Over at Jacob Russell’s Barking Dog– what a marvelous blog title so full of rich resonances! –I came across a little enigmatic aphorism that I found somewhat jarring. In response to my post on realism and speculative realism, Russell, like the Oracle at Delphi, intones that “aesthetics is lost without ontology.” This is a gorgeous and mysterious little statement that appeals even to the object-oriented ontologist– or, to try on some new “clothes” the ontographist (certainly a more appealing term than “onticology”. Steven Shaviro, for instance, has recently shown brilliantly– and I’m still pissed at him for not contributing to The Speculative Turn as he absolutely belongs there –how aesthetics is deeply ontological in the realist, non-correlationist, sense. He does this through an imbrication of the aesthetic ontology of Whitehead, the aesthetics of Kant (in a reading that can only be described as “Harmanian” in its daring misinterpretation that redeems), and of Deleuze, showing that aesthetics is not simply a human affair.
However, I suppose I find Jacob’s aphorism so jarring because I’m inclined to invert it. This for both philosophical reasons and personal reasons. A few years ago I had the pleasure of teaching an Aesthetics course here at Collin. This was a rare treat as, while I have the freedom to assign whatever texts I might like, it gave me the opportunity to teach a theme based course and work with an eclectic body of students coming from both the fine arts and philosophy. One of the things I discovered is the manner in which throughout the history of philosophy questions of knowledge, reality, truth, and ethics are so tightly interwoven with questions of aesthetics. Although aesthetics is often portrayed as a marginal branch of philosophy– with ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics being the “big three” –I am willing to wager that the aesthetic theory of a philosopher contains, in fractal form, the inner kernel and truth of any philosopher. I haven’t yet developed a theory as to why this is the case, but what I found again and again as we explored the aesthetic theories of the tradition was that the ontological, epistemological, and ethical questions of whatever philosophy we were studying converged on aesthetic issues. Indeed, I’m even willing to suggest that we can distinguish philosophy from non-philosophy in terms of whether a thinkers body of thought contains an aesthetic theory. In this respect, I’m led to wonder whether it is indeed the case that aesthetics is nothing without ontology. Might it instead be the reverse, that ontology (and epistemology) is nothing without aesthetics? Here, of course, aesthetics would have to be understood as a trifecta: a theory of sensibility (aesthesis) or better yet “appearing” or “manifestation”, a theory of art as of central ontological concern an revelation, and a theory of creation.
Of course, all of this is very well a bias on my part. In many respects, I think we all dream of being something other than we are. For me, I always dreamed of being an artist. I remember the awed wonder I experienced when I watched another child draw for the very first time. There, in the first or second grade, I watched, full of envy, as that child inscribed images on paper, bringing another world into existence. It was a simple depiction of the space shuttle, but nonetheless I was hooked at that very moment. What could be better, more miraculous, more powerful, more valuable, than this power to bring worlds into being? Oh how deeply I ached to draw, to paint, to write stories, to create poetry. I was hooked. And sadly, I just didn’t seem to be wired in that way. It could even be said that I first pursued philosophy out of a desire to do art… Philosophy, I thought, would allow me to thematize worlds, to create worlds, to create. Unfortunately it didn’t turn out that way, but it could be said that a red thread linking all the philosophers I identify with and work on is aesthetics. My compensation for this creative impotence is ontological: the only universe worth living in and affirming is a creative universe.
In this respect, I always find it curious how different intellectual practices encounter one another. One of the things I constantly encounter among my friends engaged in other practices and disciplines is a sort of “philosophy envy” or “philosophy insecurity”. How many times have I heard someone in literary studies, a social science, or engaged in an artistic practice say “what you do is rigorous and actually does something!” I’m always surprised by this and by this anxiety in the face of philosophy. If that’s the case, then it is because I believe, above all, that philosophy is a parasitic discourse aimed at thinking our present. I do not mean this in a pejorative sense at all. There is nothing to disparage in meta-theory. Rather, what I mean is that the philosopher is always a becoming-other, carried along by those who are not so much attempting to think the present, as by those who are making the present: activists, scientists, painters, poets, musicians, mathematicians, and so on. Philosophy needs all these makers as the datums that course through them, giving them the material for what is to be thought, for what provokes thought. And hopefully, in turn, philosophy can add concepts that assist these others in their making, and can help to resituate questions and problems, assisting in the birth of new possibilities for practice and engagement. I suppose I’m still that first grader gazing in awe at those who make.
July 15, 2009 at 6:42 am
“I am willing to wager that the aesthetic theory of a philosopher contains, in fractal form, the inner kernel and truth of any philosopher.”
You are perhaps not alone in thinking this. I once had a professor who insisted that the best way to get into Hegel, in terms of the clarity of presentation, is reading his Lectures on Aesthetics. I’m not really qualified to say whether he was right, but I am certainly glad I bought and read them.
July 15, 2009 at 9:01 am
[…] 15, 2009 Levi with ANOTHER GOOD PIECE, this one on the relation between aesthetics and […]
July 15, 2009 at 10:19 am
Terry Eagleton once said at a talk I attended that aesthetics was misplaced theology. Perhaps us moderns are just updating the profile.
July 15, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Levi, thanks for your generous comments on my book. And I would like to apologize again for not providing an essay for The Speculative Turn. It is really a matter of speed and urgency. I just write too slowly, and (always, it seems) have too much of a backlog, to have had any chance of doing an adequate job. I really admire how you work through ideas on your blog; and I also admire (and am envious, in fact) of how Graham writes — and gives useful accounts of how he does it on his blog as well. But my own pace is far slower (which I do not regard as a virtue, but have learned that I must resign myself to).
July 15, 2009 at 3:06 pm
No worries, Steven. I was just poking fun your way and expressing my appreciation for your work.
July 15, 2009 at 3:17 pm
[…] In what is philosophy? on July 15, 2009 at 10:16 am in two very interesting posts, (here and here) larval subjects is exploring something he is calling, separately, the ‘factory of […]
July 15, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Cezanne is reported to have said that here was he wanted to paint a still life of apples and oranges as the masters had painted images of the Modonna. Is not the aesthetic problem for the artist always a question of Being?
It’s the critic who turns it into theology.
July 15, 2009 at 4:09 pm
I have no proof, but I would wager that it is possible to “say” things in fiction, poetry, maybe even music and visual art, that it is simply not possible to say in expository language.
What intrigues me is the possibility that those things might be philosophical things.
On a semi-related note, I was blogging a couple days ago about the idea that a philosopher’s ontology is going to rely heavily on his or her “tastes”. Without wading all the way in, I’d say that aesthetics is central because it is the root of normativity.
July 15, 2009 at 5:05 pm
While we’re doing interactive links…
Were the Cave Painters our first metaphysicians?
July 19, 2009 at 2:27 am
I suppose I’m still that first grader gazing in awe at those who make.
{this part of the comment you can edit}
Mozart to Salieri: Oh yeah then why won’t you ever fuck me when I make all this amazing art for you???
Dr Sinthome I went into psychology because the family unit prohibited me from studying art, but rebelled later and studied art in the Netherlands. For a long long time my main professor was annoyed at the semiotics and the analyses, the kind of stuff that K-punk and Shaviro write, precisely for the reasons you outline – the maker cannot simultaneously occupy the position of the artist and of the theoretician, because this reflection somehow cancels out the plurality of meanings that the art directly generates, by assigning them to what is in fact a personal agenda, by stealing them in a way. As soon as you analyze art, the creativity is all gone.
And indeed I am often amazed at the amount of stupidity coming out of such analyses, for example people discussing animation without being able to draw, or people immersing themselves in the onticology of Harry Potter without a sense of the magic.
Zizek’s adumbrations on film are especially annoying this way given his near-total miscomprehension of film language and the filmmaking process.
However there is ONE possibility in theory, and I have to admit I have only so far seen it in Shaviro’s work about art, that is to make the analysis itself a work of art, something that generates worlds as well. Shaviro’s texts are ostensibly reviews and opinions, but they have a very creative effect on me because they shift my attention, turn my gaze, throw me in completely unexpected directions. I go back to his texts much like you go to your favorite director’s new movie.