackwell of Oxford, who was already publishing a book I edited on Analytic Aesthetics, granted me an advance contract for a single authored book on aesthetics from a neopragmatist perspective. In August 1988, at the XI International Congress in Aesthetics (in Nottingham), I presented the Deweyan themes of the book’s first chapter in a paper entitled “Analytic and Pragmatist Aesthetics”; the Fall 1988 issue of New Literary History (in which my “Croce on Interpretation: Deconstruction and Pragmatism” appeared) already announced in its notes on contributors that I was “writing a book on pragmatist aesthetics”; and in 1989 I published a paper entitled “Why Dewey Now?” that tried to render his key themes more relevant by recasting them in terms of the needs of a new pragmatist aesthetics for contemporary culture.41 I wrote the first draft of Pragmatist Aesthetics in 1990 while a guest researcher at Pierre Bourdieu’s research center in Paris, far away from the library materials necessary for doing proper historical research in pragmatism. In any case, my book explicitly aimed at forward-looking reform rather than reinterpreting Dewey and the pragmatist tradition. As the book’s first-edition back-cover blurb makes clear, my goal was “proposing a pragmatist aesthetics for our current postmodern condition,” since “the new pragmatism ha[d] not yet expressed itself in a new aesthetic.” Commentators on the book generally realized that its aims were to provide a new pragmatist aesthetics rather than simply an exegesis of Dewey, whose theories were confined to the book’s first two chapters. A good example is Jerrold Levinson’s review in Mind, which sees the book’s “new directions in philosophy of art” as exemplary of “a new trend in Anglo-American philosophical aesthetics, typified by a more robust engagement with the challenges of postmodern philosophy, both domestic and foreign, and a more sustained attention to and treatment of the popular arts and their products,” and which finds the book’s Deweyan aspect its least “beneficial.” But even admirers of Dewey, like James Scott Johnston, realize that Pragmatist Aesthetics “pushes past Dewey in several significant ways” and thus “should be read not as an exposition of Dewey, but as an example of how pragmatism can contribute to the debate ongoing in aesthetics in this, the

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twenty-first century.”42 Moreover, because the book I was writing sought a more general readership in aesthetics and cultural studies rather than targeting the still rather limited audience for pragmatism, I initially confined pragmatism to a subtitle, calling the book “Living Beauty, Rethinking Art: A Pragmatist Aesthetic,” in order to highlight my aim of developing a postmodern aesthetic that would restore the importance of beauty in art and reaffirm the ancient idea of ethics as an art of living. My Blackwell editor Stephan Chambers, however, suggested a title change, based on his shrewd marketing instincts and publishing knowledge. He argued that the main title I proposed, though attractively evocative, was far too vague to function successfully in the system of catalog categories and cross-listings through which the book would be principally marketed, while “Pragmatist Aesthetics” instead seemed to define a recognizable yet intriguingly new philosophical genre derived from the established fields of pragmatism and aesthetics. Moreover, a generic title like “Pragmatist Aesthetics” could build on the success of my recent Blackwell book Analytic Aesthetics, by implying the existence of an exciting new style of theory that could rival or enrich analytic philosophy of art. Chambers thus reversed my original proposal, and (with my approval of the new title) the book was published in English as Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art. In retrospect, this publisher’s act of naming proved a decisive stroke of prescient genius that helped propel not only the book’s success but also the effective establishment of the genre it names. In today’s internet age of rapid search engines, whenever anyone enters the popular terms “pragmatism” and “aesthetics,” the book Pragmatist Aesthetics immediately appears at the top of the list; and if one substitutes “art” for “aesthetics,” the book appears quite close to the top. Already in the 1990s, long before internet search engines were widely used, the same generic logic worked with library data-base searches. Anyone searching for research on pragmatism and the arts was immediately directed to Pragmatist Aesthetics, suggesting with compelling confidence that there was indeed a significant philosophical movement or academic field that the book named and treated. It is striking that the book’s first two translations—published in France and Germany by major trade publishers in a reduced, more accessible trade format—dispensed with the catalog logic of using “Pragmatist Aesthetics” as the main title, preferring instead to highlight, in different ways, the notion of “living art,” while demoting all mention of pragmatism to the subtitle. The French edition was titled L’art à l’état vif: la pensée pragmatiste et l’esthétique populaire, and the German title was Kunst Leben: Die Aesthetik des Pragmatismus.43 Indeed none of the book’s first four translations had “pragmatist aesthetics” in the main title, and three of those four did not even have it in the subtitle. If this suggests that the notion of pragmatist aesthetics seemed too unfamiliar to attract a foreign readership, then the book’s international success clearly helped change that situation; for all but one of the book’s subsequent ten

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translations (beginning in 1998) used the term “pragmatist aesthetics” (in the relevantly adjusted linguistic form) as the main title. 44 Clearly, pragmatist aesthetics has by now evolved into a well-known notion that is confidently (and almost uncontestedly) read back onto Dewey to define his own aesthetics, despite his repeated protests to the contrary.45 V Here is not the place to describe the fortunes of pragmatist aesthetics since the publication of my 1992 book bearing that title. That would require an entire essay in itself, as many authors have contributed to its development in a variety of disciplines, including the field of somaesthetics that directly emerged from it. Already in 2004, an article (which takes my book as its springboard and major focus) speaks of “the vast and ever-growing literature on contemporary pragmatist aesthetics.”46 Instead, let me conclude this essay by simply providing some quantitative evidence of pragmatist aesthetics’ considerable growth by tracing the frequency of its being named, along with some comments on the complexity of its nomenclature. Although these terminological complexities may seem philosophically superficial, they remain significant in tracking the expansion of this field, which can be rendered not only as “pragmatist aesthetics” but also as “pragmatic aesthetics,” “pragmatic esthetics,” and “pragmatist esthetics.” A comprehensive search through digital search engines must examine all these terms, which derive from variations in spelling and adjectival form that deserve some comment. The familiar American simplification of “aesthetics” to “esthetics” is a characteristic Deweyan usage that is shared by Peirce and some other pragmatists, but William James eschewed it, preferring to use the “ae” orthography which remains the prevailing American usage and the only standard British form. That diphthong orthography was the form I always used in my pre-pragmatist theorizing in Israel and Oxford, but having moved to America and adopted a Deweyan pragmatism, I was tempted to follow his more distinctively pragmatic usage—more pragmatic because simpler, more economical, and thus, by extension, also more ecologically friendly (saving ink and paper). But I remained captivated by the superior beauty of the diphthong form of “aesthetic,” where the ‘a’ has no apparent phonetic or semantic function. One reason I chose the term “somaesthetics” for my research in embodiment was indeed to make the ‘a’ of “aesthetics” distinctly functional in that compound through its “soma” component. A second complexity concerns the choice between “pragmatic” and “pragmatist,” terms which are roughly synonymous, though not identical in associative connotations. Although both terms share the two senses of relating generally to practical matters and relating more specifically to the distinctive tradition of philosophical pragmatism, the term “pragmatist” seems especially appropriate to the distinctive philosophical meaning because the “ist” suffix

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designates persons, especially persons following a particular set of beliefs, interests, or professional practices, and because the “ist” is also closer to the “ism” of the term “pragmatism.” In contrast, the term “pragmatic,” has a slightly more general application, and even in technical philosophical contexts it can signify something very different from the pragmatist tradition. It can refer, for instance, to the widely used distinction between semantics, syntax, and pragmatics in philosophy of language. If one reason for preferring the term “pragmatist” to describe the aesthetic theory I advocated was its slightly tighter link to pragmatism as a philosophical movement, then a further reason had distinctly aesthetic grounds. Phonologically, the “st” consonant cluster (composed of an alveolar fricative followed by a voiceless alveolar plosive) is softer and more fluid than the hard ‘c’ sound that closes “pragmatic,” a velar plosive pronounced farther back toward the throat. Thus “pragmatist aesthetics” seems much smoother or more mellifluous than “pragmatic aesthetics”, whose repeated closing sounds of “ic” and “ics” is not only harder on the ears but harder to pronounce, and is thus not as aesthetically attractive both in auditory and in proprioceptive terms. In short, for an aesthetic philosophy based on pragmatism, “pragmatist aesthetics” struck me as the most appealing choice. Nonetheless, most early discussions connecting pragmatism to aesthetics used the term “pragmatic” rather than “pragmatist,” perhaps because the shorter term was more widely familiar while the pragmatist tradition was still not as firmly established. Thus, long before Dewey’s Art as Experience, we find Kate Gordon, in 1908, formulating a “pragmatic view of aesthetics” and “pragmatic view of art” based on the writings of William James.47 As already noted, Pepper and Dewey use the term “pragmatic” rather than “pragmatist” in their mid-century discussions of aesthetics from pragmatism’s perspective;48 and Harvard philosopher Henry David Aiken likewise employs “pragmatic aesthetics” and “pragmatic theory” in describing Dewey’s aesthetics in 1962.49 This tendency for philosophers to prefer the term “pragmatic” to describe the aesthetics of pragmatism is continued into the early 1990s, employed by such prominent pragmatist scholars such as Richard Bernstein, Charlene Haddock Siegfried, and Thomas Alexander. 50 However, since 1992 (the year Pragmatist Aesthetics was published) the philosophical usage has significantly changed; “pragmatist aesthetics” has clearly emerged as the overwhelmingly dominant term to describe the aesthetic theories of pragmatism and neopragmatism, while the overall frequency of this and cognate expressions connoting the aesthetics of pragmatism has dramatically increased.51 In professional journals covered by The Philosopher’s Index (whose listings start from 1940), the ratio of “pragmatic aesthetics” to “pragmatist aesthetics” was 5 to 1 before 1992; while thereafter the ratio is 10 to 39. In the ProQuest data base (which goes back to 1910 and includes dissertations and newspaper articles), we find, before 1992, 15 references using “pragmatic” as opposed to 1 using

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“pragmatist,” while the ratio since 1992 is 55 to 75. In the extremely wideranging journal data base JSTOR (looking back as far as 1904), the findings display the same trends. Before 1992 the ratio of “pragmatic” to “pragmatist” was 13 to 10, but after 1992, it was 5 to 174.52 Globally, combining the numerous linguistic variants for designating pragmatist aesthetics in these three large data bases (but confining ourselves to English mentions), we see a very clear picture of the notion’s striking ascendance in recognition and use: before 1992 only 85 mentions, while since 1992 we find 618.53 In brief, since the year Pragmatist Aesthetics was published, there has been a 627 percent increase in that notion’s use. I trust that “pragmatist aesthetics” will continue to be a familiar term in philosophy and humanities discourse because it effectively indicates and promotes a wide-ranging field of promising research, based on the everexpanding pragmatist philosophical tradition, whose melioristic impact often aims to transcend the limits of theoretical discourse and improve our experience not only of art but of everyday life and the sociopolitical realities that structure all our experience. If this means that the ultimate proof of the value of pragmatist aesthetics cannot, by its own standards, be confined to popularity in academic discourse but should include the improvement of nonacademic and nontextual realities, then we should not forget that academic discourse can help shape those other realities as it is shaped by them. NOTES 1. See William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981); The Correspondence of William James, vol. 3, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992), p. 339. 2. John Dewey, Art as Experience, in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 10, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987). 3. Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); 2nd ed. (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). 4. See, for example, Wojciech Małecki, Embodying Pragmatism: Richard Shusterman’s Philosophy and Literary Theory (Frankfurt am Main-New York: Peter Lang, 2010); Dorota Koczanowicz and Wojciech Małecki (eds.), Shusterman’s Pragmatism: Between Literature and Somaesthetics (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2012);John Golden and Wojciech Małecki (eds.), Affect, Aesthetics, and the Body, a special issue of “Pragmatism Today”, 3:2 (2012). The Sorbonne also hosted an international conference on pragmatist aesthetics in May 2012 whose English title was “Pragmatist Aesthetics: 20 Years Later.” 5. See Nathan Houser and Christian J. W. Kloesel (eds.), The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 2 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). Peirce avows in “The Seven Systems of Metaphysics” (1903): “I am still a perfect ignoramus in esthetics” and “ignorant ... of Art” (p. 189, 190). He refers to being “incompetent” for “defining the esthetically good” in “The Three Normative Sciences” (1903), p. 201.

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6. For more details, see Richard Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and C.S. Peirce,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 23:1 (2009), pp. 8–27; “Dewey’s Art as Experience: The Psychological Background,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, 44:1 (2010), pp. 26-43; “The Pragmatist Aesthetics of William James,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 51:4 (2011), pp. 347–361. 7. Houser and Kloesel (eds.), The Essential Peirce, p. 201. 8. See Peirce’s letter to Lady Victoria Welby, cited in Joseph Brent, Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 49. 9. William James, The Correspondence of William James, vol. 8, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), pp. 475-476. 10. William James, “A Pluralistic Universe,” William James: Writings 1902–1910, ed. Bruce Kuklick, (New York: Viking, 1987), p. 638 11. William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 943-944. 12. James, “A Pluralistic Universe,” p. 638. 13. William James, “What Makes a Life Significant?” Talks To Teachers on Psychology and To Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (New York: Cosimo, 2008), p. 135,131. 14. James, The Principles of Psychology, p. 1235. 15. Ibid., p. 247, 249. 16. Shusterman, “Dewey’s Art as Experience,” pp. 26-43; “The Pragmatist Aesthetics of William James,” pp. 347-361. 17. See Randolph Bourne, “Twilight of Idols,” Radical Will: Randolph Bourne, Selected Writings, ed. Olaf Hansen (New York: Urizen Books, 1977), pp. 341– 347; Lewis Mumford, The Golden Day, (New York: Dover Publications, 3rd ed., 1968), pp. 134–137. 18. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 375. 19. Ibid., p. 278. 20. On Dewey as “Mr Science”, see Sor-hoon Tan, “China’s Pragmatist Experiment in Democracy: Hu Shih’s Pragmatism and Dewey’s Influence in China,” The Range of Pragmatism and the Limits of Philosophy, ed. Richard Shusterman (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 43-62. 21. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 278. 22. Ibid., p. 43. 23. Arnold Isenberg, “Analytic Philosophy and the Study of Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 46 (1987), p. 128. 24. For Dewey’s late concerns about the effectiveness of the term “experience” for contemporary philosophy, see the Appendixes to his Experience and Nature, in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 1, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981), p. 361-364; for Rorty’s critique, see Richard Rorty, “Dewey’s Metaphysics,” Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 72–89. My own position regarding the role of experience (including aesthetic experience) in philosophy, which lies between the Deweyan and Rortian views, is elaborated in Pragmatist Aesthetics but also in Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life (New York: Routledge, 1997), especially chaps. 2, 6; and Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2012), chap. 8.

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25. Stephen Pepper, “Some Questions on Dewey’s Esthetics,” The Philosophy of John Dewey, eds. Paul A. Schilpp and Lewis E. Hahn (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 3rd ed., 1989), p. 371. 26. Ibid., p. 371. 27. Ibid., p. 374-375. 28. Ibid., p. 386; Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 198. 29. John Dewey, “Experience, Knowledge, and Value: A Rejoinder,” The Philosophy of John Dewey, pp. 517-608; the response to Pepper’s article is on pages 549–554. 30. Ibid., pp. 550–554. 31. Ibid., p. 549. 32. Ibid., p. 554. 33. See Benedetto Croce, “On the Aesthetics of Dewey,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 6 (1948), pp. 203-207; John Dewey, “A Comment on Foregoing Criticisms,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 6 (1948), p. 207. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., p. 208. 36. See Richard Shusterman, “L’expérience esthétique comme forme de l’art,” Revue d’esthétique, 25 (1994), pp. 179-186. 37. Richard Shusterman, The Object of Literary Criticism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1984); T.S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). 38. William J.T. Mitchell (ed.), Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 39. See for example: Richard Shusterman, “Analytic Aesthetics: Retrospect and Prospect,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 46 (1987), pp. 115–124; “Croce on Interpretation: Deconstruction and Pragmatism,” New Literary History, 20 (1988), pp. 199–216; “Organic Unity: Deconstruction and Analysis,” Redrawing the Boundaries: Analytic Philosophy, Deconstruction, and Literary Theory, ed. Reed W. Dasenbrock (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 92–115; “The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter: A Pragmatist Perspective,” Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, ed. Diane Michelfelder and Richard Palmer (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), pp. 215-22; “Interpretation, Intention, and Truth,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 46 (1988), pp. 399–411; “Eliot’s Pragmatist Philosophy of Practical Wisdom,” Review of English Studies, 40 (1989), pp. 72–92. 40. See for example Richard Shusterman, “Postmodernist Aestheticism: A New Moral Philosophy?” Theory, Culture & Society, 5 (1988), pp. 337-355; “Aesthetic Education or Aesthetic Ideology: T. S. Eliot on Art’s Moral Critique,” Philosophy and Literature, 13 (1989), pp. 96–114. 41. Richard Shusterman, “Why Dewey Now?” The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 23 (1989), pp. 60–67. The paper was published in a symposium marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of Dewey’s Art as Experience. 42. Jerrold Levinson, “Review of Pragmatist Aesthetics,” Mind 102 (1993), pp. 682– 686 (quotations, pp. 682,686). James S. Johnston, “Deweyan Aesthetics for These Times,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, 35 (2001), pp. 109–115 (quotations from pp.112, 115). 43. Richard Shusterman, L’art à l’état vif: la pensée pragmatiste et l’esthétique populaire, trans. Christine Nuille (Minuit: Paris, 1992); Kunst Leben: Die Aesthetik des Pragmatismus, trans. Barbara Reiter (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1994).

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44. The one exception is the Japanese translation of 1999, based on the German edition’s five-chapter format but translated from the original English. Its title would read in English as Aesthetics of Popular Art: From the Perspective of Pragmatism. A complete list of Pragmatist Aesthetics’ titles in the fifteen languages and various abridged versions in which it has thus far appeared can be found at the end of my contribution to the symposium on the book in the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, 1:4 (2012), pp. 241–276, which also includes articles by Paolo D’Angelo, Krystyna Wilkoszewska, Heidi Salaverria and Roberta Dreon. My article, entitled, “Reviewing Pragmatist Aesthetics: History, Critique, and Interpretation—After Twenty Years,” is on pages pp. 267–276. 45. The distinguished Deweyan scholar, Thomas Alexander, still balks at the idea of associating Dewey with the notion of pragmatist aesthetics. In a paper he gave at a symposium on “Pragmatist Aesthetics: Retrospect and Prospect” at the annual meeting for the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (New York, March 17, 2012), Alexander insisted in putting the term “pragmatist aesthetics” in scare quotes and opened by expressing his “discomfort with the term.” I quote from the first page of his manuscript, which I received as the respondent to his paper and the three other papers in the symposium. 46. Armen Marsoobian, “Is There a Pragmatist Aesthetics,” Deconstruction and Reconstruction, eds. John Ryder and Krystyna Wilkoszewska (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), p. 109. There is also an ever growing literature on aesthetic themes of past pragmatist thinkers (such as Dewey, James, Alain Locke, Emerson) who have the label “pragmatist aesthetics” read back on them, even when, as in Dewey’s case, such a label was clearly not to their taste. 47. Kate Gordon, “Pragmatism in Aesthetics,” Essays Philosophical and Psychological in Honor of William James by his Colleagues at Columbia University, ed. Edward L. Thorndike (New York: Longmans, Green, 1908), p. 481. 48. Pepper continues to use the term “pragmatic aesthetics” along with “contextualistic aesthetics” to describe his theory and (certain aspects) of Dewey’s, in Stephen Pepper, “The Development of Contexutalistic Aesthetics,” Antioch Review, 28 (1968), pp. 169–185; where “pragmatic aesthetics” appears on pages 173,183,184. 49. Henry David Aiken, “American Pragmatism Reconsidered, III: John Dewey,” Commentary, 34:4 (1962), pp. 334–344. Foreign theorists also initially preferred to speak of “pragmatic” rather than “pragmatist” aesthetics, such as Gunar Musik, “Pragmatic Aesthetics—John Dewey: Art as Experience,” Semiosis, 8:2 (1983), pp. 43-55. The text is in German (hence “pragmatische” rather than “pragmatistische”) but the English abstract uses “pragmatic aesthetics.” The earliest instance of “pragmatist aesthetics” I discovered in my bibliographical research was a brief, single passing reference in a discussion of aesthetic value and the principle of judging works in terms of their individuality rather than conformity to general rules, a principle that “can be identified … with the contextualist emphasis of the pragmatist aesthetics.” See Abraham Kaplan, “On the So-called Crisis in Criticism,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 7 (1948), p. 42-48, quotation p. 46. Neither Dewey nor Pepper is discussed in the article; but its author later wrote the “Introduction” to the Southern Illinois Press

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edition of Dewey’s Art as Experience, and (while a visiting professor at Hebrew University in the early 1970s) was someone I worked for as a teaching assistant. 50. See Charlene Haddock Seigfried, “Weaving Chaos into Order: A Radically Pragmatic Aesthetics,” Philosophy and Literature, 14 (1990), pp. 108–116; Richard Bernstein, “The Resurgence of Pragmatism,” Social Research, 59 (1992), pp. 813–840; Thomas Alexander, “Dewey and the Metaphysical Imagination,” Transactions of the C.S. Peirce Society, 28 (1992), pp. 203–215. 51. Joel Wilson and Marlene Case should be thanked for helping me compile the statistics of these counts. The three data bases we used, The Philosophers Index, ProQuest, and JSTOR are continuously being updated (also with old material), so I should specify that the counts provided here date from Dec. 31st, 2012. 52. The term “pragmatist esthetics,” lacking my preferred diphthong, appears only once in JSTOR, namely in Jonathan Levin’s “The Esthetics of Pragmatism,” published in American Literary History, 6 (1994), pp. 658-683, an article that uses this term directly after citing my 1992 book. The term does not appear at all in the Philosopher’s Index. 53. In our global figures we include not only appearances of “pragmatic” and “pragmatist” in close conjunction (a distance of two words or less) with “aesthetics,” “aesthetic,” “esthetics,” and “esthetic,” but also appearances of “pragmatism” within the same two-word proximity to these aesthetic terms (as in “pragmatism in aesthetics,” “esthetics of pragmatism,” “pragmatist theory of aesthetics,” or “aesthetic theory of pragmatism”). Including these different variants, the combined comparative figures for The Philosopher’s Index, before and since 1992, are 8:64. This truly exponential leap seems especially striking when we consider that “before” denotes 50 years of data as compared to only 20 years of data since the publishing of Pragmatist Aesthetics, though we should also realize that recent years include more journals in the data bases.

Two THE ART OF EXPERIENCE: DEWEY ON THE AESTHETIC Scott R. Stroud 1. The Promise of Deweyan Pragmatist Aesthetics Part of the power of John Dewey’s aesthetic theory could be said to come from its inherent ambiguity. In his Art as Experience (1934), Dewey explicitly wants to resist the “museum concept of art,” or theorizing about the nature and capabilities of the aesthetic from the limits set by the historical groundings of art traditions in the western world.1 This is a starting point that produces a limited—albeit not useless—conception of art based upon its modern sequestration in the confines of museum spaces. What is problematic about starting with the modern way of viewing art is that it leads us to wonder how we are ever to connect the rarified practices of art with practical, everyday life. And if pragmatists value anything, it will be the everyday experience of life, and not simply the achieved experiences of a small cadre of individuals. But everyday experience is messy and varied in scope. Thus, Dewey hopes to produce a theory of the aesthetic that is naturalized and wideranging, so much so that one may complain that its breadth allows anything in as being aesthetic in quality. The wideness of such an account of aesthetic experience is what often draws the objections of critics looking for neat accounts of what delineates the artistic.2 It seems like it counts too much as art, or too much as aesthetic in quality. I believe that this breadth is the strength of Dewey’s form of pragmatist aesthetics, or at least the reading of pragmatist aesthetics that I see in Dewey.3 Here I will argue that Dewey’s theory covers much ground, and that this is a good-making feature of his aesthetics. He not only gives an account of the aesthetic in experiences traditionally reserved for the realm of art and art objects, but he also aims at a goal that I see underlying his complex aesthetic writings—the extension of the notion of artful activity and experience to any experience in life, not just those traditionally associated with art. Such an extension would justify commentators like David Fott in extolling aesthetic experience as Dewey’s “paradigmatic form of meaningful experience,” or those like Martin Jay, who sees Dewey’s promise that “[l]ife lived aesthetically would overcome the gap between means and ends and abet the inclusion of the many in the pleasures heretofore enjoyed by only the few.”4 In order to make this case, I will proceed as follows. First, I will detail the

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characteristics of the aesthetic as given by Dewey’s Art as Experience. Second, I will use these characteristics as a basis to ascertain what Dewey’s theory has to say about unity and meaning in the creation and perception of standard art objects. These are the art objects so prevalent and prized in mainstream western art circles. But the power of Dewey’s theory does not end with these art objects. I will finally argue that his Art as Experience not only points at a way to see the everyday world of mundane activity as aesthetic, but also gives us a melioristic way to artfully create aesthetic experiences through attention to our orientations toward activity. In this sense, this chapter represents an expounding of Dewey’s aesthetic theory with the aim of orientational meliorism, or the intelligent interrogation of our habits of attention and action with the goal of creating better qualities in experience. Dewey provides a detailed reading of the type of quality we ought to aim for in his recounting of what makes certain experiences so rewardingly aesthetic or consummatory in quality, so it is only fitting that I start my argument with these important first matters. 2. The Characteristics of the Aesthetic For a Deweyan form of pragmatist aesthetics, understanding the world of art begins with understanding the world of everyday experience. And understanding Dewey on the aesthetic is vital for understanding the two-fold way that I will argue is opened up for understanding the aesthetic in experience: in terms of art objects, and in terms of activity in general. Dewey’s Art as Experience begins with what can be called a naturalized reading of the aesthetic; the aesthetic is looked for not in certain historicallycontingent artistic practices, but instead in certain excellent experiences. Thus, as Richard Shusterman has argued, Dewey is resisting a “wrapper” definition of art or the aesthetic (viz., a descriptive account) in favor of a normative account of the aesthetic as pointing at a range of high quality experiences. 5 The first few chapters of Art as Experience leave one with the distinct impression that the aesthetic is primary and widespread in nature, and the world of traditional art objects is secondary. Dewey focuses almost exclusively on experience in its everyday aesthetic aspects, exemplified by a subject’s rapt attention to a gripping object or situation. Dewey does this to “restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience.” 6 The quality of the aesthetic is “implicit in every normal experience,” but it so often “generally fails to become explicit” according to Dewey.7 When experience hits the highpoint of the aesthetic, however, we notice its qualitative impact on us. That experience is meaningful (if not simply pleasurable), and we see the value and importance of such experience.

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The reason why not every experience is noted as aesthetic in its overall quality seems to involve a natural explanation. An organism fails to engage its environment in the right way. This right way includes meeting the challenges posed by an often resistant environment in a sustainable fashion that sets up future instances of meeting environmental challenges. In the terms of Dewey’s moral theory, the reaching of organism-environment equilibrium can be identified as “growth.”8 The living organism has needs that can be sated by the surrounding environment, but not all features of this environment conspire to help the organism meet such needs. Some create resistance or become obstacles to the living creature’s activity. “Growth” occurs when an organism feels the resistance the environment offers to its impulses, and when that organism then finds ways to overcome these resisting features through meaningful action. As Dewey puts it, For only when an organism shares in the ordered relations of its environment does it secure the stability essential to living. And when the participation comes after a phase of disruption and conflict, it bears within itself the germs of a consummation akin to the esthetic.9 An equilibrium in struggle over time has been reached, and ideally it sets up the grounds for future equilibriums to be reached as well. In Dewey’s Art as Experience, this same process is described as being aesthetic in felt quality; the organism feels the culminating meaning of overcoming resistance over a temporal span. In a real sense, growth is equivalent to aesthetic experience— the latter simply captures the qualitative “feel” of a successful temporal struggle with a recalcitrant environment (e.g., an instance of growth). What is particularly powerful about Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics is that this sort of basis will fit our temporal encounters with art objects, as well as our engagement with any temporally-extended experience or activity we may undergo (such as the search for food, as the naturalistic terminology might suggest). By naturalizing his aesthetics, Dewey lays the conceptual groundwork to extend the aesthetic to virtually any activity. What characteristics might we ascribe to the aesthetic on Dewey’s account? By my count, I find three major traits of experience noted as “aesthetic” in quality. First, an aesthetic or integral experience is known by its simultaneous integration with and demarcation from surrounding experiences. It is that stretch of experience that stands apart from other stretches of one’s experiences. The examples Dewey employs are the experiences of a wonderful meal or a tumultuous but successful journey by ship to Europe. Both of these experiences are temporal sequences of events that comprise an overall experience. They are not unrelated to surrounding experiences—one remembers how they got on the boat, to the restaurant, and so forth in connecting present and surrounding past experiences. But one does note the special nature of the present sequence of events, especially compared to the

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surrounding events. Second, the integral experience has a certain kind of individualizing quality among its parts; it has some emotional meaning or tone that makes it that noticeable stretch of experience. It is the experiential quality of that meal that makes it not just any meal. Third, the parts of such integral or aesthetic experience possess a meaningful unity among them. This accounts for the existence of an individualizing quality in this stretch of experience. As indicated previously, the vital point of the temporal nature of an aesthetic experience is also implicated here. There is not a flat unity among its parts, but a unified build or consummation. I will make more of this temporal quality in the next two sections, but suffice it to say that such a unification is what grounds Dewey’s claims that aesthetic experience is integral or consummatory experience—it goes somewhere and is idealized with meaning. Regardless of those (such as Stephen Pepper and Benedetto Croce) who accuse Dewey’s aesthetics of being idealist, it is clear that unity plays a vital role in what makes such experience powerful for humans. 10 What all of these characteristics add up to is an absorptive, immediately responsive experience for the living organism. As Dewey puts it in his Art as Experience, the aesthetic captures the unity of immediately vivid experience; “Art celebrates with peculiar intensity the moments in which the past reenforces the present and in which the future is a quickening of what now is.” 11 Art objects are often the best—but not the only—way to evoke such a vividness of present experience. It is to Dewey’s analysis of such objects that I now turn. 3. The Experience of Art as Aesthetic Dewey’s aesthetic theory does (eventually) engage what we would normally class as “art.” Art is what Dewey calls “an expression,” a word that denotes both an act and an object. The three qualities enunciated in the previous section come together in the “impulsion” that begins the Chapter 4 account of the act of expression. A creature has an impulse to engage the often resistant environment; in the world of expression, it is the material environment of the art object that offers resistance. Such impulsion at the hand of the artist is not mere discharge. At its best (expression), it is an ordered and intelligent reaction to the resistances of the material that comprises the art object. Expression happens in the temporal expanse from the old (e.g., the standing impulse of the creature) to the creation of the new (e.g., the newly charged and funded meanings wrought from the conflict of organism and environment). In art, this plays out in the integral, consummatory experience of an artist’s setting out to create a certain kind of art object. After the objective means offers forth its variety of resistances, the artist redoubles their engagement with the object, albeit in a more meaningful way. The resistances have been accounted for, according to Dewey. This is the act of expressing or squeezing out meaning from one’s creative interaction with the art object; as Dewey notes, “The act of expression that constitutes a work of art is a

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construction in time, not an instantaneous emission.”12 The act of expression is a temporal event that culminates in an artist’s increased understanding. As he puts it in Art as Experience, “The work is artistic in the degree in which the two functions of transformation are effected by a single operation. As the painter places pigments upon the canvas, or imagines it placed there, his ideas and feelings are also ordered. As the writer composes in his medium of words what he wants to say, his idea takes on for himself perceptible form.”13 The expressive object gets further specification in the art world with Dewey’s notion of media.14 Dewey’s aesthetic theory is wide, but not so wide that art objects cannot be analyzed on their own unique terms. “Media” (the typical unit of analysis in art) are contrasted by Dewey to “mere means”—the former “sum up” preceding elements of one’s experience in a consummatory whole. These elements to a very real extent compose the artistic effect that is desired. To use Dewey’s example, the paint used is the painting, it is not merely a means of painting. “Mere means” are characterized, on the other hand, by their replaceability and their externality to the effect desired. They are means that could be otherwise. They do not comprise the end desired like the paint did with the painting. Regular gas could be replaced by diesel or biodiesel; this replacement would be motivated simply by external concerns— pollution, efficiency, or availably. If one changes the paints used for a certain painting, however, one changes the painting itself. Using different words for a poem makes it a different poem. The experience of creating and hearing those words by a subject (be it artist or audience) is the aesthetic experience. The material of the art object both causes the aesthetic experience and constitutes it as instantiated. The medium is the end desired, and not a mere means to an external end. Thus, experience that is aesthetic can be said to involve an internality of means and ends—“all the cases in which means and ends are external to one another are non-esthetic. This externality may even be regarded as a definition of the non-esthetic.”15 The aesthetic gets more delineation when Dewey later adds the quality of immediacy to this unit of means-end: “It cannot be asserted too strongly that what is not immediate is not esthetic.”16 Of course, meanings and relations can be directly evident in perception, according to Dewey, so he is not simply limiting the aesthetic to shapes and form. Instead, the aesthetic is composed of a subject’s absorption in some object that is immediately meaningful and that is composed of means or materials that give it an irreplaceable quality. The internality of ends and means says something vital about the art object. I will eventually argue, however, that it also says something significant about our subjective orientation toward activity in general. In terms of art, the object will be a vital part of the experience of some subject, since it is the focus of attention in the aesthetic experience. The subject can be either the artist or the audience. It is the sculpture’s struggle with that hard stone that conditions and composes the ultimate statue. And it is the details rendered in that stone that take up the attentive audience’s focus in the experience of

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perception. Both sets of aesthetic experiences are temporal, involve individuating qualities, and consummate with a new and renewed meaning at their conclusion. “Media” is simply Dewey’s way to talk about the material of the art object in experience, but many may be tempted to take Dewey as limiting the aesthetic to the world of art and the museum. Of course, this would be far from Dewey’s point. He resisted the museum concept of art not because traditionally-defined art objects fail to be aesthetic, but because such art objects might lead us astray in determining the core of what the aesthetic is and what could possibly be aesthetic. Notice how Dewey segues from his discussion of artistic expression in his Art as Experience to art as experience. He eventually talks about “art” as a quality of doing and of what is done. Only outwardly, then, can it be designated by a noun substantive. Since it adheres to the manner and content of doing, it is adjectival in nature. When we say that tennisplaying, singing, acting, and a multitude of other activities are arts, we engage in an elliptical way of saying that there is art in the conduct of these activities and that this art so qualifies what is done and made as to induce activities in those who perceive them in which there is also art.17 This is the work of art, or the yield of the art object in the experiences of those involved. Yet Dewey leaves open the possibility that the conduct of a range of activities can be artistic or artful. This must mean that they imply or contain the same sort of qualitative distinctiveness of the aesthetic, as well as the integrity of it as media. Do the various activities that make up playing tennis, say, meet the status of being a medium and not a mere means? It is unclear that they are replaceable, as might be the case with different types of fuel in certain engines. The act of playing tennis is not simply winning; that is the goal. The act itself is the executing of certain moves and skills that comprise a certain level of tennis facility. In a very real sense, then, the act of playing tennis is comprised of that set of swings, serves, and so on. Any different set of actions would render it a different game of tennis, just as different paints or words would render a certain painting or poem a different work of art. What might fool us into thinking that such activities lack media-status is that they seem everyday and ordinary. They are simply the movements of one’s body. They also strike one as too spontaneous—one is simply lunging at that ball, say, and this is different from the forethought put into the creation of great works of art. As Richard Shusterman has demonstrated, however, there is a vital role for the body in pragmatist aesthetics.18 The body is implicated in highly skilled actions, whether they are small or seemingly insignificant in scope (moving a fine paintbrush) or larger in range (a powerful serve, say). Such actions can be done with more or less attention and skill. This is what renders them artful to some extent. True artists, be they great painters or grand tennis players, possess the somatic control, habituation, and foresight to evoke

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a certain feeling in those observing their struggle with some external material or environment. Yet one must not make the miss-step of thinking that the embodied activities paradigmatic of artful, embodied activity are those of institutionally identified artists. This might be the case in Martin Jay’s analysis of pragmatist aesthetics, when he focuses on body artists of the 1980s and 1990s who “seemed intent on foregrounding and reveling in trauma, in both its physical and psychological senses.”19 Body artists would not be excluded from Deweyan aesthetics, of course, but I believe focusing on such rarified, symbolic uses of the body gets us further from the point Dewey wanted to make—in natural and “everyday” experiences, there is the capacity for the aesthetic. The live creature and the engaged tennis player can have unity in experience in the same way that a successful performance art piece might bequeath to its doer and audience. One does not need to transcend or challenge the everyday or the ordinary to reap the rewards of the aesthetic on the account of Dewey that I have given. One merely needs the unity and build in object and in experience to get the heightened immediacy that the aesthetic represents. But here I have gone beyond a wide theory of art objects and into even more general ground. And a defense, or at least explication, of such a move must be made. 4. The Art of Experience: Activity as Aesthetic There is art in the creation of an object; there is also art in the creation of experiences with certain qualities. The latter claim expands the scope of Dewey’s aesthetics far beyond the realm of art objects. One may then ask, How can the experience of any activity become aesthetic on Deweyan grounds? If the aesthetic captures a phase or quality of experience that is particularly delightful and meaningful, this question comes with great implications. Potentially, Dewey’s aesthetics could be an “art of experience,” or a way of artfully or skillfully rendering activity as aesthetic. And, keeping in line with pragmatism’s melioristic orientation, it could be seen as a program or recipe for creating more of these valuable experiences. This theme is not totally foreign to Dewey’s pronouncements. For instance, long before he became comfortable or qualified enough to opine on art objects as traditionally conceived, he spoke on the artfulness behind activity and life. In his earlier Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics (1891), he clearly made the point that the aesthetic or the artful can encompass most of life. Given the right amount of skill, life could become the “supreme art” practiced by the living creature. Speaking on this connection of art to the various activities implicated in life, Dewey states: Living itself is the supreme art; it requires fineness of touch; skill and thoroughness of workmanship; susceptible response and delicate

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Here one sees the wide version of aesthetic experience in pragmatist aesthetics—a way of going about activity that gives it the unity, balance, and meaning that artistic media displayed in Dewey’s later analysis of art objects. As was the case in the previously used example of tennis playing, the activity itself is the medium. In other words, the activities undergone by an agent comprise the larger endeavor (e.g., playing tennis, creating this painting, etc.). The nuances and idiosyncrasies of the activities qua means become media when they infect and compose the details and particulars of the whole object in question. In the case of activities such as sports, dining, or even artistic activities like dance, the period of effort and application of skill to activity is the art object. The means here become media given their internal relation to what they create and compose. Why aren’t all activities automatically accorded the status of “media” or as artful exercises of human skill? Why must we struggle to attain this heightened notion of unity, quality, and build naturally resident in every experience in some amount? Talking about the expressivity of art objects, Dewey gives us our clue. The definition of the aesthetic does not merely mean internal unity of parts of the material world of an environment. It also implies a subject’s integration with that environment. In reply to the question, why aren’t more objects “expressive,” Dewey points to subjective shortcomings as the primary culprit, namely habitualized ways of thinking and perceiving that render objects dull and easily glossed over: Yet apathy and torpor conceal this expressiveness by building a shell about objects. Familiarity induces indifference, prejudice blinds us; conceit looks through the wrong end of a telescope and minimizes the significance possessed by objects in favor of the alleged importance of the self.21 Dewey is pointing at habits of how people attend to objects and events. Often “familiarity” and the “slackness of routine” blind agents to the aesthetic potentialities of the external world. This obviously can include one’s experience of an art museum being ruined by mental distraction, but Dewey’s point here is deeper. Much, if not all, of our non-aesthetic experiences might be causally conditioned by the habits we take to them. Yet the question still remains of this wide reading of Dewey’s aesthetic theory: what kind of subjective habits preclude the unity and meaning that is resident in artful or aesthetic experience? The hint to what the wider, subjective reading of aesthetic experience is comes from two overlooked examples in Dewey’s Art as Experience. The first example involves a simple everyday activity—a variety of passengers commuting into New York City by ferry boat. This example was first used by

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one of Dewey’s former students (Max Eastman), but here Dewey expands on it as a way to further explain the deep sense of unity and meaning implied by his aesthetic theory.22 Dewey recounts the experience of each (stipulated) passenger at the railing during the voyage into the city. One glances around randomly, seeing this building, pronouncing its name, and then glances at another one. Another passenger, anxious to get to work, sees the time on the ship as mere drudgery, as something to get through as quickly as possible. This person looks out and only sees reminders of how long a ride is left, or “landmarks by which to judge progress toward his destination.”23 Yet another passenger sees “the scene formed by the buildings ... as colored and lighted volumes in relation to one another, to the sky and to the river. He is now seeing esthetically.”24 The experience of this last person involves the perception of an interconnected whole in front of him, a “perceptual whole, constituted by related parts. No one single figure, aspect, or quality is picked out as a means to some further external result which is desired, nor as a sign of an inference that may be drawn.”25 This seems to be the person in the example who represents the aesthetic middle ground in experience, the point that lies between aimless interaction with one’s environment and mechanical fixity and focus around that environment. Yet some have taken this example to be misleading or confused, however. Armen Marsoobian reads this example as one implying Dewey’s notion of “aesthetic form,” and proceeds to question whether the second passenger—the work-obsessed one—is really “seeing” in a “less-unified manner.”26 What Marsoobian is getting at seems to be the point that aesthetic objects can be unified even in the presence of “extrinsic ends” such as the second passenger’s work obsession. Unity might have different forms than the neat, objectified reading that Dewey seems to assume with the last passenger’s aesthetic experience. I believe that the Deweyan point can be saved from such a demur, however, if one looks at it not with a focus on the aesthetic object, but instead with a focus on what habits create what quality of present experience. Our habits direct our attention, and our attention affects our present experience and the chances for success in future experience. Thus, attention is related to both experiential quality and efficacy, with the latter often ranging from present actions to future desired effects being realized. This realization is also present in Dewey’s reading of the goal of normative endeavors such as ethical cultivation. In Human Nature and Conduct (1922), Dewey argues: What sense is there in increased external control except to increase the intrinsic significance of living? The future that is foreseen is a future that is sometime to be a present. Is the value of that present also to be postponed to a future date, and so on indefinitely? Or, if the food we are struggling to attain in the future is one to be actually realized when that future becomes present, why should not the food of this present be equally precious?27

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What Dewey is reminding us of here is that so many of our normative endeavors—be they in art or in morality—focus on one site of reward and meaning: the present. Goals will always occupy some (remote) present, and all too often when we pursue a remote ideal our tendency is to ignore the present here and now. In aesthetic matters, this maligning of the present is the direct result of habits that focus our attention elsewhere. This is exactly what seems to be happening in the second passenger’s experience; they ignore the present experience (involving the activity of commuting and the vista before them) at the behest of a habitual focus on work and its activities. Once they arrive at work, it is not a stretch to envision them rushing through work tasks while caring only about the paycheck lying at the end of the week. In a deep sense, their habits of attention have externalized the value and meaning of the present experience, and in so doing, they make their experience of that present activity or object a mere means—something that could be skipped or replaced if possible. What makes the experience of the third passenger aesthetic in quality is nothing about the object (the skyline). Instead, the differencemaking factor lies in their habits of attention and goal valuation. A second example from Dewey’s Art as Experience continues to emphasize the importance of the subject in unifying experience. Dewey refers us to two identical test-taking students in an educational setting: “One student studies to pass an examination, to get promotion. To another, the means, the activity of learning, is completely one with what results from it. The consequence, instruction, illumination, is one with the process.”28 Here again we see that a situation’s experiential quality is altered based upon the attitude that an agent takes toward it. The second student’s experience seems to possess the unity of the aesthetic; this unity is precluded by the fragmenting effect of focusing on externalized goals (getting a degree as the most important thing). The object or activity is not the most important thing, since both test-takers (like all the passengers on the ferry) occupied identical material situations. What was different was the agent’s orientation toward the activity or object. Herein resides the widest possible reading of Dewey’s aesthetics: almost any activity can be rendered aesthetic by a skillful deployment of the right orientation by a subject. As I have detailed elsewhere, one’s orientation is a wide-ranging mental habit that governs how one sees the world and negotiates actions and value within it.29 What sort of orientation lies behind these examples? It seems clear that Dewey’s aesthetics idealizes an orientation that does two things: (1) it conceives of the present situation or object as integrally connected to any future (or past) state, such as a goal or cause, and (2) it values the present situation or object as equal to or greater in worth than remote states of affairs, goals, and so forth. Another way of putting it is that the aesthetic orientation does not (1) separate the present from remote states of affairs, nor does it (2) devalue that present in light of remote states of affairs. As Crispin Sartwell

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puts it, in fully aesthetic activity “we ought to reconstrue the relation of means to ends in our actions ... our action should not be performed merely for the sake of the end; the end must not absorb or expunge the means in our deliberation.”30 The means are connected to the end in a value-laden sense. Note that the operative orientation behind such experience involves a focusing of attention in a certain way. One could easily have an orientation that subverts attention to the present, perhaps in favor of ruminative worries over the future or about the past. The sort of orientation that is conducive to the aesthetic is there in the absorptive experience of art objects; it is just often obscured by the presence of objective media (e.g., the paint). Dewey’s talk of the paint comprising the painting is not inaccurate, but he is simply focused on the media that makes up the art object. The experience of the painting will clearly be one of attention to that paint, but it is an experience that takes place over time and that involves a viewer engaging the material of the art object. The work of art occurs over time, and in a viewer’s experience. The subjective side to the aesthetic comes into play here, as harmful habits of attention (orientation) can distract us from the art object, or even from the work it does on us and to us in our experience. Is this wide reading of Dewey’s aesthetics in line with his actual project? I believe it very much is. The notion of the aesthetic foregrounds absorptive, immediate experience. Good artists are skilled at wrestling with objective materials in such a way as to stand a good chance of evoking such a reaction in an audience. Yet like the passengers staring at the haphazardly-formed view of the New York skyline, we are often confronted by objects or situations that aren’t specifically created to act as objective media. The moral of Dewey’s aesthetic theory is that even these sorts of experiences can be rendered aesthetic in quality. They too can have the meaningful quality, build, and consummation that a well-wrought play could possess. One simply needs to look at and value the present as a meeting place of past and future, as the location of funded meanings pointing toward something yet unrealized. This is the picture Dewey started with in Art as Experience when he talked of the “esthetic ideal:” “Only when the past ceases to trouble and anticipations of the future are not perturbing is a being wholly united with his environment and therefore fully alive.”31 It is in such a situation that the living creature does not abandon the present through their orientational focus. Instead, To the being fully alive, the future is not ominous but a promise; it surrounds the present as a halo. It consists of possibilities that are felt as a possession of what is now and here. In life that is truly life, everything overlaps and merges. But all too often we exist in apprehensions of what the future may bring, and are divided within ourselves. Even when not overanxious, we do not enjoy the present because we subordinate it to that which is absent.32

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The aesthetic combines the future and the past in the present. In the case of art, an artist does an admirable job when it becomes easy for an audience to become enraptured in this scene, with its summations of what came before and with the anticipated pointings it does to the future within the film. Yet we must never forget that life and the struggles of the living creature—including the living symbol-using creature that is the human—extends beyond the realm of art objects as defined by specific cultural traditions of production and reception. Our activities can hold the same level of integration as an art object; the difference is simply in the details. Instead of the funded meanings being about this fictional character or that one, they might be about the tone of the tennis match or what this swing of the bat means for the next inning’s pitching challenges. The form is still there—an attentively engaged present funded by the past and anticipating the future. We can engage this present skillfully, or mechanically or randomly. The latter two qualities, of course, parallel the two extremes between which lies the aesthetic: the lockstep mechanism of pure execution and a randomness that allows of no build or meaningful culmination.33 This form is actualized in the subjective experience of a doer or an auditor (of some work of art) when their orientation focuses their attention on rather than distracts it from the present situation or object. There are clearly moral implications to this reading of the aesthetic, since it encompasses both the quality of experience denoted by the word “aesthetic” as well as the moral victories denoted by Dewey’s word of “growth.” To be an effective moral agent would be to be an agent attentively engaged with the particulars of a situation. This reading of aesthetic experience as a certain manner of attention to present experience could also be read as a form of Deweyan mindfulness.34 Space limitations prevent me from fully exploring the moral applications of this equivalence between growth and the aesthetic, but here I can merely rest on the assumption that Dewey’s aesthetics rests on—that the value of the unity, build, and quality of the aesthetic is something that needs no argument. If one grants the value of aesthetic experience, then the promise of Dewey’s aesthetic in its widest form is this: that more of life, perhaps all of life, can have the qualitative reward of the finest aesthetic experience, if only we orient ourselves in such a way as to create such an outcome. Such a skilful and intelligent engagement with experience is as artful as any work on an artistic medium for Dewey. There is still media in the artful life, it is merely the material of activity and experience itself.

NOTES 1. John Dewey, Art as Experience, in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 10, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989). 2. See, for instance, the criticisms of Noël Carroll, Beyond Aesthetics:

The Art of Experience Philosophical Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), and George Dickie, “Beardsley’s Phantom Aesthetic Experience,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 62 (1965), pp. 129-136. 3. Scott R. Stroud, John Dewey and the Artful Life: Pragmatism, Aesthetics, and Morality (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011). 4. David Fott, John Dewey: America’s Philosopher of Democracy (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), p. 109; Martin Jay, “Somaesthetics and Democracy: Dewey and Contemporary Body Art,” Shusterman’s Pragmatism: Between Literature and Somaesthetics, eds. Dorota Koczanowicz and Wojciech Małecki (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), p. 196. 5. Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2nd ed., 2000). 6. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 9. 7. Ibid., p. 18. 8. For instance, see John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, in The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 14, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988); A Common Faith, in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 9, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989). For a secondary account of growth in Dewey’s moral thought, see Gregory F. Pappas, John Dewey’s Ethics: Democracy as Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). 9. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 20. 10. For a similar way of accounting for the aesthetic, see Philip W. Jackson, John Dewey and the Lessons of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). A slightly different way is given in Nathan Crick, Democracy and Rhetoric: John Dewey on the Arts of Becoming (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010). Regarding the Pepper/Croce objections, see Thomas M. Alexander, John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987). 11. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 24. 12. Ibid., p. 70. 13. Ibid., p. 81. 14. Ibid., pp. 100-102. 15. Ibid., p. 202. 16. Ibid., p. 123. 17. Ibid, p. 218. 18. Richard Shusterman, Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 19. Jay, “Somaesthetics and Democracy,” p. 201. 20. John Dewey, Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics, in The Early Works of John Dewey, vol. 3, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), p. 322. 21. Dewey, Art as Experience, pp. 109-110. 22. Max Eastman, Enjoyment of Poetry (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913). 23. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 140.

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24. Ibid., p. 140. 25. Ibid., pp.140-141. 26. Armen T. Marsoobian, “Aesthetic Form Revisited: John Dewey’s Metaphysics of Art,” Philosophy in Experience: American Philosophy in Transition, eds. Richard E. Hart and Douglas R. Anderson (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), p. 216. 27. Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, p. 183. 28. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 201. 29. Scott R. Stroud, “Pragmatism and Orientation,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 20:4 (2006), pp. 287-307. 30. Crispin Sartwell, The Art of Living: Aesthetics of the Ordinary in World Spiritual Traditions (Albany: State University of New York, 1995), p. 97. 31. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 24. 32. Ibid., p. 24. 33. Ibid., p. 22. 34. Scott R. Stroud, “Toward a Deweyan Theory of Communicative Mindfulness,” Imagination, Cognition, and Personality, 30:1 (20102011), pp. 57-75.

Three PRAGMATIC OBJECTIVITY AND THE GROUNDS OF VALIDITY OF AESTHETIC JUDGMENTS Roberto Frega 1. Objectivity and the Art of Criticism Aesthetics is probably not the best place to start if one wishes to defend the idea of objectivity. More than any other academic discipline, aesthetics seems to be the place where any attempt at defending an “objective,” or “independent,” conception of reality should be dismissed. And in fact, especially in the wake of the last fifty years of aesthetic theory, there is certainly not much sense in reclaiming any role for an objective foundation of aesthetic judgment in its traditional meaning. Things change, however, once we dismiss the received understanding of what objectivity is, and adopt what I will call a pragmatic theory of objectivity.1 Pragmatic objectivity, as I intend to show, provides the theoretical basis for explaining the grounds of the validity of aesthetic judgments. To work out my conception of pragmatic objectivity with reference to the aesthetic domain I will refer to the works of the two pragmatists who have most contributed to aesthetic theory: John Dewey and Joseph Margolis. We often tend to believe that pragmatism requires the adoption of a relativistic stance in relation to the status of criticism, whether of an aesthetic, social, or ethico-political kind. Based on an unhappy mix of the most controversial theories of William James and Richard Rorty, one would be entitled to say that as long as the function of criticism is the improvement of our life in all its forms, then whatever will serve this end would be good and therefore legitimate. This received view contains of course a part of the truth, but it perverts it beyond recognition. The element of truth can be stated as this: all pragmatists from Charles Sanders Peirce to the present day would agree to recognize that criticism has an immanent function within experience, as experience constitutes its horizon as well as its object. Similarly, all pragmatists would be ready to assign to criticism an emancipatory or transformative function, according to a model that is political, social and aesthetic, and that was originally established by John Dewey.2 Pragmatism sees criticism as a non-universal and fallible practice, a practice that is nevertheless capable of formulating normative judgments and of providing the objective basis on which they can be defended.

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Alternatively put, criticism is a self-reflective practice. How is this possible? How, that is to say, do the pragmatists manage to hold together the two seemingly incompatible dimensions of context-dependence and epistemic accountability? For the pragmatist, in fact, criticism requires friction and is, in a way, intolerant of disagreement.3 2. John Dewey and the Objectivity of Art Criticism Dewey’s theory of judgment and criticism provides a first clue to the solution. Particularly in his aesthetics, Dewey has shown what aesthetic experience can teach us with respect to the conditions of validity and the mode of functioning of criticism. Dewey follows here an anthropological strategy of which three theses are worth mentioning. 1. The first thesis concerns the unstable and precarious nature of human existence, and the positive value of whatever contributes to the integration and stabilization of experience. Dewey says that “the institutional life of mankind is marked by disorganization,”4 and that, “In a world like ours, every living creature that attains sensibility welcomes order with a response of harmonious feeling.”5 2. The second thesis asserts that an experience that produces unification and integration within human existence creates a positive feeling, because it relieves the pain of disorganization, conflict, and uncertainty that characterizes human life. 3. The third thesis establishes a privileged link between the field of aesthetics and this unifying quality: aesthetics, both as a quality of experience and as a work of art, is characterized by its distinctive way of bringing about unification. Within aesthetic experience, “every successive part flows freely, without seam and without unfilled blanks, into what ensues.” Also, “in a work of art, different acts, episodes, occurrences melt and fuse into unity, and yet do not disappear and lose their own character as they do so.” 6 In this respect, Dewey distinguishes clearly between what he calls the aesthetic quality and what he calls the aesthetic experience, noting that the aesthetic quality is what gives unity to experience. As he explains, “no experience of whatever sort is a unity unless it has aesthetic quality.”7 From these considerations Dewey can conclude that aesthetics “is the clarified and intensified development of traits that belong to every normally complete experience”8 and that “art is the living and concrete proof that man is capable of restoring consciously, and thus on the plane of meaning, the union of sense, need, impulse and action characteristic of the live creature.” 9 Aesthetic experience is therefore an experience of unification not in the sense of an unqualified totality but rather of what Dewey calls a “feeling of exquisite intelligibility and clarity.”10 Whether at the intellectual, emotional or somatic level, aesthetic experience is accomplished and satisfying insofar as it gives its beneficiary a kind of fullness. Fullness, as Dewey explains, is a neutral term: the experience of which art tries to distill the essential features is

Pragmatic Objectivity and the Grounds of Validity of Aesthetic Judgments 49 not necessarily a pleasant experience. Consummation, to use one of Dewey’s preferred words, may cause pain and suffering. That Dewey’s concern with unification is anthropological means precisely this: our nature forces us to search for some form of unification, composition and order, and whenever we reach it we experience a sense of fullness. The meaning of the attribute “aesthetic” is therefore twofold: in a first sense, the aesthetic experience refers to the positive meaning that people associate with an ordered flux of experience. But in a second—and I would suggest more compelling—sense, the aesthetic quality refers to the determination—“intelligibility and clarity”—in our perception of the experience itself, regardless of the quality of its content. This point should come as no surprise if we take seriously Dewey’s conception of aesthetics as a discipline much broader than the theory of art, to which can attest the extensive reference to the importance of the qualitative dimension in Dewey’s logic. It is therefore in that sense that art is for Dewey “a selection of what is significant, with rejection by the very same impulse of what is irrelevant, and thereby the significant is compressed and intensified.”11 What transforms an aesthetic experience into a work of art—and what by the same token enables us to distinguish the one from the other—is the incorporation of the aesthetic quality into an expressive medium. Things being so, the aesthetic comes to denote two complementary dimensions. On the one hand, it is a fundamental dimension of human experience, because “esthetic experience is experience in its integrity.” 12 On the other hand, aesthetics refers to an achieved result, one that incorporates an expressive potential and that provides a reference for criticism thanks to its ability to single out, in the stream of undifferentiated experience, the most relevant elements. The work of art has, in this sense, a normative potential that is extremely close to that of logical thought: for Dewey, in fact, selectivity constitutes the essential feature of the aesthetic gesture as well as of the act of judgment.13 We come therefore to glimpse in what sense for Dewey aesthetic criticism has an objective basis. Dewey distinguishes two functions of aesthetic criticism: on the one hand, an emancipatory conception of art as a way to improve our ways of life in the twofold sense of an aesthetic of existence or in the more general sense of a criticism of life; on the other hand, a conception of aesthetic criticism as a critique of the work of art based on the conception of art as experience. To articulate his theory of aesthetic criticism, Dewey begins by contrasting it with two other models, which he distinguishes according to their different conception of the normative standard. The first paradigm, which Dewey calls “judiciary,” seeks to derive from the past, from existing tradition and from established practices, the standards that criticism should adopt. According to this view, “Criticism is thought of as if its business were not explication of the content of an object as to substance and form, but a process of acquittal or condemnation on the basis of merits

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and demerits.”14 Dewey criticizes this model as being inadequate to the theorizing of aesthetic criticism because of its “inability to cope with the emergence of new modes of life—of experiences that demand new modes of expression.”15 With an irony that reflects, however, his own conception of the epistemic quality of aesthetic judgments, Dewey notes that “[r]epresentatives of the school of judicial criticism do not seem to be sure whether the masters are great because they observe certain rules or whether the rules now to be observed are derived from the practice of great men.”16 The second model constitutes itself in opposition to the first, drawing from the failure of the judiciary paradigm the relativistic thesis of the impossibility of aesthetic judgment. This model, which Dewey calls “impressionist criticism,” asserts that “judgment should be replaced by statement of the responses of feeling and imagery the art object evokes.” 17 This conception of judgment is for Dewey as flawed as that which it proposes to replace. The problem here is that the qualitative impressions and emotions can be, at most, the starting point of judgment; they can never replace it. For Dewey (always careful to avoid the fallacy of the myth of the given), any verbal articulation of a supposed first impression bring us inevitably within what Sellars calls “the logical space of reasons.” Sense impressions, in other words, cannot have a total controlling power over judgment, as even the most simple act of judgment, such as definition, inevitably introduces a critical distance between the subject and the sense impression upon which critical reflection is exercised. When we try to define or describe these impressions that would directly engage with the aesthetic experience, in fact we are already caught up in the space of reasons, because “to define an impression is to analyze it, and analysis can proceed only by going beyond the impression, by referring it to the grounds on which it rests and the consequences which it entails,” and this “going beyond,” Dewey tells us, “is judgment.”18 Although apparently opposed, these two conceptions of judgment (i.e. judiciary and impressionist) are affected by the same problem, as both rely on a one-sided understanding of judgment. On the one hand, the judicial model severs technique from experience and identifies objectivity with the disciplined respect for given technical standards. It transforms the expressive means into an independent end and fails therefore to grasp the creative moment which is an essential ingredient of every work of art. On the other hand, the impressionistic model focuses exclusively on the dimension of the lived experience of the spectator and denies any relevance to the dimension of technical mastery. By denying the importance of the expressive means, the impressionist model severs the creative gesture19 from the background of the experience that not only has made it possible but that in addition provides its conditions of intelligibility. Dewey contends therefore that to understand the nature of aesthetic judgment, that is to say to understand it as a form of criticism that has an objective basis, we need to overcome this separation and reintegrate the two dimensions of objectivity and creativity. Creativity and

Pragmatic Objectivity and the Grounds of Validity of Aesthetic Judgments 51 objectivity are, in the perspective offered by Dewey, strictly interrelated and mutually dependent. But how can Dewey reconcile these two apparently incompatible dimensions? How can objectivity be expressed by a creative gesture, and how can creativity be said to be objective? Dewey’s solution consists in conjoining what the competing approaches separate, that is to say the expressive medium and the lived experience. Like any other reflective human activity, art is a problem-solving activity, and this fact provides criticism with the friction required by objectivity. As he says, “The existence of resistance defines the place of intelligence in the production of an object of fine art.” As a consequence, “the difficulties to be overcome in bringing about the proper reciprocal adaptation of parts constitute what in intellectual work are problems.”20 Artistic experience is objective in the sense that the work of art presents itself as the solution to a problem encountered in seeking to give shape to experience. In his effort, however, the artist finds himself lacking the necessary expressive means. Hence the necessity of creativity, but a necessity that is nonetheless rooted in a framework that Dewey does not hesitate to call objective, as it is determined by the conditions of an experimental activity which is—as every experimental practice is—public. This problem-solving conception of art applies to the spectator as well as to the artist. Indeed, “the perceiver as well as the artist has to perceive, meet, and overcome problems; otherwise, appreciation is transient and overwheighted [sic] with sentiment.” 21 The artist’s way of proceeding is therefore as objective as that of the experimental scientist: “the artist is compelled to be an experimenter because he has to express an intensely individualized experience through means and materials that belong to the common and public world. Only because the artist operates experimentally does he open new fields of experience and disclose new aspects and qualities in familiar scenes and objects.”22 In a complementary fashion, judgment draws its sources of objectivity from the connection with experience: to discover new means to express and to give voice to forms of experience that so far have remained silent is the external correlate to which the objectivity of aesthetic judgment refers. To defend his conception of the objectivity of aesthetic judgment, Dewey roots aesthetics in anthropology, which he uses to develop his functional theory of aesthetic experience. Although the kind of objectivity that aesthetic judgment can reclaim is not the same type of objectivity that is at work in scientific judgment, it provides what is required to save criticism from the risk of arbitrariness: to show the aesthetic value of a work of art means articulating the connection between the dimension of human experience that is individual as well as social-historical, and the material and technical dimension which is that of the available expressive means. It will come therefore as no surprise that Dewey defends the idea of a “natural history of the form” according to which the formal requirements of the artwork are “rooted deep in the world itself. Interaction of environment

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with organism is the source, direct or indirect, of all experience and from the environment come those checks, resistances, furtherances, equilibria, which, when they meet with the energies of the organism in appropriate ways, constitute form.”23 In a similar way, he will remark that “a common interest in rhythm is still the tie which holds art and science in kinship.”24 The idea of a natural history, which Dewey had already used in his epistemology, introduces us also to the social dimension of criticism. Indeed, the inclusion of art in what with Alasdair MacIntyre we may define as the “tradition of research” implies that the artist as well as the critic must appropriate the tradition against which and through which the work of art is created, because without knowing the wide variety of instruments, techniques, technologies, and solutions available at one time and accessible to those who belong to the tradition, the activity of criticism and that of artistic creation become impossible.25 On the other hand, the immanentist approach adopted by Dewey requires that we assign to experience a privileged position among the criteria of aesthetic criticism. Indeed, experience provides the second source of normativity and introduces pluralism as a constitutive condition of criticism: “the unity the critic traces must be in the work of art. This statement does not signify that there is just one unifying idea or form in a work of art. There are many, in proportion to the richness of the object in question. What is meant is that the critic shall seize upon some strain or strand that is actually there, and bring it forth with such clearness that the reader has a new clue and guide in his own experience.”26 On the one hand, since the meaning of art lies in its ability to intensify experience, and since the intensification of experience does not occur in everyone in the same way, different individuals will likely have different judgments on the same work of art. On the other hand, Dewey acknowledges that criticism too must inevitably be pluralistic, as criticism too explains art in terms of the kind of experience it engenders. The claim to objectivity of aesthetic criticism is therefore embedded in the restricted space of a controlled pluralism. From this perspective, the objective character that Dewey assigns to the work of art lies in its expressive capacity to allow discrimination between competing critical judgments. Pluralism, in fact, is not an “anything goes” relativism, so that whatever excites sensibility is not for that reason necessarily beautiful. The articulation of these two moments is a key element of this conception. Dewey constantly asserts that one is but the reflection of the other, as the work of art only exists by way of and for the sake of experience, for its capacity to allow a human group to intensify the quality of the experience we call aesthetic. At the same time, Dewey insists that the artistic process cannot be separated from objective conditions, referring to the historical conditions and historical situation of the artistic disciplines. So there is complementarity: “to be truly artistic, a work must also be aesthetic—that is, framed for enjoyed receptive

Pragmatic Objectivity and the Grounds of Validity of Aesthetic Judgments 53 perception.”27 The appeal to experience must therefore be tempered by its inclusion in a natural history of the form. This strategy neutralizes, at least in part, the criticisms that are commonly addressed to the aesthetic theories that define art in terms of aesthetic experience.28 It remains true that for Dewey the criterion of expressive capability remains essential, and that therefore it is rather to the latter that we must look ultimately to determine the sources of the validity of aesthetic judgment: to create a more intense and complete experience, and to bring others to intensify their own experience, serves as a superior normative criterion. Here too Dewey seems able to provide some bases of objectivity to aesthetic criticism, by relying on the social and natural sources of human life. But how, exactly, shall the critic acknowledge that he is on the right track? What criteria could serve as support when it comes to judging a work or to comparing two contrasting critical judgments? Dewey here invokes anthropology to define what a “normal experience” is, whose main traits are determined by “the essential conditions of life.”29 But he invokes as well the expressive function of art in relation to human community: “in the degree in which art exercises its office, it is also a remaking of the experience of the community in the direction of greater order and unity.”30 Note that this call for the role of art in the community is, however, operating within the anthropological framework. In this sense, the question of the conditions of validity of aesthetic judgment, and of the conditions of possibility of art as a critical function, can be formulated and answered only with reference to the idea of normal experience. Without the possibility of appeal to the positive value of unification and integration as a form of achieved experience, the prospects for objectivity of aesthetic judgment seem to be forever exposed to the whims of subjectivities. Dewey tries to escape these problems by insisting on the importance of the materiality of expressive means and of technique as indispensable ingredients of creation: these are the elements that ultimately account for the objectivist tone that resounds throughout Dewey’ s aesthetics. To conclude, the following are the elements that sustain Dewey’s conception of the objective basis of aesthetic judgment. Firstly, starting from his theory of experience, he argues that the artist is a problem-solver who addresses a problem that is raised by the socio-historical and technicalexpressive conditions of experience in his time: he seeks to give form to experiences that are still inchoate or unarticulated. Secondly, relying on his theory of creativity Dewey argues that the artist is successful only when this expressive search is combined with the search for new expressive means. Thirdly, he concludes that it is only the felicitous combination of these two conditions that ultimately serves as a benchmark for critique. The articulation of these aspects governs the discourse of criticism and provides it with the needed independent standpoints. While this approach is not likely (as has sometimes been said) to flatten out criticism into a naive and watered-down conception of art, it remains true that when the degree of autonomy of artistic

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experimentation exceeds a certain threshold—as is the case with most, if not all, contemporary art—the reference to the anthropological basis of “normal experience” and to the social and natural sources of aesthetic experience loses most of its grip, so that additional interpretive resources become necessary. This is the challenge taken up by Margolis’ s theory of interpretation. 3. The Non-Objectivist Objectivity of Joseph Margolis’s Theory of Interpretation To begin with, let me state how Joseph Margolis seems to see the challenge introduced by a pragmatic conception of objectivity, by quoting what he takes to be the real question that lies at the heart of his “internal relativism”: “What must the world be like, and how should our cognitive capacities conform, if interpretation has realist standing despite the fact that it could not in principle secure the inviolability of a bivalent logic of interpretation?” As he rightly notes, “[t]hat is a question almost never rightly canvassed.” 31 Margolis’s argument may be reconstructed in three steps. First, a critique of traditional conceptions of objectivity. Second, the inscription of the notion of objectivity within a “universal” theory of interpretation. Third, a practicebased theory of objectivity for the aesthetic domain. The Critique of Traditional Conceptions of Objectivity. I take Margolis’s pragmatism to be mostly evident in his willingness to take social practices seriously. In a truly pragmatist fashion, Margolis begins to answer the question of the objectivity of interpretation by observing that interpretive practices as they unfold under our eyes have the power to discriminate. Objectivity is not something imposed upon criticism from outside, but a property displayed by our practices. Aesthetic criticism proves in practice its normative potential without this requiring—this is the second pragmatist moment—“any a priori notion of objectivity.”32 The objectivity of practices of aesthetic criticism need not be vindicated from outside; philosophy is not asked to salvage the critical enterprise. Its task, in other words, will not be to justify the possibility of art criticism. Margolis’s formulation of the problem of objectivity in aesthetic judgment starts from the refusal to accept the either-or injunction to choose between realism and post-modernism, which is to say between the equally unsatisfying alternatives of the “only one interpretation” approach and the “anything goes relativism” of post-modern conceptions of the indefinite proliferation of an unbounded freedom to interpret. On the one hand are those theories which hold “that interpretation is practiced on relatively stable, antecedently specifiable referents of some sort, and that the requisite account identifies the practice by which distributed claims about them are responsibly assigned truth-like values of some sort.” On the other hand are those which hold that “interpretation is a productive practice by which an entire ‘world’ or what may be distributively referred to in that world is or are actually and aptly

Pragmatic Objectivity and the Grounds of Validity of Aesthetic Judgments 55 first constituted.”33 Margolis’s task, like Dewey’s, consists then in describing pragmatism as a third way finding its own theoretical space between the excesses of these options. Against the first option, Margolis has extensively and persuasively shown that the irreducibly intentional nature of human properties blocks the road toward realism and ruins any hope of reaching “truth” in matters of criticism. On the other hand, however, Margolis is not ready to give way to the epistemological inconsistencies of post-modern “anything goes” relativism. If we admit, as it seems impossible to avoid doing, that every human practice presupposes some form of reference, we seem to be solidly set on the path toward a conception of “objectivity without truth” or, in a more conservative way, of objectivity without bivalence, if, as in Margolis’s project, we adopt a multi-valued conception of truth.34 The merit of Margolis’s attempt resides, then, in having shown that vindicating the objectivity of aesthetic criticism is not a self-standing task, as it requires the endorsement of a much broader thesis, which is that of the irreducibility of intentional/cultural/human predicates to physical ones. This thesis, which sustains his entire effort to develop a full-blown anthropology, shoulders his theory of interpretation and provides a larger theoretical basis for a new defense of a pragmatic view of objectivity not only for the domain of aesthetic criticism but, more radically, for any intellectual undertaking dealing with human experience or, alternatively put, for any of the manifold interpretive sciences. Indeed, Margolis is well aware that “a theory of interpretation is nothing less than a theory of the human condition.”35 The ambition of the theory that Margolis sketches against the background of a world history of metaphysics opposing “flux” and “substance,” and spanning the whole tradition of western philosophy,36 explains why Margolis has left outside the scope of his theory the task of making a detailed account of the theoretical and methodological requirements that may enable us to lay out historically and socially determined conditions for objectivity. The point seems to be that for Margolis, given the kind of relativism he espouses, there is no need for—so to say—a meta-theory of objectivity: objectivity is something that is produced within social practices, according to the normative criteria these practices develop over the course of time. At the same moment, he seems to be perfectly aware of the fact that once one has accepted the framework of a theory of interpretation, then the only relevant—and indeed central—question which remains to be asked is: “in how many different ways may interpretation be taken to support claims of objective validity, and how do these fare in competition with one another?”37 Yet Margolis seems to believe that there is nothing very interesting to be said on this question at the general level of philosophical statements. Once the theory of interpretation has been vindicated as the legitimate epistemological framework within which the question of the objectivity of criticism must be asked, objectivity talk is left to the historical agents engaging in interpretive practices, and Margolis is content with observing from above that reality is consistent with his theory, and that practices

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effectively display a commitment to “radical but not unruly” practices of interpretation. I would venture to say that for him the task of the philosopher is as simple and modest as that. “Regional” socio-historically contextualized methodologies will do the rest. I want to press further my analysis to see if we can go beyond this epistemic asceticism. Interpretive Objectivity. To understand how Margolis’s epistemology of interpretation drives his understanding of objectivity we need to add two further elements. The first is the real or supposed discontinuity introduced by modernism in the history of art. The second is the idea that interpretation applies to texts or text-like entities. A text-like entity is something that intrinsically possesses intentional properties. Texts are interpretable because they are intrinsically indeterminate, and interpretation is seen as a determinating process. The relation of determination to indeterminacy opens up the space where a critical appraisal of competing interpretations is possible, and where as a consequence the issue of objectivity arises. Margolis’s theory of interpretation extends therefore far beyond the disciplinary boundaries of aesthetics. One may assume that Margolis’s reticence about putting forth explicit normative standards for aesthetic criticism reflects the historical—and perhaps cultural—distance that separates him from Dewey. After modernism and pop art, after Duchamp and the performing arts, Dewey’s reliance on experience and method has certainly proven weak as an exclusive basis on which to provide a universal account of artistic experience. Dewey’s concern in Art as Experience is predominantly with early modernist, or proto-modernist art, and most of his examples are taken from it. Margolis, on the other hand, is mostly concerned with modernism proper (from the beginning of the 20th century on) and postmodernism, and such art displays a much more sustained resistance to being curbed by objectivist criteria. Or, to put it in other words, in modernist art the gap between indeterminacy and determination is much larger, leaving open many more plausible interpretive options than is the case with the art that preceded it. The historical awareness that separates Margolis from Dewey has certainly a role to play in explaining their differences, but there is more. The second idea evoked above is that of interpretability as an irreducible feature of the human. Although I do not see here an incompatibility in principle, there is certainly a difference in emphasis: whereas Dewey insists on a natural continuity among problem-solving strategies as a basis for reclaiming objectivity, Margolis reaches the same goal by relying on an emergentist understanding of interpretive properties. Whereas Dewey’s naturalism is dominated by the question of the naturality of man as a key to dismantling dominant idealistic and intellectualistic ways of thinking, Margolis’s naturalism is rather dominated by the question of the “discontinuity in continuity” brought about by culture and language seen as emergent properties of an artifactual self, according with a model of a double—external and internal—Bildung.38 One might fear that by taking

Pragmatic Objectivity and the Grounds of Validity of Aesthetic Judgments 57 seriously Margolis’s claim that interpretable things—texts—do not possess natures but rather “careers,”39 the prospects for objectivity, already reduced by the historical awareness brought about by modernism, become very slim. If “Interpreted texts must have somewhat stable properties but they need not have altogether fixed natures,”40 then the problem remains of what it could possibly mean to say that one interpretation is more objective or more true than another. In other words, the problem seems to be now how historicity (of interpretations) and objectivity can be reconciled. For Margolis the question of interpretation goes to the heart of the properly ontological constitution of the human. He is primarily interested in establishing the legitimacy of an “interpretative nature,” in showing that interpretation does not imply the loss of reference. He wants to identify a range of variation within which the identity of texts—and of selves as texts41—can be preserved. From that perspective, objectivity names essentially the possibility of preserving reference in flux, of conceiving identities as being temporally changing. Or, to put it otherwise, objectivity is to preserve the numerical identity of texts through “indefinitely many interpretations in principle.”42 Although Margolis has been a tireless critic of aesthetic realism, he seems to be much more concerned by the challenge of post-modernism. In that sense, he is mainly concerned with showing that post-modernism—and relativism—is still compatible with objectivity, as thin as this might possibly be. Objectivity comes to have a mainly negative function which consists in allowing and at the same time limiting the relativist drift opened by interpretation. As the title of one of Margolis’s books states, objectivity allows interpretation to be radical but not unruly, without imposing on it too rigid schemes of bivalence and truth.43 In this interpretation, however, objectivity seems to lack what is generally considered one of its distinguishing features, which is its discriminatory function, its capacity to make a difference among competing claims, even in the absence of a commitment to bivalence. And, in fact, for Margolis objectivity has a weaker epistemic status: it serves to draw the boundary between valid and non-valid interpretations, allowing a plurality of equally valid interpretations to coexist in a pluralist space. More technically, according to Margolis, the kind of objectivity that is appropriate to interpretation can be defined not in terms of a linear approximation, namely of more or less proximity to the truth, but rather in terms of a holistic appraisal: each interpretation which is valid is valid in its own way which does not admit a grading.44 This may be a quite radical thesis, however, as it threatens the very possibility of objectivity. For these reasons, Margolis’s take on pragmatic objectivity cannot follow all the way down the line opened up by Dewey, as his different historical perspective on art as well as the emerging nature of intentional properties on which his theory of interpretation relies require a much more sustained degree of pluralism. In particular, if “intentional properties are such that they can be constituted, altered, affected, generated by the processes of critical discourse or

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interpretation applied to given texts or cultural referents,”45 then the resources reclaimed by Dewey for grounding the objectivity of aesthetic criticism— experience and method—become unavailable. Margolis’s theory is at the same time immensely more ambitious in its scope and significantly more modest in its achievements, and the inverse correlation between these two variables should not come as a surprise. On the one hand, by confining his theory to aesthetic judgment, Dewey can invoke expressive power and technical achievement as independent criteria on which to build an aesthetic discourse. On the other hand, by expanding the scope of interpretation to the whole gamut of human expressions—and so coming closer to Peirce’s semiotics than to Dewey’s aesthetics—Margolis should renounce the aim of providing concrete guidelines for assessing the prospects for the objectivity of aesthetic judgments. Margolis, thus recovering a central pragmatist theme, turns then to practices to look for answers concerning how “objective rigor” may be attained in interpretation. As in Dewey, our natural endowments, and our sociality as part of them, are those aspects which constrain the otherwise uncontrolled play of interpretations; intentionality is social, and sociality takes place within “the sheer conservative contingencies of life itself.” 46 Or, as Margolis has stated more recently, interpretation is at the very least a sittlich practice addressed to Intentional elements and structures (both verbal and nonverbal), entitled, for that reason, to a measure of objective standing, in assigning meaning, import, signification and the like to artworks (and other cultural artifacts: speech, history, action, tradition), ultimately grounded in the shared life of a viable human society.47 Margolis is committed to a thoroughgoing immanentism, according to which “we must begin in the middle of our usual practices— presuppositionlessly and in a sittlich way”48 and this implies looking at interpretive objectivity as a property displayed by existing interpretative practices rather than as the achievement of a detached epistemology. Here Margolis joins Dewey in seeing in the sociality of practices the source of the pragmatic constraints that allow interpretations to be radical without becoming too easily unruly, but he remains significantly less explicit on what would count as a valid specimen of objective standing. Without this, it seems unlikely that we can understand how to discriminate between competing interpretations or how, that is, we can play the game of interpretive objectivity. One way out of this problem consists in bringing the perspectives of Dewey’s and Margolis’s epistemologies to an intermediate point of convergence. This can be done by showing how Dewey’s theory of aesthetic criticism fits within Margolis’s theory of interpretation while at the same time providing a concrete instantiation of how, in a specific circumstance, the

Pragmatic Objectivity and the Grounds of Validity of Aesthetic Judgments 59 vague principle of interpretation can be brought down to earth and incarnated within a notion of precise objectivity. This should then be capable of providing specific guidelines for discriminating among competing interpretations and showing how, on a case by case basis, the objectivity of interpretation can be effectively vindicated. The viability of this interpretation seems to be confirmed by a recent statement of Margolis’s admitting the difficulty of bringing conceptual art within his own conception of interpretive objectivity, and acknowledging that the possibility of objectivity requires some minimal conditions. To be interpretable, artworks must be “well-formed ‘things’ of familiar genres.” This condition is necessary to allow what Margolis calls a “centripetal” practice of interpretation, by which he means “that interpretation tends to adopt an “internalist” stance, commits its best work to making explicit the ordered structure of the inhering properties of a given artwork.” 49 According to Margolis, conceptual art does not—or not always—satisfy this minimal constraint, and tends to allow centrifugal rather than centripetal practices of interpretation. Although this does not mean that conceptual art would be intrinsically uninterpretable, it seems that objectivity talk finds here an experiential—if not a conceptual—limitation. Margolis admits that the success of an interpretive strategy requires a minimal “measure of adequation” of the strategy to the object to be interpreted. We may assume that the very meaning of objectivity as a regulative criteria for interpretive practices should emerge precisely from this “adequational” relation. 4. The Dewey-Margolis Thesis of Interpretive Objectivity In what follows I will suggest that by re-specifying Dewey’s normative account within Margolis’s historicized interpretive epistemology, we obtain a conception of objectivity weaker than Dewey’s but more constraining than Margolis’s. I call this the Dewey-Margolis thesis. According to this view, objectivity is an immanent potentiality of aesthetic judgment and, more broadly, of any interpretive undertaking. As such, objectivity is tied to the immanent normative properties of social practices. Art as well as any other social practice develops its intrinsic normative standards through immanent experimentation. Being interpretive, aesthetic judgment opens its own objectivity to historical variation: the identities of works of art, like those of any other cultural artifacts, evolve in time, and this process gives to objectivity a dynamic twist, indexing it to socio-historical contexts. As Dewey and Margolis point out, our aesthetic judgments do not change—or not only— because our opinions are volatile, but because the very objects of our judgment have a temporal constitution and change in time. Aesthetic criticism is a social practice. For Margolis, its hope of remaining within the bounds of objective discourse are granted by its

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inscription within the domain of interpretive practice. Margolis defends a position of “epistemic abstinence,”50 according to which we should limit our desire for generalities to the general statements allowed by a theory of interpretation. Any further consideration about objectivity should devolve to local inquiries on specific interpretive practices. For Dewey the prospects of normative theory are slightly more optimistic. As one would be entitled to infer from Art as Experience as well as from his Logic, some additional general epistemic constraints can be specified. As we have seen, for Dewey objectivity of aesthetic criticism requires a minima a consideration of the expressive potential of a work of art and of its technical resources. Although what counts as a technical innovation as well as an expressive achievement will have to be specified on a case by case basis, technical innovation and expressive efficacy provide criteria which a valid interpretation should take into account. An interpretation that does not do justice to at least these two dimensions will be likely to miss the requirements for becoming authoritative, and could therefore be disregarded on the basis of a well-grounded aesthetic criticism. Other criteria could certainly be added so as further to reduce the gap between Dewey’s and Margolis’s anthropologies. The second aspect on which integration must be sought concerns the challenge of modernism. It is certainly true that in the time spanning from Dewey to Margolis we have witnessed an astonishing proliferation of artistic as well as interpretive practices, so that today even Dewey’s minimal requirements may appear beyond reach. Yet if we wish to reclaim concrete hopes for objectivity, we should probably ask for something more than Margolis’s contentment with the notion of “intuitive ability” or “gift” for producing effective or compelling interpretations. Going beyond this thin epistemic requirement is possible without violating Margolis’s conception of intentionality and interpretation. But to do it, we need a scalar theory of objectivity, according to which different practices are responsive to various conceptions of objectivity. In this view, one would be entitled to contextualize Margolis’s epistemic abstinence to those cases where, in his own words, centripetal interpretation tends to fail, so that we are driven to the center-less practice of a centrifugal interpretation which relies on very minimal objective requirements. In this view, the extreme views that modernism presses upon interpretation should not be taken to be the last word about objectivity and interpretation, but rather as a fair description of what happens to objectivity when criticism and art meet in that specific configuration. Other practices of criticism and other historical configurations will certainly allow for a greater degree of objectivity, as the discussion of Dewey’s epistemology of the aesthetic judgment has shown. No matter how we decide this matter, the Dewey-Margolis thesis firmly reclaims the epistemological priority of practice. It is a thesis which, in its own way, encompasses one of the most powerful and most promising intuitions boasted by pragmatism in aesthetics and elsewhere.

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NOTES 1. Roberto Frega, “Moral Inquiry and the Pragmatic Basis of Objectivity,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 51:1 (2013), pp. 1–23. 2. See in particular John Dewey, Experience and Nature, in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 1, ed. Jo Ann Boyston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981), chap. 10 and Art as Experience, in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 10, ed. Jo Ann Boyston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), chap. 13. 3. Huw Price, “Truth as Convenient Friction,” The Journal of Philosophy, 100:4 (2003), pp. 167-190. I have explained in “Moral Inquiry and the Pragmatic Basis of Objectivity” how the idea of friction can be preserved without having to accept a realist ontology. How, in other words, friction can be married to a mild or internal conception of relativism. 4. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 26. 5. Ibid., p. 20. 6. Ibid., p. 43. 7. Ibid., p. 47. 8. Ibid., p. 53. 9. Ibid., p. 31. 10. Ibid., p. 199. 11. Ibid., p. 211. 12. Ibid., 278. 13. John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 12, ed. Jo Ann Boyston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986). 14. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 303. 15. Ibid., p. 307. 16. Ibid., p. 305. 17. Ibid., p. 308. 18. Ibid. 19. See Giovanni Maddalena, “Creative Gestures: a Pragmatist View,” The European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, 5:1 (2013), pp. 65-76. 20. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 143. 21. Ibid., p. 148. 22. Ibid., pp. 148-9. 23. Ibid., p. 152. 24. Ibid., p. 154. 25. Ibid., pp. 314-315. 26. Ibid., p. 318. 27. Ibid., p. 54. 28. See Richard Shusterman, “The End of Aesthetic Experience,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 55:1 (1997), pp. 29–41. 29. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 18. 30. Ibid., p. 87. 31. Joseph Margolis, “Relativism and Interpretive Objectivity,” Metaphilosophy, 31:1 (2000), pp. 200–226, p. 203 32. Joseph Margolis, “Canons for Objectivist Interpretation,” The Monist, 76:4 (1993),

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pp. 494-508. 33. Joseph Margolis, Interpretation, Radical but not Unruly (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 19. 34. For a different account of pragmatic objectivity consistent with Margolis’s see my Judgment, Practice and the Challenge of Moral and Political Disagreement: A Pragmatist Account (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012), chap. 5. 35. Margolis, Interpretation Radical but not Unruly, p. 65 36. A task notably accomplished in the first two chapters of Interpretation Radical but not Unruly. 37. Margolis, “Canons for Objectivist Interpretation,” p. 505. 38. Joseph Margolis, The Arts and the Definition of the Human (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); “Constructing a Person: A Clue to the New Unity of the Arts and Sciences,” The European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, 1:1 (2009), pp. 1–22. 39. Margolis, Interpretation Radical but not Unruly, p. 35. 40. Ibid., p. 36. 41. Joseph Margolis, Selves and Other Texts: The Case for Cultural Realism (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2001). 42. Margolis, Interpretation Radical but not Unruly, p. 47. 43. Margolis, “Relativism and Interpretive Objectivity.” 44. See esp. ibid., pp. 221–222. 45. Margolis, Interpretation Radical but not Unruly, p. 48. 46. Ibid., p. 53. 47. Margolis, “The Social Space of Interpretations,” Philosophical Inquiries, 1:1 (2013), p. 48. 48. Ibid. 49. Joseph Margolis, “The Social Space of Interpretations,” p. 43. 50. The expression is Raz’s. Cf. Joseph Raz, “Facing Diversity: The Case of Epistemic Abstinence,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, 19:1 (1990), pp. 3–46. .

Four UNDERSTANDING, INTERPRETATION, ART, AND NEOPRAGMATISM Alexander Kremer Before the linguistic turn of Western philosophy, interpretation was not a significant philosophical question. With the exception of the hermeneutical tradition philosophers had not dealt systematically with understanding and interpretation, and since the time when philosophical modernity began with Descartes most of them focused on epistemological questions (“What is truth?”; “What is the best method for acquiring true knowledge?”; “Are we able to acquire knowledge about reality at all?”). This is true of traditional pragmatism as well, but neopragmatism could not follow this path due to the linguistic turn and the results and effects of philosophical hermeneutics. Traditional pragmatists (Peirce, James, Dewey) were concerned first and foremost with the question of “truth” from a scientific point of view. Though Peirce was interested in the question of interpretation within his semiotics, only Dewey delved into a slightly deeper investigation of the question of understanding and interpretation of artworks in his aesthetics. The linguistic turn, however, was the very thing which influenced Rorty (besides his revelation regarding “the resemblances of Dewey’s, Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s criticisms of Cartesianism” 1) when he started what is known today as neopragmatism. In the first part of this paper I give a description about the main claims, proofs and consequences of philosophical hermeneutics, and it will be followed by their application to the ideas of some neopragmatist thinkers: Rorty, Fish, and Shusterman. According to my thesis, understanding and interpretation have a well-founded balance in Heidegger and Gadamer, and this is extremely important in the field of aesthetics as well. 1. Philosophical Hermeneutics In our pluralistic age, when some textualists regard everything as text and every understanding as interpretation, we must not forget about the genesis of interpretive theories: hermeneutics. What is hermeneutics? Hermeneutics is the practice, the theory, and the art of understanding and interpretation. As is well known, hermeneutics was born in Hellenism, and there are two main epochs in its history: from Hellenism to Dilthey, and from Heidegger to our present time. Regarding traditional hermeneutics, it is to be emphasized that

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before F. D. E. Schleiermacher (1768–1834) hermeneutics was not a philosophical discipline, but a collection of special methods of interpretation. Over the centuries, it had developed in three different streams (in philology, theology and legal studies), but only Schleiermacher created a general theory of understanding, thus giving birth to an individual hermeneutics. This was the moment when hermeneutics became a philosophical discipline. Schleiermacher’s theory of understanding, which had been worked out, first of all, with concern for the Bible’s exegesis, already comprehended every individual human action as a possible topic of understanding and interpretation, but his hermeneutics did not cover society and history as yet. This step was taken by another German thinker, Wilhelm Dilthey (1833– 1911), who was the first to apply the Schleiermacherian individual hermeneutics to society and history. Dilthey combined Schleiermacher’s individual hermeneutics and Hegel’s teaching of the objective spirit, thus broadening the scope of hermeneutics; however, near the end of his life, he became resignedly aware that we do not have the opportunity for an absolute objective interpretation. He grew convinced that everybody can interpret the world exclusively from his or her own perspective. Martin Heidegger (1889– 1976), however, saw the possibility of interpretive freedom in this situation. He established philosophical hermeneutics, and Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900– 2002) worked out the details of it. 2. Heidegger as the Father of Philosophical Hermeneutics Heidegger created philosophical hermeneutics by achieving the existentialontological turn of traditional hermeneutics. Essentially, this turn had already taken place in his hermeneutics of facticity composed in the early 1920s, which means that it had been conceived previous to his early main work, Being and Time, published in 1927.2 What constitutes the essence of this turn? The changes may be recognized primarily at two points: a) the features and relationship of understanding and interpretation; b) the transformation of the interpretation of the hermeneutic circle. Philosophers before Heidegger (e.g. the representatives of British empiricism, Descartes, Kant, and—in some sense—the thinkers of classic German idealism as well; they believed that understanding is first of all the activity of the Absolute, and not only that of the human mind) had regarded understanding mainly as an activity of the faculty of understanding and ranked it behind interpretation. According to their theories, we first interpret and one day—if we use the right methods and are lucky—we may reach some kind of understanding. With Heidegger, however, understanding became the mode of being of Da-sein, due to his radically new comprehension of the human being’s existential structure. He developed the details of his existential analysis on the pages of Being and Time. Throughout his life, he strove to answer the

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question of Being. He wanted to fulfill his project in Being and Time, that is, to create a fundamental ontology through an existential analysis of Da-sein, but his fundamental ontology remained a torso. Nevertheless, he completed the existential analysis, which is the published part of his early project. There can already be read in the contents of Being and Time, “Being-in-the-World in General as the Fundamental Constitution of Da-sein” (title of the second chapter in division one). Heidegger, in describing the relationship between man and world, transcended not only the dualism of the knower and the known, but also that of the subject and the object in this way. Out of the three constitutive dimensions (World, Who, Being-in) of this existential structure (being-in-the-world), understanding belongs to Being-in (together with Befindlichkeit, Auslegung, and Rede), and understanding is a mode of being in Heidegger’s existential-ontological and phenomenological description: “As projecting, understanding is the mode of being of Da-sein in which it is its possibilities as possibilities.”3 This means that Da-sein projects (Entwurf) itself in understanding as existential possibilities. Moreover, “Da-sein is always its possibility. It does not ‘have’ that possibility only as a mere attribute of something objectively present.”4 Da-sein is always an existential being-possible (Da-sein ist Möglichsein). It means that Da-sein is never identical existentially with the human being’s physical, biological or even psychological dimension, but rather that we exist continuously as a permanently changing conglomerate of existential (not physical) possibilities. It follows from this that understanding continuously enriches our existential mode of being, since we project ourselves in every understanding as a new existential possibility, which means that the existential mode of our being is enriched by a new dimension. For instance, if I learn to swim, to dance, to ride a horse, to play squash or, let us say, to speak English, German or French, or if I attain the skills of a surgeon and so on, that is, if I understand (in a Heideggerian sense) the way I may and should exist as a swimmer, a dancer, a horse rider, a surgeon, etc., then these existential possibilities are at my disposal even in the case that I am merely sitting in a library, reading a book. It means that my existential mode of being has become richer by my understanding. Furthermore, according to Heidegger, understanding is always the first step, which is comprehended as the mode of being of Da-sein, and it bears upon the whole of the thing to be understood. It happens in a moment and not always in a discursive form. Understanding is “merely” followed by interpretation, and that is nothing but the development of understanding concerning the details: As understanding, Da-sein projects its being upon possibilities. This being toward possibilities that understands is itself a potentiality for being because of the way these disclosed possibilities come back to Dasein. The project of understanding has its own possibility of

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When we mention this new relationship of understanding and interpretation, we have already arrived at the hermeneutical circle, since understanding happens within a moment, “covering” the whole of the thing to be understood, while interpretation may only follow understanding (i.e. it does not follow understanding every time), and it “covers” the details of the same thing. According to the traditional comprehension of the hermeneutical circle, we always understand the details from the whole, and vice versa, the whole from the details. This classical sense of the hermeneutical circle was changed by philosophical hermeneutics in the sense that―on the one hand―it is not only valid for texts, but everything, and―on the other hand―philosophical hermeneutics shows and justifies that in every world-understanding and worldinterpretation happens some self-understanding and self-interpretation as well. It means that the traditional hermeneutical circle becomes an existential hermeneutical circle by its existential application. Heidegger also emphasizes, in connection with the above-mentioned features of understanding and interpretation, that projection (Entwurf), i.e. understanding, is not always and necessarily discursive, while interpretation is always discursive “at the first step,” i.e. as a development of understanding. This standpoint can also be found in Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Heidegger, who claims that recognition is only the derivate of understanding,6 worked out, beyond the above-mentioned relations, the forestructure of understanding (Vor-Struktur) and the as-structure of interpretation (Als-Struktur).7 The world is already disclosed for Da-sein, since Da-sein, who is understood as being-in-the-world, has a relation to the world which is basically and primarily a “circumspect, interpretive association with what is at hand”8 and not a theoretical behavior; and since the There of Da-sein is constituted by the existentials of attunement (Befindlichkeit), understanding (Verstehen), interpretation (Auslegung) and discourse (Rede). We have already been understanding the experienced meaning all the time, i.e. significance (Bedeutsamkeit) of those total relevances (Bewandtnisganzheiten) in which we live: our home, our workplace, our places of relaxation, sport, and political activities, etc. As Heidegger says: In terms of the significance of what is disclosed in understanding the world, the being of taking care of what is at hand learns to understand what the relevance can be with what is actually encountered.

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Circumspection discovers, that is, the world which has already been understood is interpreted. … What has been circumspectly interpreted with regard to its in-order-to as such, what has been explicitly understood, has the structure of something as something. The circumspectly interpretive answer to the circumspect question of what this particular thing at hand is runs: it is for…9 This happens without the simplest statements, but based on the lack of words and sentences we should not think that there is a lack of interpretation at all. The seeing of this circumspect association is in itself already understanding and interpretative, and it “contains the structure of interpretation so primordially that a grasping of something which is, so to speak, free of the as requires a kind of reorientation.”10 The as-structure of interpretation, however, is based on the fore-structure of understanding. What is this all about? It is about the situations of understanding, and we have to realize that we never get involved in such situations in the condition of epistemological virginity, but we always already have the results of earlier understandings, and approach the thing to be understood from a definite point of view, with definite concepts. It means that somehow in advance we are always already understanding the thing to be understood (fore-having, Vorhabe); we are always already approaching it from the point of view of a fore-sight (Vorsicht) created on the basis of an anticipatory perspective; and we have always already decided, “finally or provisionally, upon a definite conceptuality; it is grounded in a fore-conception [Vorgriff—A.K.].”11 In demonstrating these relations, we can say that, for instance, we are not able to look for a pair of scissors if we do not have any vague understanding of scissors, that is, if I do not know what scissors look like at all. Besides, our seeking always happens on the basis of some kind of reason, and with some kind of conceptuality. Moreover, we are also characterized with some kind of fore-having, foresight, and fore-conception even in the cases of understanding of an artwork, a philosophical or scientific theory, and so on. In summarizing these relations, we can say with Heidegger that the fore-structure of understanding and the as-structure of interpretation give together the meaning (Sinn) of our existential (self)projecting.12 All these teachings go together with the Heideggerian emphasis on the human being’s finitude and radical temporality and historicity. In our everyday life, we picture our temporality and historicity emerging from the huge objective container of time and history, similarly to, for example, the way Newton thought about time and space. We usually also accept that we not only cannot step out of these containers, but we cannot understand the whole of these containers, either. This meaning is simple enough to become popular in everyday thinking. Heidegger, however, says the opposite: we are able to know anything about history exclusively because of our historical mode of being, and our

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historicity is based on the radical temporality of our existence. It would not function without understanding, which is one of our primordial existentials. But let us not consider the detailed, textual analysis of our temporality (Zeitlichkeit) and historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) now, instead taking only into account those ultimate results of the Heideggerian Da-sein analysis that are important for our present point: not only our finitude belongs to our existence’s main features, but also its inherent, radical temporality and historicity. 3. The Elaboration of Philosophical Hermeneutics: Gadamer While Heidegger followed the call of the question of Being throughout his life, Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) became the doyen of philosophical hermeneutics. In his oeuvre, Gadamer not only worked out Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity, but also developed philosophical hermeneutics in a new direction with his own ideas. Gadamer was a German philosopher of the continental tradition, best known for his 1960 magnum opus, Truth and Method.13 Beginning in 1922 he became a student, and later a disciple and friend of Heidegger in Freiburg and then in Marburg. It was Heidegger’s influence that gave Gadamer’s thought its distinctive cast and led him away from the earlier neo-Kantian influences of Natorp and Hartmann. Gadamer’s philosophical project, as explained in Truth and Method, was to elaborate on the concept of ‘philosophical hermeneutics’ which Heidegger initiated but never dealt with at length. Gadamer did this first and foremost by using the early Heidegger’s existential-ontological, existential-phenomenological approach. Gadamer’s main goal was to renew philosophy by creating a philosophical hermeneutics. Gadamer renewed philosophy by making us aware of its hermeneutic presuppositions and of the philosophical presuppositions of hermeneutics. (That is, he achieved the hermeneutic turn of philosophy and the philosophical turn of hermeneutics.) In more detail, we may say that Gadamer legitimized the humanist tradition (the hermeneutic tradition, begun in Hellenism, was a part of Humanism), and at the same time, opposed it to the dominance of the natural scientific method, thus creating his philosophical hermeneutics. In the first of the three main parts of Truth and Method (“I. The question of truth as it emerges in the experience of art”), Gadamer shows us the hermeneutic approach to art; in the second part (“II. The extension of the question of truth to understanding in the human sciences”) he shows the hermeneutic approach regarding history and philosophy; and in the third part (“III. The ontological shift of hermeneutics guided by language”) he emphasizes the special significance of language in our relationship with the world. The train of thought in Truth and Method continually widens the territory of the hermeneutic procedure from the experience of artworks to the universal aspect of hermeneutics.

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If we look at Gadamer’s main philosophical aim, it becomes clear that he was a disciple of Heidegger, but he never wanted to answer the question of Being. Although he accepted Heidegger’s existential-phenomenological approach and his hermeneutics of facticity (created by Heidegger in the early 1920s), his main philosophical aim was to legitimize the hermeneutic truth by the hermeneutic interpretation of art, history and philosophy. Pushing Heidegger’s question of Being silently aside, Gadamer laid a special emphasis on the interpretation of history and historical understanding. He integrated the hermeneutics of facticity with some of his own ideas and with the late Heidegger’s history of Being (Seinsgeschichte), creating his hermeneutic interpretation of history in this manner. In Gadamer’s opinion, history is a historically effected event, which is the fabric of different traditions. According to Gadamer, functioning traditions always show the traces of a historical connection and genesis, which he called “the principle of history of effect” (Wirkungsgeschichte). All these views, which essentially constitute Gadamer’s “ontology,” determine his views on the history of philosophy, because he has embedded those latter into his hermeneutics. In fact, the principle of history of effect cannot be put to an end, and that is why we are unable to create neither absolutely perfect, nor absolutely original interpretations. What happens when we understand and interpret something? According to Gadamer, every understanding is essentially a fusion of horizons. Primarily, understanding and interpreting are not to be considered activities of human subjectivity, but rather historically effected events. We all are authors and players of the historically effected event that is understood as a fabric of traditions. We all live as historically and permanently changing intersections of the most different traditions. We cannot live in a different way, because we have already imbibed many traditions from infancy. We have already acquired several traditions when learning our mother tongue. In describing our life within such a context, we have not even mentioned our relatives, friends, acquaintances, schools, work places, or the mass media and other aspects of the process of socialization which is always mediating traditions. There is no way to step out of the historically effected event, but at the same time, no one can be aware of the whole of this socio-historical process either, since we can look at history exclusively from our own perspective. It influences us even before we think of it, affects us even before we reflect on it. That is why Gadamer writes, “the prejudices of the individual, far more than his judgments, constitute the historical reality of his being.”14 Our understanding functions in everyday life mostly in a spontaneous manner, without any special higher reflection. We get up, wash, and get dressed, prepare breakfast, drive our cars, etc., without giving a narrative about ourselves, or about these activities. There are situations (especially if our routine does not work), however, when the process of understanding and interpreting becomes conscious. This is when we become aware of the hermeneutical task. On these occasions, we go through the following four phases: (1) the first phase

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is when we are being addressed; (2) next is the suspension of our own prejudices; (3) then comes the dialectic of questions and answers; and (4) finally the fusion of horizons. Each step of this process has a question-answer structure, based on experience, etc.; but let us leave all these details out of consideration for now and focus on the four phases in general: 1. Being addressed—We are familiar with numerous different traditions, we live in different events of these traditions, but only some of them become important for us. Understanding begins when we are being addressed by a tradition. We are always being directly addressed by a thing, but since it belongs to some tradition(s), it is a historical thing. What is the meaning of being addressed? It means that something touches us existentially when we recognize its existential meaning and importance for us. 2. Suspension of our own prejudices—Our prejudices originate from the fore-structure of our understanding (fore-having, fore-sight, and foreconception), and it is impossible to absolutely demolish them. We can only suspend them. If we become aware of our prejudices, then we can suspend them, and thus also make the otherness of the thing to be understood more clear. 3. Dialectic of questions and answers—The suspension of my prejudices can be considered a question in a double sense. It is a question regarding my standpoint, my prejudices; and it is also a question regarding the thing to be understood. On the one hand, I have to make my standpoint, that is, my prejudices, questionable, because there is no real question without this step. If I believe that I know the answer beforehand, then I do not have the necessary openness for the true question. On the other hand, I inquire about the thing to be understood in relation to my expectation of meaning which is hypothetical and based on my previous experiences and knowledge. My preliminary expectation of meaning, which refers to the whole of the thing to be understood, must be considered in itself a question to the tradition to which the thing to be understood belongs. As Heidegger wrote in Being and Time, “Every inquiry is a seeking (Suchen). Every seeking gets guided beforehand by what is sought.”15 If everything works fine, the thing to be understood gives an answer and I will hear it, if I have an ear for its music. There are two possibilities at this point: either the parts of meaning are in harmony with my hypothesis about the expected meaning of the whole, or they are not. If there is no harmony between the parts and the whole of meaning, I have to change my preliminary expectation of meaning, and my new overall expectation will be at the same time my new question to the tradition. (Thinking of my new expectation of meaning can also start the transformation of my prejudices.) So this becomes a new question to the tradition and the tradition answers again. This dialectic process of questions and answers is the hermeneutical circle in its existential sense, because we understand and interpret not only the thing to be understood but also ourselves at the same time. The hermeneutical circle of understanding (whole)— interpretation (parts)—understanding (whole)—interpretation (parts)

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functions in connection with the given thing to be understood as long as we think that the parts and the whole of meaning are in harmony, as long as they have correctness. As Gadamer says: Thus the movement of understanding is constantly from the whole to the part and back to the whole. Our task is to expand the unity of the understood meaning centrifugally. The harmony of all the details with the whole is the criterion of correct understanding. The failure to achieve this harmony means that understanding has failed.16 So the hermeneutical circle that is the dialectical process of questions and answers between me and the thing to be understood functions to the point at which I interrupt it. Nevertheless, it can never come to an end, because newer and newer viewpoints continuously turn up, due to the historical character of the three main components of this process. Historicity of my existence, the thing to be understood, and that of the traditions-mediating community causes the continual transformation of my horizon of meaning. Still, I have to assume the completeness of the thing to be understood, of its immanent unity of meaning, for I would not even start to understand and interpret something without this presumption.17 4. Fusion of horizons—After I have reconstructed the correctness of the immanent unity of meaning which is the horizon of meaning of the thing to be understood, I bring my suspended prejudices into play—that is, my own existential horizon of meaning. The fusion of horizons takes place at this point, and it is essentially a birth of such a new unity of meaning, such a new horizon of meaning in which tradition lives onwards. It seems to be obvious from all of this that, as Gadamer says, “understanding is, essentially, a historically effected event.”18 Nevertheless, everything starts at the beginning with the birth of this new horizon of meaning, that is, we are being addressed again, suspending our prejudices, asking and answering, and a new fusion of horizons takes place—thus, traditions live onwards. We can draw at least three consequences from the teachings of Heidegger and Gadamer detailed above. Firstly, there are no pure facts. Secondly, it is impossible to create suprahistorical interpretation. Thirdly, according to Heidegger and Gadamer, understanding and interpretation, linguistic and nonlinguistic comprehension are well balanced. Every fact is given to us through a preliminary understanding and interpretation, due already to the fore-structure of understanding and the as-structure of interpretation, and we cannot step out of our radical temporality and historicality which entails the temporality and historicity of our interpretations. Furthermore, according to Heidegger and Gadamer, understanding, which covers the whole, is not necessarily discursive and linguistic, but interpretation, which covers the details, is primarily always

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discursive, following understanding as its development. Moreover, the relationship between understanding and interpretation cannot be simply conflated with that of linguistic and nonlinguistic comprehension. I will address this issue at the end of the paper, but let us now focus on these relations in the cases of the most significant representatives of neopragmatism. 4. Rorty, Fish, Shusterman If we approach these three neopragmatist thinkers from the point of view of philosophical hermeneutics, it becomes obvious that, regarding the first two conclusions, they agree absolutely, while differing seriously in the case of the third. They accept without any doubt that there are no pure facts without preliminary understanding and they also refute the possibility of final, objective, suprahistorical interpretations. Nonetheless, they have different views regarding the relationship between understanding and interpretation, as well as linguistic and nonlinguistic comprehension. Rorty and Fish are textualists,19 while Shusterman instead takes up a renewed Deweyan standpoint which is, on several points, identical with Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s position. Richard Rorty first received a strong analytic training and only then became the founder of neopragmatism.20 Two of his main theses are that “Everything is a social construction” and “All awareness is a linguistic affair”.21 It follows from this that according to Rorty everything is interpretation and the central stance of experience in Dewey’s philosophy shows him only the residue of epistemological foundationalism. In his opinion, we have to deny the central philosophical position of experience after the linguistic turn and must permanently re-describe our world if we want to avoid this kind of foundationalism.22 This leads to the total neglect of experience. In his article “Nineteenth Century Idealism and Twentieth Century Textualism,” Rorty describes textualists as follows: In the last century there were philosophers who argued that nothing exists but ideas. In our century there are people who write as if there were nothing but texts. These people, whom I shall call “textualists,” include for example, the so-called “Yale school” of literary criticism centering around Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartmann, J. Hillis Miller, and Paul De Man, “post-structuralist” French thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Michael Foucault, historians like Hayden White, and social scientists like Paul Rabinow.23 On the next pages of his article, Rorty, beyond elaborating on the parallel mentioned in the title, distinguishes the weak and the strong textualists, and it is beyond doubt that he, too, belongs to the strong textualists:

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The first sort of textualist—the weak textualist—thinks that each work has its own vocabulary, its own secret code, which may not be commensurable with that of any other. The second sort of textualist—the strong textualist—has his own vocabulary and doesn’t worry about whether anybody shares it. On the account I am offering, it is the strong textualist who is the true heir of Nietzsche and James, and thus of Kant and Hegel. The weak textualist—the decoder—is just one more victim of realism, of the “metaphysics of presence.” … The strong textualist simply asks himself the same question about a text which the engineer or the physicist asks himself about a puzzling physical object: how shall I describe this in order to get it to do what I want? Occasionally a great physicist or a great critic comes along and gives us a new vocabulary which enables us to do a lot of new and marvelous things. Then we may exclaim that we have now found out the true nature of matter, or poetry, or whatever. But Hegel’s ghost, embodied in Kuhn’s romantic philosophy of science or Bloom’s philosophy of romantic poetry, reminds us that vocabularies are as mortal as men. The pragmatist reminds us that a new and useful vocabulary is just that, not a sudden unmediated vision of things or texts as they are.24 Stanley Fish, the well-known literary theorist, legal scholar. and academic, represents very similar views. Since he confessedly places the rhetoric and the interpretive communities in a central position, experience is absolutely played down in his works. It follows from this that he does not offer a detailed description of the relationship between understanding and interpretation, or that of nonlinguistic and linguistic comprehension. Where he does mention it, however, he shares identical views with Rorty: Or one could listen to Richard Rorty as he declares with characteristic brusqueness in The Consequences of Pragmatism that “there is no way to think about either the world or our purposes except by using our language,” no way “of breaking out of language to compare it with something else.” Or we could even attend to Stanley Fish when he argues in Is There a Text in This Class? and elsewhere that we cannot check our interpretive accounts against the facts of the text because it is only within our accounts––that is, within an already assumed set of stipulative definitions and evidentiary criteria––that the text and its facts, or, rather, a text and its facts, emerge and become available for inspection. … since descriptions of the world are all we have, changes can only be understood as change in description…25 Fish regards everything rather as a text in the spirit of de Saussure’s poststructuralist inheritors and focuses almost exclusively on the question of interpretation:

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ALEXANDER KREMER I did not know then (even in some inchoate, dreamy way) that I would become obsessed with the question of sameness and difference and with the relation between the sign and the signified and with Ferdinand de Saussure’s account of language as a “system of differences without positive terms”―a system whose articulations and discriminations are not constrained by something more substantial (which is not to say that there is nothing more substantial, only that whatever it is [God, nature, Reason] language does not reflect it or match itself to it)―and with Derrida’s notion of différance.26

To do them justice, however, we have to emphasize that both Rorty and Fish accept the existence of experience, but they do not regard it as important either from a philosophical point of view (it cannot be used as proof), or from the conscious, linguistic side (which they consider the most human dimension) of our life. Nevertheless, significant problems thus emerge, concerning the one-sided, experience-neglecting, interpretation-worshipping views of Rorty and Fish. According to their standpoint described above, the relationship between world and language is wrapped in mystery. What is more, Rorty and Fish obviously fall back into the dichotomy of world and language, which was already transcended by Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s existentialphenomenological solution. That is why Rorty can write that “the world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.”27 Among others, this dichotomy and the neglect of experience is one reason why Rorty did not deal philosophically with arts such as music, dance, painting, sculpture, etc., but only with literature. To neglect experience makes language in fact a free-floating entity. How does Rorty connect world and language? Does he achieve it simply by the help of newer and newer descriptions and vocabularies? It seems to me that this is the case, and its consequence is that exclusively imagination, that is, the strong poet creating metaphors, is able to create new descriptions. Perhaps all this can be accepted regarding those descriptions truly new and fresh and with social significance, but serious doubts arise in other cases. Firstly, although Rorty sees it well, he does not emphasize that even the strong poet is determined by the existing language as the background of his thinking. The strong poet—from a general, social point of view—can be regarded only as the most conscious, paradigmatic figure of self-creation. In interpreting the strong poet in the above-mentioned, general sense (as Rorty says, “one who makes things new”28), we cannot forget that Rorty recognized well even the limits of this kind of exceptional person.29 It is obvious for Rorty that even “the strongest poet” is dependent on others, and he is able to re-describe, re-totalize himself, his individuality, that is, his private sphere, exclusively within the public, social framework. Secondly, the imagination for creating new metaphors also has at least some connection with perception and comprehension of relations among

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things, that is, with experience. Without applying earlier experiences, nobody is able to have imagination, especially not the kind of imagination needed by a strong poet. Thirdly, and probably the most serious problem here, is that socially significant and truly new descriptions full of new metaphors are rare, in contrast to the everyday life situations of understanding and interpretation. The connection between world and language, however, is created here by experience and exists in these situations, day to day. In contrast to Rorty and Fish, Richard Shusterman restores the importance of experience and takes a stance very similar to Dewey’s, Heidegger’s, and Gadamer’s: “Although Rorty repudiated Dewey’s use of the notion of experience, I defended it as an astute and essential strategy in his very effective attack on the compartmentalized, elitist isolation of fine art and his corresponding attempt to bring art and aesthetics more fully into the practices of democratic living.”30 Shusterman’s general theoretical standpoint can be described as a philosophical aestheticism saturated with democratic political intentions. It is manifested in his case in a naturalistic somaesthetics, tinted by the meliorist strive of pragmatism to democratize society as much as possible.31 Shusterman defines the essence of his somaesthetics as follows: The same meliorist orientation shapes my project of somaesthetics, which … can be briefly defined as the critical meliorative study of the experience and use of one’s body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation (aesthesis) and creative self-fashioning. In examining the forms of knowledge and disciplines of practice that structure such somatic care or can improve it, somaesthetics involves the critical study of society’s somatic values and comportment, so as to redirect our body consciousness and practice away from the oppressively narrow and injurious stereotypes of somatic success that pervade our advertising culture and to focus instead on exploring more rewarding visions of somatic value and fulfillment and better methods for attaining them.32 Although Shusterman has mistakenly called Gadamer a “hermeneutic universalist,”33 he rightly brings back the distinctive role of experience in his somaesthetics and on this basis the importance of non-discursive understanding. In what follows I will not focus on the general relationship between neopragmatism and interpretation, because Shusterman has already analyzed it.34 I will concentrate rather on the relations between experience, understanding, and interpretation, since these are the most important questions from the aspect of art. First of all, we have to emphasize that Shusterman talks about the need to distinguish understanding and interpretation: This functional distinction between understanding and interpretation, which is endorsed by ordinary usage, provides interpretation not only

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ALEXANDER KREMER with a contrast-class that helps give interpretation a clearer meaning but also with a grounding background of material on which to work and through which to guide its activity. Moreover, by recognizing a form of understanding that is immediate or spontaneous (despite being culturally mediated), we can do justice to the important unreflective dimension of our cognitive life. Most of the time, when we intelligently understand and react to situations through appropriate behavior we are not engaging in reflection, thinking, or interpretation.35

Moreover, the relationship between understanding and interpretation is not identical with the relation between nonlinguistic and linguistic comprehension. There are obviously situations in our life when understanding is discursive and is not followed necessarily by interpretation. As Shusterman says, The distinction between understanding and interpretation should not, however, be simply conflated with the distinction between linguistic and nonlinguistic comprehension. As I’ve often explained, they are different because there are linguistic understandings that are not interpretations. In most normal, everyday situations, we understand unproblematic linguistic statements (oral or written) immediately and unreflectively without interpreting them. When someone at my hotel answers my question about what time breakfast is served by saying “Seven to ten,” I don’t need to interpret this linguistic response; I understand it immediately.36 What is more, according to Shusterman it often happens in everyday life that we give nonlinguistic response to “nonlinguistic actions or situations.” Such cases clearly show that there is understanding already in experience, which is not only true in art, but also in numerous situations of everyday life: I do, however, go further in affirming that immediate understanding can also be nonlinguistic. Our behavior sometimes includes nondiscursive responses that are directed to nonlinguistic actions or situations and that demonstrate without words (or conscious representations of them in one’s mind) that one has understood. The intentional gestures or movements of a dancer, lover, or ballplayer can be understood and appropriately responded to (by a partner, teammate, or audience) without ever being articulated into words (real or imagined). Such recognition of the nonlinguistic, however, does not make me a foundationalist in the epistemological or metaphysical sense that Rorty repudiates as regressive. … Rorty is therefore wrong to conclude that rejecting foundationalism entails rejecting the notion of nonlinguistic understanding.37

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On the basis of Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s comprehension of understanding we can claim that Shusterman here has not only a Deweyan, but also a Heideggerian and Gadamerian standpoint. Understanding is nondiscursive in most situations of our life (which is primarily practice, in a broad sense). We can summarize Shusterman’s standpoint in Wojciech Małecki’s words as “a metatheoretical interpretive pluralism.”38 All this has a special importance in Shusterman’s somaesthetics, since it follows from this that he is able to emphasize the central place of the aesthetic experience in his aesthetics in a strongly sustainable way. In addition, Shusterman tries to promote the dissolution of those dichotomies that affect democracy negatively, by the use of his naturalistic somaesthetics. 39 What is more, his views in somaesthetics are in accordance with both Dewey’s and Gadamer’s interpretation of aesthetics, that it should be embedded in the whole of our very lives. Namely, if we take into account one of Gadamer’s central claims, according to which “Aesthetics has to be absorbed into hermeneutics,”40 then we may guess both that philosophical hermeneutics has a distinguished importance in the field of aesthetics, and that Gadamer’s philosophy of art has many more similarities with Dewey’s and thus with Shusterman’s pragmatist aesthetics than we might think at first glance.41 Why is it so important to restore the central place of experience? On the one hand, because first we meet works of art primarily and effectively in experience. On the other hand, a work of art does not exist in itself (according to Dewey, Gadamer, and Shusterman), only in the attaining of experience, which already always involves some nondiscursive understanding in this manner. It is the effect of the artwork in itself. This means, however, that without accepting the central place of experience theoretically, we cannot understand correctly the mode of the work of art’s being, that is, its functioning and effects. Works of art cannot exist as mere theory. One of the artwork’s dimensions is always objectivation, an “ergon” as Gadamer says. 42 This means that it must have at least one perceptible element. Even in the most ‘ethereal’ genres of art like music and literature, we can find some material, perceptible element (vibration of air, or some recorded form of the text, etc.). This is, however, only one of the dimensions of the artwork, which might remain mere possibility without the other dimension, an understanding experience. (It is true even regarding literature. Pupils of twelve are usually not capable of understanding Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain since they lack the necessary understanding experience.) An ancient Greek sculpture, covered by soil for centuries, is only the possibility of an artwork, and can become a real artwork exclusively by an understanding experience. We have to emphasize that this is true regarding contemporary artworks as well. Any contemporary music, film, photograph, painting, sculpture, poem, etc. remains a mere possibility of artwork if there is no one to appreciate it in experience in an understanding way. An artwork is an actual sense of

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comprehensive, understanding experience. This actual sense is not necessarily linguistic, but often the nonlinguistic, nondiscursive effect of the objective dimension of the artwork. Nevertheless, we also have to emphasize that not only understanding can be nondiscursive, but interpretation as well—“at the second step.” That is, interpretation as a development (Ausbildung) of understanding is always discursive “at the first step.” An artist (not every time, but often), however, is able (and wants) to transform his or her discursive meaning into the nondiscursive “language” of an artistic genre—and these “products” are the artworks as nondiscursive interpretations. (We have to mention here that it does not mean that the creative process is always or mostly happening in such a conscious way.) As Dewey puts it:, The odd notion that an artist does not think and a scientific inquirer does nothing else is the result of converting a difference of tempo and emphasis into a difference in kind. The thinker has his aesthetic moment when his ideas cease to be mere ideas and become the corporate meanings of objects. The artist has his problems and thinks as he works. But his thought is more immediately embodied in the object. Because of the comparative remoteness of his end, the scientific worker operates with symbols, words and mathematical signs. The artist does his thinking in the very qualitative media he works in, and the terms lie so close to the object that he is producing that they merge directly into it. 43

NOTES

1. Richard Rorty, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin Books, 1999), p. 12. 2. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, transl. Joan Stambaugh (New York: SUNY Press, 1996). 3. Ibid., p. 136. 4. Ibid., p. 40. 5. Ibid., p. 139. Emphasis added by A. K. 6. Cf. ibid., para. 13 and 33. 7. Cf. ibid., para. 32. 8. Ibid., p. 140. 9. Ibid., p. 139. 10. Ibid., p. 140. 11. Ibid., p. 141. 12. Cf. ibid., pp. 141-142. 13. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Continuum, 2006).

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14. Ibid., p. 278. 15. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 3. 16. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 291. 17. Cf. ibid., pp. 293–294. 18. Ibid., p. 299. 19. It is “textualism” in Rortyan sense, cf. Richard Rorty, “Nineteenth Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism,” Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 1982). Shusterman calls them “hermeneutic universalists,” although it is misleading a little bit, since—as we have seen—hermeneutics deals not only with interpretation, but also with understanding. Cf. Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), chap. 5. 20. Cf. Alexander Kremer “Martin Heidegger’s Influence on Richard Rorty’s Philosophy,” Pragmatism Today, 2:1 (Summer 2011), pp. 78–93. (http://www.pragmatismtoday.eu/summer2011/Pragmatism_Today_Volume2_Is sue1_Summer2011.pdf) 21. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, p. 48. 22. See Shusterman’s criticism in his book, Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life (New York: Routledge, 1997), chap. 6, pp. 157–177. 23. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 139. 24. Ibid., p. 152 and p.153. 25. Stanley Fish, “Change,” Doing What Comes Naturally (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1989), pp. 143-144. Emphasis added—A. K. 26. Stanley Fish, “Foreword,” Gary A. Olson, Justifying Belief: Stanley Fish and the Work of Rhetoric (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), pp. x–xi. 27. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 5. 28. Cf. ibid., p. 13. 29. Cf. ibid., p. 41. 30. Richard Shusterman, “Pragmatism and Cultural Politics: From Textualism to Somaesthetics,” Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 171. 31. Cf. Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics, chap. 7. 32. Shusterman, Thinking through the Body, p. 182-183. 33. Cf. Alexander Kremer, “Gadamer’s and Shusterman’s Aesthetics,” Pragmatism Today, 4:1 (Summer 2013), pp. 110-114, http://www.pragmatismtoday.eu/index.php?id=2013summer1. 34. Cf. Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics, chap. 4. 35. Shusterman, Thinking through the Body, p. 174; cf. Shusterman Pragmatist Aesthetics, chap. 5. 36. Ibid., p. 174. 37. Ibid., p. 175. 38. Wojciech Małecki, Embodying Pragmatism. Richard Shusterman’s Philosophy and Literary Theory (Frankfurt am Main-New York: Peter Lang,, 2010), p. 99. He also says correctly that “given that, according to Shusterman ’all meaningful experience’ is perspectival, partial, and fallible, we can assume no understanding or interpretation of any work to be absolutely true or exhaustive, something which gives Shusterman’s theory a clear anti-foundationalist character.” (Ibid., p. 99.) 39. Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics, chaps. 7 and 10.

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40. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 157. 41. Cf. Alexander Kremer, “Gadamer’s and Shusterman’s Aesthetics.” 42. Cf. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 110. 43. John Dewey, Art as Experience, in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 10, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), p. 21.

Part Two RETHINKING THE ARTS

Five JOHN DEWEY AND 20TH-CENTURY ART Krystyna Wilkoszewska Starting to build his own aesthetics based on the philosophy of experience developed before, John Dewey made an astonishing announcement—in light of the tradition of aesthetic studies—that to build a theory of art one must follow a roundabout way and that works of art may form obstacles on this way. This is why Dewey’s aesthetics or—as he called it himself—philosophy of aesthetics is not focused on the fine arts, or at least not only on them. I would like to ask a question about Dewey’s attitude to 20th-century art going through its successive stages and transformations. Dewey died in 1952; what I am going to say about his attitude to modern art will be partly a reconstruction of his views taken out of his books, and partly an attempt to confront his aesthetic theory with those currents in art which he—for various reasons—neglected, and with those which he could not witness since they came into being in the second half of the 20th century. I shall start with impressionism, which precedes the 20th century, for two reasons: firstly, without impressionism there would have been no avant-garde, and it is impressionism that introduces us to the changes in 20 th century art; secondly, in Dewey’s considerations upon art it was impressionism that constituted the main reference point: from impressionism he derived the need to criticize traditional art in its mimetic and expressive version, and in contact with works by the impressionists he sharpened his sensitivity to formal experimentation, which is a necessary element in the development of art. Dewey was rather critical in his attitude towards the two great European aesthetics—the mimetic and the expressive. Although he placed art in a close relation to life, by no means did he understand this relation as imitation of reality in art. Art is an experience; therefore it is a form of life and not its imitation. Dewey discounted the expressive theory of art as much as the mimetic theory, and he wrote quite a few sharp, sarcastic comments on expression itself in its dualistic, Cartesian sense as manifestation and revelation of the artist’s internal emotions. “What is sometimes called an act of selfexpression might better be termed one of self-exposure; it discloses character— or lack of character—to others. In itself, it is only a spewing forth.”1 Nevertheless, Dewey’s theory of art could be, in a sense, described as expressive, but only in the meaning of expression he developed himself, as a struggle in experiencing of the subjective and objective energies, and as

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tension between the received content of experience and its new material. Dewey speaks of a reciprocal pressure of the known and accepted and the new and incomprehensible. To make the new understood and acceptable, the known must get transformed. Expression is a specific interaction of adjusting and harmonizing of these tensions (pressures) and the process results in the difficult transformation of the old and the new. Yet the means and ways of this bilateral transformation as well as this mutual adjustment must be worked out anew in each period of the development of art and in each new experience. When what is given in direct experience is perceived as radically new in relation to tradition, imagination encounters strong resistance from habit, and the attempt at expression in experience may end up in failure. Impressionism and 20th-century art have challenged our experience with such novel works of art that the adjustment of tradition with the present perception of the new art (being strange, incomprehensible and alien) has become difficult or even impossible. Hence the rejection of the new for the sake of the familiar tradition is frequent in this situation. Dewey was aware of this difficulty. He wrote: “The history of science and philosophy as well as of the fine arts is a record of the fact that the imaginative product receives at first the condemnation of the public, and in proportion to its range and depth.”2 Art constantly and persistently confronts us with new forms, which challenge our habits. Dewey even collected quotations illustrating the reaction of the art critics of those days to impressionist art. For instance, the year 1887 witnessed protests against the exhibition in Luxembourg Museum of paintings by Renoir, Cezanne and Monet, since they “are denials of all that is permissible in painting,” “cause a nausea like that of seasickness” and are “products of diseased minds.”3 In 1913 paintings by Matisse were described as follows: “Their negation of all that true art implies is significant of smug complacency. ... They are not works of art but feeble impertinences.”4 Impressionism required—according to Dewey—reformulation of tradition in the area of cognition and perception. The tradition was constituted by representational art realized in mimetic aesthetics. Although the impressionists did not reject the element of representation in art, they clearly shook the ways of representing. The aesthetics that faced the challenge posed by the art was first of all formalism, represented by Clive Bell and Roger Fry, and this was the conception that was commonly adopted. Dewey writes: He [Roger Fry] speaks of lines and their relations being full of meanings. But for anything explicitly stated, the meaning to which he refers might be exclusively of lines in their relations to one another. Then the meanings of lines and colors would completely replace all meanings that attach to this and any other experience of natural scene. In that case, the meaning of the esthetic object is unique in the sense of separation from

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meanings of everything else experienced. The work of art is then expressive only in the sense that it expresses something which belongs exclusively to art.5 Dewey offered another conception, different from formalism, of a possible reconstruction of tradition which allowed for the inclusion of impressionist paintings into our experience. First, he indicated the path an impressionist artist had to cover during his creative process. Here Dewey referred to the description of emergence of an artistic vision formulated by the formalist Roger Fry, who emphasized that “in such a creative vision, the objects as such tend to disappear” and the vision itself becomes “abstract and aesthetic.” This means that “‘subject-matter’ in a work of art is always irrelevant,”6 significant form is pure harmony of lines and colors devoid of any links with life. Dewey agrees with Fry that painting does not consist in faithful imitation of objects from external reality. He rejects, however, the theory of the pure harmony of lines and colors. For him, the way of harmonizing is not limited to the issue of lines and colors; it depends on the artist’s prior experiences, which control the emergence of the vision. “The painter ... comes with a mind waiting, patient, willing to be impressed and yet not without bias and tendency in vision. Hence lines and color crystallize in this harmony rather than in that.”7 And this is why they do not carry purely formal meanings, but are filled with the meanings of life experiences. It is always so, because in every one of the artist’s new experiences “He cannot divest himself, in his new perception, of meanings funded from his past intercourse with his surroundings, nor can he free himself from the influence they exert upon the substance and manner of his present seeing.”8 Dewey’s view is clear: while the negation of mimesis in art leads the formalists to the concept of autonomous art and pure form, Dewey perceives even abstract painting as strongly connected with the external world and human experience. “Before an artist can develop his reconstruction of the scene before him in terms of the relations of colors and lines characteristic of his picture, he observes the scene with meanings and values brought to his perception by prior experiences.”9 According to Dewey, the occurrence of every new current in art emerges from the need to express something new that has appeared in human experience. He writes about the impressionists: “As these painters matured, they had new visions; they saw the world in ways to which older painters were insensitive. Their new subject-matter demanded a new form. And because of the relativity of technique to form, they were compelled to experiment with the development of new technical procedures. An environment that is changed physically and spiritually demands new forms of expression.”10 The new contents demand new forms and these, in turn, make the artist seek a technique appropriate for execution of a given form. This is the way things go; formal experiments are not a pure aesthetic game, but the

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artist’s striving to express new life meanings. These meanings need not, as was once believed, be expressed exclusively by objective similarity, just as abandoning objectivity does not signify that art leaves life for pure forms and its own autonomy. This means that art cannot be comprehended through explication of its mere form and the techniques of obtaining it. It must be done through getting to the senses and meanings from which it emerges. The core consists in “an endeavor to find out what a work of art is as an experience: the kind of experience which constitutes it.”11 Dewey comes close to the formalists in accepting the search for new forms as essential for all art; he does not accept the pure form, for each artistic form, even the most remote from life, carries the life content. Dewey believes that we cannot understand art through it alone, i.e., through an analysis of its immanent content. Whatever a work of art embraces, including the meanings as well as the harmonious formal arrangements, is an expression of the experienced life meanings. Probably, the more incomprehensible or even peculiar these works of art are, the newer are the meanings expressed by them and the more effort does it require on the part of a recipient to grasp them. Here is the place for the special function of art criticism. Art criticism does not consist in offering judgments, and Dewey sharply criticized the socalled juridical school of criticism. Criticism fulfilled its function by being the inquiring relation of a critic’s own experience, which has nothing to do with the so-called impressionist current in art criticism, in which subjective sensations are recorded. The description of a critic’s own experience means, according to Dewey, grasping the objective qualities of a work of art and in this sense art criticism is always a risk for a critic because it requires his personal engagement and thus it testifies to his sensitivity and maturity. Criticism “demands a rich background and a disciplined insight.”12 The real task of art criticism does not consist in the evaluation of a work of art but in giving examples of possible experiences of art. If a critic describes the objective qualities of the work of art experienced by him, then his experience becomes helpful for others in their course of building the immediate experiences of art. Such help is especially needed when we are confronted with very novel works of art, in which the relation between the traditional, familiar and common on the one hand, and the new and individual on the other, is troubled to such an extent that we can neither conduct our perception of a work of art nor integrate our experience. Dewey articulated his opinion about the function of art criticism very clearly: The function of criticism is the reeducation of perception of works of art; it is an auxiliary in the process, a difficult process, of learning to see and hear. The conception that its business is to appraise, to judge in the legal and moral sense, arrests the perception of those who are influenced by the criticism that assumes this task. The moral office of criticism is performed indirectly. The individual who has an enlarged and quickened

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experience is one who should make for himself his own appraisal. The way to help him is through the expansion of his own experience by the work of art to which criticism is subsidiary.13 .

1. Dewey vs. avant-garde and neo avant-garde art I have completed a reconstruction of Dewey’s views on art which he formulated through reference to impressionism. In his Art as Experience, published in 1934, he never mentioned Picasso, Braque, Kandinsky or other avant-garde artists, not to mention Marcel Duchamp. This is why speaking of the attitude of Dewey’s aesthetic theory toward the avant-garde will not be a reconstruction, but will require careful extrapolation. What has already been said about Dewey’s interpretation of impressionism and his polemics with formalism fully applies to the avantgarde art of the first half of the 20th century, to currents like, e.g., cubism, futurism, and abstract art. It is far more intriguing that the general theory of art as experience presented in the book of 1934 is in close correlation with the achievements of neo avant-garde art like ready-mades, minimal art, happening, and performance, and turns out to be very efficient in contributing to the understanding of this art in the face of which the earlier aesthetic systems, formalism included, are helpless. Here are some examples of the convergence of the efforts of neo avant-garde artists with Dewey’s aesthetics: - Neo avant-garde artists reject the artistic object for the sake of any object introduced into the world of art; frequently an objective work of art is replaced by processual forms like happening or performance. For Dewey, the object present in the aesthetic experience need not be an artistic product. What is important is not “what” we experience, but the process of experiencing, and quite often an object taken from everyday life allows us to have an aesthetic experience more easily than a masterfully formed work of art. In the case of happening, the work of art and its experience overlap, constituting one process. This is why David Kuspit has written that the amorphous and temporal structure of happening would be closer to Dewey than a masterpiece in a museum.14 - Both neo avant-garde and Dewey are characterized by rebellion against museum art and strive to abolish the boundaries between art and everyday life. According to Dewey, art goes beyond the sphere of what is artistic; every experience may become aesthetic and every element of reality may be aesthetically meaningful. - Both in neo avant-garde and in Dewey’s theory, desacralization of art is accompanied by departure from the conception of the artist as genius. The roles of the author and the recipient get mixed, active participation is preferred to the traditional contemplative reception of art, and disinterestedness accompanied by subjective-objective distance is replaced by involvement.

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This list of similarities is far from complete. The aesthetician who fully developed the quoted threads in Dewey’s theory was Arnold Berleant, the author of Art and Engagement. Both in this early work and in numerous later studies he constructed his own aesthetics. He did not identify it explicitly with a continuation of Dewey’s thought, though he made references to Dewey. Berleant’s aesthetics grew rather from his observation of changes taking place in art and from his conviction that modern aesthetics is no longer adequate for contemporary art. And the very aesthetics he was building turned out to be very close to Dewey’s conceptions. The evolution of the arts in the 20th century has often been described as experimental, controversial, even chaotic. This is hardly the first time in history that the artistic innovations have evoked confusion and dismay. … But when we consider the history of the arts from the perspective of the present, the inadequacy of the traditional doctrines is striking. The arts of this century demand a transformation of theory. … Aesthetic theory must examine artistic practice carefully and consider how best to respond to this alteration and enlargement of the traditional station and experience of the arts.15 First of all Berleant, like Dewey, identifies the aesthetic experience and not the work of art as the leading concept of his aesthetics, and he treats the category of aesthetics broadly, not limiting it to the sphere of artistic achievements. Like Dewey, he proclaims the continuity of aesthetic experience and life experience—he treats aesthetic experience as multisensual and involved. This is why, like Dewey, he criticizes strongly Kant’s idea of disinterestedness and dissociates himself from all theories derived from it, which he calls theories of ‘isolation’ and ‘distance’. He does not treat works of art as unique objects requiring a separate way of experiencing; he also claims that in the newest art, works often lose their objective mode of existence because they possess a processual character—they are events rather than things. The aesthetic theories of both these American thinkers were formulated at different time and in different conditions, but their similarity is caused by common assumptions. Although Dewey constructed his aesthetics in the early 1930s, by no means was it a modernist aesthetics. His assumptions—antidualism, the idea of continuity in place of opposition (including continuity of art and life as well as aesthetic experiences and life experience), and conceiving of phenomena as processes rather than objects—allowed him to build an aesthetics which was ahead of his time. Berleant’s aesthetics was formulated in accordance with the times; his discerning observation of changes taking place in art and culture caused him to construct a post-Kantian aesthetics for which he adopted assumptions close to Dewey’s conceptions.

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2. Environmental Aesthetics, Environmental Art: In the Circle of Ecology The so-called ecological sensitivity has penetrated numerous areas of human activity, including art and aesthetics. As we know, the leading concept of ecology is the environment understood as a complex network of relations between its elements. An ecological approach changes the traditional conception of experience as an isolated relation of the subject to the object allegedly executed independently of the context. Dewey is the only aesthetician I know of, in whose theory aesthetic experience is described as an interaction between a living creature and its surroundings; the concept of environment is among the major concepts of his philosophy. No wonder that in the heyday of ecology Dewey was recalled and started to be quoted in studies both of eco-ethics and of eco-aesthetics. The first philosopher who recognized the importance and relevance of Dewey’s concept of the environment for aesthetics was John McDermott. As early as the end of the 1960s he developed Dewey’s guiding idea, introducing the concept of aesthetic ecology. McDermott, like Dewey, does not think that aesthetics necessarily has to refer to the world of fine arts: “…aesthetic sensibility does not denote exclusive or even necessary relationship to the world of art. In this, we follow the lead of John Dewey, for whom all experiencing is potentially aesthetic. In our terms, aesthetic sensibility refers to how we and others feel our situation and feel about our situation.”16 Ecology with its idea of the environment allows us to discover senses that are not located in the isolated subject-object relation but in the network of relations. The attainment of ‘consummatory experience’ means aesthetic experience is not an easy matter and demands an effort of cooperation with our environment, sensitivity to its rhythm, and subtleness in harmonizing the subjective with the objective. In such experience we cannot be the observer but must be a participant. This is also what contemporary art requires of us; it is the art of today that leads us beyond the domain of the fine arts and introduces us to life. McDermott indicates areas of reality which should above all be subjected to reconstructive aesthetic thinking: the urban environment, the sphere of the human body and sensuality (including the contact senses), the cyber-space of electronic media. Ecological aesthetics was developed in a Deweyan spirit also by Arnold Berleant, the author of environmental aesthetics and, at the same time, a patron of the Scandinavian school of so-called applied aesthetics. According to Berleant, all human relationships, including aesthetic experiences, “are environmental in context and in substance.” The participatory model of aesthetic experience fully corresponds with contemporary art, which is in the process of radical transformation. Recent years have witnessed the development of so-called evolutionary aesthetics; for instance, works on the aesthetics of animals have been written; we also have to do with the development of bio-art which claims diverse

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achievements. It seems that Dewey’s theory of experience, rooted in Darwin’s theory of evolution and based on the matrix of interactions between a live creature and its surroundings, could be useful in research of evolutionary aesthetics. In Art as Experience Dewey wrote: „To grasp the sources of esthetic experience it is … necessary to have recourse to animal life below the human scale.”17 Dewey understood ‘experience’ as an interaction of the energies of the organism with those of the conditions under which it lives. The concept of an ‘organism’ is obviously broader than that of a “human being”; it also includes representatives of flora and fauna, and Dewey admits a possibility of experience as an interaction between plants and their surroundings (heliotropism) as well as between animals and their environment. Dewey’s aesthetics is fully open to the whole biological level of life. 3. Somaesthetics In his project of somaesthetics Richard Shusterman does not enter the vast domain of biological life in its evolutionary development, but rather tries to return the human body to its deserved though hitherto denied place both in the area of philosophical knowledge and in the practice of life itself. Somaesthetics is an integral part of pragmatic aesthetics, which develops creatively Dewey’s philosophy of experience, taking into account the changes that have taken place in the fine arts as well as in the whole culture in the second half of the 20th century. At the center of somaesthetic reflections there is an embodied man who is immersed in his biological, social, and cultural environment, a subject of perceptions and feelings registered by the external and internal senses. From the very beginning Dewey emphasized the importance of experience as an interaction in which the organic—somatic and multisensory—aspects of the human being are totally involved. My objective here is not to discuss somaesthetics in its general outlines, but rather to discuss it as one of the newest trends in aesthetics, which, having originated from Dewey’s philosophy, allows us to understand art better. In his recently published book Thinking Through the Body Shusterman indicates the possibilities of applying someaesthetics to fine arts like architecture and photography and also the art of living. I shall focus on architecture, which—in spite of being present in the practice of life—is traditionally included among the fine arts, in order to explicate the possibility of reinterpretation of this art with the help of somaesthetic methods. It should be emphasized that, because he is trying to avoid all implications of the dualistic approach isolating the body from the mind, Shusterman tends to give up the concept of body and adopt that of soma. The unity of the spirit and the body involved in the soma changes dramatically the understanding of what perception is. „Perception through the body per se”

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goes far beyond the five known sense receptor organs, and includes, among others, kinesthesia and proprioception. In reference to architecture it means: The soma is thus what enables us to appreciate not only the visual effects and structural design features that rely on perceiving distance and depth, but also the multisensorial feelings of moving through space (with the kinesthetic, tactile, proprioceptive qualities) that are crucial to the experience of living with, in, and through architecture.18 Referring to tradition, Shusterman stresses that on the one hand we can speak—according to Vitruvius—of “key principles of architectural form” as „derived from soma”, on the other hand of the architecture of the body; of the expressive character of architecture comparable to the non-discursive expression of bodily gesticulation; of the embedding of our bodies—as well as of buildings—in the environment. Special attention is paid to the category of atmosphere, vividly discussed nowadays within the theory of architecture. According to the author: Atmosphere is, I think, best understood as an experienced quality of a situation, and such qualities are notoriously resistant to conceptual definition and discursive analysis. If it defies clear categorization as objective or subjective, this is because atmosphere is a qualitative feature of a situation that is typically grasped before that situation is divided into its objective and subjective elements. Atmosphere is experienced by the subject as a perceptual feeling that emerges from and pervades a situation; like other perceptual feelings, atmosphere is experienced in large part as a bodily feeling.19 These words clearly show that Shusterman is a faithful disciple of Dewey. Perception of architecture is not visual, it is not perception at a distance (unfortunately, “on the tactile side there is no counterpart to contemplation on the optical side”20). It is an engaged somatic and multisensory experience. This is why, as Shusterman says quoting Dewey’s thought, we need “‘the reeducation of perception.’” We need training to work out somaesthetic sensibility. The example of architecture discussed above shows the potential of somaesthetics and its efficiency at reinterpreting fine arts—both the traditional and the contemporary ones—which, considered from the perspective of soma, reveal meanings which are inaccessible to the traditional approaches.

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For several decades we have been experiencing an expansion of popular art, and the tension between this art and the fine arts still persists both in the circle of aestheticians and among the recipients of art. We could think that there is no aesthetics better able to open its gates to popular art than Dewey’s aesthetics. He criticized museum art which had lost its links with life while its persistent overrating and elevation to the rank of the sacrosanct leads to mendacity because, on the one hand, people pretend to have deep aesthetic experiences allegedly evoked by the works of art and, on the other hand, they are ashamed that the art considered to be a lower kind gives them truly intense pleasure, and try to hide it. Dewey wrote: “The arts which today have most vitality for the average person are things he does not take to be arts: for instance, the movie, jazzed music, the comic strip.”21 In 1992, nearly 60 years after publication of Art as Experience, Richard Shusterman published a book in which, inspired by Dewey’s thought, he offered a project of pragmatist aesthetics.22 Both in this book and in the articles published later Shusterman admits that Dewey’s original conception of art is open to popular art, but the fragment I quoted is, for Shusterman, a starting point for his criticism of Dewey’s attitude towards popular art. This criticism includes the following arguments: Dewey himself did not make full use of the potential of his aesthetics, because he did not pay sufficient attention to popular art—the quotation included here is the only remark concerning this kind of art in Art as Experience, while the analyses in the book refer to works of high art; and Dewey neglected the role of critics working for the aesthetic validation of popular art and, at the same time, overestimated the role of aesthetic experience as the only source of such validation.23 This criticism, and careful research into contemporary art, give rise to Shusterman’s conception called meliorism. First of all it defends the aesthetic status of popular art, appreciates the importance of aesthetic criticism (formal and topical) as well as philosophical criticism, which allow for improvement both of popular art itself and of its social reception. It also indicates that we do not need to make a dramatic choice of the “either/or” type, since we can experience aesthetic pleasure in contact with works both of high art and of low art. Nor can we universally assign value to high art and universally deny it to popular art—in both these kinds of art we have to do with masterpieces as well as with works of little value. 5. Dewey and Multimedia Art Dewey was an aesthetician who guided us from the theory of disinterested aesthetic contemplation towards the principle of interaction and involved participation in our contact with art. The concepts of interaction and participation became the leading concepts in the theory of electronic media and

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they described the specific character of the contact of no longer a recipient but an inter-actor with the multimedia work which, in its openness and unfinished state, invites us to participate in an interactive game. Obviously, because of the time of its formation, Dewey’s conception does not refer to the issues of cyberspace and virtual reality, but some of the concepts that I have mentioned, and the notions of relationality, gradation and continuity, correspond to a way of thinking which is present in the theory of the new media. In my paper I wanted to show the potential of Dewey’s aesthetics, particularly his conception of experience, in reference to the changes in the art and culture of the 20th century and discuss in brief the application and development of this potential by the next generations. It was not my goal to suggest that Art as Experience is a kind of bible of contemporary aesthetics. Nevertheless, I have always found it interesting that a book written in the 1930s has more to say to aestheticians today than it had to say to aestheticians when it was first published. NOTES 1. John Dewey, Art as Experience (Cambridge: Perigee Books, 1980), p. 62. 2. Ibid., p. 269. 3. Ibid., p. 301. 4. Ibid., p. 302. 5. Ibid., p. 88. 6. Ibid., p. 94. 7. Ibid., p. 87. 8. Ibid., p. 89. 9. Ibid., p. 89. 10. Ibid., p. 303. 11. Ibid., p. 309. 12. Ibid., p. 300. 13. Ibid., p. 324. 14. David Kuspit, “Dewey’s Critique of Art for Art Sake,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 27:1 (1968), p. 97. 15. Arnold Berleant, Art and Engagement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), pp. 18-20. 16. John J. McDermott, The Culture of Experience: Philosophical Essays in the American Grain (New York: New York American Press,1976), p. xiii. 17. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 18. 18. Richard Shusterman, Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 224. 19. Ibid., p. 234. 20. Ibid., p. 236. 21. Dewey, Art as Experience, pp. 5–6. 22. Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2nd ed., 2000). 23. Richard Shusterman, “Popular Art and Education,” Studies in Philosophy and Education, 13 (1995), pp. 203–212.

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Six WRITING AS COMPLETE GESTURE: A PRAGMATIST VIEW OF CREATIVITY Giovanni Maddalena I Introduction John Ronald Reuel Tolkien used to say that the entire saga of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings was born from writing the sentence “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,” without knowing what a hobbit should have been.1 The observation is far from being trivial. Euler maintained the same when he said that the entire power of his mathematics lived in his pencil.2 Peirce’s and Wittgenstein’s notes on “doing mathematics” as the foundation of mathematics are not far away from these statements. 3 Many contemporary mathematicians seem to hold a similar perspective, accepting that the creative part of mathematics is made by “gestures.”4 Connecting doing and thinking in a perfect kind of continuity is characteristic of pragmatism, in all its stripes. From the pragmatic maxim onward, pragmatists stressed the importance of a kind of reasoning that would broaden knowledge in a synthetic way. In order to represent a real way of reasoning within this continuous path, classic pragmatists forged rational tools. Peirce’s abduction and Dewey’s logic of inquiry are perhaps a couple of the most important and most useful methods of reasoning that they pointed out. They show pragmatists’ attempt to work out a different rational paradigm that would respect the continuity of experience. They tried to avoid any abstract distinction or division and allowed for a more “ampliative” way of thinking (i.e. one that broadens our knowledge). Their tools show that pragmatism is alien both to any form of static Platonic essentialism and to many attempts to reduce knowledge to analysis or verificationism. However, their tools remain an analytic way to approach synthetic reasoning, while they never realized that their researches pointed toward a complete synthetic pattern, where synthesis is achieved through synthetic tools. A completely synthetic tool should be a completely embodied way of reasoning in our everyday way of thinking. This paper will try to find this synthetic tool through the effective example of literature. As a matter of fact, art has always been the field in which pragmatists showed this need for syntheticity. I find the same need for a different definition and use of synthetic judgment in two of the most important pragmatist aesthetics of the last

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decades: Margolis’s5 and Shusterman’s,6 both of whom summon Dewey’s aesthetics to show that art can be a synthetic tool of knowledge. However, neither of them finds a sufficient technical explanation of the way in which art can achieve that. Relying on Peirce’s semiotic and on the example of Vasily Grossman as an author, this paper will show why and how writing is a synthetic tool of knowledge that we can call “gesture” and that explains creativity in a pragmatist pattern. It will then explain why and how this gesture, when it is a “complete” one, fosters knowledge much more than any analysis, including the author’s analytic knowledge of his creativity. II Vasily Grossman is one of the most important and less well known masters of writing of the twentieth century. Born in 1905, he grew up in a Jewish family but was completely absorbed in communist multicultural revolutionary ideas. At quite a young age he became a well-respected, integrated writer of the regime, thanks to Gorky’s approval of his short stories.7 During the Second World War, Grossman became nationally famous. He lost his mother in the first Nazi attack. She was executed as thousands of Jews had been, in Grossman’s home town, Berdichev (Ukraine). Somehow feeling guilty for not having gone quickly enough to rescue his mother and summon her up to Moscow, Grossman enrolled in the Red Army where he was soon chosen as reporter for the Red Star, the newspaper of the Army. Following the troops, Grossman fought at Stalingrad, where he did his work courageously on the right bank (while party members fled to the safe left bank) where the German and Soviet armies clashed. After the war, he started working on a big novel representing the Battle of Stalingrad. The first part of the novel, For a Just Cause, was published only in 1952, and only Stalin’s death prevented major and potentially very dangerous critiques from appearing in official newspapers. Such critiques were the outcome of the growing anti-Semitism of Stalin’s regime even though the novel was following the rhetorical truths and patterns of Soviet literature. In the 1950s Grossman worked on the second part of the novel, in which he changed his perspective. He decided to tell the whole truth at any cost. The cost was high. The manuscript of Life and Fate was seized by the KGB (1961) and Grossman’s complaints to the authorities remained unheard. Grossman died a few years later (1964), abandoned by the majority of his friends and without the permission to publish anymore. A copy of his masterpiece was smuggled to Western countries only in 1978 and was published in 1980 in Switzerland. Only in recent years has Grossman become widely popular.8 This brief biographical sketch is necessary to understanding the first step of this paper: writing is a gesture by which we know something in a synthetic

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way. In order to explain what a “gesture” is, let us take a meaningful example from Grossman’s Life and Fate. In Chapter 14 of the second part, the commandant of a Nazi Lager, Liss, summons an old Soviet prisoner, Mostovskoy. This latter had been one of the first Bolsheviks, Lenin’s comrade, one of the main characters of the Revolution. Liss does not want to interrogate the old communist. He wants to make him listen to his own wellpondered theory about the absolute equivalence of the Nazi and Soviet systems. The scene starts as an interrogation but reveals itself to be a strange sort of dialogue. ‘I’ve been summoned for interrogation,’ he [Mostovskoy] said out loud. ‘There’s nothing for us to talk about.’ ‘Why do you say that?’ asked Liss. ‘All you see is my uniform. But I wasn’t born in it. The Führer and the Party command; the rank and file obey. I was a theoretician. I’m a Party member, but my real interest lies in questions of history and philosophy. Surely not all the officers in your NKVD loved the Lubyanka?’ … ‘When we look one another in the face, we’re neither of us just looking at a face we hate—no, we’re gazing into a mirror. That’s the tragedy of our age. Do you really not recognize yourselves in us—yourselves and the strength of your will? Isn’t it true that for you too the world is your will? Is there anything that can make you waver?’9 “We are gazing into a mirror” is Grossman’s conclusion. Today this historical statement seems almost trivial, even though it is not universally accepted. However, it was not trivial at all in 1961 when this similarity was rarely affirmed in the Western world, and never in the Soviet Union. 10 In this case, literature represented an inconvenient truth; it showed this sad equivalence well before it was known to historians in its particulars, and to philosophers in its reasons. Literature shows a comprehending power through its representation. What is the dynamic of such a process of knowledge? How is it connected to creativity? In what sense is it a pragmatist way to look at knowledge? In pragmatist terms we could say that Grossman had an experience of this political reality. He fought at Stalingrad and he saw the atrocities perpetrated by both armies. Even more, he realized on that occasion how on both sides soldiers were caught up by ideologies through Party control. As a matter of fact, Grossman’s novel shows that soldiers in both camps become more human when they lose contact with their parties, in the moment in which they are losing the battle. Germans and Soviets experience the same path of rescue from ideologies. When one has an experience like this one, a powerful experience for which there is no previous pattern of understanding (at that

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time ideology was not studied as it is now and it was harder to understand its mechanisms), the synthetic path of knowledge emerges more clearly than usually. This path is semiotically constituted. Avoiding any overly technical explanation, let us sum up this fundamental pragmatist conception. According to Peirce, semiosis is the process by which we transform the multiplicity of data into unity through quality, relation, and representation.11 In a later text, semiosis is the dynamic of the relationship among object, representamen (sign in itself), and interpretant.12 Both formulas express the profound and new realism that informed many pragmatist views: experience becomes intelligible through signs that generate comprehension in the form of other signs. In this way pragmatists account for both realism and the construction of interpretation: knowledge is not a plain copy but an interpretation. However, interpretation is not the fruit of some arbitrary construction but the outcome of a process of reality of which interpreters (human or not) as well as the instruments of knowledge themselves are parts. Reality evolves also in a semiotic way which we belong to and with which we cooperate. In Peirce’s complex classification of signs (56,049 different kinds), a triad appears as the most important: icons, indices, and symbols, the three kinds that link representamen and dynamic object. Icons are those kinds of signs that represent the object by similarity, while indices represent it by brute connection, and symbols by interpretation (i.e., images of any kind are icons, signals are indices, words are symbols). In turn, this classification reflects phenomenological relations that Peirce called Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness in order to express the relation with oneself, with another one, and with a plurality. Any form of reality displays this phenomenological pattern. Now, an accomplished knowledge can be summarized by words, that is, at a symbolic level. New and difficult situations like the Battle of Stalingrad and the clash of ideologies were too powerful and too unknown to be already well-formed and ready for analysis. A communist writer was facing both the strength and the falsity of his maternal culture. His world was collapsing before him. In technical terms, experiences like this one are still vague and need comprehension. As we have seen, the process of representing and comprehending are one thing for pragmatists of Peirce’s stripe (and in general, with different nuances, for all classic pragmatists), so much so that any comprehension, that is, any semiosis, is somehow a creative process, if we understand creativity in a broad sense. Grossman, like any artist, displays this ordinary semiotic pattern at a more visible level: he actually has to employ different levels of signs at the same time in order to represent (or to comprehend) experience. He has to give an iconic-indexical-symbolic form to the object (the experience) he wants to represent. This “giving form” happens on both a phenomenological and a semiotic level. On the phenomenological level, the experience is an indeterminate form, what we call a ‘vague idea’ in ordinary language. It is the level of firstness, of

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the idea in itself. When the author starts writing it becomes effective (secondness) in the action of the actual scribing. Material or virtual writing modifies the idea, making it existent. This is why we have the impression that the actual writing is the source of thought itself. Finally, a complete picture of the situation, with characters and dialogues, emerges while we are writing. The complete displaying of the form of experience is a thirdness, a relationship among experience and the signs of its interpretation. Thirdness is the new reality formed from both the initial experience and its semiotic development. It is a new form of reality, independent of what any thinker, or even the majority of thinkers, can understand or say. The dialogue between Liss and Mostovskoy is a reality: it provokes effects and it is independent of any opinion. On the semiotic level, the idea takes the shape of images, that is, icons: images are the set-up of the scene in the Lager and the actions that the characters perform from the initial description of Liss’ physical aspect to the final movement with which Mostovskoy grasps the manuscript that Liss entrusts to him.13 Proper names are indices, connecting characters and geophysical entities. Liss and Mostovskoy are obviously the first two proper names that bring the situation alive, but there are many: Stalin, Hitler, NKVD, Lubyanka, etc. Nicknames or epitomes like “the Fürher,” “our chief,” and so on are also indices. Finally, the discourse itself is a symbol that proceeds through words and that develops a meaning toward which the scene tends. In a sense the semiotic analysis can be much more complicated. To be thorough it should say that icons and indices are expressed by symbols (words) anyway so that we could talk of pure symbols and degenerate symbols of different kinds (which contain indices and icons, only indices, or only icons). However, at this point we are interested not in this kind of analysis because we wanted only to cast light on what happens in the representation of experience through writing, so that we can limit ourselves to the basic analysis that we mentioned. For the purpose of this paper, it is important that when the action of representing involves both the phenomenological and semiotic levels in all their main distinctions, we have a “gesture.” What is a “gesture”? An action can be only a reaction. But every action that bears a meaning—as the pragmatic rule says—is a “gesture” (from the latin gero = I bear, I carry on). Our lives are full of meaningful actions in love, religion, work, science, and death. Public and private rites are usually gestures, but also scientific inquiry, family relationships, and social gatherings have their own characteristic gestures. The double phenomenological and semiotic pattern defines why some actions are such a powerful tool of comprehension. Writing, and especially creative writing, is one of them. Following Peirce’s semiotic indications, we can say that when a “gesture” blends all the kinds of signs together in “equal” proportion, we have a “complete gesture.” Any creative act broadly understood in the many fields we have mentioned is a “gesture.” But a gesture can be incomplete, as are our ordinary way of understanding through semiosis and our ordinary actions. A

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creative act like “artistic writing” is a “complete gesture,” that is, a “gesture” that blends together signs in a certain intentional and equal way. We cannot go here into the complex theme of awareness and its normative implications,14 but we will stick to the semiotic form and implication of a “complete gesture.” III What does an “equal blending” of signs mean? What kind of knowledge does it permit? Once again we will start with examples taken from Grossman’s masterpiece. Grossman’s main concept is the nature and dynamic of freedom as opposed to ideology. With Grossman we find a theoretical explanation of what freedom is. The manuscript that Mostovskoy receives from Liss has been written by Ikonnikov, a “fool of God” who is prisoner in the camp. As a “fool,” Ikonnikov is allowed to tell the truth, according to an ancient literary tradition. The truth is that any form of Good is ideological. In the name of the Good, so many atrocities have been committed that one would have to be blind not to see that any theorization of the Good becomes evil and violent. Moreover, through Ikonnikov Grossman indicates that this Evil is not only on the human level. Beasts and even trees fight one another in order to survive. Evil seems to cover the entire development of any living being, even though Grossman observes all the way through the book that living in itself is the only Good and the only meaning we can attribute to the words Freedom and Life. This double conviction is paradoxical: life is good and free, but the development of life and its unavoidable death is evil and slavish. Ikonnikov’s solution is that the Good is opposed to kindness. Kindness is the practical, illogical, little attitude that common people show to one another outside any theoretical consideration. These are Grossman’s theoretical statements. Paradoxical as they are, the only way in which the author can express them is by representing them through gestures. And gestures must be complete in order to reach meaningfulness. Even in Ikonnikov’s text, this illogical goodness has to be shown by examples made of gestures, so much so that Ikonnikov’s manuscript tells the story of an old Russian woman whose husband has been shot by Nazi occupiers. Eventually she will help the German soldier who is accidentally wounded at her apartment. How so? For no reason. Illogical, silly, practical kindness: this is the only reflex of the original freedom of life. This senseless kindness is condemned in the fable about the pilgrim who warmed a snake in his bosom. It is kindness that has mercy on a tarantula that bitten a child. A mad, blind, kindness. People enjoy looking in stories and fables for examples of the danger of this senseless kindness. But one shouldn’t be afraid of it. One might just as well be afraid of a freshwater fish carried out by chance into the salty ocean.

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The harm from time to time occasioned a society, class, race or State by this senseless kindness fades away in the light that emanates from those who are endowed with it. This kindness, this stupid kindness, is what is most truly human in a human being. It is what sets man apart, the highest achievement of his soul. No, it says, life is not evil! This kindness is both senseless and wordless. It is instinctive, blind. When Christianity clothed it in the teachings of the Church Fathers, it began to fade; its kernel became a husk. It remains potent only while it is dumb and senseless, hidden in the living darkness of the human heart.15 However, this theoretical discourse with its examples is not Grossman’s best representation of his idea. In Chapter 48 of the second part Sofya Osipovna is a Russian doctor. She is taken prisoner at Stalingrad. During the long journey by train, she becomes acquainted with a young orphan, David. The train takes them to Treblinka. Once off the train, she has the opportunity to escape the gas chamber by declaring her status as a doctor. However, she decides to stay with the child who is already affectionate towards her. Their painful journey terminates in the gas chamber. Here Grossman has to represent one of the crudest experiences of humanity: “Speech was no longer of any use to people, nor was action; action is directed towards the future and there no longer was any future.”16 The symbolic level is here declared insufficient. Sofya Levinton felt the boy’s body subside in her arms. Once again she had fallen behind him. In mine-shafts where the air becomes poisoned, it is always the little creatures, the birds and mice, that die first. This boy, with his slight, bird-like body, had left before her. ‘I’ve become a mother,’ she thought. That was her last thought. Her heart, however, still had life in it: it contracted, ached and felt pity for all of you, both living and dead; Sofya Osipovna felt a wave of nausea. She pressed David, now a doll, to herself; she became dead, a doll.17 Grossman’s theoretical statements about kindness are presented through a “gesture” here. Taking for granted the phenomenological analysis of the gesture by the author, let us concentrate on the semiotic level of the scene. Everything is described by words, that is, by symbols, but words are declared impotent to describe what is going on. Thus words have to work not at a conceptual level but at the iconic and indexical levels. Indices are decisive here, in order to recapitulate what Sofya’s and David’s lives were. Her eyes—which had read Homer, Izvestia, Huckleberry Finn and Mayne Reid, that had looked at good people and bad people, that had

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GIOVANNI MADDALENA seen the geese in the green meadows of Kursk, the stars above the observatory at Pulkovo, the glitter of surgical steel, the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, tomatoes, and turnips in the bins at market, the blue water of Issyk-Kul—her eyes were no longer of any use to her. If someone had blinded her, she would have felt no sense of loss.18

David’s memories are not strictly indexical, but by use of a list an indexical value emerges—common names are used as labels more than descriptions: He had taken only few steps in the world. He had seen the prints of children’s bare heels on hot, dusty earth, his mother lived in Moscow, the moon looked down and people’s eyes looked up at it from below, a teapot was boiling on the gas-ring ... This world, where a chicken could run without its head, where there was milk in the morning and frogs he could get to dance by holding their front feet—this world still preoccupied him. All this time David was being clasped by strong warm hands. He didn’t feel his eyes go dark, his heart become empty, his mind grow dull and blind. He had been killed. He no longer existed.19 The strong, last hug is the iconic image that sums up the entire, ineffable feeling of that old lady for the young son of her people: the profound unity, the unutterable piety, the rage against the enemy, and the deep unanswered questions of the utility of her life. But that hug opens up the last (symbolic) thought: I am a mother. From the ultimate border of the evil stems the greatest answer to her eternal questions. At a semiotic level, all three kinds of signs are present in a much more artistically convincing way than the short description of the old Soviet woman in Ikonnikov’s manuscript. Cleverly, symbols as such (words) are said to be silent in a scene of death. However, the scene is described through words and, at the end, it is a word that expresses a well-formed thought about being a mother, the real meaning of the story. Indices are used to recapitulate existence, playing on their power to label existent experiences. Icons describe the movements in the gas chamber: those movements represent the emptiness of insensate death as well as the deep meaning of that last hug. Everything keeps together in a proportion that we could judge so equal as to perform a “complete gesture.” Now, let us go back to our questions: what does an “equal blending” of signs mean? What kind of knowledge does it permit? “Equal blending” means that this action has elements of originality insofar as it represents the forms of the experience from which it stems (iconic level); it has an actual determination in existence (index); and it has a scope (symbol), a final destination which is the ideal end that the single realization has to confirm and which will verify the goodness or the plausibility of the act itself.

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So far I have not determined how “equal” can be measured in a positive way. However, we know what it means in a negative way. We know that when the iconic reading of forms is weak, there is no variation, thus there is no novelty or passion. When indices are weak, there are mere repetitions. And finally, when symbols are weak, acts become incomprehensible. In Ikonnikov’s manuscript icons are weak so that we face the typical tone of theoretical statements. They are still creative in a way since they are forms of artistic writing as well, but they lack the power and the novelty with which icons describe the process of understanding that is going on in experience. Theory is already settled. Indices grant the connection with hard existence. If we imagined Sofya’s scene without indices, we would not understand the richness of the persons that we are losing in the gas chamber, because the lists of memories make us comprehend who they were. Without symbols, the final revelation of the episode would be lost and death would only remain a monstrosity. From these semiotic characteristics, the answer to the second question arises. What kind of knowledge does a “complete gesture” permit? When a gesture is “complete” we understand something in a more determinate way. Any synthesis brings us something new, but this kind of synthesis clarifies in one act an entire idea or concept. Sometimes, as in this passage, we understand something more than the author himself. In the chapter following Sofya’s death, Grossman explains his philosophy again. He underlies that when a person dies, the entire universe that she had in her dies. Only in human existence does life become happiness, freedom, supreme value. Death is slavery. “When a person dies, they cross over from the realm of freedom to the realm of slavery. Life is freedom, and dying is a gradual denial of freedom.”20 However, the Sofya episode has just shown something more: death is the chance for supreme humanity. In many other passages, Grossman shows this peculiarity of the “complete gestures” that he creates, so much so that when the scene is ended, often questions and not theories arise. When Colonel Darensky defends a mistreated German soldier against a Soviet general, he does not preach about justice. He asks himself questions about his relationship with his people and his nature. What an abyss lay between the road he was following today and the road he had taken to Yashkul through the Kalmyk steppe. Was he really the same man who, beneath an enormous moon, had stood on what seemed to be the last corner of Russian earth? Who had watched the fleeing soldiers and the snake-like necks of the camels, tenderly making room in his heart for the poor, for the weak, for everyone whom he loved? 21 The thousands of questions that fill up Life and Fate show that the last answer to the problem of the nature of life and freedom is not the theory of Ikonnikov’s manuscript but a much more complicated paradox: life is good at

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its origin and it is free; death is evil and is pursued by nature as well as by human beings; but death and evil cannot be a nihilist final description, there is something more in life, something good that makes us raise questions about the meaning of life even when evil seems to triumph. This is the meaning of the fertile death of Sofya Levinton. The human in humanity is not only senseless kindness, but a rational link with the meaning of the universe. This link is usually expressed by small and big questions such as those that Alexandra Vladimirovna asks at the end of the book. The lives of those close to her were unsettled, confused, full of doubts and mistakes, full of grief. What would happen to Lyudmila? What would be the outcome of her family troubles? Where was Seryozha? Was he even alive? How hard things were for Viktor Shtrum? What would happen to Vera and Stepan Fyodorovich? Would Stepan be able to rebuild his life again and find peace? ... And Vera?... And Zhenya? Would she follow Krymov to Siberia? ... Why were their destinies so confused, so obscure? ... No, whatever life holds in store—hard-won glory, poverty and despair, or death in a labour camp—they will live as human beings and die as human beings, the same as those who have already perished; and in this alone lies man’s eternal and bitter victory over all the grandiose and inhuman forces that ever have been or will be. 22 “Complete gestures” show this triple enigma of good, evil, and meaningfulness much more than Grossman’s theory, which reaches only the first two steps without any other philosophical solution. The equal blending of signs typical of “complete gestures” displays the way in which creativity grasps the too-complicated experience of reality. When gestures are not complete they are more ordinary: they represent less and they understand less. However, as we have seen they are always partly creative insofar as they provide new synthetic knowledge. In the difference between completeness and incompleteness of gestures we can see the difference between ordinary and extraordinary creativity in life, science, and the arts. We can sum up this pragmatist pattern of creativity in a table:

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Action without acquisition of knowledge

Reaction

Shock or clash

Uncreative act

Vague (not completely determined) synthesis

Incomplete gestures (phenomenologi cal and semiotic level)

Semiosis (representation and comprehension)

Creativity broadly understood

Completely synthetic pattern

Complete gestures (phenomenological and semiotic level with equal blending of kinds of signs)

Specific semiosis (intentional representation and clarification of comprehension)

Creativity strictly understood

IV Conclusion The philosophy of “complete gestures” as a key to comprehending what creativity is respects all pragmatist insights. It relies upon a deep continuity between reality and interpretation, as all pragmatists have advocated. Classic pragmatists had a profound understanding of the unity and the rationality of experience so that it can furnish a better explanation of what creativity is. For pragmatists, experience includes, and thus overcomes, any dichotomy: thoughts and actions, facts and values, mind and body, private and public, individual and society, physics and metaphysics. With different nuances, they thought that experience contains all those items at the same time because they are part of a deeper relationship or continuity. As is well known, with different perspectives that range from Peirce’s mathematical studies to James’ psychological insights and Mead’s sociological approach, they also understood this continuity to be evolutionarily determined. The tool of “complete gesture” explains how this continuity can act in synthetic knowing acts. A last example taken from Grossman will show how much this picture of creativity embedded in experience is a common asset of all those who reflect or try to represent their own creativity. In Life and Fate the scientist Viktor Shtrum, Grossman’s alter-ego, discovers a new nuclear power conception. In that moment Grossman describes how creativity works. Here again the representation is superior to the author’s ideas. Grossman wants to say that, contrary to Marxism, ideas are not the product of practice, but in the description of it he affirms a much more profound unity between the whole experience and comprehension. In this description, the phenomenological path of ideas in themselves (firstness), physical actions (secondness), and final destination (thirdness) appears.

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And at the same time his head had been full of other laws and relationships: quantum interactions, fields of force, the constants that determined the processes undergone by nuclei, the movement of light, and the expansion and contraction of space and time. To a theoretical physicist the processes of the real world were only a reflection of laws that had been born in the desert of mathematics. And his head had also been full of readings from different instruments, of dotted lines on photographic paper that showed the trajectories of particles and the fission of nuclei. And there had even been room in his head for the rustling of leaves, the light of the moon, millet porridge with milk, the sound of flames in the stove, snatches of tunes, the barking of dogs, the Roman Senate, Soviet Information bulletins, a hatred of slavery, and a love of melon seeds. All this was what had given birth to his theory…And the logic of mathematics, itself quite unconnected with the world, had become reflected and embodied a in a theory of physics; and this theory had fitted with divine accuracy over a complex pattern of dotted lines of photographic paper. And Viktor, inside whose head all this had taken place, now sobbed and wiped tears of happiness from his eyes as he looked at the differential equations and photographic paper that confirmed the truth he had given birth to…. How could he ever make sense of all this…? …It’s a strange feeling, you know. Whatever may happen to me now, I know deep down in my heart that I haven’t lived in vain … No, it’s as though a lily had suddenly blossomed out of still, dark waters… Oh, my God… 23 Even if Grossman underlines the power of the mind, the initial richness and indetermination of experience (in which ideas are present as well as the soup) emerges in the concrete adhering of ideas to the scribing of the photographic paper until the blossoming of final truth from those sheets like a water lily from a dark pond. Here there is no reference to the semiotic unity because it is not represented, but the rest of the story shows that the theory created by Shtrum becomes a crucial technical experiment that has to be performed. The crucial experiment blends together the different kinds of signs. Crucial experiments are scientists’ “complete gestures.” But the passage serves to illustrate the phenomenological level that any practitioner of creativity strictly understood would recognize. When creativity is at stake there is no more difference between sciences and arts. Creativity works in the same way through the completeness of the phenomenological and the semiotic pattern that find their unity in “gestures” whose equal blending give birth to that special creativity of artists and inventors.

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Finally, the pattern of “complete gesture” accounts for three experiences about creativity that common sense acknowledges. First, somehow we understand that there is almost always something creative in the ordinary gesture. In love, religion, work, education, science, and social commitment we are aware (and often happy) when there is some sort of creativity involved in what we are doing. At the same time, we understand that there is a difference between ordinary incomplete gestures and extraordinary complete gestures performed by those whom we consider masters in their field. Second, the semiotic pattern that presides over gestures and complete gestures accounts for Tolkien’s, Euler’s, and many others great masters’ convictions about the fundamental role of the material act through which our thought develops. The saga of The Lord of the Rings stemmed from that first utterance because that statement was a “complete gesture.” Third, as far as it belongs to a complex development of experience through signs, creativity, in a strict sense, belongs much more to the whole reality in which we are immersed than to our individual geniuses. This explains why creativity on the one hand is perceived as a gift, and on the other hand is always an improvement on something that was “in the air,” that others started thinking, and that somehow belongs to the spirit of times. Certainly, the peculiarity for which this phenomenological and semiotic flux of reality is accepted, assented, and fostered by singular individuals (and by human beings) remains to be explained and will involve ethical, aesthetical, and psychological studies. This paper wanted to explore the phenomenological and semiotic sides of the phenomenon of creativity through the lenses of literary creation. Further studies are needed in those normative and psychological fields, and I am sure they will confirm the synthetic pattern of the complete gesture as an explanation of creativity broadly and strictly understood.

NOTES 1. Humphrey Carpenter (ed.), The letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (London: Haper and Collins, 1995), letter 163. 2. Giovanni Vailati, Gli strumenti della ragione, ed. Mario Quaranta (Padova: il Poligrafo, 2003), p. 87. 3. Christiane Chauviré, L’oeil mathématique. Essai sur la philosophie mathematique de Peirce (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 2008), pp. 191–195. 4. Fernando Zalamea, Filosofia francesa de la matemàtica en el siglo XX, Seminario, 2012, Pro manuscripto. 5. Joseph Margolis, What, After All, Is a Work of Art? Lectures in the Philosophy of Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). 6. Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).

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7. John and Carol Garrard, The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman (London: Pen and Sword, 2012). 8. For the story of the manuscript and the entire work of recognition of Grossman’s work see the website of the Vasily Grossman Study Center, www.grossmanweb.eu 9. Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate (London: Vintage, 2011), pp. 378–379. 10. One of the notable exceptions is Hannah Arendt work on totalitarianism, see Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland: World Pub.Co., 1951). 11. Charles Sanders Peirce, The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 1, ed. Nathan Houser and Chrisian J. W. Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 1–27. 12. Charles Sanders Peirce, The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 2, ed. Nathan Houser and Chrisian J. W. Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 398–433. 13. Grossman, Life and Fate, pp. 375–387. 14. Giovanni Maddalena, “Creative Gesture: a Pragmatist View,” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, 5:1 (2013), pp. 65–76. 15. Grossman, Life and Fate, p. 393. 16. Ibid., p. 537. 17. Ibid., p. 538. 18. Ibid., p. 537. 19. Ibid., p. 538. 20. Ibid., p. 539. 21. Ibid., p. 698. 22. Ibid., p. 846. 23. Ibid., pp. 333-334.

Seven WALLACE STEVENS’S PRAGMATIST POETICS OF PLENITUDE Kacper Bartczak 1. Some Introductory Remarks: Self-Styling and Self-Dissolution in the Body and Language Richard Shusterman’s continuation and reworking of Dewey’s aesthetics includes a curious point at which the project of aesthetic self-creation, an apparently goal-oriented endeavor of a strong individualistic will, enters an area in which the developing self temporarily relinquishes its distinct contours. Bringing together complex self-styling discourses from Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, and Emerson, Shusterman explores the moment at which the self lends itself to a motley of larger powers, a risky instance of both dissolution and reformulation. Shusterman quotes from Emerson’s essay “Art”: “we do few things by muscular force, but we place ourselves in such attitudes as to bring the force of gravity … to bear upon the spade or the axe we wield … we seek not to use our own, but to bring a quite infinite force to bear,” which he precedes with the following comment of his own: “Spontaneous nature and intentional striving may seem inconsistent, but when coordinated … they yield the most powerful results.”1 In Shusterman’s aesthetic discourse, it is the bodily that is the primary area of such merger of the self and some greater alterities, either natural or social. The clearly defined practices with which somaesthetics approaches the body do not exhaust the scope of the meanings and significances that the ever-evolving soma may produce. There is an element of a fruitful blank, an opening, an unpredictability, within the area of the somatic itself. This blank, just like somaesthetics in general, is not to be fully identified with states of linguistic awareness. There is a complex commerce between the somatic and the linguistic, but the two spheres are not fully coextensive, with the somatic understanding not translating fully to its linguistic counterpart. What happens, however, in the aesthetic fields which, while they work on the borderlines between the somatic and the linguistic, rely on language as their primary material? One such field is poetry. In the following article, I am going to talk about Wallace Stevens’s poetics of self-obliteration and suspension of meanings. Stevens’s use of the metaphor makes it a powerful instrument of aesthetic inquiry into the possibilities of self-development at the heart of which we find a moment of blank and suspension. This blank, however, is

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induced willfully, to be filled with new meanings and new shapes of the self. Although the process is linguistic, this metaphor-induced state frees language of its sentence-protocol discursivity and opens it up to other meaning-creation channels. One could argue, as I do elsewhere, speaking of the somatic element of Stevens’s poetry, that it is at such moments that language realizes the Whitmanian project of embodied poetry.2 At the end of the essay, I will show how such an opening fits in with the interpretive plenitude, both linguistic and somatic, which William James called the “pluralistic universe.” 2. Poetic Imagism as an Inquiry “The irritation of doubt causes a struggle to attain a state of belief. I shall term this struggle inquiry,”3 wrote Charles Sanders Peirce in 1877, laying the foundations for a boost to American intellectual culture which later became known as “pragmatism.” Whenever we experience doubt as to what is the case, and feel a desire to clarify this doubt, we commence an inquiry. The product of inquiry is a state of belief. The formulation of beliefs and their further verification give us our knowledge of reality. Consequently, what we call reality, and to a certain extent what we call the truth, is in fact the present state of our beliefs as products of previously undertaken inquiry. Truth and reality are dependent on inquiry; in the sense that inquiry becomes an inseparable part of what we call reality. Let me quote Peirce again: “the opinion fated to be agreed on by all who investigate is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. This is the way I would explain reality.”4 Inquiry, then, which leads to a formulation of belief, is what we begin when we ask: what is it that we see, or experience, or what is it that is actually the case? Taken as such, inquiry is also an ingredient of aesthetic experience and aesthetic process. The reality of a work of art includes inquisitive questions addressed to its real life conditions and its internal structure. The intertwining of reality, of “what is the case,” with inquiry and belief, or with a potentiality of plural inquiries, is a paradigmatic condition of modernity and it extends into the life of aesthetics. Modernity in the arts becomes a twofold inquiry: into what we perceive but also into how we perceive. Such is the case with modernist painting, from Cezanne, Braque, and Picasso, to Pollock and Rothko, and such is the case with modernist poetry. A prominent example of treating aesthetics as a mode of inquiry into the true state of reality is the poetic movement of imagism, which was to define and determine a large chunk of the history of 20th-century poetry in the West. The originator of the movement was, of course, Ezra Pound, who saw the “image” as an inquiry tool which he called an “interpretive metaphor.” But Pound’s theories, however groundbreaking and influential, found diverse realizations in other poets, some of whom seem to correct the original project. One of these reformulations is found with Wallace Stevens’s concept of “supreme fiction”

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and his attendant understanding of the metaphor. Pound’s and Stevens’s poetics lead to radically opposed conceptions of the relation of poetry to language, the surrounding world, and the idea of the subject. As I am going to argue, Pound’s image/vortex and Stevens’s reformulation of those are two different types of metaphor, displaying two different understandings of how the metaphor works, connected with two different notions of truthfulness. My main goal is to elucidate Stevens’s type of metaphor, strongly connected with a mysterious entity he names “the nothingness that is,” but I would like to introduce it here by contrasting it with Ezra Pound’s image. Later in the essay, I will discuss Stevens’s metaphor in further detail by recourse to Donald Davidson’s concept of this figure of speech. Davidson’s analyses and approaches to everyday communication and to literary language locate him definitively within the pragmatist way of looking at aesthetics from the point of view of its real life effects. As I will attempt to show, Davidson’s view of the metaphor, slightly amended by a reading of Stevens, shows this device as connecting the process of never ceasing negotiation of meaning with the pragmatist idea of self-development, thought of as looking forward to one’s own future selves. Finally, I will relate this project to William James’s idea of how the human interpretive element regulates and finds itself amidst an uncertain multitude of inquiry possibilities, a manifold that James called a “pluralistic universe.” 3. Stevens’s “Decreation” as a Reworking of Pound’s Image Pound’s image is a tool of inquiry, a device Pound himself calls an “interpretive metaphor.” It is a metaphor very much in the classical Aristotelian sense: it brings together various objects in hope of capturing some so far unnoticed connections between them. In so doing, it also articulates ideas and feelings and thus it “interprets the world.” 5 A Poundian image endeavors “to represent a cluster of associated percepts, ideas, and emotions.”6 Meant to avoid dogma, it is also supposed to bear resemblance to the scientific type of objectivity. It is a part of “scientific poetics,” and “the figure fulfils the scientific program.”7 It avoids emotionality or ornament, aims at directness, concision, and a hard delineation of the object, and in these ways connects Pound to the empiricist tradition: Pound wants the “interpretive metaphor” to be precise, and the precision is to be found in the manner of “correspond[ence] to definite sensations undergone.”8 This accuracy of representation is the locus of the power of the metaphor’s truthfulness: interpretive power and truth go together: “As to… the poetry which I expect to see written… it will be as much like granite as it can be, its force will lie in its truth, its interpretive power.”9 However, this empirical side is complemented in Pound by his cultural metaphysics: the accurate and precise rendering of experience connects one— through a luminous channel—with trans-historical creative energies, which in

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various epochs took various shapes that we call the material aesthetic styles of these epochs. The task of the modernist arts is to reconnect us with those energies: “we appear to have lost the radiant world where one thought cuts through another with clean edge, a world of moving energies.” 10 But these energies are nothing without proper organization by form. The exactitude that Pound looks for in the work of art is the discipline of form—in the poetic sense—needed to organize ethereal energies, the Form, or Forms in the Platonic sense. It is this skill that the modern age must recapture by instruction of the previous epochs: “for the modern scientist energy has no borders, it is a shapeless mass of force. …The medieval philosopher would probably have been unable to think the electric world, and not think of it as a world of forms.”11 A properly “objective” work of art gives the recipient access to just these forms as catalysts of energy, and Pound imagines the resulting message to be determinate and definitive: “Confound you, you ought to find just that in my painting.”12 Pound’s objectivism is thus a form of metaphysical aesthetic representationism: although the directness and accuracy of representation are poetically achieved as an aesthetic training of the senses, they also bespeak a timeless, more abstract, conceptual content of the mind, which, through the senses so trained, comes in direct touch with essential meanings that shape reality. This metaphysical thrust is maintained and continued, in a modulated version, in the present-day stage of Pound’s critical reception, which, although it eschews the sheer metaphysics of presence of the timeless energies so conspicuous in Pound’s own argument, develops toward a metaphysics of the independence of material reality from the human element. A portion of Pound’s large influence on contemporary criticism and poetry gives us an aesthetic that could be called “metaphysical materialism.” It seeks to enter the materiality of language, which, in turn, is supposed to usher the reader into the realm of things in themselves, equalizing the poem with the object, eliminating the subject, and eventually removing the poetic act itself. This evolution is found in the line that connects earlier Pound’s critics, such as Hugh Kenner, with the much more recent commentators associated with the formalist avant-garde of the LANGUAGE movement. Gerald Bruns, for example, follows Kenner’s instruction to read Pound’s Cantos as a spatialvisual work which flaunts the materiality of its inscription. In this Poundian lesson, continued and developed by other materialist poets of the 20th century, “words are as material as things … words are not ideal objects … they are sounds, letters, diacritical marks.”13 For Bruns, this leads to the idea of a posthuman materiality in which the poem “redeem[s] mundane things from the oblivion to which human self-centeredness consigns them,” an action that the critic finds in the French poet Francis Ponge.14 In a quite similar vein, Lyn Hejinian, one of the leading representatives of the Language movement, wrote: “the observer should experience direct and sensuous contact with the concrete and material world … the materials of nature speak.”15

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While Pound strove to open and enter timeless energies through the form of a “poem including history,” a term he coined in an essay called “Date Line” as a definition of an epic poem,16 Stevens was a strongly ahistorical poet. His linguistic aestheticism and his opaque abstractions made him seem a poet of the flight from reality, from the objective and sharable world, a solipsistic poet who gets immersed in private ornamentation and inscrutable subjective mentalism. Stevens himself, meanwhile, as we well know, always claimed that he was a “poet of reality.” The search for “reality” was a life-long creative, philosophical, and aesthetic task for him. As the poet says: “we seek / Nothing beyond reality. Within it / Everything.”17 His poetics as a reformulation of imagism undertakes its own inquiry into what is real. The difficulty or misleading paradox with Stevens is that the tool he fashioned for himself for the purpose of bringing poetry and reality together is an operation he calls “decreation.” Stevens bumps into this concept when speaking of the relations between poetry and painting. Moving from classical to modernist painters, he reveals the effort of the latter to be not so much that of portrayal of the real, but that of reaching down to interpretive laws which make up our sense of the real. He observes how “reality changes from substance to subtlety,” 18 by which he means the artist’s interpretive delving beneath or beyond the merely perceptual, into the rich aesthetic and conceptual play of patterns, perspectives, other elements. Stevens quotes Cezanne approvingly, when the painter speaks of “the colored area where shimmer the souls of the planes,” and Klee, who sees the artist at “the organic center of all movement in time and space [which] determines every function.”19 At the center of a painting, and a poem, is the interpretive capacity of a maker to interpret and reinterpret the given and the seen, to move from the given to the conceptual networks that give the given to us. However, to so move, to dwell at such a center, means to be able to move to and fro from the ready-made version of the object to its variously dismantled versions. “Decreation” is a term that signifies this power of moving from the apparently stable veneer behind or beneath it. It is a power of transcending, transforming, possibly even abandoning the conceptual network responsible for a particular visual or verbal layer.20 The results or symptoms of “decreation” working inside a Stevens poem are found in various notions of nothingness, absence, ascetic leanness, vacancies, etc. that are detectable throughout his output. These are connected with Stevens’s attempts to “unmake” the forms he receives visually, conceptually, or linguistically. Stevens’s nothingness, is, as I am going to show, a kind of interpretive metaphor, which, unlike that of Pound, gives us reality without reference to anything beyond itself and without the necessity of forsaking the poetic act. In fact, Stevens’s poetics comes close to overcoming the duality of poetry and reality entirely. Let us start with “The Snow Man,” one of Stevens’s most chilling and most enigmatic poems, whose coldness stands out among the lushness of

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Stevens’s debut volume Harmonium. The poem begins as an active image of a winter landscape presenting a sparse and yet piercing visual layer. The few objects that make up the scene are caught up in the freezing grip of a Connecticut winter. Their presence and stability seem radiant and immovable. Within one or two lines, however, Stevens unmasks this stability as the result of a conceptual work of the mind: the landscape comes in a package of human associations. At this moment the poem begins to work against those associations. Their dismantling is precipitated by a convenient formal ploy: the vision disappears halfway through the poem, as the radiant glitter of the January sun makes us abandon the visual for the auditory. After they are blinded by the sharp winter sun, the readers are urged: not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place21 The howling of the wind, when listened to intently enough and long enough (through Stevens’s repetitive syntax) will also get dispelled. The wind is another perceptual fiction, a creation of the human nerves rather than any kind of external reality. But to reduce and dismiss both the images and sounds is to reduce the human: the listener becomes a kind of nothing. The wind howls: For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.22 Thus, there are two kinds of nothingness at the end of “The Snow Man”: the “nothing that is not there” and “the nothing that is.” The question is how to deal with the latter construct. Among the critics who have paid attention to Stevens’s notion of “nothingness” the most characteristic comments are those of J. Hillis Miller, more recently echoed by Simon Critchley. Miller, who has examined Stevens’s central oscillation between reality and imagination, shows convincingly how it culminates in a poetry that leads us beyond the two concepts, uniting them in what the critic calls “the poetry of being.” It is the Heideggerian concept of being as an overall presence both funding beings and receding behind them that Stevens attains to in his late poems: “a pervasive power, visible nowhere in itself, and yet present and visible in all things.”23 In Stevens’s late poems things are transformed through the touch of the peculiar “nothingness” of being, but so transformed they are still “just as they are.”

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The poetry of the Heideggerian “being” ends up being the poetry of “things as they are,” without human intervention. This thesis by Miller is maintained by Critchley when he argues that Stevens’s late poems, of which “The Snow Man” would then be an early harbinger, study nothingness as an access to things “which merely are,” giving us “the cry of matter mattering regardless of whether it matters to us,”24 and in so doing also relieving the poet of the tensions inherent in poetry itself. According to Critchley, in his late poems Stevens formulates and realizes his “desire to be cured of the desire for poetry.”25 This is where we arrive at a surprising merger with the findings of the Pound scholarship. The surprise is in the suggestion that Stevensian poetics, very much like the poetics derived from Pound’s revolution, aims at eliminating the human and digging up a state of thingness of things allegedly freed from the human—the human seen as an imposition. The first problem with such reading is connected with our understanding of the trope of “nothingness” in Stevens. Miller and Critchley discuss Stevens’s poems as if the nothingness were to be discovered and unveiled, a final result of the poetic inquiry and the ultimate representation of reality. In so doing they pay insufficient attention to the action of the poem itself and the role that the concept, or actually trope, of nothingness fulfils in this action. Whatever the poem seems to discover, it is first of all a verbal act. In “The Snow Man” the “nothingness that is,” whatever it may represent to the Heideggerian ear, is a product of the poem only by being one of its elements. One must move through the poem’s preceding operations before one stumbles upon Stevens’s curious kind of nothing. There is no “nothingness that is” without the poem called “The Snow Man.” With the last line we reflect back on the expanse of land traversed so far and we are now, thanks to the poem, able to read the nothingness that is as being active right from the beginning: it is active in the landscape, which in Stevens is the same as saying that it is active in the poem. The “nothingness” is the active principle of “decreation” that Stevens sees as working behind each visual or verbal representation, reminding the readers of its conventionality, and preparing them to abandon it. This property of Stevens’s trope of nothingness is perhaps better visible in a shorter poem from the same volume, “Anecdote of the Jar,” an apt companion piece to “The Snow Man.” It begins by contrasting a human gesture with its natural environment: I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.26 The poem reverses the process presented in “The Snow Man.” Here, a simple, slightly preposterous gesture of “placing a jar in Tennessee” effects a transformative change on the physical surroundings. From a “slovenly

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wilderness” they are transformed into a more organized landscape. Matter in its inhuman state is now transformed—by the gesture of placing a human artifact in its midst—and absorbed into the domain of cognition. The instrument of the change itself is interesting. The jar has a very peculiar status in the poem. First, it is an object. It is real, taken in its concreteness—not an abstract notion (you can imagine the action of putting a real jar in Tennessee). But, as we learn from the poem’s final stanza, the jar, despite the fact that it “took dominion everywhere,” is “gray and bare”—an unassuming prop, an ordinary piece of matter.27 Stevens makes us realize that, when it comes to objects, there is no such thing as material in-itself-ness. The object is inseparable from the plethora of concepts that come with it. One cannot divorce the jar from the inevitable human interpretive activity that is intertwined with an indefinite cluster of more or less abstract notions, such as roundness, tool-making, storage of goods, craft, artisanship, transparency, barrenness, and probably many more. The jar is itself because it evokes and implies a hypothetical field of these abstract concepts: matter is meaningful through this merger with indeterminate fields of more abstract conceptual play. The indeterminacy of this play makes the jar peculiarly empty. It is a roundness in which things meet but we cannot determine the result of the meeting precisely. Which one exactly of the plethora of ideas associated with the jar do we pick up for our own construction of the landscape? Neither a thing in itself, with its own essence, nor quite an abstraction, the jar becomes a poetic prop, an element in a poetic game: its thingness is not independent of the poem as a whole. The jar itself behaves precisely as an agent of the active nothingness that Stevens calls “decreation”: an indeterminate cluster of cognitive potentiality that resides in the midst of both the landscape presented and the poem as an object. Thus the jar, besides being a palpable object, also works as an analogy of the poem. The jar’s peculiar emptiness has its counterpart in the emptiness of the poem. The poem does not have any stable meaning besides being a field in which abstract notions collide. What matters is that the poem allows the humanly arranged but indeterminate cluster of ideas—the jar—to enter into a relation with the sheer physis of nature. As the jar brings concepts and material reality together into meanings, it displays a larger principle of Stevens’s poetics. The poem itself, as with Pound’s image or “interpretive metaphor,” is the site of the ultimate meaning making: by putting one simple object in the vicinity of another, we obtain a network of possible meanings and significances. The difference however lies in the fact that in Stevens, in contrast to Pound, the process produces a reality—a landscape—not as a trans-historical essence but as a set of relations. From Pound’s epistemology of presence we move to the poetics of reality as a relational network. No world of trans-historical luminous energies precedes the poetic act or waits to be uncovered by the poetic mind: whatever world there is, it is not unveiled, or recovered from historical oblivion, but made. To put it differently: in Pound the “interpretive metaphor” conveys

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representational and cognitive content. The “image,” later evolving into “vortex,” represents accurately the mental contents experienced by minds that precede us in history. In Stevens, by contrast, the metaphor is empty of both representation and cognitive content: the poem remains its own nonparaphrasable self. It does not point beyond itself either toward things rendered “directly,” or toward accurately represented sensual percepts, or toward essential transhistorical energies that give us properly harmonized formulas for action in historical surroundings. The major theme in “The Snow Man” and “Anecdote of the Jar” is the action of the poem itself, which is the action of connection-making. The landscapes are secondary to this action as its effects. But the action itself—taken separately from its product—is empty of specific, determinate content. It is a kind of vague, indeterminate space of potentiality, a field of a plethora of possibilities. Here is the challenge of Stevens’s poetry: at the center is the act of the poem—what Stevens misleadingly called the act of the mind, suggesting an abstracted, transcendental, even inhuman, version of “the mind.” Stevens approaches the poem as a kind of nothingness—a metaphor devoid of cognitive content—because he sees poetry as an act that should be, at best, placed slightly beyond the language game presently in use. In his Adagia, Stevens has the following entry: “To live in the world, but outside of existing conceptions of it.”28 This positioning of the poet toward the world is behind the instruction according to which: “Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully.”29 He does believe, however, that this placing will have to employ the human interpretive action of putting things together in new constellations. Rather than revealing the world of lost luminescent energies, as is the case with Pound, the acts will only point to themselves—as an ongoing human potentiality—at the same time becoming the sources of the meanings of things and of selves. We are dealing here with two ways in which the metaphor becomes truthful. In Pound the truthfulness is achieved through accuracy of representation: first of sensations, and then, secondarily, of the exact mental contents that in previous historical epochs were correct representations of transcendental creative energies. With Stevens the challenge is different. The metaphor does not represent anything. It is opaque, it focuses attention on itself, points toward itself, but, so goes the claim and purport of Stevens’s poetics, in so doing it re-constitutes cognitive space. Here the truthfulness of the metaphor does not issue from the correctness of representation. With Stevens we have to look for the truthfulness of the metaphor elsewhere.

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KACPER BARTCZAK 4. Donald Davidson’s “Metaphor” and Literary Language Communication

The concept of the cognitive emptiness of the metaphor and the question of its relation to truth brings me to Donald Davidson’s model of literary language, and specifically the metaphor. Metaphor in Davidson is a special case of communication distortion. For Davidson, all communication, both the everyday normal discourse and the literary style, is always suffused with strong distortion which departs from rule-governed convention. In each case, however, communication will happen beyond convention due to what Davidson calls “radical interpretation.” As linguistic creatures, humans keep projecting on one another patterns of rationality and coherence of beliefs which bind them and the physical world they come to share. If they are committed to communication, the participants will navigate their way amidst the possible idiosyncratic departures from the norm by observing the other’s linguistic reactions to the phenomena in the environment and correlating these reactions with their own. This correlation occurs through the act of commitment to the communication, a projection of one’s own pattern of beliefs and consistency onto the other—an act that is required and made possible because of what Davidson calls “the principle of charity.”30 Now, it is this principle that governs both normal everyday communication and literary communication. In the former case, the intentionalities of the interlocutors are regulated by their mutual and rational attendance to their utterances and the phenomena in the physical world. In the case of the literary act, the stabilizing factor of the external world is replaced by the author and the reader sharing familiarity with the existing body of literature or the pre-existing texts by this author.31 We thus have to do with two types of triangulation schemes of communication in Davidson. One is for ordinary communication: the physical world

speaker 1

speaker 2

This pattern can be extended onto the literary type of communication between the author and the reader:

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the literature preceding the reading encounter

author

reader

On this model of literary language even a stylistic play as dense as Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake will be logically decipherable because beneath the layers of intense witty distortion, literary allusion, and erudite interlingual overlapping, works the intentionality of the author, who is not a Humpty Dumpty: he knows what words he uses, and what effects they will have on the reader (he knows very well what Davidson calls “the first meanings” of words). In other words the procedure of “radical interpretation,” demanding a certain intentional logical consistency, works for literary language as well as for everyday communication; as Davidson says, recalling important critics of Joyce: “there are no nonsense syllables in Joyce.”32 Davidson seems to see the metaphor as regulated by the kind of authorial intentionality that governs other distortions of the norm. In a response paper to Rorty, he states: „Our ordinary talk is studded with metaphor, ellipsis, easily recognized irony, and hyperbole, not to mention slips of the tongue, jokes, and malapropisms.”33 And yet, despite this assertion, a careful analysis of his own concept of the metaphor should make this device into a more unique and special kind of distortion. Davidson takes the metaphor to be a case of usage, a highly novel constellation of language. It is not just the novelty that matters, however, but the place of the metaphor in the logic of the language game. In the context of the network of beliefs held by the interlocutor, the metaphor is a kind of sentence which is patently false, which distinguishes it from simile: “the metaphor says only what shows on its face —usually a patent falsehood or an absurd truth. And this patent truth or falsehood needs no paraphrase… its meaning is given in the literal meaning of the words.”34 There is nothing to metaphor beyond the literal surface of its linguistic cluster, beyond the first meanings of the words that make up the metaphor. While all stylistic distortion exerts pressure on meaning-generating theories that interlocutors bring to the encounter, in the case of metaphor the pressure is exceptionally strong. Its force may actually call for an overall suspension of all meaning generating theories that the interlocutor or reader has at their disposal. In the classical Aristotelian understanding, one that works to a large extent in Pound’s vortex, the metaphor is a revelation of sets of connections between objects that have not been spotted before. But in Davidson, the metaphor is not just a transference of similarity, but a radically new

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constellation, a hypothesis that there might be new similarities. If the metaphor makes us spot some so far undisclosed relations, as Aristotle and Pound would like to see it, for Davidson there is no simple way of telling what it makes us notice. He argues: The reason it is often so hard to decide [what the cognitive content of the metaphorical meaning may be] is I think that we imagine there is a content to be captured, when all the while we are in fact focusing on what the metaphor makes us notice. If what the metaphor makes us notice were finite in scope and propositional in nature, this would not in itself make trouble; we would simply project the content the metaphor brought to mind on to the metaphor. But in fact there is no limit to what a metaphor calls to our attention… when we try to say what a metaphor means we soon realize there is no end to what we want to mention.35 One cannot explain the content of the metaphor: such an explanation will always be only a partial paraphrase. The metaphor is the richest and yet the riskiest moment of the inquiry: it brings an abundance of material under analysis, an analysis that puts inquiry into a state of fruitful crisis, and this crisis becomes a suspending prelude to the inquiry proper. The metaphor in Davidson’s understanding has two ends, so to speak. We are able to deal with it, if at all, because of the operation of what Davidson has called “first meanings”: metaphors are not outside language and authors must take into account and consider the value of the words used in the figure and their recipients’ familiarity with it. Shakespeare may speak of “the eye of heaven,” because he knows that his audience will be familiar with the normal usage of all the items. As Davidson emphasizes: “Only the first meaning has a systematic place in the language game of the author.” 36 Although it is clear that this end of the metaphor is responsible for a small portion of its ultimate effect—Davidson says “only”—this end of the metaphor is very important: it keeps it within the realm of human language. But the second end of the metaphor, the one at which there is no telling what the metaphor may make us notice, should make it stand out from Davidson’s own characterization of the literary speech act as an act governed by authorial intentions. The challenge posed to the reader by a witticism, paronomasia, malapropism, or catachresis—the challenge epitomized by the modernism of Joyce—is stabilized by the intentions of the author. When tested, Davidson’s intended reader will guess that the range of the possible interpretations Joyce’s sentence “my cold cher’s gone ashley” should start with “my cold beer has gone to ashes.” Davidson also thinks that the metaphor can be dealt with in the similar way: Shakespeare may safely project “the sun” to be the primary referent of the metaphor “the eye of heaven.” For Davidson, the notion of the “first meaning” of words stabilizes the play of the metaphor.

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5. Stevens’s Sense of the Metaphor as a Modulation of Davidson’s Concept Stevens’s poems display both ends of the metaphor in the Davidsonian sense. The poem itself, the poem that “resists intelligence almost successfully,” is a form of the metaphor, very close to the sense given to this trope by Davidson. It proposes familiar, often banal words in highly unfamiliar positions which should be taken at face value, without recourse to paraphrase. Stevens was famously hostile to attempts at paraphrasing his poems. To paraphrase a poem is to kill it. “A poem exists for itself,” wrote Stevens in one of his letters; “You do not pierce an actor’s make-up: you go to see and enjoy the make-up; you do not bother about the face beneath. The poem is the poem not its paraphrase.”37 Metaphor, or the poem as a whole taken as a metaphor, has an emptiness in it: the poems do not deal with meanings but with reconfigurations of the logical space. The metaphor is like Stevens’s jar: it enters an environment, starts working on it, but in itself, it is an abundance of indeterminate interpretive possibilities. The poet controls and is responsible for the first end: he knows what words he accepts and wants in the poem, what word clusters fulfill his aesthetic endeavor. He may also suspect the outcome of the metaphorical encounter, but—and here we amend Davidson— his intentionality does not control the entire field of the encounter. In fact, in the case of the metaphor, its producer controls a much smaller area of its effects than is the case with other malapropic tropes mentioned by Davidson. Shakespeare may have known that he intended the sun to be the referent of his “eye of heaven” but, with the Stevensian amendment of Davidson’s notion of the metaphor, this initial intention should count for very little in the final account of the literary communicative encounter. We may be confronting a historical aesthetic difference between Shakespearian and Joycean styles, Davidson’s primary examples, and Stevens’s poem-as-an-empty-metaphor. When Stevens arrives in his poems at such unexpected and not readily explicable figures as “the palm at the end of the mind”38 or “the river of rivers in Connecticut,”39 or when he declares “one feels the life of that which gives life as it is,”40 or when he mentions “that scrawny cry [which was] like a new knowledge of reality,”41 the point of such arrivals is that Stevens himself has a vague knowledge, at best, of the possible referents, or outcomes, of these metaphorical events in the poem. The “jar” of the poem does not contain any blueprint, any kind of underlying form of the landscape it helps to organize. Just as Davidsonian metaphor, it is truly empty of cognitive content. The major difference, however, is the following: according to Davidson, Shakespeare and Joyce imply meanings that they control to a large degree. They have in mind references that at least anchor the ensuing interpretations within a stable interpretive system, which leaves them safe—they count on the correct triangulations by their readers. Stevens, however, while also relying on the

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regularities of “first meanings,” does not rely on such anchors. The stipulated field on which interpretation will be possible is much more indeterminate. In other words, Stevens opens himself to a radically incalculable field of metaphor. This means two things. The poet uses material which he is responsible for: he recognizes and accepts the first meanings of words. Not only that—the included material projects an aura of strong attraction for the poet: the poet desires certain word sounds and word constellations but he is not sure why. This largely inexplicable attraction is the theme of a number of key Stevens essays, notably “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” and the already-mentioned piece on “The Relations between Poetry and Painting.” It is also a major theme of “The Irrational Element of Poetry.” In this text, the poet reports that his writing stems from capturing the simplest facts of the empirical world, such as the hardly audible sound of cat’s paws on the snow at dawn, which fascinate him he knows not why and communicate to him he knows not what. The intention, even desire, to communicate is present: the content is not. Stevens writes in the essay: As I lay in bed I heard the steps of a cat running over the snow under my window almost inaudibly. The faintness and strangeness of the sound made on me one of those impressions which one so often seizes as pretexts for poetry. … While there is nothing automatic about the poem, nevertheless it has an automatic aspect in the sense that it is what I wanted it to be without knowing before it was written what I wanted to do.42 The metaphor is empty of content; it is its promise. The power of the poem-as-metaphor stems from the fact that the current absence of cognitive content is accompanied by a strong attraction toward the included linguistic material. The fact that the indeterminate material attracts the poet is a signal that the first, more determinate end of the metaphor is effective. The first meanings of words are active and we know the poet’s responsibility for them precisely through the fact of his attraction to them. Stevens’s poem-asmetaphor, although radically open, is a form of linguistic communication. The very decision to put certain words in the poem spells out a care for the material. The attraction itself—the fact of an aesthetic preference—is part of communication, the full content of which remains unknown. To consent to the cognitive opening of the poem-as-metaphor means to commit an act of trust: the poet’s trust in the undisclosed significance of his aesthetic preferences. The projected indeterminacy becomes a space of imminence and expectation; the opening is onto the future, which will reveal, or create, the poet’s sensibility for him. The poet waits for the language of his own poem, or poems in the long run, to tell him something about himself, something he is unable to know at the time of writing the poem. The reference to Davidson allows us to reformulate the notion of the truthfulness of metaphor. Not residing in its cognitive or representational

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value, truthfulness here is a result of the intensity and faithfulness of the communicative commitment, much like the one that Davidson projects between the author, the text, and the reader. However, now, having seen how Stevens’s use of the metaphor annuls the clearly rationalistic intentionality of the author, we might introduce another version of the triangle, one that will work for Stevens’s poetics: we see now that, unlike Shakespeare or Joyce, a poet like Stevens is exposed to and affected by his own metaphors, the full value of which he is waiting to have revealed to himself in time, in his future poems. But the poem, if it is to remain an act of communication, requires a stabilizing principle, a bonding that will let it be an individual poem, separate and different from other poems. This stabilizing factor is found with the same principle of charity that works in normal communication. Here, however, the charitable projection goes in the direction of the poetic act itself and it consists of the faith that the act will, in time, help formulate the so far undisclosed or unformulated areas of the poet’s own self. The poet treats charitably his own aesthetic preferences, whose cognitive value is unknown, hoping that they will, in the future, reveal their significance for his evolving self. We thus arrive at Stevens’s modulation of Davidson’s triangulation model of communication in literary language: text or texts of the author

the author

the author’s future selves

6. Conclusion: Stevens’s Poetics of Plenitude and Poetic Faith We started by saying that in the pragmatist tradition reality and truth are bound up with the process of inquiry. This formulation by Peirce is the beginning of a process in which the idea that the truth is a name given to an accurate representation of an inhuman reality gives way to the process of inquiry itself. However, the process is not monistic in nature. At any given synchronic moment there are other inquiries possible, other points of entry, other strings of connections. The world we live in, as William James realized, is pluralistic: there is a multitude of inquiries possible at any given time and place. “Things are ‘with’ one another in many ways,” wrote James in his Pluralistic Universe.43 In this universe there is an excess and an abundance of “reality” understood as the result of inquiry. Louis Menand thus comments on this excess: “Reality … is distributive … things are connected loosely, provisionally, and every which way.”44 Menand follows this with a quote

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from James’s notebooks: “Everything is many-directional, many dimensional, in its external relations.”45 The plurality of the world, the possibility of various inquiries running alongside each other, could be described as a reality of plenitude or abundance of potentiality. This same plenitude is found in Davidson’s concept of the metaphor. For James, any given experience may lead in a multitude of directions, depending on the contingencies of the inquiry. Similarly, the occurrence of a metaphor in any discourse is capable of pushing the communicative process in directions which cannot be mapped beforehand. From this point of view the metaphor is not a device: it is an occurrence, a happening, an event in the poetic space, which funds the process of inquiry, redirects it, and backs it up as a reservoir of interpretive energy: “there is no limit to what the metaphor may make us notice.” This property of the metaphor, already observable in normal discourse, is enhanced in poetic discourse. Stevens’s poetry developed and grew around this principle, perfecting it and leading it to become an article of its author’s aesthetic faith. Stevens called this faith his “supreme fiction.” Unlike in Pound, Stevens’s poem as metaphor offers no representational content. It is a different type of inquiry. It inquires into the state of plenitude that is evoked at the commencement of inquiry and that pragmatists called the pluralistic world. At the heart of reality is the plentiful human interpretive capacity. Stevens, a student of Harvard at the times of James and Santayana, intuited this source of the real and devoted his poetic endeavor to investigating it. As I mentioned at the start of this article, the work of the metaphor pushes the poem outside the narrowly defined area of the linguistic. I have argued before46 that in Stevens, as well as in a number of other American poets, this is the moment of the true poetic merger of the linguistic and the somatic. In this chapter, however, I have tried to concentrate solely on the mechanics of the metaphor as a tool of the paradoxical merger of selfabandonment and self-development. The poem as an aesthetic act of speech is an attempt to enter the state of interpretive abundance and plenitude, poetic in nature, that sustains reality. Such poetic entrance into the state of plenitude is inseparable from a form of subjective commitment—the poet must commit to the “first meanings” of words—necessary if the entrance is to remain an act of linguistic communication. It is this subjective aesthetic commitment, an act that could be described by Davidson’s pragmatist notion of the “principle of charity,” that stabilizes the entry onto the area of interpretive plenitude. Since the results of inquiry and the evolutions of meaning that “first meanings” will be subjected to are only a future projection, the activation of the poetics of plenitude is inseparable from a charitable disposition—a poetic faith in the future meanings of the act.

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NOTES 1 Richard Shusterman, “Genius and the Paradox of Self-Styling,” Performing Live: Aesthetic Alternatives for the Ends of Arts (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), p. 216. 2. See Kacper Bartczak, “Bodies that Sing: Somaesthetics in the American Poetic Tradition,” Pragmatism Today: The Journal of the Central European Pragmatist Forum, 3:2 (2012), pp. 29-39. 3. Charles Sanders Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” Pragmatism: A Reader, ed. Louis Menand (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), p. 13. 4. Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” ibid., p. 45. 5. Patricia Rae, The Practical Muse: Pragmatist Poetics in Hulme, Pound, and Stevens (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1998), p. 98. 6. Ibid., 94-5. 7. Ibid., 94. 8. Ezra Pound, “Cavalcanti,” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. Thomas Stearns Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1935), p. 162. 9. Pound, “A Retrospect,” ibid., p. 12. 10. Pound, “Cavalcanti,” p. 154. 11. Ibid., pp. 154-5, original emphasis. 12. Ibid., p. 155, original emphasis. 13. See Gerald L. Bruns, The Material of Poetry: Sketches for a Philosophical Poetics (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2005), p. 83. 14. Ibid., p. 81. 15. See Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 153. 16. Ezra Pound, “Date Line,” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, p. 86. 17. Wallace Stevens, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: The Library of America, 1997), p. 402. 18. Wallace Stevens, “The Relations between Poetry and Painting,” Poets on Painters: Essays on the Art of Painting by Twentieth-Century Poets, ed. J. D. McClatchy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 123. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Stevens, “The Snow Man,” Collected Poetry and Prose, p. 8. 22. Ibid. 23. J. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth Century Writers (New York: Atheneum, 1969), p. 272. 24. Simon Critchley, Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 72. 25. Ibid., p. 83. 26. Stevens, “Anecdote of the Jar,” Collected Poetry and Prose, p. 60. 27. Ibid., p. 61. 28. See Stevens, “Adagia,” Collected Poetry and Prose, p. 904. 29. Ibid., p. 910. 30. I am referring to a number of seminal papers by Davidson, see Donald Davidson, “Truth and Meaning,” and “Radical Interpretation,” Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), pp. 17-36, 125–139 respectively; “A

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Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge,” Reading Rorty: Critical Responses to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (and Beyond), ed. Alan Malachowski (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 120–138. 31. See Donald Davidson, “Locating Literary Language,” Truth, Language, and History (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005), pp. 167–181. 32. Davidson, “James Joyce and Humpty Dumpty,” ibid., p. 152. 33. Donald Davidson, “Truth Rehabilitated,” Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert B. Brandom (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 72. 34. Donald Davidson, “What Metaphors Mean,” Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation , p. 259. 35. Ibid., pp. 262-63, emphasis mine. 36. Davidson, “Locating Literary Language,” p. 173. 37. Holly Stevens, ed., Letters of Wallace Stevens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 362. 38. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, p. 476. 39. Ibid., 451. 40. Ibid., 460. 41. Ibid., 452. 42. Stevens, “The Irrational Element in Poetry,” Collected Poetry and Prose, pp. 782, 784. 43. William James, “A Pluralistic Universe,” Writings 1902-1910 (New York: The Library of America, 1987), p. 776. 44. Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (London: Flamingo, 2001), pp. 377–78. 45. James, qtd. in ibid., p. 378. 46. See endnote 2.

Eight PRAGMATIST AESTHETICS AND CINEMATIC EXPERIENCE: EMERSON, DEWEY, AND SHUSTERMAN Jerold J. Abrams The theory of knowing is modeled after what was supposed to take place in the act of vision. The object refracts light and is seen; it makes a difference to the eye and to the person having an optical apparatus, but none to the thing seen. The real object is the object so fixed in its regal aloofness that it is a king to any beholding mind that may gaze upon it. A spectator theory of knowledge is the inevitable outcome. — John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty1 1. The Spectator Theory of Cinema John Dewey characterizes virtually the whole Western philosophical tradition, and especially modern epistemology, as enchanted by a natural but incorrect image of the human mind as a detached spectator observing the world from afar. Against this enchanting image of the mind as spectator, Dewey portrays the mind as embodied and engaged and transformative of the world, and recasts the poetic image of the mind from spectator to artisan. On this pragmatist view, human eyes are not so much lenses through which a ghostly spirit of mind gazes on the things of the world, but more like hands that reach out and imaginatively take hold of the things of the world, gripping and grabbing, holding and manipulating, and with the imagination creatively transforming the world. Dewey extends this same critique to aesthetic experience so that the various forms of art such as painting, sculpture, music, and poetry also require embodied, instrumentalist, and imaginative engagement for full aesthetic understanding. Among these forms of art, however, cinema may seem especially resistant to any such pragmatist and instrumentalist view of aesthetic experience, because cinema seems to present in artistic form a perfect mirror image of the spectator theory of knowledge, and the spectator theory of art. Spectators come to the theatre for the exhilaration of the quintessentially spectatorial aesthetic experience of gazing in awe at glowing and gigantic and fast moving objects amidst thunderous sound effects for a dizzying two hours or more. But this spectator theory of cinema (as it may be called) fails to capture the intrinsically pragmatist and constructive nature of all cinematic experience, which requires continuous instrumental perceptual grasping and imaginative

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transformation of the moving images as they appear onscreen, and master filmmakers like Buster Keaton, Ingmar Bergman, and Stanley Kubrick have always grasped (and engaged onscreen) this fundamentally pragmatist dimension of cinematic experience. 2. Pragmatic Instrumentalism and Cinema While Dewey is right that much of the history of philosophy has been enchanted with the image of the spectator and that pragmatism uncovers and replaces that image with the image of the artisan, the beginnings of this transformation actually go back to Ralph Waldo Emerson, and more particularly Emerson’s engagement with Aristotle. Of course, Dewey is well aware of these beginnings and encapsulates this dialogue between Emerson and Aristotle with his central image of the mind as the “tool of tools,” in Experience and Nature.2 Aristotle himself uses this same image in De Anima III.8 to describe the power of the hand, and compares that power to the power of the mind: “It follows that the soul is analogous to the hand; for as the hand is a tool of tools, so thought is the form of forms and sense the form of sensible things.”3 Emerson in “Works and Days” quotes this passage in Aristotle and similarly portrays the body as an instrumental power to do things in the world, and to shape the world in its image, so that everything humanity crafts reflects its origins and function in the instrumentalism of the body (and the mind). “Man is the metre of all things,” said Aristotle; “the hand is the instrument of instruments, and the mind is the form of forms.” The human body is the magazine of inventions, the patent-office, where are the models from which every hint was taken. All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses.4 As Aristotle portrays the hand as the tool of tools, and the mind as the form of forms, Emerson also extends that instrumentalism through the whole body and then through the mind as well, which, despite appearances, is actually not so un-Aristotelian after all. Like Aristotle in De Anima, Emerson also portrays the mind as a “potentiality” (or power), and building on Aristotle’s analysis of the intellectual virtue of art in the Nicomachean Ethics VI.4,5 Emerson thinks of the whole of the mind and body as an instrumental and artistic potentiality directed into the future. Emerson in “Greatness,” in Letters and Social Aims, even uses Aristotle’s language of the “potency of an individual mind,”6 and in “Resources,” in Letters and Social Aims, defines humanity by its potentialities: “Men are made up of potencies.”7 All of these potencies, all speech, all thought, all action, even all observation are extensions of the one instrument of instruments, all forms of art. Emerson in Nature explicitly identifies visual perception as artistic and idealizing, the original and even the best of the artists: “The eye is the best of artists.”8 Then

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in “Art,” in Society and Solitude, Emerson rejects the view that art is external to the mind and body, and rightly portrays the mind and body as intrinsically artistic: “The conscious utterance of thought, by speech or action, to any end, is Art.”9 The same view appears in another essay entitled “Art,” in Essays: First Series, in a description of the artistic self-creation of the soul through time: “Because the soul is progressive, it never quite repeats itself, but in every act attempts the production of a new and fairer whole.” 10 The soul always seeks to advance itself artistically as a new soul, by imagining itself anew, and by inhabiting this new form, and by exploring its world and itself in its world through its perceptual instrumentation. Following Emerson, Dewey similarly portrays the embodied mind as the “tool of tools,” which evolves from the natural world and interacts with the natural world, and creates the cultural world all around it as an extension of itself. The human creature is no “cold spectator,” writes Dewey in Art as Experience,11 or “mirror of nature” as the later Deweyan pragmatist Richard Rorty writes in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,”12 but alive and engaged and grasping the world, transforming the world, with eyes like hands for reaching out and grasping the aesthetic object. The hands and the eyes are not separate instruments from the rest of the embodied mind, but extensions of the whole living organism, the tool of tools, and the means in all means, which reaches out to the aesthetic object and feels it with the mind, as Dewey writes in Art as Experience: “Hand and eye, when the experience is esthetic, are but instruments through which the entire live creature, moved and active throughout, operates.”13 This way of thinking about the perception in experience and aesthetic experience is, of course, quite counterintuitive because there is no empirical experience of the eyes actually reaching out, or the mind reaching out, or even the body reaching out to a work of art in a museum or gallery, and holding it and transforming it, all of which can make pragmatism (and Emerson) difficult to grasp, at least at first. But exploration of this pragmatist view gradually reveals an aesthetic and instrumental dimension in all thought, as Emerson writes, and may appear even in the attempt to get hold of or grasp or feel one’s way about this very idea of instrumental grasping, or perhaps with the consideration of the performatively self-contradictory position of thought seeking to grasp a realm beyond grasping, a trans-pragmatic realm where tools and transformation disappear. The mind searching itself, according to Emerson and Dewey, finds itself always grasping and creating its thought and the world, and always seeking to get a better aesthetic instrumental hold on oneself as a whole, always seeking oneself anew and better in the world. Drawing together the tradition from Aristotle to Emerson to Dewey, Richard Shusterman in “Thinking through the Body, Educating for the Humanities: A Plea for Somaesthetics” develops his own somatically engaged and instrumentalist pragmatist aesthetics: “The body’s instrumental function is etymologically indicated in words like ‘organism’ and ‘organ,’ which

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derive from the Greek word organon, meaning ‘tool.’”14 Shusterman in “Thinking through the Body” also draws on Emerson’s Aristotelian picture of the body as instrumental in developing his pragmatist aesthetics: “‘The human body,’ Emerson reaffirms, is the source of all invention: ‘All the tools and engines of this earth are but extensions of its limbs and senses.’”15 For Emerson, Dewey, and Shusterman the artifice of the cultural world in all its vast complexity and power reflects the embodied human mind in all its complexity and power because the embodied mind creates this world precisely in order to actualize its own instrumental powers and to achieve higher experiences of grace and form and control and enjoyment of the embodied mind. Shusterman, again in “Thinking through the Body,” draws out the meaning of instrumentalism in Emerson and Dewey, against the spectator theory of mind, and similarly portrays the mind and body as a unity, and portrays that unity as the “tool of tools.” We humanist intellectuals generally take the body for granted because we are so passionately interested in the life of the mind and the creative arts that express our human spirit. But the body is not only an essential dimension of our humanity, it is also the basic instrument of all human performance, our tool of tools, a necessity for all our perception, action, and even thought.16 Humanist intellectuals generally distinguish between the mind and the body, and then think of the body as instrumental (the hands being instruments), and the mind as ethereal and non-instrumental, and the perception (unlike the hands and body) remains an extension of the ethereal spectator mind. But the whole of the individual lives and breathes and moves and thinks in an instrumental mode of being, and no thought or action or even perception of the world or oneself or others or a work of art is possible except through the instrumentality of the embodied mind. The most natural image of the human mind is that its most fundamental activity is to gaze at the world, and the most important revolution of thought in pragmatism (again following Emerson) is the thought that this image is an illusion, and that the true image is the counterintuitive image of the whole body always already reaching out into the world, grasping the world, re-grasping and re-handling the world, transforming it imaginatively, technologically, creatively. Only by poetically imagining the mind with its perception reaching out like hands and idealizing a grasp, by conflating the hands with the eyes, by seeing how seeing is really a holding, and readjusting, and then even a transforming of the materials held and adjusted, can the fundamental insight at the heart of pragmatism and pragmatist aesthetics come into view, and only once this Emersonian and pragmatist view of embodied perception comes into view, can the true nature of cinematic experience come into view as well.

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3. Instrumentalism and Cinematic Experience Before a film begins, the viewer seeks an ideal seat from which to get the best possible instrumental grasp of the moving images, not so close to the screen that the viewer loses the perimeter, and not so far that the viewer loses the experience of immersion in the film, and not on the sides, but always in the middle to align the head and neck and back, and thereby hold the embodied mind, the tool of tools, in an ideal position to grasp and hold and shape the material of the moving images.17 Once seated, and before the projectionist dims the lights, the viewer looks out at a giant white screen within a large room typically without adornment, which focuses the perception on the screen. The tiered seating raises the perception sufficiently over the viewers seated in front and below further to focus the perception on the screen and to optimize the grasp of the moving images to come. The empty space between the perception and the screen (before the first images appear) may seem to oppose a detached spectator and a regal object beheld from afar, in Dewey’s sense, but the embodied perception naturally draws the objects to itself, naturally reaches out to grasp them, naturally envelops itself in the world portrayed on film, and indeed the appearance of a two-dimensional rectangular screen disappears the moment the images appear, for the viewer unconsciously, automatically, and imaginatively transforms the synthetic twodimensional moving images into a living three-dimensional cinematic world, which extends outward (within the imagination) toward the perception, enveloping the perception in the world portrayed. At the same time that the viewer transforms the two-dimensional screen into a three-dimensional world, the viewer also casts this three-dimensional world beyond the present backward into the past, and forward into the future, so that the moving images onscreen take on a past and actually move ahead of themselves in hypothetical relations with one another (again within the imagination), so that the viewer is constantly projecting and anticipating the future of the moving images. This perceptual engagement is not a two-stage process by which the viewer views the moving images, and then considers and determines what they could be or would be in the imagination, or how to transform them in the imagination. Rather the viewer never grasps the moving images as purely now, but always grasps them instrumentally and hypothetically into the future from out of the past (as on the way to other things). The viewer reaches out with visual hands and grasps the images, the objects, onscreen, but can only grasp these objects instrumentally with an understanding of them in time, and how they could go on or would go on, in relation to what they have been and done. Of course as the viewer reaches out and takes hold of the images, the images continue to move and continue to slip through the perceptual fingers, so as the film is always changing on the screen, the cinematic experience is

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also always changing within the imagination in its hypothetical constructions, in relation to the changes onscreen. The viewer continuously rewrites or rescreens the future (and the past) of the film according to the changing movements onscreen in order to recreate at every single moment of the film the same film (extended from present into future) in the imagination. The screen continues to move successively and is always meeting up with the already projected cinematic world within the imagination, but this meeting up is never so fast that the imagination is not already out in front of the next image given on the screen, and constructing the cinematic world anew. This instrumentalist grasping of objects in time can perhaps more easily be seen in cinematic experience than in experience of the world, even though cinema may appear at first to be the most spectatorial of artistic forms, because experience of the world does not come in “cuts,” from one scene to another. Cinematic experience requires that the viewer allow scenes of different contexts to pass one into another without warning, and when a new scene, with different characters set in a different place, emerges, the viewer’s perception, sufficiently thrown off guard, must regain a grasp of the moving images and proceed to anticipate anew what could or would come from these new scenes, in contrast to everyday experience, which presents changes in objects but not constant and radical changes in scenes. This process of rescreening and rewriting in cinematic experience continues throughout the duration of the film until the final scenes when the cinematic experience collapses, which, of course, does not end philosophical reflection on the film, but does end the pragmatic activity of grasping and projecting the moving images. 4. Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. While all films require instrumental grasping of the images in time, some films especially reveal this activity of the perception and the imagination, either by challenging the viewer’s ability to grasp the moving images by presenting a character or a scene or a cut which forces this very activity upon the viewer, making the viewer explicitly aware of the difficulty of re-grasping the moving images; or, more spectacularly, by actually showing a representation onscreen of this very pragmatic activity of instrumentally reaching out with both hands into a film screen and grasping and failing to grasp and then succeeding in grasping the moving images of a film. Buster Keaton in Sherlock Jr. (1924) presents exactly this self-portrait of cinematic experience as instrumentalist in one of the most magnificent scenes in the history of cinema. A film projectionist and amateur detective (played by Keaton himself) falls asleep in the projectionist booth and dreams that he steps out of his sleeping body as a ghostly shade, looks around, looks at himself sleeping, then walks down the aisle of the movie theatre, approaches the screen, steps into the screen, and becomes part of the film Hearts and Pearls.18 But almost as soon as he steps into the film, he is thrown back out of

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the film (by one of the characters) into the theatre, incapable of maintaining his footing among the characters and within the scene, incapable of getting a grasp of the world of the film. So the projectionist tries again and this time he successfully steps into the film and remains in the film, but again he struggles because now the scenes change around him, just as the scenes change for the viewer seated in the theatre who also tries to maintain a hold on the imagery, and to anticipate the movements of the images. The projectionist steps down what he thinks are stairs or what will continue to be stairs, but then he falls off a park bench. Now in a new setting he thinks he has a hold of his surroundings and that he can rest for a moment, but the scene changes on him yet again, and this time he falls down in the middle of a busy street. He looks around and avoids the approaching cars, but then as soon as he has a moderate grasp of the directions of the cars and the people, as soon as he discovers a path out of the street and starts walking, then suddenly the scene shifts on him again, so that he is not walking out of the street but walking on a mountain ridge toward a cliff. He catches himself barely and falls on the cliff but not off the cliff, backs up and then approaches the cliff again and cautiously attempts to look down off the cliff to consider what might have happened had he taken just one more step, but instead of looking down into the mountain valley, he looks at the ground right in front of his feet. The mountain ridge scene has disappeared and now he stands in a jungle between two full grown male lions looking at him, so he cautiously steps back and away, and takes a few more steps, and when they do not follow, he thinks he is safe, but he is not safe: he is in the desert on a railroad track in the path of a speeding train which barely misses him. He jumps out of the way just in time and the train speeds by, and happy to be alive he believes once again he might rest, so he sits on a hill of sandy dirt and begins to think (perhaps about the strange world of film), but again the scene changes. The desert is now the ocean, and the hill is a large rock, and waves crash upon him, so he stands up and looks around at the ocean, and decides that he must try to dive and swim to shore if he can, but no sooner does he dive into the ocean than the ocean becomes woods filled with snow. Instead of diving into ocean water, he dives down a snowy embankment, and lodges himself head down in the snow, with his legs flailing. So he pulls himself from the snow, stands up, and surveys the new terrain, and considers what he might do next, and leans against a tree but the tree disappears along with the whole scene and he falls over the original park bench. This scene in Sherlock Jr. masterfully represents the pragmatist aesthetic activity of the viewer in cinematic experience and provides (already in 1924) a rich philosophical critique of the spectator theory of the cinema. The dream sequence is a metaphor for what happens in cinematic experience through the perception and the imagination in which the imagination acts through the perception and reaches out and attempts to grasp the moving images, until the imagination and the perception can get an instrumental and anticipatory hold on what could or would happen next. On the pragmatist view of cinematic

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experience the viewer (despite appearances) actually plunges into the screen through the perception and the imagination, just as Keaton plunges into the screen in the dream sequence in Sherlock Jr., just as Dewey describes the nature of all aesthetic experience as a “plunging in” in Art as Experience: Perception is an act of the going-out of energy in order to receive, not a withholding of energy. To steep ourselves in a subject-matter we have first to plunge into it. When we are only passive to a scene, it overwhelms us and, for lack of answering activity, we do not perceive that which bears us down. We must summon energy and pitch it at a responsive key in order to take in.19 The same point holds good of all cinematic experience, for all cinematic experience requires an act of going out of energy to the screen to receive images, not a withholding of energy, as Dewey writes, like a cold spectator. To steep himself in the film, the viewer must first plunge into it, as Keaton’s projectionist plunges into the screen, not remaining passive and allowing it to overwhelm the mind. The images at first bear the projectionist down, but soon he summons all his energy to go out and into the film to get hold of the moving images and to anticipate what would or could or should happen next. Once inside the film, he is no longer carried along and moved about by the images, tossed from one scene to the next, but holds them in his grasp, controls them, and now even directs them, and directs himself (as an actor) among them. He has plunged into the material of the aesthetic object, in Dewey’s sense, obtained a powerful grasp, and now as an artisan crafts the material of the moving images. He even inhabits a new character, “the world’s greatest detective—Sherlock Jr.!” (whose name is a variation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s master detective Sherlock Holmes), and who is no longer an amateur detective, but a master sleuth, and even more a master director of the events unfolding in the film, someone capable of projecting future images according to his own designs. Sherlock Jr. knows every move of the game of the film, knows how to anticipate what would and could happen, and is always ahead of everyone else. 5. Bergman’s The Seventh Seal Like Keaton in Sherlock Jr., Ingmar Bergman in The Seventh Seal (1957) also draws the viewer cinematically into a philosophical investigation of the very activity of cinematic experience as fundamentally pragmatist and instrumentalist, and similarly challenges the viewer to grasp the moving images onscreen. But rather than portraying an image onscreen of the viewer literally trying to grasp the images of the screen, as Keaton does, Bergman in The Seventh Seal more subtly draws the viewer into a game of seeing how viewing a film requires this instrumental grasping, the same kind of

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instrumental grasping required in a game of chess. At the beginning of the film, a fourteenth-century knight, Antonius Block (Max von Sydow), and his squire, Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand), return home from the Crusades to Sweden in the middle of the bubonic plague, and the knight meets Death himself (Bengt Ekerot). Death appears to the knight on a rocky beach in the form of a ghostly white man in a black hooded cloak and introduces himself, saying that he has been with them all along, invisible but observing them (apparently like viewers in a film theatre). Death tells the knight that the knight’s time has come, but the knight challenges Death to a game of chess to postpone his death, and Death accepts the game, which persists throughout the film’s story of the journey of the knight and squire. The Seventh Seal’s famous imagery of the hooded figure of Death playing chess with the knight on the beach for the time of his departure is one of the most sublime and philosophical moving images in the history of cinema. The scene is rich with philosophical opposition: on the threshold of land and ocean, on the threshold of being and becoming, in a game that life has never won and cannot win, life once again plays against death, white pieces against black, in a black and white film. The black and white pieces on the chessboard also correspond to the figures of Death in black and the good white knight, while the imagery of Death in black also refers to the Black Death or bubonic plague of Europe surrounding the knight; and Death and the knight understand these relations. They understand that their opposing positions on the chessboard correspond to their opposing positions in the world, and that the winner of the game wins life or death. But these oppositions, and particularly the opposition of an invisible viewer, namely, Death (shrouded in darkness), viewing a world like a film, subtly draw the invisible viewer in the theatre to reflect on the viewer’s own opposition to the moving images of the film as instrumental rather than spectatorial. As soon as Death and the knight take themselves to be identical with their black and white pieces on the chessboard, they present themselves to one another and to the viewer viewing the film not as beings to be watched but as beings to be played, instrumentally and strategically on the black and white chessboard of the world in the film. The viewer, reflecting on the opposing characters of Death and the knight as players and pieces to be grasped, as they themselves grasp their own chess pieces, gradually comes to see that there are, in fact, three games of chess being played in and by the film. The first game of chess is the actual game of chess begun on the beach by the knight and Death who are players manipulating chess pieces. The second game of chess is the game played between the characters of Death and the knight who identify themselves as both players and pieces in a game whose board is the world; and whoever wins the first game wins the second. The opposition and connection between these two chess games then draws the viewer in the theatre into seeing that viewing this very film is also a kind of chess game. The third chess game is a

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cinematic chess game between the viewer in the theatre and the film itself in which the viewer grasps and strategically manipulates the moving images of the characters of the knight and Death through the imagination, just as the knight and Death grasp and manipulate one another through language and imagination, and just as they grasp and manipulate their own representations in the form of chess pieces in their chess game. As Death and the knight instrumentally grasp the pieces and anticipate possibilities on the board, they also instrumentally grasp and anticipate possibilities about each other, and the viewer similarly instrumentally grasps and anticipates possibilities about the characters of the knight and Death in the film. The viewer moves the characters of the knight and Death about within the film in relation to one another, as if picking them up and setting them down in alternative positions in space and time, not haphazardly but always in relation to the determined positioning of the board of the film, always in relation to what the knight and Death have already done, and what they are doing in the film. During the game the knight struggles to get a grasp on the nature and mind of Death because Death, unlike a chess piece (but very much like character in a film), can appear and disappear as a moving image. So the knight does not know when to expect Death to appear or disappear, any more than the viewer in the theatre knows when to expect him to appear or disappear (in a cinematic cut), any more than the viewer knows exactly when to expect anything, even though the viewer cannot but continue to expect and anticipate and wonder what could be and would be in this world on film. The knight continues throughout the film to struggle to get a perceptual and intellectual hold on this strange moving image of Death who is there and not there, always watching, sometimes hiding, always manipulating the knight like a chess piece. Indeed, the knight does not expect Death in a church when the knight confesses his desire for knowledge of God and his meeting with the figure of Death and their game of chess. Instead the knight unwittingly takes Death for a priest and even reveals his plan to beat Death by a strategy of knight and bishop (by a strategy of bravery and faith). Death then reveals himself to the knight who, angered, realizes that he is playing a very ancient master of the game, using a strategy of apparent alternative positioning and even apparent nonexistence. The knight finds himself opposed to an immortal chess player who does not lose to men like the knight and who will determine the end of the game and the end of the life of the knight partly by tricking the knight into giving away his strategy. Eventually the knight realizes that he cannot win the game any more than anyone can win the game of life against death, and that he cannot determine the end of his own life. Nonetheless, the knight continues to play and try to win by continuing instrumentally to grasp and manipulate the moving images of Death, just as the viewer continues to grasp and manipulate the moving images of Death and the knight, and their strategies in the film, until the end of the game of chess and end of the life of the knight and end of the film itself, which the viewer is powerless to change.

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6. Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey Like Sherlock Jr. and The Seventh Seal, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey presents a philosophical meditation on the instrumentalism of cinematic experience, but in contrast to Sherlock Jr., in 2001 the presentation is not explicit, and in contrast to The Seventh Seal, 2001 does not draw the viewer into a philosophical dialogue on instrumentalism by holding up a cinematic image of the viewer as a player manipulating pieces in a game. Instead, 2001 challenges the viewer to grasp the moving images of the film by presenting to the viewer in one moment the prehuman evolutionary back story of humanity, and then in the next moment the end of human history, in just one magnificent cinematic cut, which powerfully implies the whole of universal history as driven by instrumental intelligence, perhaps the greatest cinematic cut of all time. A group of prehumans lives in a cave and wakes to find a black monolith standing outside their cave, so they observe it and touch it and begin to wonder, but they do not and cannot possibly suspect that the monolith (set there by aliens with Promethean designs) will transform their minds, which it does. Before the transformation, the prehumans are simply part of the natural environment, going about their day gathering plants and drinking from their watering hole and coexisting with difficulty with the big cats and another group of prehumans. But once the monolith alters their minds, they become pragmatist animals, for the Promethean gift from the aliens is a distinctly instrumental gift: it is the tool of tools (as described by Emerson, Dewey, and Shusterman). Before the transformation, skeletons had lain on the ground without interest for the prehumans, but after the transformation the bones of the skeletons become instruments for defense and hunting: the prehumans can now kill their food and defend their watering hole from their rivals. But this transformation of their minds is not a one-stage development: the gift of the tool of tools is an evolving gift which will speed the evolution of the prehumans into humans. The first tools will develop their minds further and show them how to develop new and better tools, and these new and better tools will show them still greater tools: “Invention breeds invention,” as Emerson writes in “Works and Days.”20 Kubrick does not show this process of invention breeding invention, but instead implies it on a world historical scale, implies the causality of tool use in shaping the mind, and instrumental intelligence in developing greater tools, in the famous scene in which the leader of the prehumans begins to grasp the power of instrumentality. The leader examines a long bone from a skeleton, holds it, feels it in his hand, hammers with it gently, then hammers harder, feeling the force and lever action of the bone as a club, imagining what he could do or would do with it, and soon realizes its uses for hunting other animals and defending his watering hole from the rival troop of prehumans.

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The prehuman begins to see the bone as a tool extended from his body, and begins to understand his whole body as the tool of tools, begins to think through his body, in Shusterman’s sense. Then in glory he throws the bone high into the air, and then in one cut, which implies the whole of universal history and the pragmatist view of intelligence developing through tool use, the white airborne bone becomes a white spaceship floating through the heavens among the stars. As Emerson writes in “Works and Days,” the process of continuous invention eventually transforms culture and provides humanity with godlike powers: “These arts open great gates of a future, promising to make the world plastic and to lift human life out of its beggary to a godlike ease and power.”21 Here on the other side of history, in Kubrick’s film, humanity has at last been lifted out of prehuman and human beggary and achieved godlike ease and power. For the viewer of this incredible cut, grasping the transition and all that it implies is difficult because the viewer, like the projectionist in Sherlock Jr., finds himself in an entirely new world, once on land, then floating in space, once at the beginning of universal history, then at the end, once in possession of the first tool, then in possession of the last human tools of space travel and artificial intelligence. The imagination attempts to bridge the two scenes, but to bridge the two scenes adequately would require the imagination almost instantaneously to reconstruct the images implied in the causal montage, which, of course, are all the images of humankind, which, of course, is impossible. The viewer may attempt to reconstruct the major stages of human development from hunting to walking to language and culture, and the various ages of universal history from Egypt to Greece to Rome to the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, and globalization, and finally the space age. But the linear movement of universal history in the imagination culminating in a space odyssey is also a circular movement (befitting a film named after Homer’s Odyssey with its own voyage of return), which returns the imagination to the world of the prehumans because humanity in the space age is now pursuing with its advanced technology the very alien species which shaped the course of history by reshaping the prehuman mind with technology, again making this single montage one of the most difficult and magnificent in all cinematic history, and all the more so as it calls the instrumental powers of mind to work upon images which reflect upon the instrumental powers of mind. The scene cut from the bone in the air to the ship floating in space serves as the master scene for understanding the pragmatist philosophy of Kubrick’s 2001, just as the scene of Keaton stepping out of his body and walking down the aisle and into the film screen serves as the master scene for the pragmatism of Sherlock Jr., and just as the scene of the knight playing chess with Death on the beach serves as the master scene for the pragmatism of The Seventh Seal. In all three films these scenes appear early, and intensely condition the rest of the films, like cinematic prologues for the philosophical pragmatism and instrumentalism of the films themselves, and as a means of

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engaging the viewer philosophically in reflection on the pragmatist aesthetics of cinematic experience. In Sherlock Jr. the scene of Keaton walking into the film explicitly portrays the spectator theory of cinema with a man overwhelmed at the images he sees from afar, but then pragmatistically collapses that spectatorial distance between viewer and viewed with the image of a man literally reaching out to the images and grasping them, anticipating them, and even moving them about; so that the rest of the film must then also be viewed within this pragmatist space of philosophical dialogue on the instrumentality of all cinematic experience. The same conditioning appears in The Seventh Seal with the early scene of the chess game and the explicit identification of the figures of Death and the knight as not only playing chess on a board but taking themselves as chess pieces, black and white, instrumentally projecting and anticipating, strategically engaged with one another within the world. The rest of this film too must then be viewed within this pragmatist space of philosophical dialogue on the instrumentality of all cinematic experience. The early scene of the bone and the ship in 2001 similarly conditions the rest of the film and engages the viewer philosophically on the pragmatist nature of the mind, which evolved from the earliest stages of tool use, and culminates at the end of universal history in the highly technological world of space travel, and the search for the origins of the instrumentalism which permeates all human experience, all forms of art, and therefore cinematic experience as well, even the instrumentalist cinematic experience of this very film about the origin and evolution of the tool of tools. 7. Conclusion Pragmatism and cinematic experience might appear diametrically opposed because pragmatism defines itself in reaction to the self-image of the individual as a spectator, and cinema appears to be the most spectatorial of art forms. No philosophy is more opposed to thinking of the mind as detached and gazing upon the objects of the world, and no form of art more celebrates (or appears to celebrate) the power of the mind to detach itself from the world and gaze upon representations of the things of the world. But cinema only appears to be the quintessential spectator form of art, just as the mind only appears to be an epistemologically detached spectator of the world, and the same embodied tools of the eyes and the mind which Emerson, Dewey, and Shusterman portray as engaging the world instrumentally and creatively, also engage and grip and transform the images of the screen in cinematic experience. The viewer in cinematic experience is not a regal voyeur beholding disinterestedly the moving images on the screen without engaging them, without reaching out to them, without plunging into them through the imagination. All cinematic perception is a going out of energy of the body and a plunging into the moving images, taking a role in the movement of the moving images, instrumentally moving them in the imagination. Master

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filmmakers like Keaton, Kubrick, and Bergman understand this intrinsically pragmatist and instrumentalist nature of film, reveal it in their films, and instrumentally interact with the instrumental powers of the viewer by engaging these powers, often with exhilarating transitions, and sometimes even portraying this very activity of the instrumental grasping of moving images in the moving images themselves.

NOTES I am very grateful to Elizabeth F. Cooke and Wojciech Malecki for reading, editing, and commenting on an earlier draft of this chapter; of course, any mistakes that remain are my own. 1. John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 4, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), p. 19. 2. John Dewey, Experience and Nature, in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 1, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), pp. 189–190. 3. Aristotle, De Anima, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 1, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), Bk. 3, chap. 8, 432a1, p. 686. 4. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Works and Days,” Society and Solitude, in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 6, eds. Ronald A. Bosco and Douglas Emory Wilson (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 79. 5. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, Bk. VI, chap. 4, 1140a9–11, p. 1800. 6. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Greatness,” Letters and Social Aims, in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 8, eds. Ronald Bosco, Glen M. Johnson, and Joel Myerson (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 168. 7. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Resources,” Letters and Social Aims, p. 72. 8. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 1, eds. Robert E. Spiller and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 12. 9. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Art,” Society and Solitude, in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 7, ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Douglas Emory Wilson (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 19. 10. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Art,” Essays: First Series, in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 2, eds. Joseph Slater, Alfred R. Ferguson, and Jean Ferguson Carr (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 209. 11. Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Capricorn Books, 1934), p. 5. 12. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 9. 13. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 50. 14. Richard Shusterman, “Thinking through the Body, Educating for the Humanities: A

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Plea for Somaesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, 40:1(Spring 2006), p. 9. 15. Ibid., p. 9. 16. Ibid., p. 2. 17. See also Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 302. 18. See also Jerold J. Abrams, “Hitchcock and the Philosophical End of Art,” Hitchcock as Moralist, eds. Steven Sanders and Barton Palmer (Albany: SUNY Press, forthcoming). There I argue for the Hegelian thesis (following Arthur Danto’s thesis about the self-consciousness of Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes and the end of art) that film as a representational art form comes to an end in Sherlock Jr. because it becomes “self-conscious” in the sense that Sherlock Jr. is actually a film about the very experience of observing a film, in fact, about observing this very film, Sherlock Jr. (it is self-interrogating), and that this philosophical end of film is recognized and recapitulated in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. 19. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 53. 20. Emerson, “Works and Days,” p. 81. 21. Ibid., p. 80.

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Nine EMBODIED CREATION AND PERCEPTION IN VISUAL ART Else Marie Bukdahl On a map of the highways and byways of philosophers and aestheticians, Richard Shusterman’s thought occupies a unique position, as not only is it situated at the crossroads of various, often opposed, traditions (while he is doubtless a representative of pragmatism, his brand of it incorporates various themes and methods from both continental and analytic thought), but it also reaches beyond the confines of academic philosophy. It can be characterized, after Wojciech Małecki, as a form of “embodying pragmatism,”1 in at least two senses of that phrase. First of all, Shusterman is convinced, after John Dewey, that philosophy must focus on giving practical solutions to practical problems (social, political, ethical, etc.), and he does his best to meet this aim. Secondly, he emphasizes, to a much greater degree than other contemporary pragmatists, the importance of corporeality for all aspects of human existence, including the very activity of philosophizing. Both these senses dovetail in a new interdisciplinary field of studies which Shusterman christened “somaesthetics,” and which is devoted to “the critical study and cultivation of how the living body (or soma) is used as the site of sensory appreciation (aesthesis) and creative self-stylization.”2 Before we show how a somaesthetic perspective can be useful in approaching various concrete examples of visual art, we need to stress that somaesthetics constitutes an extension of Shusterman’s general project of reviving John Dewey’s philosophy of art, an enterprise whose origins should be traced to the late 1980s. What Shusterman takes from Dewey is the latter’s conception of art as aesthetic experience, a conception which deems an artwork “a transactional nexus of interacting energies connecting” the art object and the viewer. Importantly, while Shusterman agrees with Dewey on many features of that kind of experience (that the viewer’s role in it is never passive, and that it is an interplay between tradition and innovation, etc.), he abandons the teachings of his mentor in some crucial aspects. For instance, as he states in his comment on the renowned intellectual historian Martin Jay’s essay devoted to the interrelations between somaesthetics and body art, “rather than being limited to experiences of organic unity and wholesome consummation that Dewey urged, somaesthetics can also illuminate artistic expressions of rupture, abjection and disgust, which form a significant part of contemporary visual art.”3 Shusterman thus draws into his aesthetics a whole

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range of important artistic forms of expression which have a very significant place in the art of our time, yet would have to be denied the status of genuine art altogether by Dewey’s theory. It needs to be stressed once again that such critical remarks about Dewey’s aesthetics on Shusterman’s part are merely corrections of a theory he generally endorses, and which, let us add, he favourably contrasts with the tradition of analytic aesthetics, blaming the latter for being too intellectualist in its “emphasizing art as a symbol system or an object of mere cognitive interpretation, rather than an object of deeply felt experience.” Obviously, he is well aware of the fact that much of contemporary art has openly refused to grant its audience such an experience, but instead of thinking that this refusal justifies the cognitive focus of analytic aesthetics to any extent, he points out that the experiential poverty of today’s art has resulted in its “losing its appeal,”4 and argues, moreover, that it is also for this reason that stressing “the power and value of aesthetic experience” should be a duty of aestheticians. In what follows we will analyze a series of artworks which do have a “powerful appeal” and which have provided deeply-felt experiences to many people who do not come into contact with art frequently, and even to those who once turned their backs on it because it had failed to satisfy their experiential needs. But these artworks also visualise major elements of Richard Shusterman’s somaesthetics, in much the same way as these aesthetics can clarify important aspects in the artworks and place them in a new and promising context. These analyses also demonstrate that art can promote somatic consciousness and awareness or meet limit-experiences. The internationally renowned sculptor Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) is a prime example of an artist who—as Shusterman expresses it—“thinks through the body.”5 In her works, the body—both her own and those of her sculptures—become, in a particularly unique way, a means of managing and communicating various affects. As she herself put it, “Since the fears of the past were connected with the functions of the body, they reappear through the body. For me, sculpture is the body. My body is my sculpture.”6 Time after time she found that art could dissolve trauma and eliminate anxiety, and that it could function as a liberating force. She expressed this view as follows: “My sculpture allows me to re-experience the fear, to give it physicality, so I am able to hack away at it. Fear becomes a manageable reality.”7 A good example of the visualization of this experience can be seen in Bourgeois’ large works in public spaces such as Maman (1999) or the very sensuous sculpture titled Nature Study (1984) (Fig. 1). The former is a ninemeter tall spider, modelled in bronze, which, with its large body, legs, and a sack of eggs, is supposed to communicate to the audience the feeling of being embraced by a protective mother animal.8

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Fig. 1 Louise Bourgeois, Maman, 1999. Bronze, stainless steel and marble, 500 × 333 cm. Kongens Nytorv (King’s Square), Copenhagen, Denmark. Photo: Per Bak Jensen

Fig. 2 Antony Gormley, Horizon Field Hamburg, 2012. Steel 355, steel spiral strand cables, stainless steel mesh (safety net) wood floor, screw & PU resin for top surface coating;

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206 x 2490 x 4890 cm; 67 000 Kg. Installation Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany. Photograph by Henning Rogge, Hamburg. © the Artist

The Spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. My family was in the business of tapestry restoration, and my mother was in charge of the workshop. Like spiders, my mother was very clever. Spiders are friendly presences that eat mosquitoes. We know that mosquitoes spread diseases and are therefore unwanted. So, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother.9 Nature Study,10 through its six breasts, the dog-like pose and the claws, likewise reveals her preoccupation with motherhood, her anxiety about the welfare of her family, and a desire to defend it at all costs. As she explains: “It is not an image I am seeking. It is not an idea. It is an emotion you want to recreate, an emotion of wanting, of giving, and of destroying.”11 In both artworks the viewer is drawn into the into the magical sphere of Bourgeois’ art. Her works also demonstrate that the soma—both our actual bodies and the bodies represented in the visual arts—are always shaped by the environments in which they are nested, including the social and biological contexts where females of different species function as mothers. Antony Gormley interprets his art as “an attempt to materialise the place at the other side of appearance where we all live,” 12 and describes his installations in urban and rural environments with terms such as “displacement,” “other places” or “energy fields.” All three of these keywords describe equally well the impressive installation Horizon Field Hamburg (2012) (Fig. 2) which was exhibited in the Deichtorhallen (an enormous contemporary art and photography centre) in Hamburg in 2012, and had been created specifically for one of its great halls with a large window providing spectacular views of the city. Dirk Luckow describes the installation as consisting of a large, black, reflective, synthetic surface measuring 1200 square meters and which, suspended from a steel structure, horizontally spans almost the entire reach of the Deichtorhallen’s northern hall at a height of 7.4 metres. Rather like a large, lightly oscillating airborne raft, this object, weighing 70 tons, floats in space and can accommodate up to 100 visitors at a time.13 One might interpret Horizon Field Hamburg as aiming at what is also the primary goal of somaesthetics—to contribute to the art of living by enhancing our bodily awareness. In this installation, aesthetic experience involves the whole body and uses it as a living soma in new and startling ways. There is no doubt that “the experience of ascending onto the platform, of experiencing our visual, acoustic and physical impact on it—both

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individually and as a group—heightens our awareness ... and reassesses our position in the world.”14 In addition to that, new communities are established among the many people who find themselves on the platform. They dance, talk, enjoy themselves, rest, and are constantly placed in new and surprising situations which can abolish the boundaries between young and old and break down the differences in culture and working life. Spontaneous joy flows through the crowd, moving freely and at times boldly on the platform, which itself resembles a “a piazza hanging in the sky,” a “dark pool” or a “deep lake frozen overnight.”15 Yet participants experience fear, anxiety, and thrills as well. For Gormley “plays on people’s fear of the limitless, the infinite, the unbound void: the oscillation of the platform feels as though the earth beneath one’s feet is being pulled away—the steadfastness of one’s own body disappears.” The many mirror effects induce in the audience an undefined sense of space, and the mirror image that the ceiling creates on the black reflective surface provides the participants with a thrill, because they feel as if they were stepping into the abyss instead of simply walking on a black mirror. It seems like the “vaulted ceiling space extends beneath our own bodies into sheer infinity,” something which engenders “a floating sensation.”16 The experience of most participants on the “dark pool” can be characterised as a contemporary interpretation of Edmund Burke’s portrayal of the “sublime” as a “sentiment or a passion.” He points out that everything the imagination cannot sum up in a single impression—the darkness of night, the wide open space and “infinity”—arouses a sensation of “the sublime.” The very fact that these attempts to synthesize fail abysmally evokes “horror” and “terror.” But this “terror” is mingled with a sensation of “delight” because “the terror-causing threat becomes suspended” and because it reveals new experience and ways of looking at and experiencing things. Lyotard rightly claims that “for Burke the sublime was not a matter of elevation ... but of intensification.”17 Intensity is an important keyword in Shusterman’s conception of art in connection with the description of the “limit-experience” which the majority of people experience on the swaying, reactive platform. He characterizes this “intense limit experience” as follows: The value of these limit-experiences lies not simply in their experiential intensity that seems related to the intense sublimities of aesthetic experience, but in their power to transform us by showing us the limits of our conventional experience and subjectivity and by introducing us to something fascinatingly powerful beyond those limits, an “au delà” of what we are and know.18 It is perhaps worth mentioning in this context that Gormley has described the goal of his art as follows: “The best art for me always makes you turn your back on the work and face existence with the ability to see what you didn’t before.”19 In Horizon Field Hamburg he has fully realised this goal.

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The Danish/Norwegian artist Marit Benthe Norheim (b. 1960) is known first and foremost for the many unique sculptures and installations—often on a large scale—which she has created in Norway, Denmark, England, Sweden, Iceland and Greenland. These works reveal new perspectives and communicate new patterns of meaning in the public space. They thus confer a new identity on the locations in which they are situated. Through her works she creates a closer and more personal contact with the audience and local population groups. Like Shusterman, she is interested in how the power of art “can serve individual, social and political reconstruction” and support “the pursuit of perfectionist self-cultivation in the art of living.”20 In her sitespecific projects—in industrial plants, schools and other institutions—she has attempted to improve both the environment and the living quality of the people who live there. She has stimulated their imagination, and added a poetic aspect to a one-dimensional and often cold technological world. Her work seems to be driven not by the impulse to mirror things, but rather by what Shusterman calls “a meliorist goal of making things better … opening thought and life to new and promising options.”21 Almost all of Marit Benthe Norheim’s sculptures are modelled directly in cement and depict women. They exude a formal simplicity, a peculiar sensibility, and an intense expressive force. Through her female figures she visualizes her conception of the body, which is similar to that underlying somaesthetics, in that she “treats the body not only as an object of aesthetic value and creation, but also as a crucial sensory medium for enhancing our dealings with all other aesthetic objects and also with matters not standardly aesthetic.”22 Another important element that her artistic outlook shares with Shusterman’s pragmatist aesthetics is a critical approach toward what Shusterman calls “the hold of object fetishism in contemporary art, aesthetics and culture.” He calls this characteristic the “exaggerated sense of art’s demarcation from the rest of life and its autonomy from wider social and political forces that in fact penetrate even into the very forms of artistic expression.”23 In order to intensify the dialogue between art, its surroundings, and people, Marit Benthe Norheim has created moveable sculptures with integrated music which constantly create novel, surprising experiences and are therefore capable of splintering the network of conventions that envelop our encounters with artworks in museums and galleries. These works are examples of vibrantly embodied art. One of the latest and most promising examples of her realization of this ideal is a rolling sculptural installation entitled Five Camping Women (2008) which consists of five large female sculptures which are built on top of five working caravans (Fig. 3). Their interiors are filled partly with sculptures, partly with photographs, and partly with porcelain mosaics.

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Fig 3 Marit Benthe Norheim, Five Camping Women, 2008. White concrete modelled over old functional caravans. Height 4 m, length 4,5, width 2–2,5 m. Private collection. Photo: Niels Fabæk.

Fig. 4 Jeppe Hein, Modified Social Bench #3. Part of the series Ten Modified Social Benches, 2005. Shown in Aarhus, Denmark, 2009. Photo: Line Marie Bruun Jespersen.

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She introduces us to five sensuous and forceful Camping Women: The Refugee, Maria Protector/Virgin Mary, The Bride, The Siren and the Campingmama. In the interiors of each of the caravans, one can hear music composed or adapted by the renowned Norwegian composer Geir Johnson which, in a richly expressive manner, highlights the themes that each of the Camping Women symbolizes. For example, the Camping Woman named Maria Protector is a symbol of contemporary humanity’s need for care. Geir Johnson has interpreted the tension between the human and the divine aspect in Maria the Protector in his personal adaptation of Gregori Allegri’s work of the 1630’s, Miserere mei, Deus. In the interiors of the Camping Women there are also sculptures, e.g. of the dead Jesus, who expresses what the artist perceives as God’s love for humanity. The Camping Women directly engage the senses and imagination of the audience. They incorporate the viewer in a very active way as she can enter the caravans, sit or lie in their interiors, meditate, listen to music, and discuss or study the photos, sculptures or other works that are inside. In fact, the viewer of these sculptures ceases to be merely a viewer, as her other senses are engaged too. Through their allowing haptic contact, Norheim’s works also challenge one of the most fundamental prohibitions of the museum world—“don’t touch”; not to mention that unlike most sculptures exhibited in such spaces, which can only be appreciated from outside, they invite the audience inside. The many surprising connecting threads which the Camping Women create between visual art, music, the adults’ and children’s worlds are extended in many new and unexpected ways. The Camping Women travel from location to location in search for dialogue with the various people they meet. In the international art world, the Danish artist Jeppe Hein (born 1974) is mostly famous for his production of experiential art and interactive artworks which are located at the point where art, architecture, and electronic technologies intersect. Notable for their formal simplicity and frequent use of humour, his urban installations often feature surprising and captivating elements which place spectators at the centre of the event. Jeppe Hein focuses on the corporeal experience of the world, trying to uncover new perspectives of how urban installations can communicate with the body. He is also preoccupied with investigating how the installations’ focus on corporeal experience contributes to transforming his audience’s sensual perception of city space. The way his urban installations intervene in the social space—that is, engage the people who walk around them—is meant to inspire new communities and contacts. Jeppe Hein regards his urban installations as “a tool to bring people in a city together, to establish new kinds of social spaces, which create new connections between people and the city.” 24 In order to realize that goal, in 2005 and the following year, he created what he called Modified Social Benches. Ten of them were set up in Aarhus in 2009. All the benches depart in a clear, and often humorous, way from the

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usual concept of a bench: some of them are bent and pulled out of shape; others are too tall or too short. They thus challenge our somatic habits involved in sitting and encourage us to rethink the nature of that bodily activity, something which constitutes an instance of somatic self-reflection advocated by Shusterman’s somaesthetics. To illustrate this point, let us take one of the Modified Social Benches, which is situated in an area of Aarhus where many socially excluded people circulate and where there had never previously been a bench. It is a social bench. The seat curves downwards, as if it were soft and if you sat on it you would slide towards the other person sitting on the bench and a contact would take place (fig. 4). The same goes for the bench that has a lopsided seat which is impossible to sit on, but upon which one can both slide and skate. The encounter with the benches awakens the audience’s ingenuity: sometimes this results in their trying out kinds of bodily movements and comportments that they would normally not exhibit in a public sphere, and it can also lead— occasionally to the accompaniment of liberating laughter—to meeting new acquaintances from different social spheres. As we have seen, Louise Bourgeois’s, Antony Gormley’s, Marit Benthe Norheim’s and Jeppe Hein’s works visualize some basic points of Shusterman’s somaesthetics, particularly as regards embodied creation and perception, the interactive dialogue with the viewer and the surroundings, and the unification of art and experience, as well as the hope of being able to inspire and benefit life. Our analyses could then be seen as suggesting that somaesthetics can provide artists with a new and stimulating understanding of the body’s role in the arts as a resource for working on the problems of creating and interpreting art and improving the quality of our life and the society as such. It is precisely these essential elements in Shusterman’s conception of art that we hope will be able to provide a great deal of inspiration for the artists of our time.

NOTES 1. In his book Embodying Pragmatism. Richard Shusterman’s Philosophy and Literary Theory (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2010), Wojciech Małecki has with both great precision and knowledge, and well-argued criticism, described these dialogues or “maps.” And in this connection he has, in a lucid, independent, and clearly profiled manner, revealed and analyzed Richard Shusterman’s original contribution. 2. Richard Shusterman, Performing Live: Aesthetics Alternatives for the Ends of Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), p. 144. 3. Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and the Revival of Aesthetics,” Filozofski Vestnik, 2 (2007), p. 141. 4. Lauri Väkevä, “Interviewing Richard Shusterman. Part 1,” Action, Criticism and Theory for Music Education,1 (April 2002), p. 5. 5. Shusterman, “Somaesthetics at the Limits,” The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, 35

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(2008), p. 18. 6. Louise Bourgeois, Destruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews 1923-1997, eds. Marie-Laure Bernadac, Hans-Urlich Obrist (London: Violette Editions, 1998), p. 228. 7. Ibid., p. 228. 8. Bourgeois, Maman. Bronze, stainless steel and marble. 500 × 333 cm. Kongens Nytorv (King’s Square) Copenhagen, 1999. 9. Quoted in Wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise Bourgeois. 10. Bourgeois, Nature Study. Latex. 76, 2 48, 3 x 38, 1 cm. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, 1984. See Else Marie Bukdahl, “The Visual Arts’ Liberating Power: On the Relationship between Life and Art in Louise Bourgeois’ Works,” Carlsbergfondet. Yearbook, 2003, pp. 161-162 and illustrations. 11. See http://www.fantasyarts.net/bournature.html 12. Quoted in Gormley: Making Space, Beeban Kidron documentary, 2007, shown on Channel 4 UK, November 2009; Channel4.com. 13. “Foreword” by Dirk Luckow for the catalogue for the exhibition Antony Gormley Horizon Field Hamburg (Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Snoek, 2012), p. 16. The catalogue contains the following articles: Dirk Luckow, “Unbounded Space,” Stephen C. Levinson, “A Swing for the Gods,” Iain Boyd Whyte, “Elevated Thoughts on a Raised Platform.” 14. Whyte, “Elevated Thoughts on a Raised Platform,” pp. 139-140. 15. Levinson, “A Swing for the Gods,” p. 82, p. 86. 16. Luckow, “Unbounded Space,” p. 44. 17. Else Marie Bukdahl, Johannes Wiedewelt, From Winckelmann’s Vision of Antiquity to Sculptural Concepts of the 1980’s (Hellerup Denmark: Edition Bløndal, 1993), pp. 42-43. Also see A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) by Edmund Burke. lain Boyd Whyte also cites Burke in his interpretation of Gormley’s work. See his article “Elevated Thoughts on a Raised Platform”, pp. 126-128. 18. Shusterman, “Somaesthetics at the Limits,” p. 20. 19. Whyte, “Elevated Thoughts on a Raised Platform,” p. 140. 20. Richard Shusterman, “Pragmatism and East-Asian Thought,” Metaphilosophy, 35 (2004), pp. 13-43. 21. Richard Shusterman, “What Pragmatism Means to Me. Ten Principles,” Revue française d’etudes américaines, 124 (2010), p. 64. 22. Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics. Leaving Beauty, Rethinking Art (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), p. 278. 23. Shusterman, “Somaesthetics at the Limits,” p. 17. 24. Line Marie Bruun Jespersen, Urbane Installationer (Aalborg: Aalborg University, 2011), p. 161.

Ten PRACTICING AESTHETICS AMONG NONHUMAN SOMAS IN THE AGE OF BIOTECH Monika Bakke 1. Introduction: Against Somatic Speciesism Accepting nonhuman somas will have serious ontological and ethical consequences, but such acceptance is inevitable for somaesthetics. Practicallyoriented philosophy focusing on the body cannot afford to remain indifferent to current developments in the life sciences and biotechnologies, nor to postanthropocentric views emerging in the humanities and art. Only when somaesthetics is fully aware and open to such developments, I believe, will it be able to participate in efforts to overcome what Eleine Graham calls the “ontological hygiene by which for the past three hundred years Western culture has drawn the fault-lines that separate humans, nature and machines.”1 As a work in progress, practical somaesthetics, in particular, needs to be ready to embrace biotechnological practices because, as Richard Shusterman writes, “[a]s long as our future involves transformations in bodily use and experience, somatic self-consciousness should play a central role in tracking, guiding, and responding to these changes.”2 In the twenty-first century—when bodies are being modified on the molecular level and transgenic organisms created for specific uses—we need to reconsider not only our concepts of body, identity, and species boundaries but also our responsibilities towards these bodies. But before we do anything with our own bodies in the biomedical context, we first need to do it with nonhuman animals, plants, fungi and bacteria. The molecularization of life and the translation of the body into a code, as biologist Craig Venter notes, is “a very important philosophical step in the history of our species. We are going from reading our genetic code to the ability to write it. That gives us the hypothetical ability to do things never contemplated before.”3 Yet, on a cellular level—the level of life rather than of information—our body, like any other body, is not a sealed vessel existing in isolation from nonhuman embodied lives. On the contrary, bodies are always entangled and embedded, functioning in transspecies networks of dependencies. Although his work focuses exclusively on the human soma, Shusterman does not rule out somaesthetics as a field for inquiry into nonhuman somas. He states that “[q]uestions such as the possible limits of the human soma and whether or how should we speak of nonhuman somas are interesting topics for

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somaesthetic analysis,” and adds that “[t]hey depend not simply on the future of technology but also on the evolution of our conceptual schemes concerning the human and concerning the notion of soma.”4 Although all biological life is embodied and has a single, common ancestry, traditionally, nonhuman bodies/life forms have been treated as objects and denied autonomy. Now, however, scientists report that “neural circuits supporting behavioral/electrophysiological states of attentiveness, sleep and decision making appear to have arisen in evolution as early as the invertebrate radiation, being evident in insects and cephalopod mollusks (e.g., octopus).”5 Moreover, both human and nonhuman animal bodies have prosthetic inclinations. In writing about soma’s boundaries, Shusterman focuses on the human being, who “can extend her somatic feeling and performance through instruments that through habituation become part of the lived somatic experience of a person: contact lenses, false teeth, high heels, a cane, etc.” 6 Elizabeth Grosz, on the other hand, points out that sticks, stones and other found objects, particularly those which are colorful or shiny, are often used by nonhuman animals. She observes that “[p]rosthetic incorporation is not a rare or isolated phenomenon but seems pervasive in all cultural life, whether considered in human or, more broadly, in animal or insect form.”7 Yet those who emphasize similarities between human and nonhuman behaviors are still often accused of anthropomorphism because the fundamental alterity of nonhuman life forms serves the prevailing human exceptionalism. However, we human animals have started to realize that there are ways of being in the world which are other than human, and, as Barbara Noske points out, “[t]hose features of the world that we would select as salient characteristics need not in any way correspond with what would be relevant to a particular animal.”8 Moreover, we have begun to take into consideration that for other life forms humans are not exceptional beings. Scientists researching plants, for example, suggest that for the green life forms surrounding us, “[w]e are simply one of many external pressures that increase or decrease a plant’s chance for survival and reproductive success.”9 In this situation, we feel a need for zoontologies, microontologies, and vegetal antimetaphysics, to reconsider traditionally understood species boundaries and reexamine the messy contact zones between somas. In the following text, I call for including nonhuman somas into the realm of somaesthetics, and I propose to do this through the use of both science and art, that is, by examining some recent bio art practices in which art engages living media in the form of tissue and unicellular and multicellular organisms in a technoscientific context. These art works guide nonexperts through biolabs, to which public access is usually restricted, and provide inventive and rewarding insights into new territories of life as we have not yet known it. In looking for a less anthropocentric approach to nonhuman life forms, I seek not a sentimental view of always happy intersomatic experiences, but rather a sober view of the reality of messy transspecies entanglements. I want to stress

Practicing Aesthetics among Nonhuman Somas in the Age of Biotech 155 that nonhuman others are not a total alterity, and therefore I will emphasize transspecies continuations, symbiosis and entanglements. We can neither become who we are nor know ourselves without nonhuman others. 2. Microontologies of Soma “Our bodies (like our thoughts),” Shusterman points out, “are thus paradoxically always more and less than our own.”10 Self-knowledge in the twenty-first century involves inquiries not only into social and psychological contexts, but also into the molecular and cellular level of the body. It was expected that in the year 2000 genomics would give us the answer to the question of what is human, following the first sequencing of the human genome. However, in looking for the uniqueness of humans, and hence for “human nature,” from the Human Genome Project, we actually learned quite the opposite: on the molecular level there are more similarities than differences between humans and nonhumans. The Human Microbiome Project was launched in 2008 and announced in the scientific journal Nature as “a logical conceptual & experimental extension of the Human Genome Project.”11 The goal of the Human Microbiome Project is to determine what the effect of the human microbiome is on our health and disease; in other words, how microbes coexist with us as their hosts. Thus, self-awareness via soma becomes an awareness of transspecies relations with ethical implications and obligations. It is clear that our own bodies are environments in which human cells are in the minority. Although this fact usually does not really affect our self-recognition directly and is not a threat to our identity, an awareness of it definitely alters the way we think of our bodies, as they no longer can be perceived as sealed vessels, but rather as transspecies environments. This mode of being-in-the-world reconfigures traditional ontological hierarchies and values, demonstrating, as Graham claims, that “ontological hygiene” produces “human nature,” which “is as much a piece of human artifice as all the other things human beings have invented.”12 Our microbial self, however, has become of interest not only to life scientists and researchers in the humanities and the social sciences, but also to artists. Stephen Wilson believes that a good starting point for establishing a conscious relation to the nonhuman self is to explore one’s own body on the microscopic level. He provided such an opportunity to the public in his art installation IntroSpection (2005), where viewers had a chance to look closely at their microscopic inner world, brought to visibility in the language of computer games. In preparation for the game, members of the audience were asked to submit samples of their own microbial life. Using a provided kit, participants swabbed their mouth in order to prepare a biological slide for insertion into an automated microscope. A sample containing human cells, microorganisms and inorganic matter was a requirement for the viewers engaging the installation, an engagement which took place in four steps:

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Explore, Mystery, Match, and Blow-up. During this process, alien-looking life forms were brought to visibility through digital mediation and revealed on a publically accessible screen; in this way, they became more familiar, but were deprived of any intimacy related to physical or mental introspection. Explaining his motivations for producing IntroSpection, Wilson stated: “I felt that this level of unfamiliarity was culturally dangerous in an era where biology research was becoming so critical.”13 Concerned with the lack of public understanding of the significance of microbial research in terms of physical and mental health and profiling, the artist postulated a “deep literacy,” that is, providing non-experts with access to scientific and medical protocols, microbiological tools and concepts. The new worlds being made accessible by science are vital yet also quite alien to us, as they operate on a different scale. Sonja Bäumel’s artistic approach to microbial life is different, as she has brought it to visibility by cultivating it outside of her body surface. In her 2012 work entitled Expanded Self (Fig. 1) the artist made use of her own skin microbes, grown in a full-body sized petri dish (210 x 80 centimetres) filled with agar—in this case serving both as a nutritional substance and as a base for a living and growing full-body image of her microbial companions. This unique composition of skin microbes reflects the particular moment of her contact with the agar in the specific environment of a room, city, continent, etc. It becomes an extensive finger print of the artist, where the self is defined via nonhuman life forms. As individuals, we differ remarkably in the microbes that occupy the habitat of our bodies; therefore, our microbial profiles are very complex and specific. Although much of this diversity is unexplained, we know that among the most important factors influencing our microbiome are diet, environment, host genetics, and early microbial exposure. Our first contact with our microbial companions takes place at birth. During the journey through the birth canal while gaining independence from the maternal body, we develop our dependance on nonhuman microbial companions; in the case of a caesarean section, the first microbes come from the mother’s skin. Thus, the very moment of appearing in the world as an individual soma determines one’s specific microbial make-up, which then gains further diversity from interactions with the environment. This means that being in the world as an individual really means being a multispecies community in a vital process of constant exchange.

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Fig. 1 Sonja Bäumel, Expanded Self, 2012, courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 2 Beatriz da Costa, Dying for the Other, 2011, courtesy of Juan Recaman and Robert Nideffer.

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In and on a single person, there may be hundreds of thousands of species, including organisms such as bacteria (which are in the majority), archea, eukaryotes, viruses, yeasts and parasites. This certainly calls for a shift from the traditional notion of the body understood as a sealed one-species unity, to the notion of a human-nonhuman super-organism. This humanmicrobial continuity is vital, as the lives of microbes and our own lives are closely bound. The image of being a host may replace our well-protected selfimage as a predator residing at the top of the food chain. In June, 2012, Science published a special issue entitled Gut Microbiota, the editorial introduction to which stated: “The next decade will see a revolution in understanding our microbial symbionts and how they can be manipulated for therapeutic benefits that will bring true inner world peace.” 14 Our trillions of nonhuman residents play a significant role in our lives, helping us to digest food and supporting our immune system; when their composition is out of balance, they can cause serious disorders, such as cancer, asthma, obesity, inflammatory bowel disease, and perhaps even autism. As we are only starting to understand the complexity of human-microbe relations, we still need to wait for “microontologies.” This term, coined by Myra J. Hird, “refers to a microbial ethics, or, if you will, an ethics that engages seriously with the microcosm.”15 In other words, we need to recognize nonhuman microbial life forms as actors co-shaping our own bodies, and therefore lives, as they influence both our physical and mental constitution. By taking care of them, we are actually taking care of ourselves and vice versa. 16 3. Face-to-face with Animal Somas A growing interest in nonhuman animals within the humanities and the social sciences has resulted in a rapid proliferation of academic publications on a diverse range of animal-related topics. Animal studies, or rather humananimal studies, an academic discipline once associated mainly with animal rights activism, has now lost its edge and become part of the academic mainstream. It is debatable whether such academic activities actually serve nonhuman animals in any way, since perhaps we are continuing to deal with theory detached from embodied reality. In this situation, I believe, the embracing of animal somas by somaesthetics could offer a valuable contribution to the theory and practice of human-animal intersomatic relations. Shusterman, however, calls for caution in taking animals on board somaesthetics: “If we assume that they have living, purposive bodies that not only are in some way conscious of their bodily feelings and body parts but also aesthetically groom or therapeutically nurse those parts when needed, then such animals would seem to have a soma, a body they experience as both subject and object…”17 But how could we assume otherwise in light of the immense body of scientific evidence? A good example of an effort to convey

Practicing Aesthetics among Nonhuman Somas in the Age of Biotech 159 such scientific findings to the public is the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, proclaimed in June 2012 by eminent neuroscientists at the Francis Crick Memorial Conference. In it we learn that: Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.18 However, in embracing the idea that nonhuman animals have consciousness, we put ourselves in the serious ethical predicament of accepting “the relation of unequal use.”19 If animals have consciousness, we should change our attitudes towards them and find less exploitative ways of cohabitation. The Western tradition of human exceptionalism, which denies animals their subjectivity, and therefore soma, remains prevalent. As a result, we divide animals into categories according to their use (e.g. farm, lab, companionship) and treat them accordingly, mainly as objects and only rarely as a subject. This categorization is not species-specific, but context-specific, as a rabbit, for example, may be a laboratory animal, a source of meat, or a pet. Animals’ presence in our everyday life—with the exception of companion animals—is almost always reduced to food, and other material for various industrial uses, including biomedical research and pharmaceutical products. Barbara Noske coined the term “animal industrial complex” to describe modes of production such as factory farming, which nowadays includes pharmaceutical farming, gene farming, and other ways of making animalbased products. Genomic research and DNA-sequencing technology, which have made available many complete genome sequences from different species—starting with model organisms such as the fruit fly, mouse and rat, moving later to farm animals, such as the chicken in 2004, cow in 2006, horse in 2007, and pig in 2009—contribute to the further instrumentalization of animal lives and extensive use of their bodies. Yet, on the other hand, these very developments in the life sciences enable us to see the complexity of animal lives, and actually demand an ethical response. “[S]omaesthetics’ concern with the physical body,” Shusterman claims, “also goes beneath the Körper’s surface appearance, extending to its anatomical, physiological, and neurological functioning,”20 similar to that in nonhuman animals. It is on the basis of these similarities that in a scientific context, we have looked for hundreds of years into animal bodies to learn what a body is and how it works. Now genetically modified laboratory animals are used to provide animal models of human diseases for the purpose

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of helping humans better understanding their own bodily dysfunctions. These “humanized” nonhumans, developed using bioengineering techniques, often carry human genes and are modified in ways which make them susceptible to specific human diseases. They are also a source of organs for transplantation into human bodies or bioreactors for producing therapeutic proteins. And yet, as Lynda Birke points out, “Western scientific medicine is founded upon specific, dualistic, assumptions about humanity’s relationship to other living beings,”21 treating them as fundamentally different and at the same time close enough to be used in mimicking human physiological processes. Access to biomedical research laboratories that make use of animals is strictly controlled. This is because the laboratory, for its service to science and the greater good of society has gained the status of a place outside of general social rules. As nonexperts, we have very little knowledge of or influence on ethical standards regarding the biomedical use of animals; nonetheless, justification for such use comes from a deeply embedded sense of human exceptionalism. We are occasionally alarmed by explicit images of laboratory animals released by activists for animal rights. While our ethical responses are generally ambiguous, undoubtedly our strongest concerns are formulated in relation to the companion species used in laboratories. For this reason, the antivivisection movement of the nineteenth century emerged as a protest against using dogs and cats for medical experiments. Much less was made of the use of rodents, such as rats and mice, who are considered vermin and are now the species most commonly associated with lab animals.22 Art provides another perspective on the complex issue of the life and death of laboratory animals without offering any easy answers. In her video triptych entitled Dying for the Other (Fig. 2), Beatriz da Costa offers an insight into the lives (and deaths) of laboratory mice and her own life over the summer of 2011. Gaining access to the breast cancer research facility in New York City where she herself was being treated, the artist captured on video various biomedical procedures, including those in which mice models of human cancer lost their lives. Explaining her motivations, she pointed out “the messiness embedded in the practice of maintaining one kind of life by killing another.”23 In the video, we can observe the artist herself struggling with severe symptoms of the same disease the mice suffer from. Aware of the ethical complexity of her situation, the artist, who is a patient at the same time, however, hopes for survival cues from the nonhuman bodies tested in the lab. There is no promise of a happy ending for any of the creatures involved, but there is certainly hope for the sick humans, and therefore the artist believes that “it’s helpful to render the ethical, emotional and economic factors more transparent to an interested public, unwilling to blindly accept a black and white picture of the situation.”24 Although one dies for the other and not vice versa, nameless animals have faces, as they are both objects and subjects, at least in the minds of some cancer patients who appreciate the work the animals’ bodies do for them in this one-way intersomatic exchange.

Practicing Aesthetics among Nonhuman Somas in the Age of Biotech 161 4. Are There Green Somas? “[O]n a broad level we share biology not only with chimps and dogs, but also with begonias and sequoias,”25 states plant biologist Daniel Chamovitz in his recent book, which bears the provocative title What a Plant Knows. Chamovitz uses a strategic anthropomorphism as he discusses senses such as sight, smell, touch, hearing and abilities like proprioception and memory in plants. However, while far from claiming that plants are like us and pointing out that our evolutionary paths split about two billion years ago, he takes up the task of demonstrating plants’ way of being-in-the-world. In other words, he presents what plants perceive and remember and proposes a notion of an “aware plant,” though he adds that “the overall sensual experience is qualitatively different for plants and people.”26 Anthony Trewavas, also a plant biologist, goes even further, causing controversy by talking about “plant intelligence,” which he defines as “adaptive variable growth and development during the lifetime of the individual.”27 He claims that the hostility towards the concept of an “intelligent plant” comes from “a mind-set, common in plant scientists, that regards plants basically as automatons.”28 However, in recent years, scientists interested in plant signalling and behaviour have provided more and more significant evidence that plants behave intelligently and that some decision-making takes place in roots.29 This has captured the attention not only of plant biologists, but also of philosophers such as Paco Calvo Garzon and Fred Keijzer, who claim that “plants can be considered to be minimally cognitive and that they constitute an important domain for cognitive studies.”30 Although we have just started to look at plants as individuals that actively respond to the world, we are moving closer to accepting that “[p]lants experience the world in their own way,”31 being able to sense, communicate and act. Art works exploring plants’ awareness encourage inquiries into this new territory. A basic curiosity about plants may be exercised in nonexpert face-to-face encounters—a strategy used by the artist Denise King, whose work Mimosa Pudica Greenhouse builds an awareness of what plants are by using the simplest of means. The art installation consists of real mimosa plants with which the public can interact and write observations about in a notebook provided by the artist. However, the complexity of the work lies both in the immediate experience of the “sensitive plant” and in the vast cultural, scientific, geographic and political context it activates. Due to its rapid movements in response to external stimuli, the mimosa plant has had a great impact on Western views of plant sensitivity and on the drawing of analogies with animals. With her human-plant interactive work, the artist invites the viewer to actually experience the rapid movements of the mimosa plant and makes us reflect on our well-established hesitation to accept plants as sensitive beings capable of responding to the world.

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Fig. 3. Miya Masaoka, Pieces for Plants, 2002, (photo: Donald Swearington), courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 4. Allison Kudla, Search for Luminosity, 2005–2007 (photo: Neil Lukas), courtesy of the artist.

Practicing Aesthetics among Nonhuman Somas in the Age of Biotech 163 Sensitivity in plants, however, is usually much less obvious, though it may be demonstrated with the help of specific instruments. The artist Miya Masaoka traces plants’ awareness of their environment in her interactive sound installation entitled Pieces for Plants (Fig. 3). She has chosen to work with the American semi-tropical climbing philodendron in her interactive and perhaps even intersomatic experiment. With the help of highly sensitive electrodes attached to the plant’s leaves, its real-time responses to its environment—especially to human touch—were translated into sound. In this way members of the public could actually consciously interact with plants. However, though not being able to feel pain, plants feel touch and appear not to like it: “as sessile, rooted organisms, plants may not be able to retreat or escape, but they can change their metabolism to adapt to different environments,”32 and moreover can send a warning from one leaf to another or to other plants. Plants also monitor their changing visual environment, as they are capable of perceiving a much broader spectrum of electromagnetic waves than humans. They can see, although not in pictures, as they do not have a nervous system that translates light into images. For plants, light is vital as food and as a source of cues about the time of day and time of year. Allison Kudla, in her art installation entitled Search for Luminosity (Fig. 4), points out something we have in common with plants: an internal clock called a circadian clock, which is in tune with day-night cycles. “At the basic level of blue-light control of circadian rhythms,” Chamovitz points out, “plants and humans ‘see’ in essentially the same way.”33 Kudla’s work is an interactive installation involving a computer controlling light and six living Oxalis Regnelli (“lucky shamrock”) plants, well known for their photonastic movements, historically called “sleep movements,” which affect the leaves and flowers. The artist’s aim is not only to observe, but also to play with the circadian rhythms of the plants. The computer controls the activation of the lighting system, where one lamp is dedicated to one plant, while the overall set-up operates, like circadian rhythms, according to a 24-hour cycle. When one of the plants starts to open up in anticipation of dawn, the computer turns on the light over it and switches the light off over another plant, inducing its closure. This way, plants demanding light interact with the computer, and hence, to some degree, they have a measure of control over the system. And yet, “how do they know it’s autumn? Phytochrome tells them that the nights are getting longer.”34 We certainly cannot exist without plants, here on earth as well as out in space. Luckily for us, plants can even put up with microgravity and have been residents of space gardens on board spaceships and space stations. According to NASA, their presence in space will certainly increase in the future, benefitting the human crew both physically and mentally. The first benefit concerns the need to produce food on long journeys; the second is related to the need for psychological comfort and relaxation. Thus, with our interactions with plants taking place on so many levels—from a vegetable meal or a stroll in the forest

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to molecular interventions in their bodies—we have to negotiate our relations with them for our survival. In Matthew Hall’s words, “[t]hese conflicts between human wants and plant needs should be the primary focus of a wide-scale deliberation on and negotiation of appropriate human-plant relationships.”35 A growing interest in ethical approaches to plants—their being considered as life forms with an inherent worth, and therefore deserving protection for their own sake—is now gaining visibility in the humanities, as well.36 Accepting the position that “[t]o view plants as entirely disposable objects is to do them an injustice”37 is becoming one of the new challenges facing us in the twenty-first century. This emerging human-plant ethics, shaped by attitudes that no longer prize human exceptionalism, requires our responsibilities and decision-making become more emancipated from stereotypical views of plants as automata. Knowing more about plants and learning about their autonomous ways of being in the world evokes an ethical obligation that will allow us—given that we are in this together—to mutually flourish by nourishing each other. 5. Somatic Entanglements in the Age of Biotech No body can survive in isolation. Thus, human embodied life, the focus of somatic philosophy, cannot continue without interacting with other life forms; in other words, our life is always an intersomatic experience involving nonhuman bodies as well as other material forces. Referring to John Dewey’s “transactional body” and the Asian philosophical tradition, Shusterman suggests that the “relational symbiotic notion of the self inspires a more extensive notion of somatic meliorism in which we are also charged with caring for and harmonizing the environmental affordances of our embodied selves, not just our own body parts.”38 Hence as living beings we are ecological entities. Yet Shusterman does not go as far as postanthropocentric thinkers, who reject human exceptionalism and go against the grain of the focus in the Greek and Christian tradition on pre-human and non-human aspects of life as zoe. In her book Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti claims that we are now witnessing a return of real bodies and of Life as zoe.39 In other words, “[w]hat returns now is the ‘other’ of the living body in its humanistic definition: the other face of bios, that is to say, the generative vitality of non- or pre-human or animal life.”40 The binary bios/zoe, where zoe was always the worse half of bios, has been crucial for Western metaphysics. It also has a gender dimension, as women traditionally have been situated closer to zoe than men, since they nourish life not only through their services related to the realm of the household, but also by passing their biological resources directly from their bodies, which function as incubators and a source of vital nutrients for gestating life. Since Antiquity, as Braidotti puts it, “zoe stands for the mindless vitality of Life carrying on independently of and

Practicing Aesthetics among Nonhuman Somas in the Age of Biotech 165 regardless of rational control. This is the dubious privilege attributed to the nonhumans and to all ‘others’ of Man.”41 Nonetheless, there is no bios without zoe, and no life can continue in isolation, as life is always embodied and embedded. What then is a “good life”—bios in the age of biotech? In his book The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the TwentyFirst Century, Nikolas Rose points out that as a result of the developments in the life sciences and biotechnologies “our somatic individuality has become opened up to choice, prudence, and responsibility, to experimentation, to contestation.”42 Now, however, the bio-power of zoe is increasingly attracting attention, although this is a tendency which, as Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault both pointed out earlier, originated in modern times. A desire for zoe prevails and influences contemporary debates about human exceptionalism, human-animal relations and life itself, as much as it affects debate about biotech industries. In this respect, Rose gives a very accurate diagnose of our current situation in saying: Our very understanding of who we are, of the life-forms we are and the forms of life we inhabit, have folded bios back to zoe. By this I mean that the question of the good life—bios—has become intrinsically a matter of the vital processes of our animal life—zoe.43 Developments in the life sciences challenge not only specific forms of life but also the very notion of life itself, focusing special attention on the status of what Susan Squire calls liminal lives. The latter are understood as “those beings marginal to human life who hold rich potential for our ongoing biomedical negotiations with, and interventions in, the paradigmatic life crisis: birth, growth, aging, and death.”44 They include in vitro lives and other technologically augmented lives, as well as other procedures directly influencing our bodies. We cannot ignore new territories for new life forms, such as the territorial expansion of the “extreme” environments of biotech labs, where technologically augmented life dwells in highly controlled human-made environmental networks. Moreover, it seems vitally important not to isolate human life as exceptional, nor to position technologically augmented life as an object outside of the ecologies to which we belong. These new technological environments are our own, not merely because we created them, but also because our own lives unavoidably and in a complex way are now technologically augmented. 6. Coda: Challenging the Anthropocentrism of Somaesthetics For somaesthetics to keep up with developments in the life sciences, biomedicine, biotechnologies and, last but not least, art practices that make use of living media, it is necessary to reconsider and expand the notion of

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soma to include nonhuman somas. I believe this can be done in three steps by accepting that: 1) no body lives in isolation; 2) human and nonhuman bodies are entangled on the social, economic, and biological (physiological and molecular) levels; 3) technologies are inherent to and inseparable from bodies. Therefore, somaesthetics should not ignore biotechnologies as they, in small steps but permanently, reshape bodies and our position in a web of transspecies dependencies. With rapid developments in the life sciences and biotechnologies, these relations are not better or worse, but different, requiring special attention. “The human body and subjectivity alike,” Michael Marder suggests, “are not pure expressions of Spirit but strange archives, surfaces of inscription for the vestiges of the inorganic world, of plant growth, and of animality—all of which survive and lead a clandestine afterlife in us, as us.”45 Faced with such evidence from molecular biology, we are able to challenge prevalent convictions about human exceptionalism and revise our notion of human nature. Our bodies are constantly changing transspecies environments within other environments. However, with this move away from human “ontological hygiene,” the concept of an individual as an embodied unity needs serious reconsideration. Shusterman seems aware of this in stating that the somatic self is “an essentially situated, relational, and symbiotic self rather than the traditional concept of autonomous self grounded in an individual, monadic, indestructible, and unchanging soul.”46 Yet the real challenge is to realize these ideas in our somatic practices.

NOTES 1. Elaine L. Graham, Representations of the Post/human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 11. 2. Richard Shusterman, Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 14. 3. Craig Venter in conversation with Ed Pilkington, The Guardian (Oct. 6, 2007), http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/oct/06/genetics.climatechange. 4. Richard Shusterman, “Somaesthetics,” The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, eds. Mads Soegaard, Rikke Friis Dam (Aarhus, Denmark: The Interaction Design Foundation, 2nd ed., 2013), http://www.interactiondesign.org/ encyclopedia/somaesthetics.html. 5. The Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness in Non-Human Animals, http://fcmconference.org/#talks. 6. Richard Shusterman, “Soma and Psyche,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 24:3 (2010), p. 223. 7. Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 146. 8. Barbara Noske, Beyond Boundaries: Humans and Animals (London, New York: Black Rose Books, 1997), p. 160.

Practicing Aesthetics among Nonhuman Somas in the Age of Biotech 167 9. Daniel Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses of the Garden —and Beyond (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2012), p. 171. 10. Shusterman, Body Consciousness, p. 214. 11. Feature the Human Microbiome Project, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal /v449/n7164/full/nature06244.html. 12. Graham, Representations of the Post/human, p. 14. 13. Regine, Interview with Stephen Wilson, http://we-make-money-notart.com/archives/2007/04/interview-with-12.php. 14. Kristen Mueller, Caroline Ash, Elizabeth Pennisi, Orla Smith, “The Gut Microbiota. Introduction to Special Issue, ” Science, 336:6086 (8 June 2012), p. 1245. 15. Myra J. Hird, The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution after Science Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 1. 16. Nutrition Reviews. Nutrition and the Human Microbiome, Special Issue, 70 (2012). 17. Shusterman, “Soma and Psyche,” p. 219. 18. The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in Non-Human Animals. 19. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), p. 77. 20. Shusterman, “Soma and Psyche,” p. 218. 21. Lynda I. A. Birke, “Animal Bodies in Production of Scientific Knowledge: Modelling Medicine,” Body & Society, 18:156 (2012), p. 171. 22. Lynda I. A. Birke, Arnold Arluke, and Mike Michael, The Sacrifice: How Scientific Experiments Transform Animals and People (Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2007), pp. 21–29. 23. Beatriz da Costa, Dying for the Other, http://beatrizdacosta.net/Dying_for_the_Other. 24. Ibid. 25. Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows, p. 174. 26. Ibid, p. 173. 27. Anthony Trewavas, “Aspects of Plant Intelligence,” Annals of Botany, 92 (2003), p. 1. 28. Ibid, p. 2. 29. Frantisek Baluska, Stefano Mancuso, Dieter Volkmann, and Peter W. Barlow, “The ‘Root-brain’ Hypothesis of Charles & Francis Darwin: Revival After More than 125 Years,” Plant Signaling & Behavior, 4:12 (2009), p. 1125. 30. Paco Calvo Garzon and Fred Keijzer, “Plants: Adaptive Behavior, Root-brains, and Minimal Cognition,” Adaptive Behavior, 19:3 (2011), p. 156. 31. Florianne Koechlin et al., “Rediscovering Plants: Rheinauer Theses on the Rights of Plants,” http://www.blauen-institut.ch/tx_blu/tt/tt_rheinau_2.html. 32. Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows, p. 84. 33. Ibid, p. 30. 34. Ibid, p. 27. 35. Matthew Hall, “Plant Autonomy and Human-Plant Ethics,” Environmental Ethics, 31:2 (Summer 2009), p.180. 36. Matthew Hall, Plants as Persons. A Philosophical Botany (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011). 37. Koechlin et al., “Rediscovering Plants.” 38. Shusterman, Body Consciousness, p. 215. 39. Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), p. 37. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid.

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42. Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 76. 43. Ibid, p. 83. 44. Susan Merrill Squier, Liminal Lives. Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 9. 45. Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), p. 10. 46. Shusterman, Body Consciousness, p. 8.

Eleven EATING AS AN AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE Barbara Formis Wenn alle Künste untergehn, Die edle Kochkunst bleibt bestehn.1 1. Thinking the Experience of Eating: A Challenge for Pragmatism As a philosophy oriented towards the real, pragmatism invites us to define experience through the concrete practices of living creatures. For this reason, it possesses critical force within the field of aesthetic theory. This force is visible in the typical pragmatist gesture of liberating aesthetic experience from any exclusive attachment to the art world. Pragmatism opposes rationalistic and speculative logic; rather it promotes active knowledge anchored in life. Aesthetics then becomes a particular kind of experience endowed with both intellectual and corporeal properties. These properties are accessible to all and widely shared, thus showing that aesthetics belongs to common people as much as to the elite. Pragmatist aesthetics can also be characterized by its drive to reveal a plane of immanence that disrupts some of the most persistent dualisms of the western philosophical tradition: contemplation versus action, theory versus practice, facts versus values, mind versus body, art versus life. But pragmatism does not promote a simple monism where everything is identified with its opposite in a melting pot of genres and categories; pragmatism accepts the complexities of exchanges and differences that arise precisely where analogies can be built. Thus, Dewey’s idea of “art as experience” does not imply that art is experience, but, more subtly, that art can be considered as an experience, that art is constituted by the complex horizons of lived and multiple experiences and that a work of art cannot be separated from this specifically human, emotional and lived part of existence. “Art as experience” refers to the idea that art and life share certain qualities, and more specifically certain aesthetic qualities. Pragmatism is thus oriented towards the dynamics that are at the centre of everyday acts and behaviors. As such it refuses to confine aesthetic qualities to a certain type of object, those supposed to be “art objects.” Aesthetics, from a pragmatist point of view, has more to do with the body than with images, more to do with experience than with recognition, more to do with behaviour than with objects. It focuses on consciousness rather than culture, and privileges living creatures over institutions. This is why aesthetics can be understood as a device for intensifying experience. Any human

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experience opens itself to the possibility of an inner determination that can intensify it and consequently expose the continuity of art and life. The aesthetic dimension is thus the background from which everything done, lived, judged, and perceived is articulated. Within the pragmatist glorification of experience, of the ordinary and the everyday, one can identify a common background to art and life, a background that also reveals the ontological association of aesthetics and social practice, more specifically politics. There is, for instance, a strong theoretical and political equation between Richard Shusterman’s association of a commentary of T. S. Eliot’s poetry with a critical reading of rap and the Deweyan critique of the social division between the “leisure class” and “labor class.” The first terms (poetry and leisure) are linked to the parameter of representation and the second (rap and labor) to the criterion of action. The pragmatist program in aesthetics can be understood as a radical democratization of culture: it focuses on mass culture because the aim is the expansion of education and the improvement of society. In this sense, art will not lose its exclusivity in order to be dissolved in the opaque waters of life, but rather it will obtain the role of elevating the ordinary towards some richer and more intense potentialities. The ameliorative drive characteristic of the pragmatist program does on occasion go ideologically astray; nonetheless it has the merit of conferring an active and privileged place on art amongst the totality of social practices. Despite the efforts of pragmatism, the concept of practice still encounters strong resistance within the field of art. The reason is ancient and goes back to the visceral split between praxis and poïesis first established by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics. This split divides those actions that are connected to politics and moral behaviour from actions that are more related to production and fabrication. Praxis does not produce anything more than the action itself and is inherent in the agent (as a subject, as an author and as a living body). Poïesis, on the other hand, implies what we can call “creation,” the passage from the state of non-existence to the state of existence: poïesis has the particular character of producing something different than the simple action and its contextual effects. That is to say it creates an object that will survive its author. From this point of view, the experience of eating would be more related to praxis, whilst the experience of cooking would be more related to poïesis. It is with this opposition in mind that we can understand why “eating” is perfectly suited for a pragmatist enquiry. After Aristotle, and gradually, as the centuries went by, poïesis found its favourite field of application in the world of art and became almost identifiable with the artistic gesture. Within the system of the fine arts, bodily practices, such as eating, were consequently limited to gustatory taste or to the organ of touch. The reason for this classification was that such practices were understood as being based on a lively and playful will, leading to ephemeral traces and impressions. The act of experience was thus limited and dissolved

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as soon as the practice or event finished. The aesthetics of taste was seen as necessarily empirical; as such, it was categorized by means of the contrast between the beautiful and the agreeable, most often being associated with the agreeable. From a Kantian perspective, for example, the aesthetics of taste is devalued and denigrated because the human dependence upon food is considered to be an obstacle to freedom. From a Hegelian perspective, the same disqualification occurs but for different reasons: eating is a manner of destroying the very object we taste, which then causes a paradox insofar as the work of art, by being destroyed, loses those supposedly “inner” qualities of eternity and universality . More specifically, in classical aesthetics eating has also been seen as too close to bodily organs that are habitually downgraded within the art system: touch and smell. If the organ of touch is noteworthy for Aristotle,2 Descartes,3 and Diderot,4 the experience of smelling is neglected because it is too marked by animality. Hegel will exclude taste, touch and smell from the field of aesthetics, his reason being that they involve too much intimacy with objects.5 For smell, taste, and touch have to do with matter as such and its immediately sensible qualities—smell with material volatility in air, taste with the material liquefaction of objects, touch with warmth, cold, smoothness, etc. For this reason these senses cannot have to do with artistic objects, which are meant to maintain themselves in their real independence and allow of no purely sensuous relationship. What is agreeable for these senses is not the beauty of art.6 For Hegel, only hearing and sight allow a theoretical relation with objects, insofar as they create the proper distance.7 Eating is then considered a sort of destructive addiction, incompatible with proper aesthetic taste. The presupposition of this theory becomes clear: bodily memory and the destructive consumption of the object do not provide a reliable and efficient mode of recording or, consequently, for the production of art works. The memory of the body does not seem to be a good instrument for archiving and for the institutionalization of a work. The taste left by food in the mouth or the tactile impression on one’s hand do not constitute works that last sufficiently long. Eating does not produce anything exterior to the agent. Eating is not a “poïetical act.” Yet, if it is true that bodily memory does not produce objects, it nonetheless leaves some deep traces in both our fleshy and our psychic existence, insofar as it can also shape and define our identity. Moreover, bodily memory can be reactivated; it lends itself to a process of return, repetition, self-maintenance and self-conservation, a process similar to a restoration process, which is entirely opposed to the idea that bodily memory is qualified by a radical “ephemerality.” What do we do when we eat? Can a meal be considered a work of art? Eating is very different from the act of observing food, because when we observe, we can easily assume an attitude

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of contemplation or judgement, but we do not embrace an attitude of consumption. The idea of considering “eating as an aesthetic experience” focuses on the supposedly non-archivable aesthetic qualities of the meal. It focuses on consumption as an act leading to the destruction of that sensible matter that is the very object of the experience. It rehabilitates those unfairly devalued organs of taste, touch and smell. This dialectical, and almost paradoxical, experience is worthy of full philosophical investigation, and it requires more specifically a pragmatist approach. It is certainly due to this embodied and non-visual quality that Dewey selected eating as one of his key examples in Art as Experience. Much more than observing a painting, or even observing the beauty of food in one’s plate, eating is an active and embodied experience, deeply separated from the contemplative distance that characterizes the aesthetic phenomenon in its conventional understanding. Eating can then become a sort of paradigm of the continuity between “works of art and everyday events” which is the hypothesis at the core of pragmatist aesthetics. 8 In his third chapter, called “Having an Experience,” Dewey famously argues that in contrast to the “dulllived experience” which produces “distraction and dispersion” an aesthetic experience is unified, self-sufficient, satisfactory, and fulfilled. The first example given by Dewey is “that meal in a Paris restaurant.” This example is followed by a second one: “that storm one went through in crossing the Atlantic.”9 Two examples: a meal, a storm; two phenomena that produce, in Dewey’s eye, the same kind of experience. This association is surprising for several reasons: firstly, a meal seems a much more contained, peaceful and organized experience than a storm, which is chaotic, frightening, and overwhelming; secondly, eating is an action, an activity that we master as human subjects, whilst the confrontation with a storm produces disempowerment: it is a phenomenon that we are subjected to; thirdly, a meal is a constructive form, the result of culture, reason and society, whilst a storm is an irrational wonder of nature; and finally, and this last reason is considerable, in the history of aesthetic philosophy, the example of the storm is a commonplace and it is normally related to the experience of the “sublime.” German philosophers, such as Kant and Schiller, have used the image of the “stormy ocean” as the emblematic moment of the “dynamic” or “practical” sublime, which differentiates itself from the “mathematical” or “contemplative” sublime. In comparison, the example of the meal does not offer the same astonishment and has the advantage of being less historicized, less dramatic, and therefore more original. For Dewey, there is a very good reason why the association holds between the meal and the storm. That particular meal and that particular storm crystallize what a meal and a storm can be: they sum up in themselves all the qualities of this kind of event, they actualize their potentiality “by standing out because marked out from what went before and what came after”10; they are the realization of everything that is possible, they intensify the ordinary event

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and offer a form to what is usually dispersed. That is why they can be called “aesthetic experiences.” And if an ordinary meal is already a constructed form of activity, the aesthetic meal intensifies its formal qualities. As aesthetic experiences, the meal and the storm are distinct from the flow of events due to their self-sufficiency and self-identity. Thus in order to be an aesthetic experience, eating is considered by Dewey to be something more than flux and change, but more importantly a “form.” which arrives “whenever a stable, even though moving, equilibrium is reached.”11 That’s why Dewey can say, “Art is thus prefigured in the very process of living.”12 But how does this work? How can art be at the same time in continuity with the process of living and “marked out” from it? How can one think of a relationship that is qualified both by difference and by identity? How can art produce an experience that is prefigured in life but not yet formed by life alone? And finally, what does the example of eating teach us? If we can accept that the aesthetic experience is characterized by embodiment and continuity with ordinary life, are we forced to agree that it has to be unified, self-sufficient, satisfactory, and fulfilled? Many artists, especially from the late 1960s onwards, would disagree with this vision of art. From their perspective an aesthetic experience can be multiple, fragmented, unsatisfactory, and neither self-sufficient nor self-identical. This opposition is particularly striking in the case of the relationship between art and food, insofar as eating is a sensitive experience that is repetitive, collective and intrinsically corporeal. A confrontation between a Deweyan aesthetics and some art practices will be helpful in order to expand the possibilities of what we call “a pragmatist aesthetic experience.” 2. The Path Opened by Art How can a meal be considered an aesthetic experience? And does this imply that it could, or even should, be considered as an artwork? If eating can become an aesthetic experience, does it mean that any form of praxis can be identified with aesthetics? The extension of the consequences of the hypothesis of “eating as an aesthetic experience” is significant: the act of eating reveals a deep complexity. Pragmatism has already pointed out the paradox: the supposed simplicity of ordinary gestures and activities is an illusion. Eating is at the same time a private, singular, and intrinsically intimate experience and a social and intersubjective set of exchanges and behaviors, profoundly related to cultural and economical conditions. This inner duality is also visible in the places of the accomplishment of gestures related to eating: the public sphere (restaurants, commercial centres, terraces) and the private sphere (what we call “home”). Consequently, an art process dealing with gestures related to food cannot be dissociated from social practices. As Lévi-Strauss has demonstrated in his famous Mythologies, food

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as such does not exist because any human relation to edible matter transforms it and integrates it in a larger social and collective scale. Eating is intrinsically a social practice and consequently, art reflects the deeply collective and intersubjective aspects of food as practice. Let us recall, as a first example, in the early hours of the 20th century, the experimental projects of the Italian Futurists: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his fellows extended their revolutionary spirit to the field of food consumption, with the “Futurist Dinners,” sorts of proto-happenings that started in Trieste as early as 1910. They were conceived as part of a social and political revolution: Against practicality, we Futurists therefore disdain the example and admonition of tradition in order to invent at any cost something new which everyone considers crazy. While recognizing that badly or crudely nourished men have achieved great things in the past, we affirm this truth: men think, dream and act according to what they eat and drink.13 The Futurist program aimed at restructuring Italian social habits through one simple practical rule: the abolishment of pasta. Against the weight of pasta, which is an obstacle to intellectual freedom, the Futurists propose the lightness of rice, a better instrument for thought and also an economical food, which will contribute to financial reconstruction. The motto is simple but ambitious: produce revolution through alimentation. The Futurist Dinners were an intense experience: the artists inverted the order of plates; associated asymmetrical tastes, like bananas and anchovies; and mixed up sugary and salty food, following the formula “wake up stomach” (“sveglia stomaco”), in which imagination and intelligence are an antidote to triviality, repetition and expense. This revolution also aimed at reflective action targeting sexual difference: We Futurists feel that for the male the voluptuousness of love is an abysmal excavator hollowing him out from top to bottom, whereas for the female it works horizontally and fan-wise. The voluptuousness of the palate, however, is for both men and women always an upward movement through the human body. We also feel that we must stop the Italian male from becoming a solid leaden block of blind and opaque density. Instead he should harmonize more and more with the Italian female, a swift spiralling transparency of passion, tenderness, light, will, vitality, heroic constancy. Let us make our Italian bodies agile, ready for the featherweight aluminium trains which will replace the present heavy ones of wood iron steel.14 The utopian revolution of the Futurists set out to “spiritualize” culinary experience and submit cookery and eating to progress. This idealized vision of the impact of food as an art project explicitly integrates the collective and social part of eating within a strong political manifesto. Later, during the

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sixties, other artistic practices also testified to a communal source of eating and art-making. A very well known one is Daniel Spoerri’s Eat Art, which led to the opening of a permanent restaurant in Düsseldorf in 1968. Eat Art was a movement that included other artists, such as Dorothy Seltz and Dieter Roth. The main idea consists in considering food as an ephemeral material for art objects, implying that art can be eaten. Spoerri multiplied different types of works oriented towards this concept: grocery products guaranteed as artworks by a stamp, objects made of bread paste, and of course the famous tableaux-pièges (literally: trappaintings) which are the more materialized expression of eating as art-making. The restaurant opened by Spoerri generated an atmosphere of involvement based on the act of sharing food and exchanging ideas through dialogue. The aesthetic qualities of the experience were visible in the experimental and inventive characters of the meals. Spoerri wished to evoke imagination in the senses of taste by mixing ordinary ingredients, such as bread and steak, with some disturbing ones. The menu included extreme dishes, such as roasted termite omelette, chicken embryos, bear paws, rattlesnake ragout, and slices of elephant trunk. During the same period the Fluxus movement also invented some experimental projects which we can now retrospectively associate with performance art. For Mystery Food (1963), Ben Vautier proposed a “show” where performers would eat a meal that was impossible to identify, and during Supper (1965) the score was as follows: The curtain is raised. A large table set with food, drink, flowers and candles is displayed on stage. 10 well dressed performers carrying instruments enter, bow, and seat themselves behind the table. They lay down their instruments. 2 waiters begin to serve food and wine. Performers begin to eat, drink and talk. After a few minutes, the audience can also be offered food and drink.15 In this performance the ritual and formal aspect of eating, and especially eating “out,” is accentuated; eating out thus becomes a way of externalizing oneself within social space and adapting one’s habits to the collective. During the period, Bengt Af Klintberg worked on criticizing and transforming this particular set of social rituals. In a project called Food Piece for Dick Higgins (1963), he attempts to dismantle the ritual of eating: A rich variety of food has been placed on a table. The performer starts to take food and put it in his mouth, but he drops the food to the floor at the same moment it touches his lips. He takes as much food as in a regular meal, but when he has finished all food is on the floor in front of him.16 Playing on Dick Higgins’ idea of “intermedia” which stipulates artistic experimentation as practice “in between” art disciplines, Bengt Af Klintberg

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attempts to display the existence of the process despite the fact that it is not properly completed, that it fails in a certain sense. Rules are undone and reconstructed through a theatrical process that stages failure in order to create both a parody of eating but also a critical statement about the conventional regime of art. This practice is highly pragmatist insofar as pragmatist philosophy is a device that distorts and reinvents our habitual behaviors in order to render them more conscious and in order to make us situate ourselves in a critical perspective towards conventional habits. In Klintberg’s work, as in pragmatist philosophy, conventions and natural acts are placed side-by-side in a deconstructive and performative process. Ken Friedman, another Fluxus artist, also exemplifies this pragmatist attitude in his project called Restaurant Event (1964). Here, the artistic experience is supposed to have a transformative power, both for the agent and for the social context within which the experience takes place. The score is as follows: Dress as badly as possible. Wear surplus store clothes, tattered shoes, and an old hat. Go to an elegant restaurant. Behave with dignity and exquisite manners. Request a fine table. Tip the maître d’hôtel well and take a seat. Order a glass of water. Drink the water. Tip the waiters, busboy and staff lavishly, then leave.17 Here the objective of art is not art per se, nor even its performative or spectacular modalities, but rather ordinary life as such. The public space of the restaurant becomes a theatrical stage upon which our gestures gain a transformative capacity. This is a profoundly pragmatist objective. It has also been very effectively proposed by Alison Knowles, another member of the Fluxus movement and wife of Dick Higgins. Alison Knowles carried out a long investigation into of the ritual of eating, a 4-year project titled The Identical Lunch18 (1967-1971). Her daughter, Hannah Higgins, recalls: Beginning in 1967, Alison Knowles began each day to eat the same lunch— a tuna fish sandwich on whole wheat toast with butter, no mayo, and a cup of buttermilk or the soup of the day—at the same time and location, Riss Foods Diner in Chelsea. With Philip Corner, this became an extended meditation, score, and journal. Repeating the gesture made the meal a selfconscious reflection on an everyday activity. Friends and interested artists joined in. Receipts were kept, and slight differences in the meal noticed. The Identical Lunch thus became a carefully documented experience of both the taste and habits of a particular diner. In 1971, Maciunas suggested an adaptation, put it ‘all into a blender.’19 The documentation of the project is collected in a little book called The Journal of the Identical Lunch.20 This meditation on the everyday involves a focusing of the attention that calls upon our memory, our self-consciousness

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and our knowledge of the outside world. Receipts are kept as archives: in the journal this solitary activity is described following different literary styles. Each style corresponds to the different actors in the experience. In the experience of Identical Lunch, life becomes theatrical yet the main characters are unaware of playing a role: the waiters and the other customers do not participate consciously in the experience. The journal collects genres such as scripts, personal diaries and letters, police investigation reports, storylines, simple notes. The Identical Lunch is a method for sifting through a multiplicity of experiences in which repetition produces an effect of juxtaposition and accumulation. Contra Dewey, the Identical Lunch is an aesthetic experience that is not self-sufficient. It is repeated, deconstructed, lost in time and space, reiterated and lived as a multiple. We should also add that, despite appearances, the Identical Lunch does not rely on pleasure, fulfilment or satisfaction. Jim Maya, one of the artists taking part in the project, explains: An identical lunch is very different than the other kind which is different from the rest. The identical food demands little or no thought: the surrounding activities take all your thought: the waitress, her hair, her lips, the napkins, their embossments or lack of embossments. The stools, the chairs, the heat. When you have finished—you hardly know you’ve eaten.21 The aesthetic experience is thus based on something opposite to what Dewey identifies. It is precisely repetition, and not self-sufficiency, that is supposed to produce the awareness necessary for an aesthetic experience. Instead of rejecting the unmarked flux of the everyday, this art experience promotes it. Instead of rejecting the total identification with the ordinary, it intensifies it; instead of seeking unity and fulfilment, it creates multiplicity and dispersion. Knowles creates a pragmatist aesthetic experience, because the project is in continuity with an everyday event, involving consciousness and practice, and yet, contra Dewey, there is no unity and no identity—and this against all expectations. Surely, repetition is supposed to reiterate identity, but, in reality, each identical lunch is not self-sufficient since the identity is supposed to reside at the level of the series. One can then ask whether the series of lunches, as a whole, is self-sufficient? In one sense it is because as a project with a proper name it is documented in a single book and “it is marked out from what went before and what came after,” as Dewey would say. In another sense, it is not self-sufficient because many aspects during those lunches went undocumented, some events may have taken place around the performer and gone unnoticed, and some unknown people may had tuna sandwiches, at that diner, at noon, during the four-year project, without that being part of the performance. Hence, potentially the identical lunch becomes completely invisible through its own anonymous multiplication. It is in this manner that it

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rejoins the texture of everyday life. But because this experience imitates the inner qualities of life, it does not mean that the flux produced by art dissolves art into life; it means on the contrary that art intensifies life, following a similar objective to pragmatism. Yet, in contrast to Dewey’s meal, it is precisely the neutralization of qualities that facilitates self-consciousness and awareness of the outside world. It is precisely because we are less stimulated on the level of taste that we pay more attention to the surroundings. If Dewey’s aesthetic aims at one experience summing up and unifying a multiplicity of different qualities, in Knowles’ case aesthetic experience occurs through a reaching out into multiplicity itself. In contrast to Dewey, each single lunch is a barely perceptible anomaly for both the person eating and the people around her. The repetition of identical lunches over four years by different actors slowly forms, through accumulation, an imprint within the texture of life. Over time and after many reiterations, the experiment highlights an oscillation between the visible and the invisible, awareness and distraction, unity and multiplicity, contraction and dispersion — an oscillation that is constitutive of all experience. 3. For a Philosophy of Embodiment The comparison between pragmatist philosophy and art projects such as those of the Fluxus movement teaches us that there are two different ways to intensify ordinary experience: one seems to go higher, as in Dewey, by summing up and marking out one experience from others. The other way seems to go lower than ordinary life, as in Knowles, but also as in Ken Friedman or Bengt Af Klintberg, by going further into distraction, dispersion, and multiplicity. However, whether higher or lower than the ordinary, pragmatism and Fluxus are seeking a similar relationship of continuity between art and life. In both cases, aesthetics is understood as a way to emphasize and intensify the everyday by creating interaction between activity and passivity, observation and action, judgement and feeling. Nevertheless, there is an ontological difference between these two methods. Intensifying the everyday by summing up and unifying its qualities is not the same thing as intensifying the everyday by diminishing and multiplying its qualities. As Jim Maya said, “An identical lunch is very different than the other kind which is different from the rest.” If we agree that both methods (summing up and diminishing) succeed in creating an aesthetic experience, then this comparison is useful in order to examine the limits of Dewey’s pragmatist conception of experience. Two major limits can be mentioned: the first one concerns the criterion of “unity” and the second concerns the status of “interpretation.” By referring to aesthetic experience as “an” experience, Dewey’s definition is reduced to a temporal distinction wherein the aesthetic can be framed as one event isolated from what happened before and after. But this definition does not always hold

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because aesthetic experiences can be reiterated, forgotten, fragmented and multiplied without losing their strength. Second, Dewey’s conception is confronted with an even more thorny issue concerning the subject who names and interprets the experience. Who gives the authority to a particular subject to name that particular experience as an aesthetic one? What happens when the experience is collective, as in the case of the Identical Lunch? If the method of interpretation is not clarified, there is a risk of relativism in Dewey’s aesthetics. Both of these problems are leftovers from metaphysics, in that they assume classical conceptions of unity and subjectivity. Moreover, by identifying aesthetic experience as a unique and subjective event, Dewey confirms the traditional distinction between the aesthetic and the artistic. As he himself explains: “The word ‘esthetic’ refers to the experience as appreciative, perceiving and enjoying. It denotes the consumer rather than the producer’s standpoint. It is Gusto, taste; and, as with cooking, overt skilful action is on the side of the cook who prepares, while taste is on the side of the consumer. … Perfection in execution cannot be measured or defined in terms of execution; it implies those who perceive and enjoy the product that is executed. The cook prepares food for the consumer and the measure of the value of what is prepared is found in consumption.22 What is striking in this paragraph is certain key terms that have a different symbolical power nowadays: consumption, production, perception, and enjoyment. Today this description has a strange bitter aftertaste of capitalism and liberal economy, where the despotism of the consumer prefers aesthetic enjoyment to aesthetic experience and forgets the political implications of American pragmatism. The idea of the product seems to underline the pragmatist conception of the artwork; with food, the experience of eating seems to be reduced to taste and gustative appreciation. But what if taste and judgement were not relevant, as with the examples proposed by the artists? What if eating was merely a praxis and a simple performance, not even performance art, but only a series of ordinary acts? What if eating could assemble aesthetic experience and an artistic experiment in a multiple and loose event that has nothing to do with a product? What if the experience was lived, but not enjoyed? What if the event occurred without being judged? This possibility would lead to another type of embodiment, another type of pragmatist experience where multiplicity, dispersion, and fragmentation are fully accepted as inner qualities, a pragmatist experience capable of going beyond unity and subjectivity to embrace multiple intersubjectivities, a multiple experience where the subject is collective and, why not, often unaware of the full significance of the set of actions forming the experience. One could object that this would also lead to the dissolution of art in the dark waters of ordinary life. Certainly, but this would be the only way to allow a genuinely pragmatist

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concept of aesthetic experience to reveal a continuity between art and life, a continuity that allows passage in both directions: not only going higher, from ordinary events to aesthetic experiences, but also lower, from art experiences to everyday life. Not only art as experience but also experience as art. Moreover, eating would then appear not only as an aesthetic experience, subjected to the rules of judgement and appreciation, but more profoundly as the unreflective experience at the origins of any other type of experience. The experience of eating would testify to the possibility of constructing a background to life, the conditio sine qua non for thinking, perceiving, and judging. Eating is a way to go back to the real. Philosophy has always preferred to extract the subject from the concrete continuum of life, in order to familiarize us with abstractions, flights of fancy, and theoretical investigations. But the real investigation, the one that holds the threads of our existence, happens often unmarked under our eyes, or hidden in our stomachs. Coming back to alimentation allows us to build a philosophy of necessity, an ethics of needs, and a materialistic aesthetics. One way of thinking eating beyond the grasp of judgement is to argue that eating is not only an experience that we can appreciate, nor an experience we can think about, rather it is the experience that allows us to appreciate and to think the world. The satisfaction of hunger is the basis of any thought, any action, any experience of contemplation and any aesthetic judgement. We need to have eaten if we want to think, act, and contemplate the world: eating is the premise of existence. This line of thought has been explored by Jérôme Thélot, under the distant influence of phenomenology (Husserl) and the philosophy of deconstruction (Derrida). In his beautiful and profound book entitled Au commencement était la faim. Traité de l’intraitable (At the Beginning There Was Hunger. Treatise of the Untreatable, not translated into English), Thélot builds a rigorous and poetic philosophical construction around this thesis: at the origins of philosophy there is the satisfaction of hunger. The latter is the most human and the most archaic experience. Philosophy is built upon the oblivion of hunger, and philosophy is necessarily a replete thought. In a proper phenomenological act, Thélot gives philosophy the task of ‘uncovering’ this ancestral oblivion, the task of reflectively unmasking itself. He writes: Any philosophy that does not have hunger as its first theme is forgetful of the native affect philosophy owes to the satiety that determines it. … Any philosophy that starts out from something other than hunger, that does not enquire into hunger, forgets hunger. This is hunger’s own forgetting. Philosophy strikes it with oblivion, and that oblivion then makes its way within philosophy. It is hunger that conditions the philosophy that ignores it, this replete knowledge that can be named a satisfied philosophy.23

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Besides being a simple process ensuring elementary subsistence for corporeal life, the act of “filling up” the body is the ineluctable hidden premise of philosophical thought, and consequently of aesthetic experience. How could we not recall this famous passage from Kant’s Third Critique, which implicitly asserts the same idea? Hunger is the best sauce; and people with a healthy appetite relish everything, so long as it is something they can eat. Such delight, consequently, gives no indication of taste having anything to say to the choice. Only when men have got all they want can we tell who among the crowd has taste or not.24 If Kant does not insist on the influence of economic conditions on judgement of taste (as Pierre Bourdieu will much later in his influential book Distinction), it is nevertheless evident that the poor and the hungry, those who do not have the luxury of choice, are destined to lose the possibility of an aesthetic experience. For the hungry subject, pleasure is identical with the satisfaction of need. The hungry subject is not in a position of freedom; he is dependent on consumption, on the necessity driven by a primordial need. Indeed if one considers that ‘experience’ is more than simply living, that is to say, if, in a classical vein, one considers aesthetic experience as the nec plus ultra of experience per se, then the hungry, having no access to the aesthetic, are deprived of access to the very essence of experience. Their life is bare survival. Philosophy, aesthetics, and any cultural institution are founded upon the principle of discrimination, excluding human subjects incapable of satisfying their hunger. If it is true that hunger is a primary need beyond which no experience seems possible, it is reductive to think of the satisfaction of this need as a radical premise, or even as a necessary condition of anything more than simple survival. The implications of the satisfaction of hunger could be extended far further than the arguments of the sophisticated forms found in the clothing of phenomenology and deconstruction. The idea that philosophy, as a totally reflective practice, fails to remember one essential condition of its reflective practice is certainly a powerful one. However, the oblivion of one condition of possibility amongst others could be thought to be a positive inner quality rather than a limiting external condition. At a logical level, it is one thing to say it is possible via a certain kind of pragmatist experience to expose an experience of eating beyond judgement. It is quite a different argument to say that the satisfaction of hunger must occur before any solid judgement can be made. The former is an ontological argument, the latter is an empirical argument. One could fall victim to another kind of reductivism, one opposed to aesthetic reduction; that is, in speaking of eating as being primordially the satisfaction of hunger one runs the risk of exclusively classifying eating under a utilitarian judgement. Consequently, access to eating beyond judgement

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would be impossible, and we would have just opposed a utilitarian judgement of hunger to an aesthetic judgement of hunger. The idea that one has to eat in order to live implies that one must receive before building, one must move before resting, one must fight before making peace. This idea is dialectical: it contains an internal tension between forces. Ultimately, this idea does not help going beyond the same old classical dualisms that the experience of eating, as such, attempts to overcome. A philosophy of the oblivion of the satisfaction hunger as a condition that philosophy has to uncover, is still thinking of eating as a merely corporeal and material experience. It is not by any materialist reduction, or elimination, that we will arrive at the praxis of eating. Moreover, at a vulgar empirical level are we sure that philosophical thinking presupposes the satisfaction of hunger? We can think of many cases of great philosophical works that have been written under very precarious conditions: Antonio Gramsci writing in prison where his health rapidly deteriorated; Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose Tractatus was thought and written during his service as an officer in the trenches on the German side; Diogenes, this old homeless tramp—sometimes described as hedonistic and irreligious, sometimes as a harsh and ascetic hero; certainly did think and write on an empty stomach. We can think of other figures, artists and writers, who inspired philosophy and who also were deprived of their primary needs without being prevented from building magnificent thoughts and works: Antonin Artaud, writing and drawing in the psychiatric hospital of Rodez where he received heavy electroshock treatments, or Marcel Proust, who completed his Research dictating the last book of the series, Albertine disparue, from the bed to which he was confined due to his severe asthmatic condition. Obviously, these counterexamples do not demonstrate that the satisfaction of hunger, or any other physical need, is not a necessary condition of life, experience, or any reflexive act. They show that this condition is not absolute. They indicate that hunger is not per se an obstacle to thought. Thus, a philosophy of embodiment that fully accounts for the experience of eating is anchored in a matrix of complex qualities that engage both sides of the ancient dualisms: body and mind, matter and value, experience and judgement. Eating as a mere praxis, completely emancipated from any remote idea of poiesis, allows us to think of praxis as a legitimate set of actions in the art field.25 Eating as an aesthetic experience that is lived, without being necessarily enjoyed, frees the aesthetic experience from the old mirages of beauty, pleasure, and uniformity. Eating as a corporeal experience that does not produce objects of any kind (and especially not ‘art’ objects) is not doomed to fail and to evaporate in oblivion. Gestures count, movements leave traces in our bodies, experiences model our identity, even when they pass unnoticed.

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NOTES 1. Anonymous: “even when all arts will pass away, the culinary art will stay.” 2. Aristotle, “On the Soul,” Aristotle’s on the Soul and On Memory and Recollection, transl. Joe Sachs (Sante Fe: Green Lion Press, 2004), book II, chap.9, para. 421 a. 3. René Descartes, Discours de la méthode, suivi de La Dioptrique (Paris: Gallimard, 1991). 4. Denis Diderot, Lettre sur les aveugles: à l’usage de ceux qui voient. Lettres sur les sourds et muets: à l’usage de ceux qui entendent et qui parlent, eds. Marian Hobson and Simon Harvey (Paris: Flammarion, 2000). 5. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “The System of the Individual Arts,” Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 2, transl. Thomas Malcolm Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), part 3. 6. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 1, p. 38. 7. Ibid. 8. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee Book, 1980), p. 3. 9. Ibid., p. 36. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., p. 14. 12. Ibid., p. 24. 13. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Cookery Manifesto”/“Manifesto della cucina futurista,” first published in Gazzetta del Popolo in Turin (28 December 1930). 14. Ibid., p. 29. 15. Ben Vautier in Fluxus Performance Workbook, digital supplement to Performance Research, 2:3 (2002), p. 106. 16. Bengt Af Klintberg in FluxusPerformanceWorkBook, p. 56. 17. Ibid. 18. For a detailed description of this piece, see Philip Corner, The Identical Lunch: Philip Corner’s Performances of a Score by Alison Knowles (San Francisco: Nova Broadcast Press, 1973); Alison Knowles, Journal of the Identical Lunch (San Francisco: Nova Broadcast Press, 1971); Kristine Stiles, “Tuna and Other Fishy Thoughts on Fluxus Events,” in Alison Knowles: Notes toward Indigo Island (Saarbrücken: Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken, 1995). 19. Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 47-48. 20. Knowles, Journal of the Identical Lunch. 21. Ibid. 22. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 47. 23. Jérôme Thélot, Au commencement était la faim. Traité de l’intraitable (La Versanne: Encre Marine, 2005), p. 21. My translation. 24. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (London: Wilder Publication, 2008), p. 31. 25. For an interesting discussion of the Aristotelian distinction between praxis and poïesis see: Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on gesture,” Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000), chap. 2.

Twelve SOMAESTHETICS AND THE ART OF EATING Dorota Koczanowicz 1. Introduction The so-called Western dietary style, which entails consuming considerable quantities of industrially processed food with excessive caloric content and meagre nutritious value, keeps spreading in our society, causing detrimental subsequent effects. The deleterious dietary habits cause obesity and increase the risk of numerous civilizational diseases. For this reason, eating is with increasing frequency addressed in the social discourse and public policies. Besides, eating is a focal object of interest to neurologists, dieticians, historians, anthropologists, aestheticians, and artists, to enumerate but a few fields. Although eating seems to be lavished with scholarly attention, I believe that serious reflection on preparing and consuming meals is still inadequately developed, if not actually absent. The discourse of diet surfaces as early as in the ancient writings. The thinkers of Antiquity clearly discerned the close links among what we eat, how we behave, how our minds function, how we interact in society and even how our political states operate. Nonetheless, we still lack an integrative perspective which could comprehensively account for eating from the vantage point of bodily practices and fuse the dispersed discourses of diet and healthy lifestyle. Eating is both a biologically necessitated precondition of our physical existence and a culturally determined act. As our lifestyle keeps changing along with civilizational developments, we need to continually reflect on what diet would be optimal for us. With this ascertained, we also need to acknowledge that it is utterly impractical to formulate a detailed, yet universal recipe of a diet appropriate for everyone. Nevertheless, it is possible to establish certain general rules which could be accommodated within ameliorative philosophical paradigms. I believe that the best ramifications for such an enterprise are provided by pragmatist philosophy, whose founders— William James and John Dewey—postulated that philosophy should not only construct a theoretical apparatus, but also practically engage with life. This philosophical tradition, with its vision of the combined intellectual and practical pursuits, lies at the foundation of Richard Shusterman’s pragmatist project of somaesthetics.1 In this paper, I will reflect on how the discourse of diet can be expanded within the framework of somaesthetics. I would argue

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that somaesthetic philosophy offers an integrating potential that could harmonize and advance reflection on eating. Of course, improper body weight is by no means an exclusively contemporary problem. In her book Calories and Corsets: A History of Dieting over Two Thousand Years Louise Foxcroft spins stories of many historical personages who coped with weight disorders (usually overweight) and had to make a choice between pleasure and suffering. We could, for example, cite the culinary preferences of Friedrich Nietzsche, who loved sausages. Unfortunately, this predilection combined with his sedentary lifestyle made him obese. Compelled to consider dieting, Nietzsche took then to reading Luigi Cornaro’s The Art of Long Life, a very popular handbook whose last edition was published in 1903. In 1502, when the author—a rich Venetian—was only 35, doctors opined that he was on the verge of death and only severe restrictions on eating could save him. They recommended that he lead a moderate life and regain selfcontrol which would curb his drive for pleasures. Cornaro’s diet was very rigid: briefly speaking, he was required to eat as little as possible. And so he ate 400 gram of solid food and drank half a litre of wine daily. Towards the end of his life, he would limit himself to eating only one egg a day. Nietzsche became interested in Cornaro because of the Italian’s extremely slow metabolism, which the philosopher compared to his own. For example, in Ecce Homo he observed, “My blood moves slowly.”2 Nonetheless, Nietzsche could not imagine himself adopting Cornaro’s diet, since he was convinced that “a scholar in our time, with his rapid consumption of nervous energy, could simply destroy himself on Cornaro’s diet.”3 Beyond possibly personal and situational bias, such a pronouncement results from the more general tenets of his philosophy of life, which identified intellectualism and asceticism with an impoverishment of life. As we know, many philosophical tendencies have traditionally postulated combining theory and practice, yet in Nietzsche’s case the philosophical leanings and the life practice failed to go hand in hand. The divergence is thematized in Robert Hass’s poem “A Supple Wreath of Myrtle.” The poem portrays the creator of the idea of the Übermensch as torn between his pessimism about the future of culture and civilization, on the one hand, and on the other, the trifling everyday sensual pleasures he indulged in. Prophesying the demise of man, Nietzsche could brood upon the impending apocalypse, enjoying his favourite sausage and Georges Bizet’s light music at the same time: Poor Nietzsche in Turin, eating sausage his mother Mails to him from Basel. … Dying of syphilis. Trimming a luxuriant moustache. In love with the opera of Bizet.4

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2. Taste and Evolution In his book Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters, Gordon Shepherd expounds what a complex construct flavor is. We have five basic tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami, meaning “savory/meaty.” Even though a child is indeed born with an innate liking for the sweet flavor and a patent distaste for the sour and bitter ones, culinary tastes are to a considerable degree culturally conditioned. The biological equipment and neurological mechanisms that participate in creating flavor are importantly supplemented by the social component. That our tastes are by no means fixed can be instantly comprehended if we only remember how we came to relish coffee. Evidently, we can learn to appreciate new flavors and find pleasure in the bitterness of espresso, for example. The flavor that we associate with food is a result of many stimuli and complicated neurological processes, which all contribute to the gustatory sensation. Citing numerous experiments, Shepherd shows that perception of flavors depends not only on the taste buds but also, to a considerable extent, on smell as well as on the complex processes involved in touch, sight and even hearing. At the green market, we touch the fruits we select at the stand to feel whether they are ripe for eating. Yet we touch food not only with our hands. While eating we touch it with our teeth, tongue, cheeks and palate. These body parts furnish us with knowledge about the food’s texture and channel the pleasure involved in its pieces, which crunch or melt in our mouths. Not everyone realizes that the taste of food is to a significant degree conditioned by the smell it produces. A simple experiment shows that we will not sense a candy’s sweetness if we hold our breath. We will feel its size, its weight, its crunchiness or glutinousness, but not its flavor. The presentation, appearance and shapes of the meals also affect our taste sensations, with colors clearly exerting the greatest influence on our gustatory impressions. For example, brightly colored substances seem to smell more intensely, and white wine tinted with a tasteless red dye starts to taste like red wine to us. Hearing has its own role to play in this sensory density as well. Asked what food sounds like, the author answers that various products have obviously their own specific sound fields, with the sound of crunching being the most appetizing to us. The mechanisms of the production of gustatory sensations are analyzed by Shepherd within the neurological paradigm. Without undercutting his findings, we can adopt yet a different framework of reference and consider taste as a manifestation of the holistic activity of the body in its social and cultural contexts. Indeed, Shepherd underscores such contexts himself when he discusses the creation of olfactory sensations. Namely, our emotions and memory influence the way we perceive smells, and hence the way we perceive the flavor of a particular meal. It turns out that, paradoxically and counterintuitively, perhaps, the taste of a meal does not come from the meal itself. It is ingrained in our holistic experience, which is generated by all our

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senses; experience, however, whose intensity and character are a result of the joint work of memory, associations, and the social context. 3. Taste and Culture Neurogastronomy fascinatingly envisages the processes in which taste is created. Nonetheless, we cannot disregard the obvious fact that we often act against evolutionary advantage, striving to meet culturally produced requirements. Here I will refer to two meaningful utterances which reflect two modes of thinking on what food and eating can and should be in culture. 1. Lord Byron stated that a woman should not be seen while eating, the only exception being a meal of lobster salad and champagne. 5 He did not follow this kind of diet himself, though. With his tendency to gain weight, Byron coped with multiple challenges as his epoch expected a poet to have a willowy silhouette and a pale, spiritual, and melancholy face. To approximate the Romantic ideal, he consumed large quantities of rice, which was considered to guarantee fair complexion. He also drastically lost weight (from 100 kilos down to 54), eating mashed potatoes with vinegar, one of fashionable diet regimes of the day. As we learn from Calories and Corsets: A History of Dieting over Two Thousand Years, the English poet “in his early thirties, while travelling in Italy … kept mainly to a diet of claret and soda water.”6 Byron’s craving for a supple silhouette had not only aesthetic underpinnings. The “acquaintances” of the author of Don Juan “record his horror of fat, which he believed lead [sic] to lethargy, dullness and stupidity, and his anxiety that his creativity would be lost … .”7 2. Rirkrit Tiravanija, one of the most prominent contemporary artists, has made shared meals into an element of his artistic undertakings. A crucial assumption underlying his stance is that art has already exhausted its limits as far as producing objects is concerned. Now art faces another task, and that is to create through interaction, exchange or relationships. Maybe it’s a way to communicate differences, otherness and understanding. When you want to experience something outside of yourself, the objects turn to [sic] be too distant. Interaction and exchange are very human—you get much closer. It’s probably why I cook. To eat and to taste is an experience known to everybody. It’s surprising how people find themselves more open and more adventurous through food. The world we live in is becoming more and more open and things are interfusing each other.8 Unquestionably, eating is central to human physiology, but the two examples above prove that its role is not simply reducible to satisfying the biological needs of our organisms. They clearly indicate that eating—one of the very basic life processes—is, as already intimated, tightly interwoven with

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culture. Some anthropological conceptions even argue that social bonds have developed out of the foundations laid in the course of preparing and sharing food.9 Furthermore, the invention of thermal processing of meat was a seminal moment in the evolution of the human species. The new diet, rich in caloric intake and new flavors, made a civilizational breakthrough possible. Unsurprisingly, Richard Wrangham contends that the consuming of cooked food is the basic indicator that differentiates humans from other species. 10 With the media manifesting a great interest in cooking as well, cooks become celebrities, and cooking shows, a staple feature of most TV channels, win audiences of millions upon millions. On the other pole of fascination with cooking, significant social movements, such as “slow food,” are being founded. However, we still fail to fully capture the complexity of eating and to realize the extent of the devastation wrought by the Western dietary style. Eating goes far beyond mere nutrition. It is a complex cultural and social process, which calls for an interdisciplinary analysis that can encompass all its dimensions. 4. Somaesthetics Shusterman observes that contemporary culture is preoccupied with the body. We allocate a lot of time and money to shaping our bodies and making them more beautiful, fighting off the signs of ageing. And yet, paradoxical though it may sound, the author of Body Consciousness simultaneously notes that we devote far too little attention to our bodies. This deficit of reflection is to be countervailed by somaesthetics, a research project that Shusterman has been involved in for more than ten years now. Shusterman’s writings are permeated with the idea of integrated human experience, in which the aesthetic, the ethical, the political, the practical, the cognitive, and the corporeal interpenetrate and condition each other. Revisiting the ancient ideal of philosophy as an art of living,11 the author of Practicing Philosophy evidently proposes a holistic approach to human existence. He believes that combining philosophy as a theoretical inquiry with philosophy as an artful life-practice yields optimal effects. In this way, Shusterman aims to overcome the defiance of the body which haunts philosophy. Reflecting on one of the most pertinent queries that philosophy poses, that is, “How to make life better?,” he contemplates ethical, political and aesthetic questions, but he assigns equal importance to proper bodily posture, appropriate nourishment, and the ability to regulate one’s breathing. Hence his philosophy is not simply one more attempt at valorizing “the body” vis-à-vis “the mind,” but rather a descriptive and normative project of recognizing “the sentient soma” in the totality of its operations. Crucially, the field of somaesthetics, as Shusterman has emphasized on many occasions, must include theoretical reflection alongside “practical bodily disciplines to enhance our experience and performance while increasing our tools for self-fashioning.”12

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Richard Shusterman is one of few thinkers who probe into the philosophical senses inherent in everyday activities. He analyses primarily the kinetic aspects of the modes in which human beings function, but the somaesthetic perspective can be fruitfully applied also to theoretical reflection on eating. Shusterman agrees with Dewey that separating the mental and the physical dimensions of human action is hardly viable. In Dewey’s essay titled “Body and Mind,” which Shusterman approvingly refers to, the act of eating features as an example of an integrated action: Eating is also a social act, and the emotional temper of the festal board enters into the alleged merely physical function of digestion. Eating of bread and drinking of wine have indeed become so integrated with mental attitudes of multitudes of persons that they have assumed a sacramental spiritual aspect.13 Our moods influence what we eat and drink and how the processes of digestion proceed in our bodies, but the reverse relationship is also true: our bodily condition, affected by what we eat and drink, has an impact on our mental states. As civilization progresses, the number and scope of the purely physical or purely mental behaviors keep decreasing. And attempts to separate these two orders turn out to produce pathologies. When behavior is reduced to a purely physical level and a person becomes like a part of the machine he operates, there is proof of social maladjustment. This is reflected in the disordered and defective habits of the persons who act on the merely physical plane.14 The passage from Dewey quoted here could serve as a sound description of the situation in which the protagonist of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times finds himself. Chaplin shows a factory worker who loses his senses amidst endeavors to meet the demands inscribed in highly specialized, effectivenessfocused, profit-maximizing work on an assembly line. After a day’s work he is still unable to prevent himself from mechanically repeating a series of automatic gestures. In a hilarious, but also painfully pertinent episode, Chaplin envisions the risk of estrangement which impinges on eating. The scene involves pragmatically minded scientists who test on him a machine designed to feed a worker. Eating, reduced to sheer nutrition, a necessary supply of energy, is here divested of all its social and cultural aura and significance. Intended as effective and hygienic, the machine is doomed to failure, and ultimately it falls to pieces. The “streamlined” meal, befitting the new era, becomes merely a source of torment. Chaplin’s film was made in 1936. The bane of our times is groceries which have little in common with natural food. Instead of employing cooks, the supermarket chains rely on “food developers”15 to prepare dishes they sell.

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And their tasks consist not so much in cooking wholesome foods as in producing a commercially attractive commodity which will tempt as many consumers as possible. Although organic food shelves are found even in discount food outlets and an assortment of fresh vegetables and fruit can be purchased in all huge supermarket chains, the producers of processed and convenience food do not stop fighting for the client, using a range of aggressive marketing tools to convince buyers that the time spent in the kitchen is wasted time. Hence the urgent need for education which would help to make eating an attentive pleasure consciously indulged in. The focus on eating is one of the central concerns of the body cult permeating contemporary culture, which Shusterman comprehensively describes. And its manifestations are manifold and often contradictory. For instance, cooking books and magazines on food are being published by the score, but at the same time, people who spend hours glued to their TV sets, watching cooking shows, rarely use the recipes so lavishly showered on them. They simply have no time to spare for cooking because they are too busy watching cooking shows. Another alarming tendency observable in modern societies is that overwhelmed with a dieting obsession, people are in huge numbers starting to treat food as an enemy and to consider cooking a waste of time. Contemplating the essence of the philosophical life, which is frequently identified with the mental life, Shusterman explores the ways and extent to which such life is modeled by bodily practices. Among the practices, he enumerates somatic consciousness and fitness exercises side by side with proper nutrition. Such a stance is hardly surprising if we remember his fundamental tenets: that philosophy’s goal is to augment human life by offering a critical reflection on the general and individual human condition, and that philosophy aspires to combine theoretical reflection and life practice. Moreover, Shusterman’s thought converges here with the convictions of Dewey, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Michel Foucault, that “philosophy … [is] … a life practice where theory [derives] its real meaning and value only in terms of life in which it [functions].”16 The belief that philosophy is grounded in life, which clearly implies also the somatic aspect, directs the philosophical reflection towards proper diet as a component of good life. Diet here does not mean, however, the popularly understood eating regime identified with rigorous constraints imposed both on the diversity and the quantity of food which lead to emaciation of the body. In this discussion we need to return to the etymology of the word “diet,” since: The Greek word diaita, from which our word ‘diet’ derives, described a whole way of life rather than referring to a narrow, weight-loss regimen. It provided an all-round mental and physical way to health, basic to one’s very existence and success.17

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So far Shusterman has not comprehensively discussed diet as an element of somaesthetics; however, in his latest book, Thinking Through the Body, eating is repeatedly thematized as an example or a point of reference. The holistic character of somaesthetics undoubtedly makes it possible to accommodate such issues in its field. And it hardly comes as a surprise since the philosophical life certainly includes the eating of meals. 5. Pathologies Shusterman urges the reflection on the body and postulates raising of the body consciousness in order to expand human perception skills, discover pleasure in simple activities, and develop sensitivity towards the world and one’s own needs. One of the forms of the body consciousness is the consciousness of what its mechanisms are and the needs pertaining to eating. In my view, conscious eating entails two things primarily: knowledge about our organisms’ nutritional needs and knowledge about the products that we consume. More conscious eating can help to reduce obesity, one of the serious bodily dysfunctions, and also foster delight, since a meal is fully satisfactory only if all the senses are gratified. Eating in a hurry without paying proper attention to what is being eaten does not appease hunger, and consequently results in gobbling successive helpings, which again fail to satisfy and, additionally, may contain harmful fats, sugars and chemicals. Our obesity problems as well as other eating pathologies, such as bulimia and anorexia, may result from violating the relationship that Shusterman foregrounds. It seems to me that another problem is the industrialization of food, which turns it into an estranged product whose ties with the natural vegetation rhythms have been severed. Awareness of the need to regain the pleasures of eating local, seasonal products, which have not been industrially and chemically processed, lies at the foundation of the worldwide slow food movement. The success of the laudable slow food movement exposes the complex enmeshment of eating in the operations of contemporary consumer society. Attitudes to eating entail at the same time, as the ancient Greeks intimated, attitudes to ourselves, to culture, and to the society we live in. For the ancient Greeks, eating was a constituent of a lifestyle whose objective was attaining harmony with the universe. The ideal was established by Symposion: a banquet during which eating is a vital component of conversation leading to a better understanding of ourselves and the reality around us. And what is it actually that our contemporary eating habits speak of? For one, they reveal that eating has been harnessed to the machinery of the consumer lifestyle. In highly developed societies, eating is all too often subordinated to other activities. The most suggestive examples include eating as nourishment or reproduction of labor force; Chaplin’s protagonist’s situation is replicated now, for example, by a businessman negotiating a contract over a business

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lunch or a politician using his time at the dinner table to raise funds for his party. Can they actually enjoy eating? Sometimes it seems to us that in preparing food, or thinking about eating for that matter, we simply squander our time: we might just as well gulp this or that snack—end of story. This frequently results in dissatisfaction with a slapdash meal and repeated attempts to find gratification in having one snack after another, again and again. In effect, eating or—to put it more precisely— the unpleasant sensation of unfulfilment keeps nagging us ever longer. Consequently, we eat far more than we actually need to eat. A well-balanced, diversified meal, on the contrary, satisfies our gustatory needs and makes us satiated, but not heavy. Discussing somatic pathologies bound up with improper routines imprinted in our bodies, Shusterman also addresses detrimental eating habits. Our somatic style comprises such eating-related bodily manifestations as specific ways of sitting at the table, holding cutlery or raising a glass to our lips. The style is, in fact, subject to modifications, depending on what particular situation we find ourselves in. We behave in one way having breakfast at the kitchen table and in a different way partaking of an official dinner which stipulates the observance of a codified etiquette. Still, our somatic style18 pertains to far more elementary issues as well. For example, while learning to eat, we learn, among others, how to put food into our mouths, how to chew it, and how to crush big bites into smaller ones: There are different habits of how one deploys one’s lips and tongue, what part of the mouth one uses in chewing; how fast, how long, and how vigorously one chews; how fast, how often, and how hard one swallows; how often one pauses during eating in order to drink, to speak to one’s dining companion, or to reflect on the food’s taste, aroma, or texture or on one’s diverse feelings in eating including the feeling of becoming satiated.19 In time, as these gestures and movements turn into a routine, we cease to pay attention to particular stages and components of our bodily actions. In such cases, we are guided by muscle memory, which Shusterman calls performative or procedural memory. This kind of memory is activated and utilized when we perform basic everyday motions, such as putting on a sweater or tying our shoelaces. We go through them automatically, without reflecting on the consecutive stages of a given activity. Such automaticism is evidently useful in everyday activities as it ensures the litheness of our movements and re-channels our attention towards more complicated tasks. Yet despite its functionality, it can also have adverse effects by entrenching pathological behaviors. One of them is eating too quickly, which neither fosters the correct functioning of our organisms nor provides sensory pleasure and satisfaction with food.

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When food or drink is consumed rapidly and inattentively, we are less able to appreciate its taste. As our eating enjoyment is diminished by this inability to properly savor our food, so we tend to compensate by eating more. Unsatisfied by the flavors and textures of what we’ve already eaten (because they have gone largely unnoticed through our habitual hurried or inattentive eating), our quest for the satisfaction which we know should come from food drives us to continue eating in the hope that such satisfaction will eventually come. This unfulfilled hope often keeps us eating even after we’ve already had our fill.20 Still, people who tend to eat too quickly, even if they realize it, find changing habits rather challenging, since “muscle memory sets the rhythm and style of their eating.”21 The performative muscle memory bound up with our dietary style is very deeply ingrained, because it concerns activities repeatedly performed throughout the day. Erasing parts of performative memory is admittedly difficult, but by no means impossible. 6. Enhancement of Experience Invited by the Hiroshima University’s Graduate School of Education, Shusterman spent the academic year 2002/2003 in Japan. He was taught by the Zen Master Roshi Inoue Kido. Roshi welcomed his new pupil with kindness, yet—as Shusterman remarks—“his open, friendly personality did not interfere with the strict disciplinary role he had to play as my teacher.”22 Under Roshi’s tutelage, Shusterman immersed himself in the aesthetics of the everyday. There are two ways in which the everyday can impress its aesthetics upon an individual, or—to put it more precisely—there are two ways in which an individual can experience the aesthetics of the ordinary. The first option involves affirmation of the elements of everyday reality which usually seem unattractive, for example its monotony, tediousness and repeatability. The other way, espoused by Shusterman, leads through the transformation of perception so that one starts discerning beauty in things which seem inconspicuous and unspectacular at first glance. The monastic discipline was necessary in order to allow one to sense in full “the transfiguration of ordinary objects or commonplace experience into a more intensified perceptual experience that is characterized by explicit, heightened, appreciative awareness.”23 The American philosopher describes three momentous occasions on which he went through a unique illumination. They involved the perceptual alteration of two rusty old cast-iron oil barrels into a beautiful object, finding new methods of breathing, which resulted in “generating pleasure, making each breath taste cleaner, sweeter, and fresher,” 24 and, finally, perceiving beauty in the ritual of daily meals. I will focus on the latter here. Three meals a day were served at the monastery. The food itself was not sophisticated, the

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crockery was very plain and unmistakably worn from long use. This, however, does not mean that the meals were an insignificant element of the monastic daily life. On the contrary, they constituted an integral part of the somatic training, which was at the same time training in awakened awareness. Shusterman observes: Meals were a place where we could demonstrate awakened mindfulness in active everyday movement, and do so in a challenging context where our appetites and unconscious habits were fully aroused and thus especially potent for distracting us from focused attention to the movements we performed and the feelings we experienced in this communal act of dining.25 Master Roshi was mindful of all the tiniest details of a meal. He corrected the way his pupils held chopsticks or bowls, and he monitored the pace of eating, chewing and tasting the food. All components of the daily life at the monastery, including the basic, prosaic ones such as washing, as well as those pertaining to the place and time of meditations, were regulated by a peculiar etiquette that each new pupil had to master. Shusterman recalls that he found learning how to eat properly a particularly challenging task. Fortunately, Roshi was not only a strict, but also a patient teacher: He then patiently showed me what he considered the aesthetically proper way to pick up and put down one’s chopsticks and to hold one’s rice bowl and cup. When I tried to emulate his method, inaccurately at first, he demonstrated and explained again, until I grasped the principles and method, which I subsequently applied in actual practice.26 Mastering all the monastic savoir-vivre principles was not an end in itself, though, but rather a prerequisite for moving to a higher level of experience. Eventually, subordination to the master’s instructions rendered results. The objects ceased to resist, and the pupil’s movements became harmonious. Satisfied with his accomplishment, Shusterman observes that: With skillfully focused purpose, my consciousness would smoothly shift attention from the pickled plum, seaweed, or clump of sticky rice and fermented soy beans on the tips of my chopsticks and direct it to the opening of my mouth and then to the diverse feelings of tasting and chewing the food, before I would swallow with similarly heightened awareness.27 Crucial though it was, the concentration on eating and gracefulness of bodily movements accompanying the act was no less important than the attention devoted to other pupils’ needs. Because the meals were consumed in silence, one had to constantly sustain alertness not to overlook the signals

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ensuing from their gaze or postural orientation. One was expected to pay attention to such apparently trifling details as passing somebody a dish that they could not reach but clearly felt like trying. Roshi found hardly anything inconsequential. Shusterman recounts an incident in which he was sharply upbraided for leaving three grains of rice in his bowl. He recalls also another pupil who was forced to eat a live squid and, having left a bit of it on his dinner plate, was served this very bit again on his breakfast plate. The awaited transformation occurred, finally, when his movements, glances and thoughts harmoniously fused with an elegance of movements, glances and thoughts of the other diners. Shusterman realized then that a meal was a meticulously designed and orchestrated performance. All elements of the event found their proper place in an intricate, dynamic configuration. The result was that everyday ordinary meals became an extraordinary experience of mindful, coordinated action, a sophisticated, elegant choreography of dining movement pursued with heightened attentiveness to graceful movement and careful respect for one’s comrades and one’s food as well as for one’s self and one’s teacher.28 “Somaesthetic Awakening and the Art of Living” is a gripping story about the transformation of eating plain, rather bland and ungarnished food served on cheap, somewhat chipped earthenware, of the everyday, unreflective activity of breathing and of even an ugly object, into a source of intense, gratifying experience of the “everyday aesthetics of living.” Shusterman identifies interrelationships between the world-perception underlying the Zen philosophy and the views that American transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau held on the place of man in the universe. His depiction of the experiences he had at the monastery is preceded by an analysis of the notion of the philosophical life that can be arrived at through an awakening. The philosophical life is a conscious life predicated on patience, simplicity and slowness and deeply steeped in the here and the now. Shusterman emphasizes that Emerson and Thoreau alike “commend awakening first for promoting genius in the fields of art, ethics, and spiritual character,”29 yet he sees a possibility of expanding their reflection to include the corporal issues. Such extension is effected by applying the category of the art of living, which can assume more democratic forms because, as he contends, “[b]esides the creation of distinctive works of genius, awakening is praised for the more general value of promoting keener, more focused consciousness in our everyday living.”30 Shusterman strives to locate somaesthetics in a theoretical space which is manifestly fraught with conspicuous dualism and evinces resentment towards corporeality. Thoreau abhors his animalistic part and only endures this low, repulsive admixture to himself because he is unable to fully rid himself of it. Shusterman quotes Thoreau’s disparaging remark: “We are

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conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled.”31 The author of Walden prefers to feed the soul rather than to feed the body, which seems a “slimy” activity to him. Although he is incapable of relinquishing his bodiliness, he believes he can at least fully harness it and hold it in check. Yet the spirit can for the time pervade and control every member and function of the body, and transmute what in form is the grossest sensuality into purity and devotion. The generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us.32 In turn, at the Zen monastery, the author of Body Consciousness goes through an experience in which eating changes into a virtually spiritual act. Describing the meals partaken of at the monastery, he demonstrates “how the discipline of awakened life can provide everyday experience with deep aesthetic enrichment and even spiritual enlightenment.”33 It is at this point that the paths which Thoreau and Shusterman walk separately do converge because, as the latter argues, “for Thoreau, ‘all purity is one,’ our conscious discipline of eating and drinking can guide us toward more mindful control of other appetites and to the rich fruits of spiritual awakening.”34 7. Awakening to Eating Philosophical awakening, both as defined by the American transcendentalists and as conceived of by the Zen masters, can be treated as an ultimate goal, accomplishing which is possible only by the chosen few because it requires a complete transformation of life that only a few are capable of. This does not mean, nevertheless, that the division between those who have attained the awakening and the remaining, average members of the consumer society is in itself inevitable. In the first place, what somaesthetics aims at is, exactly, imbuing everyday life with the consciousness of the body. But apart from these sublime, quasi-mystical moments of grasping a timeless now, there is the simpler yet significant value of attentive awareness to our mundane experience, of being fully present in what we do and where we are so that we can more fully profit from what our surroundings actually offer.35 We can all live better, healthier and more gratifying lives. Evidently, the spirit of somaesthetics makes the impossibly elevated categories of complete awakening translatable into more practical instructions, showing common people how to improve their lives. “This idea of living in the here and now by

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appreciating the present moment with vivid attention and clear consciousness,”36 which is central to the Zen tradition, can be a helpful clue that comes in handy in everyday, mundane life even to those who do not aspire to practice Zen fully and profoundly. Moderation, concentration on a task and conscious choices enable us to control what we eat and drink and reduce the risk of the food snatching away and taking command over our lives and ourselves. As far as the principles of everyday diet are concerned, the category of “awakening” is employed by Alice Waters, the owner of Berkeley’s celebrated restaurant Chez Panisse, who calls herself an American slow food movement pioneer. She experienced her awakening in the mid-sixties, when she went to Paris to study. It was there that she was captivated by the flavors of simple dishes made of fresh produce. During that period Americans, completely entranced by “simple” deep-frozen or canned dishes, simply reheated convenience foods instead of cooking proper meals. Sorely missing the French experience, in 1971 Waters set up a restaurant which she named after the title of a French film. At the beginning, she used the vegetables she grew herself in her own garden. Currently, Chez Panisse caters to 500 customers a day, so the restaurant collaborates with many local food producers. I wish to show to what extent Thoreau’s ideas correspond to the “philosophy” of eating whose nodal points are constituted by “patience,” “simplicity,” “slowness,” and “being in the here and the now.” The main indicator of Waters’s philosophy of food is the simplicity of dishes composed of top quality products, which is also closely intertwined with being in the here and the now. It is really essential to her that the visitors to her restaurant find only local, seasonal products on their plates. Moreover, the menu specifies clearly what plantation or farm the particular dish components come from.37 Because the ingredients are all locally produced, the visitors eat what is best at the lowest possible prices that organic food of this quality can reach, since the energy and transportation costs are minimized: neither does the food travel over long distances, nor is energy used to grow plants out of their natural growing season. The imperative of being present here and now forbids receiving telephone calls at the table or surfing the net while eating. Hence the request on the menu not to use phones or computers at the table. It is also possible to detect here the slowness that Thoreau appreciated so highly, which actually combines the patience of waiting for slowly simmered intense bouillons and the patience of waiting for products that become available only at certain moments in the year. Such approach precludes the use of chemical substances to accelerate growth or enhance taste. Patience is also required of the customers who wait for a table. It is recommended to book in advance because the restaurant’s enormous popularity has not subsided since its opening, and it has become one of the world’s most recognizable venues. Patience could be recommended as well to those who like more sophisticated

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dishes because the menu changes every day, evolving over the week from very simple dishes on Monday towards more and more refined ones on the following days. The most sophisticated, and consequently the most expensive, menus can be enjoyed on Saturday and Sunday. In one of his lectures on good food, the American food journalist Mark Bittman questioned the principle of local and seasonal food, contending that such a luxury could be afforded only by the residents of California; for the rest of the world it was allegedly a “poor joke” only. However, it suffices to mention another famous restaurant—Copenhagen’s Noma— to show how fallacious such reasoning is. Strictly abiding by “the local produce principle,” Noma asserts that such a policy can work perfectly in any geographical and climatic conditions. Since 2010, the Scandinavian restaurant has remained in first place in the prestigious world’s top 50 restaurants ranking announced annually by the British monthly Restaurant. Since 2004, Rene Redzepi has unfalteringly observed the “cleanness, simplicity and freshness” rule. He keeps working towards reviving the Nordic culinary art, recreating and preserving its typical flavors. His website contains, for example, the following declaration: “In an effort to shape our way of cooking, we look to our landscape and delve into our ingredients and culture, hoping to rediscover our history and shape our future.”38 The Noma specialists traverse Scandinavia in search of the best ingredients, smoke meats, make pickles, vinegars and other preserves, and distil their own alcohols. Its cooks use fruit juices, fruit vinegars for sauces and soups, seasonal vegetables, spices, and wild herbs and plants, including such “exotic” ones as moss.39 8. Delicious Revolution Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin announced that we are what we eat, and for that reason we should always know for sure what we have been served.40 The certainty increases if we prepare our meals ourselves, using local ingredients bought directly from the producers. Cooking at home not only can be a culinary experience, but also can mean revisiting the past. Home-made pastries baked “according to Grandma’s recipe” will obviously upgrade the tea, but they will first of all set us off on a sentimental journey back to childhood, when we tasted them for the first time. Things once so obvious and taken for granted as the daily cooking of meals at home are, apparently unavoidably, sinking into oblivion, and the skill of cooking is gradually becoming a forgotten art. 41 Though this concerns the United States and Great Britain to a greater degree than Poland or France, the cultural changes affect more or less decisively all developed countries. Because of the industrialization and commodification of food, which disconnected it from the agricultural cultivation and animal husbandry, we no longer associate the products we buy at supermarkets with a particular plant or a specific animal.

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We do not know what part of the animal a given lump of meat comes from; nor can we visualize the plant that, say, the kiwi fruit ripens on. What the meat and the kiwi fruit are for us is a product and not a food. We have also forfeited the ability to check whether food is fresh, consequently becoming thoroughly dependent on the expiry date labels. They are obviously approximations only, but if we see that the “best before” day specified on a pack of yoghurt has already passed, instead of checking whether the yoghurt is by any chance still good, we automatically throw it into the garbage bin. In Europe and America, half of the food produced is thrown away. Instead of buying good quality, slightly higher priced food with caution and calculation, we tend to spend as much money on the cheap food of inferior quality, which we then dump without scruples or remorse. Of course, we can never afford everything we might wish to have. The time is ripe to replace the industrial revolution with a “delicious revolution,” as Waters postulates. She argues that the most profitable investment we could possibly make is an investment in our daily diet. Low-processed food, free from preservatives, produced in compliance with the vegetation rhythms of the natural world, takes of course more time to produce and requires a larger workforce and more labor. Hence it is understandably more expensive than industrial food. Waters has frequently confronted charges that her attitudes and the practices she advocates are highly elitist. An ecological lifestyle is costly today. Evidently, our consumption is always affected and, perhaps, constrained by financial options. All the more, then, do we need to establish new spending priorities. The celebrated restaurateur believes that it is better to spend money on excellent food than on another pair of shoes, a fashionable outfit or a car. To conclude, I would like to evoke another philosophical tradition which is aligned with Shusterman’s somaesthetics and certainly would be enthusiastically endorsed also by Waters. What I mean is the ancient imperative of the care of the self. This is perhaps slightly too general a formulation, but I believe that whoever observes it in their daily culinary choices will enjoy a better and healthier life. NOTES 1. See Richard Shusterman, Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Richard Shusterman, Thinking Through the Body. Essays in Somaesthetics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. 223. 3. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ: or How to Philosophize with a Hammer, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), p. 58.

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4. Robert Hass, “A Supple Wreath of Myrtle,” Time and Materials: Poems, 1997-2005 (New York: Ecco, 2007), p. 4. 5. See Louise Foxcroft, Calories and Corsets: A History of Dieting over Two Thousand Years (London: Profile Books, 2011), p. 53. 6. Ibid., pp. 52–53. 7. Ibid., p. 52. 8. Rirkrit Tiravanija, “Zapowiedź projektu Zielony Ujazdów,” Tranzystor CSWZU, 4 (July 2012), p. 1. 9. Cf. Glynn Ll. Isaac, “Food Sharing and Human Evolution: Archaeological Evidence from the Plio-Pleistocene of East Africa,” Journal of Anthropological Research, 34:3 (Autumn 1978), pp. 311–325. 10. Cf. Richard Wrangham, Catering Fire: How Cooking Made Us Humans (London: Profile Books, 2009); Massimo Montanari, Food is Culture: Art and Traditions of the Table, trans. Albert Sonnenfeld (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 11. Cf. Richard Shusterman, Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). 12. Shusterman, Thinking through the Body, p. 289. 13. John Dewey, Body and Mind, in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 3, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), p. 28. 14. Ibid., p. 29. 15. Cf. Barb Stuckey, Taste What You’re Missing: The Passionate Eater’s Guide to Why Good Food Tastes Good (New York: Free Press, 2012). 16. Shusterman, Practicing Philosophy, p. 21. 17. Foxcroft, Calories and Corsets, p. 15. 18. Cf. Richard Shusterman, “Somatic Style,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 69:2 (Spring 2011), pp. 147–159. 19. Richard Shusterman, “Muscle Memory and the Somaesthetic Pathologies of Everyday Life,” Human Movement, 12:1 (March 2011), p. 13. 20. Shusterman, Thinking through the Body, p. 300. 21. Shusterman, “Muscle Memory,” p. 13. 22. Shusterman, Thinking through the Body, pp. 305–306. 23. Ibid., p. 303. 24. Ibid., p. 313. 25. Ibid., pp. 309–310. 26. Ibid., p. 311. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., p. 310. 29. Ibid., p. 295. 30. Ibid., p. 296. 31. Henry David Thoreau, “Walden,” Walden and Other Writings, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 2000), p. 206; qtd. in Shusterman, Thinking through the Body, p. 300. 32. Ibid., p. 207; qtd. in ibid. 33. Shusterman, Thinking through the Body, p. 290. 34. Ibid., p. 300. 35. Ibid., p. 299. 36. Ibid., p. 300.

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37. On 19 March, 2012, when I had the good luck to eat in the café part of Chez Panisse, the dinner menu included: Willey Farm artichoke salad with parsley, lemon and parmesan, a bowl of Churchill-Brenneis Orchards Page mandarins and Flying Disc Ranch dates, and Llano Seco Ranch pork shoulder roasted in the wood oven. 38. http://noma.dk/ (retrieved 27.01.2013). 39. Even in France, which is celebrated for its sophisticated cuisine, we can currently witness a revolution which causes a departure from the nouvelle cuisine, which the world admired in the seventies, and a new appraisal of the simple cuisine based on the top quality ingredients. One of the Parisian culinary stars is at the moment Gilles Choukroun, called by some a Robespierre of the new movement. 40. Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste, or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy, trans. M. F. K. Fisher (New York: Vintage Books, 2011). 41. Traditionally, cooking was women’s chore. The division into the masculine and the feminine in culture has been fiercely criticized in feminist writings. When I speak of returning to the kitchen, I do not mean returning to the stereotypical gender role categories, obviously.

Thirteen SOMAESTHETICS IN JAPAN AS PRACTICING PRAGMATIST AESTHETICS Satoshi Higuchi I first encountered Richard Shusterman’s work in his paper, “Form and Funk: the Aesthetic Challenge of Popular Art,” published in the British Journal of Aesthetics.1 My interest in his work came about as part of my own attempt to analyze sport in terms of aesthetics,2 a subject which is fundamentally overlooked by traditional aesthetic theory. Reading his essay, which was later included in his book, Pragmatist Aesthetics (1992),3 I found much overlapping between his work and my own. Specifically, we shared an approach that seeks to challenge the traditional practical/aesthetic opposition and to release “our conception of the aesthetic from the narrow domain and role that philosophy’s dominant ideology and cultural economy have assigned it.”4 What was important for me too in Shusterman’s work is that he pointed out the obstacles the mind-body dualism poses for understanding the pleasure human beings derive from the arts and learning, and went on to propose a new conception linking mind and body, which he called “somaesthetics.” 5 In this article, I will discuss several problems occurring when the philosophy and practice of somaesthetics are introduced in Japan as a form of practicing pragmatist aesthetics, and consider the possibilities for developing somaesthetics in the context of contemporary Japanese somatic culture. 1. How to Translate “Somaesthetics” into Japanese Shusterman’s “somaesthetics” is a term coined by combining the Greek word for body, soma, with the term “aesthetics,” and it is supposed to denote “a discipline devoted to the critical, ameliorative study of the experience and use of the body.”6 Since the usual Japanese translation for “aesthetics” is bigaku, and “soma” should be translated as shintai, a possible translation for somaesthetics is shintai bigaku. However, taking into consideration Shusterman’s conception of this discipline, I chose to translate “somaesthetics” as shintai kansei ron. Based on the presupposition of somaesthetics’ taking “the body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation (aisthesis) and creative self-fashioning,”7 the concept of aesthetics should be regarded as going back to the original meaning of “aesthetics” as a theory of aisthesis, or kansei ron.

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In Japanese scholarship, one place where we can see the move from bigaku to kansei ron is in the book Kansei ron [Theory of Sensibility], edited by Ken-ichi Iwaki.8 In the preface, Iwaki wrote that, “Ästhetik, which is based on late 19th century European concepts, was translated into Japanese during the Meiji period (1868-1912) as bigaku (‘the study of beauty’). Based on this late 19th century European concept, aesthetics in Japan became mainly associated in academics with matters relating to beauty and fine arts … and this was also something maintained in the institutional independence of the academic field as well.”9 Indeed, just as Iwaki suggested, academic research in aesthetics has mainly been concerned with issues regarding “aesthetic consciousness” and “fine arts.” However, one possibility for moving beyond this narrow characterization of the field of aesthetics is to further explore Iwaki’s kansei ron, or theory of sensibility, in order to tie the issues of “beauty” and “fine arts” with a variety of other matters, such as politics, education, the environment, and cross-cultural understanding. Wolfgang Welsch’s Ästhetisches Denken,10 and his paper “Aesthetics beyond Aesthetics: For a New Form to the Discipline,”11 are other important sources of inspiration. In 2001, Iwaki published an introductory textbook on aesthetics titled Kansei ron: Aesthetics.12 In the book, while consistently using the term “geijutsu” (art), written in Chinese characters, to exclusively designate fine arts (or Kunst as an institution of the modern era), he uses the same term, but this time written in katakana (a Japanese syllabary generally used for words of foreign origin), for various activities that are not usually thought to belong to the fine arts, but which could be classified as art in a certain sense (say, room decoration, makeup, food presentation, tea ceremony, etc.). In English, there is only one way to write the word “art,” but the Japanese language gives one the ability to distinguish between these two differing conceptions of art by writing the word in two ways—by using Chinese characters and by using katakana. “Art” written in katakana signifies a broader expressive performance which is linked with “the art of living” and extends beyond the concept of “high art” introduced in the modern era. In addition to the plastic arts, music, and poetry, many other artistic practices were included in the Japanese traditional concept of art in the pre-Meiji times (before 1868). For example, theatre, bodily disciplines such as the martial arts, crafts, and gardening were all considered art in Japan, whereas they are excluded from the concept of fine arts within the European context.13 We can say, then, that the original Japanese term “art” (or “geijutsu”) had a richer meaning than the modern, Western-derived term, “fine arts,” and that this is the meaning that Iwaki wants to convey by writing the term in katakana. As Iwaki correctly pointed out, the usual understanding of the field of aesthetics as bigaku continues to dominate the Japanese researchers’ framework of thinking. For this reason, Iwaki’s choice to title his book on aesthetics Kansei ron is significant. Shusterman’s somaesthetics is “devoted to the knowledge, discourses, practices, and bodily disciplines that structure [our] somatic care or

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can improve it.”14 Within this project, he does not examine what is ordinarily referred to as “aesthetic consciousness” or “fine arts” (i.e., subjects that are typically thought to constitute the focus of aesthetics as bigaku). Therefore, the proper translation of his term “somaesthetics” is most certainly “shintai kansei ron” rather than “shintai bigaku.” However, I know that this choice is not incontestable. Translation of “somaesthetics” as “shintai bigaku” would be possible in a certain context. It depends on the disputant’s interest in somaesthetics. If a person is mainly interested in Shusterman’s analytic somaesthetics, an extension and a new development of the traditional discipline of aesthetics could be possible under the title of bigaku as a strategy. A problematic attitude we should avoid would be a sort of essentialist way of thinking where one wants to fix a single translation of the word. I believe the avoidance of such essentialism is an important aspect of pragmatism. The translation of “somaesthetics” as “shintai kansei ron,” clearly suggests that we regard the somaesthetic as shintai kansei (body consciousness) and not shintai bi (beauty of the body). Shintai bi carries the nuance of objective and representative beauty of the body, while Shusterman’s somaesthetics should be understood in terms of “body consciousness” as an experiential aesthetic. However “shintai kansei,” which links together “shintai” and “kansei,” is also not without problems. The term “shintai” (body) does not mean simply the body, as the phenomenological body theories show, and “kansei” is not a simple word, but a philosophical technical term that denotes one of the three basic human faculties: reason (Vernunft), understanding (Verstand), and sensibility or kansei (Sinnlichkeit). What, then, is “body”? What, then, is “sensibility” (kansei)? There is an abstractness in shintai kansei that is resistant to simple understanding. And, despite the fact that Shusterman understands the body as the place where sensibility (kansei) occurs, sensibility is not synonymous with the senses. The translation of somaesthetics as shintai kansei ron must be taken up with the understanding that this is an approach which aims to construct an understanding of human beings beyond the reason/sensibility duality. Taking all these prospects into consideration, somaesthetics is legitimately translated as shintai kansei ron. 2. The Position of Practical Somaesthetics in the Japanese Language Context Shusterman’s somaesthetics has three dimensions: analytic somaesthetics, pragmatic somaesthetics, and practical somaesthetics.15 Analytic somaesthetics “describes the basic nature of our bodily perceptions and practices and their function in our knowledge and construction of reality.”16 It is an exploration into ontological and epistemological issues concerning the body. Overlapping with so-called “body

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theory,” it can also include socio-political investigations, such as those found in Michel Foucault’s work. Pragmatic somaesthetics “is the dimension concerned with methods of somatic improvement and their comparative critique.”17 We know that “over the course of human history, many kinds of methods have been recommended to improve our experience and use of the body,”18 and they have been divided into the representational and the experiential. The former “emphasizes the body’s external appearance, while the latter focuses not on how the body looks from the outside but on the quality of its experience.” 19 “Cosmetic practices (from make-up to plastic surgery) exemplify the representational side of somaesthetics, while practices like Zen meditation or Feldenkrais’s Method of Awareness Through Movement are paradigmatic of the experiential.”20 This experiential approach is helpful in understanding somaesthetics in terms of kansei ron (theory of sensibility). Both the analytic and pragmatic somaesthetics can be understood as “theory.” The third, practical one, however, does not constitute theory in the sense of a discourse on practice but rather as practice itself, and it connects with Shusterman’s meliorism and the pragmatic embodiment of philosophy. In this way, this third dimension of practical somaesthetics is qualitatively different from the analytic and the pragmatic. Looking up the word “aesthetic” in an English-Japanese dictionary, we find two meanings: one for “biteki” (beautiful) and one for “bigakuteki” (pertaining to aesthetics as an academic discipline). In Japanese, these two meanings are clearly distinguished; the former signifying the aesthetic qualities of an object and the latter signifying the level of theoretical inquiry on such qualities. Of course, both meanings can be distinct in English, too. However, there is only one English word “aesthetic” which is used to signify both meanings. Therefore, it can be said that there is an ambiguity here. Somaesthetics’ first (analytic), second (pragmatic), and third (practical) dimensions are all categorized into somaesthetics. This is clearly a reflection of there being no distinction of biteki and bigakuteki in the English terminology. In contrast, in the Japanese language context, the analytic and pragmatic would be known as theory (bigakuteki/kansei ron teki), while the practical would be considered as practice (biteki/kansei teki). This clear differentiation in the language between “theory” and “practice” is a common part of the Japanese academic understanding. For example, kyoiku gaku (science of education) is a science, but kyoiku (education) itself is not science but practice. However, Shusterman includes this third practical dimension in his somaesthetics and calls it “practical somaesthetics”—not the “practice of somaesthetics.” I said above that, in our context, an appropriate way to translate Shusterman’s “somaesthetics” into Japanese is “shintai kansei ron.” But given the standard use of the Japanese word for “theory,” i.e. “ron,” it would not make sense to apply that term to the practical dimension of somaesthetics, even if it would be entirely appropriate to do so in the case of the analytic and

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pragmatic dimensions. The practical dimension would commonly be referred to in Japanese in terms as the “practice of somaesthetics.” However, I think there is a very positive aspect to the way Shusterman’s somaesthetics can encompass both so-called theory and practice. Namely, it allows a reexamination of the relationship between theory and practice as it is understood in Japan, by showing that the relationship in question could be closer than some theorists imagine. 3. Various Types of Bodily Disciplines in Contemporary Japan In this section, I focus on practical somaesthetics. As Shusterman says, “the practical somaesthetics of performance seems useful …, if we follow the reasoning of Xenophon’s Socrates that the cultivation of a stronger, healthier, better performing body should result in better functioning of the senses and mind.”21 For Shusterman, practical somaesthetics encompasses a variety of bodily disciplines, e.g. yoga, the Alexander Technique or Feldenkrais Method. But what is the philosophical connection between those bodily disciplines and Shusterman’s somaesthetics? It comes from his recalling “philosophy’s central aims of knowledge, self-knowledge, right action, justice, and the quest for the good life.”22 Somaesthetics corrects “the actual functional performance of our senses by an improved direction of one’s body, since the senses belong to and are conditioned by the soma,” and “works toward improved awareness of our feelings.”23 Furthermore, Shusterman says, “if philosophy is concerned with the pursuit of happiness and better living, then somaesthetics’ concern with the body as the locus and medium of our pleasures clearly deserves more philosophical attention.”24 Now, what types of bodily disciplines in contemporary Japan might serve as possibilities for practical somaesthetics? Let us begin with the Feldenkrais Method; a method that Shusterman is a practitioner of himself. Established in Japan in 2001, the Feldenkrais Association actively puts on workshops across the country. In 2011, there were 80 registered Feldenkrais practitioners in Japan. In 1982, Takeshi Yasui published his translation into Japanese of the book, The Feldenkrais Method.25. Yasui was a graduate of Kyoto University, where he studied literature. He became a theater actor after graduation. In his afterword to the book, he explained that he had become interested in the Feldenkrais Method, which had been gaining so much attention in Europe and which treated the body and mind as one organic whole, because he found it to be a unique way to awaken capabilities that were lying dormant within people’s bodies. 26 Characterized by its unique way of freeing up a person’s “body-specific movement repertoire” shaped through years of tensions and habits, it is said to share common principles with yoga, Zen meditation, Tai Chi, autogenic training, Noguchi Taiso (gymnastics), and biofeedback. Originally a dancer, Yasuko Kasami is a practitioner who started her own training center in 2003 called Feldenkrais Japan. Kasami bases her training on a “systematization of

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senses,” and sees the Feldenkrais Method as a method for large-scale development of the body’s possibilities.27 Let us now turn to another body discipline Shusterman has discussed in his somaesthetic writings, namely, the Alexander Technique. Kaori Yoshino, who is a certified American Center for the Alexander Technique instructor, writes in her 2003 book How to Use the Alexander Technique 28 that it is a method for learning the correlation between mind and body, connecting awareness and movement. Specifically, one is trained in how to be aware of one’s own body. Rather than a method of teaching a certain set of specific movements, the technique teaches people how to move in general. Because of this, it has wide possibilities for application, from sport and dance to music and theater. It has also been shown to be effective for rehabilitation and counseling and is appropriate for age groups from small children to the elderly, as well as for those with disabilities. Yasui mentions several other disciplines that share mind-body training approaches similar to the Feldenkrais Method. One of the most popular is Yoga. Prominent Indian philosophy scholar Hajime Nakamura has written that although Yoga was popular in both the East and the West, texts conveying the fundamental principles of the philosophy were few. Kuniko Yamada, who translated Kuvalayananda and Vinekar’s book, Yogic Therapy,29 wrote that yoga was not concerned merely with the physical side of human beings, as it was a comprehensive and holistic practice which aimed to improve the harmony between body, mind, and soul; and that yoga as therapy was based on certain fundamental principles for developing various techniques for harmonizing and regulating mind and body. It is generally known that yoga is based on exercises called asana (poses or postures); for example the “cobra pose” or the “grasshopper pose.” It is worth noting that Yamada’s interest in yoga came about after seeing her mother, who was suffering from severe symptoms of menopause, show remarkable improvement after taking up yoga. She decided to go to India herself and enrolled in the Yoga University there to study yoga. Becoming a yoga teacher, she opened her own yoga school and was instrumental in spreading yoga in Japan. Yamada’s yoga is an orthodox style she learned in India. However, Japan has also seen a great rise in American-style yoga schools, which can be seen as mere health fads having little in common with how yoga is taught in India; and also certain types of yoga that have more in common with new religions or cults. Tai ji quan is another popular health regime in Japan. The Japan Wushu Taijiquan Federation is a public corporation, and according to its website, Tai ji quan is a martial art widely-known in Japan as a “sport.” That is, it is something which a person can take up in their youth all the way up into old age; in addition, a competitive sport that Japanese athletes compete in at such competitions as the Japan Championships and World Championships. It is also a popular exercise and preventive care regime for the elderly. The Japan

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Wushu Taijiquan Federation conducts skill and level tests that are in line with the kinds of level tests given in Japanese-style martial arts. Tai ji quan begins at the 5th level (kyu) going up to 3rd rank (dan). In The Science of Tai ji quan and its Breathing30 by Yo Susumu, et al., the authors stress the scientific basis of the physical movements of Tai ji quan. If the movements fall into the imitation of the forms, that would be a collapse into meaningless formalism. So the scientific method is presented as a way to avoid this trap. The basic principles of Tai ji quan include: “Moving while being conscious of every part of your body;” “to move your leg, move your pelvis;” “your body is used differentiated into its left side and right side;” “eyes and ears determine the pose;” “move as slowly as possible;” and “be aware of unnecessary force.” These basic principles could be said to have commonalities with the other types of physical training discussed here. In addition to the above, there are several other types of training worth mentioning, which have been the subjects of many books published and translated into Japanese; such as biofeedback, which is a style of therapy developed out of scientific research in psychophysiology, and autogenic training, which was developed out of clinical research into brain physiology. 31 In contrast to these scientific techniques, there are training styles found in Zen Buddhism, such as Rinzai and Soto. As a religion, Zen is not known much at all any more in Japan. However, the spirit and mood of “Zen meditation” is something very well-known and admired in Japan. Also popular with a certain segment of the Japanese population is Kiko (Qigong), which is derived from ancient Chinese philosophy and medicine. In addition, there is Makkoho, which though it has a Buddhist-sounding name has nothing to do with religion and is a somewhat popular physical practice.32 Furthermore, two types of physical training styles popular in Japan are the Noguchi Taiso (gymnastics) and the Nishino Breathing Method; both techniques were uniquely developed in the life experiences of their founders, Michizo Noguchi and Kozo Nishino. Noguchi Taiso is named after the man who developed the method, Michizo Noguchi (1914-1988). Noguchi was a professor at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music (which is now called Tokyo University of the Arts), and his method is described as a philosophy that seeks to examine human beings by looking at human movement. Noguchi explained it as follows: Human beings must move in order to live and this is something that is in continual transformation. The kind of movement that has come down to us today is something extremely ungainly and lacking in grace; and there is a huge gap between our modern ungainly way of moving and a more naturally rational and efficient style of movement. By sticking to the ordinary inefficient and clumsy style of movement we stifle our potential as human beings. By being conscious of our movements through

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SATOSHI HIGUCHI uncovering and developing principles and characteristics of graceful movement that is both inherently efficient and naturally rational, we can grasp intuitively the desired style of movements which are most natural and rational. And, by then applying this movement know-how to our everyday lives, we will be able to thereby expand our human potential. This is how I would like to describe my method and call it taiso (gymnastics).33

Noguchi’s philosophy is very consistent with Shusterman’s basic ideas. This is, in fact, an exercise method which should produce bodies which really feel the force of gravity and can move adapting to this in maximum flexibility. His method and philosophy attracted many followers, and after his death, the Noguchi Taiso Association was formed. Born in Osaka in 1926, Kozo Nishino started off his university studies in medicine, but he left university to become a member of the Takarazuka Revue Theater; later becoming a music teacher for the theater company. After this, he traveled to New York, where he studied at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School. Returning to Japan, he opened his own ballet studio. He also studied Aikido and Chinese martial arts, as well as medicine. Using all his knowledge, he came up with a unique Breathing Method and ran a studio where he taught many enthusiasts. The method of breathing is known as sokushin, which draws in breath from the soles of the feet, and then after being mindful of one’s entire body, the person exhales out from the soles of the feet. In reality, practitioners are drawing in breath from their nose, but as they inhale through their feet, they are meant to be fully aware of their body; starting with the soles of the feet, up through the knees and thighs, and then to the lower abdomen, called tanden or the solar plexus. This is thought to be the seat of the body’s energy. This process is not unlike the way trees draw in moisture from the earth. From the tanden, the energy rises up along the spine, reaching the head, one holds one’s breath for a moment and then the breath travels back downward: from the nose, mouth, throat, chest and then back down to the abdomen.34 Breathing in this manner, practitioners engage in slow exercises, twisting their bodies from side to side gently. Finally, I want to mention the martial art practitioner and teacher Yoshinori Kono’s Kobujutsu. (I wrote about his life, philosophy, and practices in my paper, “Archeology of the Art of Body Movement: Learning from Japanese Kobujutsu”35). Kono was born in Tokyo in 1949. Questioning modern agricultural practices and modern medicine, he took up martial arts in an attempt to answer some of our human problems. In addition to Aikido and swordsmanship, he created his own unique form of martial arts which aimed to rediscover various body movement techniques that have been lost in the modern culture. For example, even in our simple daily exercise of walking, Kono teaches that a different method would be possible. Kono’s body movement techniques are characterized by their avoiding of twisting and

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standing firmly in place. His teaching is significant beyond the martial arts, as it asks us to reconsider the meaning of our nature as human beings. Beyond martial arts training, the bodily disciplines recall some of the same approaches as somaesthetics. Kono’s studio, the Shoseikan, has attracted interest from a wide range of people, from martial arts practitioners to those in medicine, philosophy, education, and the arts.36 4. Possibilities of Somaesthetics in Contemporary Japan Shusterman’s somaesthetics is a critical, ameliorative study of the experience and use of the body. It consists of discourses, practices and physical training techniques that make possible structuring and improving the attention to the body as “a locus of aesthetic appreciation (aisthesis) and creative selffashioning.”37 As the bodily discipline in Shusterman’s somaesthetics, the Feldenkrais Method has been mentioned. In addition to the Feldenkrais Method, I think that any of the other disciplines mentioned in the above section also have similar approaches to practical somaesthetics and could be considered as training for improving the experience and care of the body. As Yasui, who introduced the Feldenkrais Method into Japan, says, these bodily disciplines have the same fundamental principles. The affinity lies in their being undertaken in order to increase body-awareness and uncover a new self, which will lead to improved body use and pleasure, culminating in a greater joy of life. Taking this situation into consideration, we might say that practical somaesthetics is already flourishing in Japan. In Japan, there is a long history of regimens including these kinds of bodily disciplines. There is also critical research into it. One example is Satoshi Tanaka’s Social History of Hygiene and Healing.38 “Health” is considered here as being something to improve the body’s functioning and realize a happy life. In his book, Tanaka considers a wide variety of knowledge and techniques such as religion, folklore and magic, medicine, nutrition, life science, physics, psychology, ethics, philosophy, and martial arts.39 Such knowledge and techniques attract a lot of people. Indeed many people are very passionate and committed to various health regimes. There is an idea of the so-called “romantic pathology” based on the antagonism between civilization and nature behind the body disciplines, by which people want to overcome the mechanization of our lives, Tanaka suggests, and people’s consciousness of their own body is the radical appearance of this thought.40 This is a “health” fetishism. The bodily disciplines attract many enthusiasts, but on the other hand, they are sometimes viewed with suspicion. If we think about the spread of the Feldenkrais Method as a kind of privileged practice in somaesthetics, I think with its spread and increased popularity, we will also find in Shusterman’s practical somaesthetics the kind of suspiciousness mentioned above. At Hiroshima University, as part of a class I was teaching about somaesthetics, I also tried to incorporate an

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experimental workshop of the Feldenkrais Method. The workshop saw great interest and enthusiasm from the students. On the other hand, however, despite the fact that the concepts concerning Awareness Through Movement were carefully explained, there were students who were unable to grasp these ideas and had a hard time with this part of the workshop. In particular, the demonstration of Functional Integration during the second half of the workshop seemed to cause some difficulties and students could be seen leaving. From a certain point of view, the workshop could have been viewed as a religious meeting (new religion or cult) making use of scientific discourse as an underpinning to its teachings. I don’t think somaesthetics has such suspicious characteristics. I take to heart Tanaka’s worry about health regimes that are taken up too fanatically. Instead our task must be to critically reflect on the pleasure from those health regimes that we have obtained in our daily lives to clarify the way they function, and to critically think about our own living and the way in which we find pleasure in the particular health regime. In my opinion, this is something achieved by Shusterman’s somaesthetics. Shusterman wrote at the beginning of the final chapter of Practicing Philosophy that “if philosophy is a life-practice of self-examination and selfcreation in the quest to live better, a book that only examined the life-questions of others would be incomplete, perhaps even dishonest.”41 We should reflect on our own personal interest closely related to our life behind the philosophical study. Particularly in the field of aesthetics, for example, “aesthetics of music” would be born from the experiences of a person who was mesmerized by music, and “aesthetics of performing activities” would arise from admiration for theatre. Those experiences are somatic experiences of mind-body integration which could be observed also in the practical somaesthetics mentioned in this article. However, in aesthetics as we have known it up to now, this practical experience was not considered to be particularly valuable to the scholarship. Shusterman’s somaesthetics, however, is giving rise to new situations in scholarship, and I believe that bringing about the transfiguration of aesthetics and philosophy is the most important possibility of somaesthetics in contemporary Japan. If academic learning changes, the practices, as its objects, will also change their conditions. My current research is concerned with developing conceptions which can bring about the reform of school education from the perspective of somaesthetics. In Japan, we are seeing practical somaesthetics being adopted in university education and discussion concerning possibilities of combining the scholarship with practical approaches. At this time, in particular, I can cite Keio University and Sophia University, both in Tokyo, as places where we see this process beginning to take place.42

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5. Concluding Remarks In this article I discussed the following: 1) why somaesthetics should be translated into Japanese as shintai kansei ron ; 2) that somaesthetics implies practical somaesthetics means the creation of a new relationship between theory and practice; 3) in Japan since ancient times many people have practiced various bodily disciplines, however, it is not appropriate to take them simply as practical somaesthetics, and it is important to reflect on the experiences of one’s own bodily disciplines; and 4) somaesthetics has tremendous possibilities in contemporary Japan for changing the situation of academic scholarship based on the dichotomies of theory/practice and reason/sensibility. Indeed, this kind of transformation in academic scholarship is needed in other countries as well. In Japan, in particular, however—with its long tradition of placing practice at the center of art―the integration of the theoretical with the practical in scholarship has real possibilities. Among those with an interest in Shusterman’s Pragmatist Aesthetics, there are many scholars who will be interested in discussions related to the orthodox theoretical part of analytic somaesthetics. For truly dynamic discussions to take place, perhaps what is really needed is for those in the field to first reflect on their own practical somaesthetics. The question which will be asked is: “What is your practical somaesthetics?” With reflection regarding this question, the personal experiences will become interesting and meaningful in analytic, pragmatic and practical somaesthetics. Perhaps when everything falls into place, all this will bring forth what will be a unique and totally different “aesthetics of performing experience.” NOTES 1. Richard Shusterman, “Form and Funk: the Aesthetic Challenge of Popular Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 31:3 (1991), pp. 203–213. 2. Satoshi Higuchi, “From Art toward Sport: An Extension of the Aesthetics,” Aesthetics, 6 (March 1994), pp.113–122. 3. Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992). 4. Ibid., p.viii. I have been engaged in introducing Shusterman’s somaesthetics to Japanese academe. In 2002, while Shusterman was a visiting professor at Hiroshima University, he wrote an article “Somaesthetics and Education” in the Bulletin of Graduate School of Education, Hiroshima University, Part I, 51 (2002), pp.17–24. I also wrote an article in this Bulletin, in which I made comments on Shusterman’s article and examined the significance and possibilities of applying somaesthetics to the field of education, see Satoshi Higuchi, “Gakushuron toshite mita ‘Shintai kansei ron’ no igi to kanosei” [The Significance and Capability of “Somaesthetics” from the Viewpoint of Learning Theory: A Commentary on R. Shusterman’s Article], Bulletin of the Graduate School of Education, Hiroshima University, Part I, 51 (2002), pp.9–15. It was

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followed in 2005 by a chapter on somaesthetics in my book, Shintai kyoiku no shiso [Thoughts of Body Education] (Tokyo: Keiso shobo, 2005). Quite a lot of interest was shown in somaesthetics in Japan through my research. In 2012, a translation of Shusterman’s Practicing Philosophy that I completed along with two colleagues was published in Japanese. Richard Shusterman, Pragmatism to tetsugaku no jissen [Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life], trans. Satoshi Higuchi, Takao Aoki, and Yasushi Maruyama (Tokyo: Seori shobo, 2012). 5. Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2nd ed., 2000). 6. Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and Education,” p.17. 7. Ibid. 8. Ken-ichi Iwaki (ed.), Kansei ron [Theory of Sensibility] (Kyoto: Koyo shobo, 1997). 9. Ibid., p. i. 10. Wolfgang Welsch, Ästhetisches Denken (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1990); trans. Nobuyuki Kobayashi as Kansei no shiko: Biteki riarity no henyo (Tokyo: Keiso shobo, 1998). 11. Wolfgang Welsch, “Aesthetics beyond Aesthetics: For a New Form to the Discipline,” Undoing Aesthetics (London: Sage Publications, 1997), pp.78–102. 12. Ken-ichi Iwaki, Kansei ron: Aesthetics [Aesthetics: For a Theory of Unfolded Experiences] (Kyoto: Showado, 2001). 13. Satoshi Higuchi, “The Politics of Art in Modern Japan: The Fine Arts versus the Martial Arts,” XVII International Congress of Aesthetics: Congress Book 2 (Selected Papers) (Ankara: SANART, 2009), pp.89-96. 14. Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and Education,” p.17. 15. Ibid., pp.19-20. 16. Ibid., p.19. 17. Ibid., p.19. 18. Ibid., p.19. 19. Ibid., p.19. 20. Ibid., p.19. 21. Ibid., p.20. 22. Ibid., p.17. 23. Ibid., p.18. 24. Ibid., p.18. 25. Moshe Feldenkrais, Feldenkrais shintai kunrenho [Awareness Through Movement], trans. Takeshi Yasui (Tokyo: Yamato shobo, 1982). 26. Ibid., p.241. 27. Yasuko Kasami, “Translator’s note” to David Zemach-Bersin, Kaethe ZemachBersin, Mark Reese, Relaxercise, Feldenkrais no no to karada no exercise, trans. Yasuko Kasami (Tokyo: Bansei shobo, 2005), pp.158–159. 28. Kaori Yoshino, Alexander technique no tsukaikata [How to Use the Alexander Technique: Reading the “Reality”] (Tokyo: Seishin shobo, 2003). 29. Swami Kuvalayananda, S. L.Vinekar, Yoga Therapy [Yogic Therapy: its Basic Principles and Methods], trans. Kuniko Yamada (Tokyo: Shunju sha, 1995). 30. Susumu Yo, et al., Taikyokuken to kokyu no kagaku [The Science of Tai ji quan and its Breathing] (Tokyo: Baseball magazine sha, 2003). 31. Gary E. Schwartz et al., Biofeedback, trans. Hisashi Hirai et al. (Tokyo: Seishin shobo, 1975, 1979); Marvin Karlins, Lewis M. Andrews, Biofeedback, trans.

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Hisashi Hirai et al., (Tokyo: Hakuyo sha, 1978); Barbara Brown, Kokoro to karada no taiwa [New Mind, New Body ], trans. Hitoshi Ishikawa et al. (Tokyo: Kinokuniya shoten, 1979); Biofeedback Society, Biofeedback to meiso [Biofeedback and Meditation] (Tokyo: Seishin shobo, 1980); Minayori Kumamoto (ed.), Biofeedback ho no kiso to rinsho [The Fundamentals and the Clinic of Biofeedback] (Tokyo: Kyorin shoin, 1983); Elmer Green and Alyce Green, Biofeedback no kyoi [Beyond Biofeedback ], trans. Yosuke Kamide, Hiroko Kamide (Tokyo: Kodan sha, 1990); Hellmuth Kleinsorge and Gerhard Klumbies, Jiritsukunrenho no sidojissai [Technik der Relaxation], trans. Yujiro Ikemi and Yuji Sasaki (Tokyo: Iwasaki gakujutsu shuppan sha, 1970); Johannes Heinrich Schultz and Wolfgang Luthe, Jiritsukunrenho [Autogenic Training ] trans. Kikuo Uchiyama (Tokyo: Seishin shobo, 1971); Ainslie Meares, Jiritsukunrenho: Fuan to itami no self-control [Relief without Drugs], trans. Yujiro Ikemi, Takako Tsurumi (Osaka: Sogen sha, 1972); Yoshihiro Ito, Jiritsukunrenho no igaku [The Medicine of Autogenic Training] (Tokyo: Chuokoron sha, 1982); Yuji Sasaki (ed.), Jiritsukunrenho [Autogenic Training] (Tokyo: Nihon bunka kagaku sha, 1989). 32. http://www.makkoho.or.jp/ 33. Michizo Noguchi, Gensho seimeitai toshiteno ningen [Human Being as a Primitive Form of Life] (Tokyo: Mikasa shobo, 1972), p.13. 34. Kozo Nishino, Ikiru power [Living Power: Seven Principles of Nishino Breathing] (Tokyo: Chikuma bunko, 2003), pp. 83-84. 35. Satoshi Higuchi, “Archeology of the Art of Body Movement: Learning from Japanese Kobujutsu,” presented at the International Conference “Bodies in Motion: Explanations in Perception and Performance,” hosted by the Center for Body, Mind, and Culture of the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, USA, on December 5th, 2008. 36. Yoshinori Kono, Kobujutsu ni manabu shintai soho [Art of Body Techniques Learning from the Ancient Martial Arts] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2003). 37. Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and Education,” p. 17. 38. Satoshi Tanaka, Kenkoho to iyashi no shakaishi [Social History of Hygiene and Healing] (Tokyo: Seikyu sha, 1996). 39. Ibid., p. 9. 40. Ibid., p. 12. 41. Richard Shusterman, Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), p. 179. 42. Vimara Inoue, Hitomi Sato, Toru Iwashita, Kyoko Ono, Takaaki Kumakura, Chizuko Tezuka, Chiaki Yokoyama, Karada o hiraku, kokoro o hiraku [Learning Through the Body Project: Open your Body, Open your Mind] (Keio Research Center for the Liberal Arts, 2008). http://www.hc.keio.ac.jp/lib-arts/. Katsushi Hikasa, Tetsuo Konno, Masafumi Todaka, Atsuhisa Yamamoto, Mamoru Suzuki, “Media toshiteno shintai” [The Body as a Media: Symposium], Sophia (Sophia University), 56:3 (2008), pp. 342–391.

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS Jerold J. Abrams is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, USA. He writes on aesthetics, philosophy of film, philosophy of popular culture, pragmatism, and American philosophy. Monika Bakke writes on contemporary art and aesthetics, with a particular focus on post-humanist, gender, and cross-cultural perspectives. She works in the Philosophy Department at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland. She is the author of two books: Open Body (2000, in Polish) and Biotransfigurations: Art and Aesthetics of Posthumanism (2010, in Polish), coauthor of Pleroma: Art in Search of Fullness (1998), and editor of Australian Aboriginal Aesthetics (2004, in Polish), Going Aerial: Air, Art, Architecture (2006), The Life of Air: Dwelling, Communicating, Manipulating (2011). Since 2001 she has been an editor of the Polish cultural journal “Czas Kultury.” Kacper Bartczak is an Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Łódź, Poland. He has been a Fulbright scholar at Stanford and Princeton, and a Kosciuszko Foundation scholar at Florida Atlantic University. His study of John Ashbery’s poetry, In Search of Communication and Community, was published by Peter Lang in 2006. His collection of essays Świat nie Scalony (2009) won a prize from Poland’s magazine Literatura na Świecie in 2010. He writes on literature, theory, pragmatism, and Polish and American poetry. He is also a poet in Polish. Else Marie Bukdahl is a Danish art historian, curator, and professor at the University of Aalborg, Denmark, and a former rector of the Royal Danish Art Academy. Bukdahl is a member of numerous boards and committees, including the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences. She was also a member of the Executive Board of the New Carlsberg Foundation and on the board of Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. She was named by the French Minister of Culture an Officier de Palmes Académiques, 1987 and Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, 1998. Her works include Diderot, critique d’art. I. Théorie et pratique dans les Salons de Diderot. II. Diderot, les salonniers et les esthéticiens de son temps (1980-82); Johannes Wiedewelt: From Winckelmann’s Vision of Antiquity to Sculptural Concepts of the 1980s (1993); Puissance du baroque., ed. (1996); Caspar David Friedrich’s Study Years at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and His Importance for Danish Art (2005); The Golden Islamic Age in Spain: Art, Architecture and Science in Cordoba and Granada (2006); and The Re-enchantment of Nature and Urban Space: Michael Singer Projects in Art, Design, and Environmental Regeneration (2011).

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Barbara Formis, PhD in Philosophy, is Assistant Professor of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art at the Sorbonne University (Paris I) in the department of Fine Arts and Art Theory. Her interests include pragmatism, phenomenology, performative thought, performance art, dance, and everyday life. She is a member of the Institut ACTE—Arts Créations Théories Esthétiques (UMR Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne and C.N.R.S.), a member of the French Society of Dance Research, and co-director of the Laboratory of Gesture. She has edited two collections of essays: Gestes à l’oeuvre [Gestures at work] (2008, 2013), Penser en corps: Soma-esthétique, art et philosophie [Thinking Through the Body: Somaesthetics, Art, and Philosophy] (2009), and she published a book in 2010 called Esthétique de la vie ordinaire. She has been director of Seminars at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris (2006-2007) and researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie of Maastricht (2006). She has training as a professional dancer and also works as a dramatist (for the choreographers Richard Siegal and Colette Sadler). She is currently working on two books: Manger, une philosophie [Eating, a Philosophy, forthcoming from Flammarion] and Esthétique de la performance culinaire [Aesthetics of Culinary Performance, forthcoming from P.U.F.]. Roberto Frega is researcher at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and Fellow of the Paris Institute of Advanced Studies. He has published two monographs on John Dewey’s philosophy, a book on contemporary theories of rationality in American Philosophy, a book on pragmatist moral and political philosophy, and more than twenty articles on contemporary moral and political philosophy. Besides several edited volumes on pragmatist philosophy, he has also edited a selection of Dewey’s epistemological essays. He is co-founder and co-executive editor of the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy. Satoshi Higuchi is Professor for Philosophy and Aesthetics of Body, Mind, and Culture at the Graduate School of Education, Hiroshima University, Japan. He studied Philosophy and Aesthetics of Sport and Body, and received a Ph.D. from the University of Tsukuba, Japan in 1983. He was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Tennessee in 1988-1989. Since 2003 he has been Coordinator for the Joint Research Project between Hiroshima University and the University of Graz, Austria. Among his many publications is “Eastern Mind-Body Theory and Somaesthetics,” included in Concepts of Aesthetic Education: Japanese and European Perspectives (2007). Dorota Koczanowicz, PhD, is the author of Doświadczenie sztuki, sztuka życia: Wymiary estetyki pragmatycznej [The Experience of Art and the Art of Living: Dimensions of Pragmatist Aesthetics] (2009). She also co-edited Między estetyzacją a emancypacją: Praktyki artystyczne w przestrzeni publicznej [Between Aesthetization and Emancipation: Artistic Practices in

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Public Sphere] (2010), Between Literature and Somaesthetics: On Richard Shusterman’s Pragmatism (2012), and Discussing Modernity: A Dialogue with Martin Jay (2013). She has done research at the John F. Kennedy Institute in Berlin and in Norway at The Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen (WAB). Currently she is working on a project concerning relations between food and art. Alexander Kremer is a habilitated associate professor of philosophy at the University of Szeged, Hungary. His professional field of interest includes hermeneutics, ethics, aesthetics and pragmatism, especially neopragmatism. He is the author of three books (Chapters from the History of Western Philosophy from Thales to Hume; Basic Ethics; Why Did Heidegger Become Heidegger?) and has published numerous articles on philosophical hermeneutics and Richard Rorty’s neopragmatism. He is the editor in chief of Pragmatism Today and was a Fulbright Visiting Professor at the UNCC for the year 2005-2006. Giovanni Maddalena, PhD, Roma Tre, is Aggregate Professor at the University of Molise. He works on American Philosophy, especially focusing on Charles S. Peirce and the classic pragmatists. In his monographs La lotta delle tradizioni: MacIntyre e la filosofia in America [The Clash of Traditions: MacIntyre and American Philosophy] (2000); Istinto razionale [Rational Instinct] (2003); and Metafisica per assurdo, [Metaphysics per Absurdum] (2009), and in his many articles in international journals (The Review of Metaphysics, Quaestio, Cognitio, European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, Paradigmi, Semiotica) he underlines the possibility of a philosophy of language based on signs and open to metaphysics. He edited, translated and introduced a large Italian anthology of Peirce’s work: C. S. Peirce, Scritti scelti (2005). He is co-founder and executive editor of the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy and cofounder and scientific director of the Vasily Grossman Study Center. He is founding member of Associazione Pragma, the Italian association for studies on pragmatism. He was a Fulbright Research Scholar for the year 2009-10. Wojciech Małecki is Assistant Professor of Literary Theory at the Institute of Polish Philology, University of Wrocław, Poland. His research interests include American pragmatism, continental philosophy, aesthetics, philosophy of the body, post-humanism, ecocriticism, American and Polish literatures, and popular culture. He is the author of Embodying Pragmatism (2010), the editor or co-editor of three collections of essays, and sits on the editorial board of Pragmatism Today and the Eger Journal of English Studies. He has published numerous book chapters and articles in journals such as The Oxford Literary Review, Foucault Studies, Angelaki, Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, and others.

220

Index

He has been a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (University of Edinburgh) and the Center for Body, Mind, and Culture (Florida Atlantic University), and an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellow at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies (Freie Universität Berlin). Richard Shusterman is the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities at Florida Atlantic University (Boca Raton) and Director of its Center for Body, Mind, and Culture. Author of Body Consciousness (2008) and Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics (2012), he has also written Surface and Depth (2002); Performing Live (2000); Practicing Philosophy (1997); and Pragmatist Aesthetics (1992, 2000, and translated into fourteen languages) as well as other books. A graduate of Hebrew University of Jerusalem (B.A. and M.A.) and Oxford University (D. Phil), he has held academic appointments in France, Germany, Israel, Japan, Italy, China, and Denmark, and has been awarded research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Commission, the American Council for Learned Societies, the Humboldt Foundation, and UNESCO. The French government has bestowed on him the title of Chevalier in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques. His research in somaesthetics is nourished by his work as a certified somatic educator in the Feldenkrais Method. Scott R. Stroud is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He specializes in the intersection between rhetoric and philosophy. He is author of the book Pragmatism and the Artful Life (2011), as well as a variety of publications on John Dewey’s aesthetic theory and its relevance to rhetorical experience. His research has been published in venues such as Philosophy & Rhetoric, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and the Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Krystyna Wilkoszewska, Ph.D., is Full Professor and Head of the Department of Aesthetics at the Institute of Philosophy, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland. Her main fields of interest are aesthetics, contemporary art, American pragmatism, postmodern philosophy and art, ecological and environmental aesthetics, new media art, Japanese aesthetics, and transcultural studies. She has authored, edited, and co-edited numerous publications, including Aesthetics of the Four Elements: Earth, Water, Fire, Air (2001), and Deconstruction and Reconstruction (2004). She is President of the Polish Association of Aesthetics and the founder and director of the John Dewey Research Center at the Jagiellonian University. She is also a Member of the Board of the Central European Pragmatist Forum.

INDEX Abrams, Jerold J., 6, 9, 141, Adorno, Theodor W., 24 Agamben, Giorgio, 183 Aiken, Henry David, 27, 31 Alexander, Frederick Matthias, 207–208 Alexander, Thomas M., 8–9, 27, 31– 32, 45 Allegri, Gregori, 150 Andrews, Lewis M., 214 Arendt, Hannah, 108, 165 Aristotle, 6–7, 120, 128–129, 140, 170–171, 183 Arluke, Arnold, 167 Arnold, Peter J., 9 Artaud, Antonin, 182 Ash, Caroline, 167 Bakke, Monika, 6–7 Baluska, Frantisek, 167 Barlow, Peter W., 167 Bartczak, Kacper, 5–6, 125 Barthes, Roland, 23 Bäumel, Sonja, 7, 156–157 Beardsley, Monroe C., 23 Bell, Clive, 84 Bergman, Ingmar, 6, 128, 134, 139 Berkeley, Elizabeth M., 28 Berleant, Arnold, 88–89, 93 Bernstein, Richard, 27, 32 Birke, Lynda, 160, 167 Bittman, Mark, 199 Bizet, Georges, 186 Björnstrand, Gunnar, 135 Bloom, Harold, 72–73 Bourdieu, Pierre, 24, 181 Bourgeois, Louise, 6, 144, 146, 151–152 Bourne, Randolphe, 17, 29 Braidotti, Rosi, 164, 167 Braque, Georges, 87, 110 Brillat–Savarin, Jean Anthelme,199, 201 Brown, Barbara, 215 Bruns, Gerald L., 112, 125 Bugaeva, Lyubov, 9 Bukdahl, Else Marie, 6, 152 Burke, Edmund, 147, 152 Byron, George, 188

Caroll, Noël, 44 Carpenter, Humphrey, 107 Case, Marlene, 32 Cezanne, Paul, 84, 110, 113 Chambers, Stephen, 25 Chamovitz, David, 161, 163, 167 Chaplin, Charlie, 190, 192 Chauviré, Christiane, 107 Cornaro, Luigi, 186 Corner, Philip, 176, 183 Costa, Beatriz da, 7, 157, 160, 167 Crick, Francis, 159 Crick, Nathan, 45 Critchley, Simon, 114–115, 125 Croce, Benedetto, 2, 20–21, 23, 30, 36, 45 D’Angelo, Paulo, 31 Danto, Arthur C., 141 Darwin, Charles, 90 Davidson, Donald, 1, 3, 5, 9, 111, 118–126 de Man, Paul, 72 Derrida, Jacques, 23, 72, 74, 180 Descartes, René, 64, 171, 183 Dewey, John, 1–9, 14–15, 17–24, 26– 31, 33–53, 55–61, 63, 72, 75, 77– 78, 80, 83, 84–93, 95–96, 109, 127–131, 134, 137, 139–141, 143– 144, 164, 169, 172–173, 177–179, 183, 185, 190–191, 201 Dickie, George, 45 Diderot, Denis, 171, 183 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 63–64 Diogenes of Sinope, 182 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 134 Dreon, Roberta, 31 Duchamp, Marcel, 56, 87 Eastman, Max, 41, 45 Ekerot, Bengt, 135 Eldridge, Michael, 9 Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 22–23, 170 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 3, 6, 31, 109, 128–130, 137–141, 196 Euler, Leonhard, 95, 107

222 Fabæk, Niels, 149 Feldenkrais, Moshe, 206–208, 214 Fish, Stanley, 1, 3–4, 22–23, 63, 72– 75, 79 Formis, Barbara 7, 9 Fott, David, 33, 45 Foucault, Michel, 24, 72, 165, 191, 206 Foxcroft, Louise, 186, 201 Frega, Roberto, 4, 61–62 Friedman, Ken, 176, 178 Fry, Roger, 84–85 Gadamer, Hans–Georg, 4, 23, 63–64, 66, 68–72, 74–75, 77–79 Garrard, Carol, 108 Garrard, John, 108 Garzón, Paco Calvo, 161, 167 Golden, John, 28 Goodman, Nelson, 1, 23 Gordon, Kate, 27, 31 Gorky, Maxim, 96 Gormley, Antony, 144, 146–147, 151–152 Graham, Elaine, 153, 155, 166–167 Gramsci, Antonio, 182 Green, Alyce, 215 Green, Elmer, 215 Grossman, Vasily, 5, 96–98, 100–101, 103–106, 108 Grosz, Elizabeth, 154, 166 Haack, Susan, 9 Hall, Matthew, 164, 167 Haraway, Donna, 167 Hartmann, Geoffrey, 72 Hartmann, Nicolai, 68 Hass, Robert, 186, 201 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 64, 73, 171, 183 Heidegger, Martin, 4, 63–72, 74–75, 77–79 Hein, Jeppe, 6, 149–151 Hejinian, Lyn, 112, 125 Higgis, Dick, 175 Higgins, Hannah, 176, 183 Higuchi, Satoshi, 7–8, 213–215 Hikasa, Katsushi, 215 Hird, Myra J., 158, 167 Hirsch, Eric D., 23

Index Hitchcock, Alfred, 141 Hitler, Adolf, 99 Homer, 138 Houser, Nathan, 28–29 Husserl, Edmund, 180 Inoue, Vimara, 215 Isaac, Glynn Ll., 201 Isenberg, Arnold, 29 Ito, Yoshihiro, 215 Iwaki, Ken–ichi, 204, 214 Iwashita, Toru, 215 Jackson, Philip W., 45 James, William, 1, 3, 13–18, 26–29, 31, 47, 63, 73, 110–111, 123–124, 126, 185 Jasui, Takeshi, 207–208, 211 Jay, Martin, 33, 39, 45, 143 Jensen, Per Bak, 145 Jespersen, Line Marie Bruun, 149, 152 Johnson, Geir, 150 Johnson, Mark, 1 Johnston, James Scott, 24, 30 Joyce, James, 119–121, 123 Kandinsky, Wassily, 87 Kant, Immanuel, 3, 16, 64, 73, 88, 172, 181, 183 Kaplan, Abraham, 31 Karlins, Marvin, 214 Kasami, Yasuko, 207, 214 Keaton, Buster, 6, 128, 132, 134, 139 Keijzer, Fred, 161, 167 Kenner, Hugh, 112 Kido, Roshi Inoue, 194–195 Kidron, Beeban, 152 King, Denise 161 Klee, Paul, 113 Kleinsorge, Hellmuth, 215 Klintberg, Bengt, Af, 7, 175–176, 178, 183 Kloesel, Christian J. W., 28–29 Klumbies, Gerhard, 215 Knowles, Alison, 7, 176–178, 183 Koczanowicz, Dorota, 7, 9, 28 Koczanowicz, Leszek, 1 Koechlin, Florianne, 167 Konno Tetsuo, 215 Koopman, Colin, 8 Korsmeyer, Carolyn, 10

Index

223

Kremer, Alexander, 4, 79–80 Kubrick, Stanley, 6, 128, 137–139 Kudla, Allison, 7, 162–163 Kuhn, Thomas, 73 Kumakura, Takaaki, 215 Kumamoto, Minayori, 215 Kuspit, David, 87, 93 Kuvalayananda, Swami, 208, 214

Nakamura, Hajime, 208 Natorp, Paul, 68 Nideffer, Robert, 157 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 73, 109, 186, 200 Nishino, Kono, 210, 215 Noguchi, Michizo, 209–210, 215 Norheim, Marit Benthe, 147–151 Noske, Barbara, 154, 159, 166

Lenin, Vladimir IIyich, 97 Levin, Jonathan, 32 Levinson, Jerrold, 24, 30 Levinson, Stephen C., 152 Lévi–Strauss, Claude, 173 Locke, Alain, 1, 31 Luckow, Dirk, 146, 152 Lukas, Neil, 162 Luthe, Wolfgang, 215 Lyotard, Jean–François, 147

Ono, Kyoko, 215

MacIntyre, Alasdair, 52 Maciunas, George, 176 Maddalena, Giovanni, 5, 61, 108 Małecki, Wojciech, 19, 28, 77, 79, 143, 151 Mancuso, Stefano, 167 Mann, Thomas, 77 Marder, Michael, 166, 168 Margolis, Joseph, 1, 3–4, 23, 47, 54– 62, 96, 107 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 174, 183 Marsoobian, Armen, 31, 41, 46 Masaoka, Miya, 7, 162–163 Matisse, Henri, 84 Maya, Jim, 177–178 McDermott, John, 89, 93 Mead, George Herbert, 105 Meares, Ainslie, 215 Menand, Louis, 123, 126 Merleau–Ponty, Maurice, 141 Michael, Mike, 167 Miller, J. Hillis, 72, 114–115, 125 Misak, Cheryl, 9 Mitchell, William J. T., 30 Monet, Claude, 84 Moore, George Edward, 23 Mueller, Kristen, 167 Mullis, Eric, 9 Mumford, Lewis, 17–18, 29

Pappas, Gregory F., 45 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 1, 3, 5, 13– 15, 17–18, 26, 28–29, 47, 58, 63, 95–96, 98–99, 105, 108, 110, 125 Pennisi, Elizabeth, 167 Pepper, Stephen, 2, 20–21, 27, 30–31, 36, 45 Picasso, Pablo, 87, 110 Pilkington, Ed, 166 Pollock, Jackson, 110 Pound, Ezra, 110–113, 115–117, 121–125 Price, Huw, 61 Proust, Marcel, 182 Pryba, Russel, 10 Rabinow, Paul, 72 Rae, Patricia, 125 Raz, Joseph, 62 Recaman, Juan, 157 Redzepi, René, 199 Reese, Mark, 214 Renoir, Auguste, 84 Rogge, Henning, 145 Rorty, Richard, 1, 3–4, 9–10, 19, 23–24, 29, 47, 63, 72–76, 78–79, 119, 129, 140 Rose, Nikolas, 165, 168 Roth, Dieter, 175 Rothko, Mark, 110 Salaverria, Heidi, 31 Santayana, George,124 Sartwell, Crispin, 42, 46 Sasaki, Yuji, 215 Sato, Hitomi, 215 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 73 Schiller, Friedrich, 172 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Ernst, 64

Daniel

224 Schultz, Johannes Heinrich, 215 Schwartz, Gary E., 214 Seigfried, Charlene Haddock, 27, 32 Sellars, Wilfrid Stalker, 50 Seltz, Dorothy, 175 Shakespeare, William, 13, 120–121, 123 Shepherd, Gordon, 187 Shusterman, Richard, 1–3, 6–10, 28– 31, 34, 38, 45, 61, 63, 72, 75–77, 79, 90–93, 96, 107, 109, 125, 129– 130, 137–140, 143–144, 148, 151, 152, 153–155, 158–159, 164, 166– 168, 170, 183, 185, 189–197, 200– 201, 203–207, 210–215 Skrupskelis, Ignas K., 28 Smith, Orla, 167 Socrates, 207 Spoerri, Daniel, 175 Squier, Susan Merrill, 165, 168 Stalin, Joseph, 96, 99 Stevens, Holly, 126 Stevens, Wallace, 5–6, 109–111, 113– 117, 121–125 Stiles, Kristine, 183 Stroud, Scott R., 3–4, 10, 45–46 Stuckey, Barb, 201 Susumu, Yo, 209, 214 Suzuki, Mamoru, 215 Swearington, Donald, 162 Sydow, Max von, 135 Tan, Sor–hoon, 29 Tanaka, Satoshi, 211–212, 215 Tezuka, Chizuko, 215 Thélot, Jérôme, 180, 183 Thoreau, Henry David, 196–198, 201

Index Tiravanija, Rirkrit, 188 Todaka, Masafumi, 215 Tolkien, John Ronald, 95, 107 Trewavas, Anthony, 161 Turner, Bryan S., 10 Vailati, Giovanni, 107 Väkevä, Lauri, 151 Vautier, Ben, 175, 183 Venter, Craig, 153, 166 Vinekar, S. L., 208 Vitruvius, 91 Volkmann, Dieter, 167 Warhol, Andy, 141 Waters, Alice 198, 200 Welsch, Wolfgang, 204, 214 White, Hayden, 72 Whyte, Iain Boyd, 152 Wilkoszewska, Krystyna, 4, 5, 31 Wilson, Joel, 32 Wilson, Stephen, 155, 167 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 23, 63, 95, 109, 182, 191 Wrangham, Richard, 189, 201 Xenophon, 207 Yamada, Kuniko, 208 Yamamoto, Atsuhisa, 215 Yokoyama, Chiaki, 215 Yoshino, Kaori, 208, 214 Zalamea, Fernando, 107 Zemach–Bersin, David, 214 Zemach–Bersin, Kaethe, 214

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