Aesthetics as Phenomenology

Günter Figal, Jerome Veith

Description

Connecting aesthetic experience with our experience of nature or with other cultural artifacts, Aesthetics as Phenomenology focuses on what art means for cognition, recognition, and affect—how art changes our everyday disposition or behavior. Günter Figal engages in a penetrating analysis of the moment at which, in our contemplation of a work of art, reaction and thought confront each other. For those trained in the visual arts and for more casual viewers, Figal unmasks art as a decentering experience that opens further possibilities for understanding our lives and our world.

Translator's Foreword
Introduction
Chapter One: Art, Philosophically
1. Why Art?
2. Which Art?
3. Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics
Chapter Two: Beauty
4. Free Play
5. Appearances and Things
6. Showing and Self-Showing
Chapter Three: Art Forms
7. Arts
8. Essential Determinations
9. Mixtures
Chapter Four: Nature
10. Oppositions
11. Limits and Inclusions
12. Primordial Appearance
Chapter Five: Space
13. Places
14. Emptiness
15. Here
Bibliography
Index of Names and Subjects
Index of Terms

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Philosophie de l'esprit
• Esthétique et philosophie de l'art
• Movements
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Phenomenology
• Aesthetics

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 02 février 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253015655
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

AESTHETICS AS PHENOMENOLOGY
S TUDIES IN C ONTINENTAL T HOUGHT
John Sallis, editor
Consulting Editors
Robert Bernasconi
William L. McBride
Rudolph Bernet
J. N. Mohanty
John D. Caputo
Mary Rawlinson
David Carr
Tom Rockmore
Edward S. Casey
Calvin O. Schrag
Hubert Dreyfus
Reiner Sch rmann
Don Ihde
Charles E. Scott
David Farrell Krell
Thomas Sheehan
Lenore Langsdorf
Robert Sokolowski
Alphonso Lingis
Bruce W. Wilshire
David Wood
A ESTHETICS
AS
P HENOMENOLOGY
THE APPEARANCE OF THINGS
G NTER FIGAL
Translated by
JEROME VEITH
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Published in German as G nter Figal, Erscheinungsdinge 2010 Mohr Siebeck GmbH Co. KG T bingen English translation 2015 by Indiana University Press All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-01551-8 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-01558-7 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-01565-5 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15
For A. M. E. S. with love
Enough now of preposterous theories. No conceivable theory can mislead us with respect to the principle of all principles: that every originally giving intuition is a legitimating source of cognition , that everything that offers itself to us originarily in intuition (in its corporeal actuality, so to speak) is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being , but also only within the limits in which it is presented there .
-Edmund Husserl, Ideas I
CONTENTS
Preface
Translator s Foreword
Introduction
1. Art, Philosophically
2. Beauty
3. Art Forms
4. Nature
5. Space
Notes
Bibliography
Index of Names
Index of Subjects
Index of Terms
PREFACE
Upon completing my book Gegenst ndlichkeit , which appeared in 2006 [the English translation appeared as Objectivity in 2010], I decided to undertake a new, intensive engagement with art. I wanted to know in more detail how the objective itself is constituted, and I wanted to clarify this by means of artworks, the objects par excellence. The present work also became a demonstration of gratitude to all the artists and artworks that have enriched my life. I am also grateful to all who have assisted in the creation of the volume.
First in this regard is my wife Antonia Egel, without whom the book could not have begun and without whom it could not have been completed. There is not a single important idea we have not put to the test conversationally, no aspect we have not scrutinized together in its correctness and consistency. Even the experiences of art that nurture the book were made together.
My thanks also go to my friends Damir Barbari , Rudolf Bernet, Gottfried Boehm, Donatella Di Cesare, Lore H hn, Toshitaka Mochizuki, Dennis J. Schmidt, Manfred Trojahn, Bernhard Zimmermann, and special thanks this time to John and Jerry Sallis, who made my visit to Fallingwater possible.
An invitation from the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) to spend my winter semester 2009-2010 as a Fellow of the School for Language and Literature made it possible to complete the present work calmly. I would like to thank the other fellows in the program, especially Richard Eldridge, Rolf-Peter Janz, and Marisa Siguan, for their stimulating conversations. I extend my heartfelt thanks to the literature director of the School for Language and Literature, Werner Frick.
Finally, I would like to thank David Espinet, Tobias Keiling, and Nikola Mirkovi for their thorough reading and helpful responses, and Anna Hirsch and Ole Meinefeld for their careful editing of the text.
G nter Figal Freiburg im Breisgau May 2010
TRANSLATOR S FOREWORD
This is a book about the experience of art. As the title Aesthetics as Phenomenology suggests, G nter Figal takes a phenomenological approach to aesthetic experience, rendering an account of what unifies it and distinguishes it from other experiences. In taking this approach, he aims to avoid the many pitfalls and dead ends of prior aesthetic theories, which in his view have either failed to delineate the proper object of aesthetics or to engage with it on adequate terms. The book s title also indicates, conversely, the significance that aesthetic experience holds for phenomenological philosophy itself. It is by way of an artwork s thing-like appearance, according to Figal, that we first encounter spatiality as such, thereby experiencing the very conditions of our embodied access to the world and unselfconsciously performing a Husserlian . (The German title, Erscheinungsdinge , rendered here as the subtitle The Appearance of Things , captures this prominence of phenomenality.)
The book is thus instructive in two directions at once. On the one hand, it shows that philosophy can still-and is perhaps now especially prepared to-contribute to the understanding of art and its enriching effect. Accordingly, Figal considers a wide range of artworks, noting every aspect of how they appear, and deftly engaging the history of thought in his analyses. On the other hand, we see that art provides a corrective to philosophy itself, directing our attention to a relational, lived space of which artworks are exemplary appearances. In this regard, the works considered in the present volume are more than mere illustrations of a theory; they instead shift our gaze precisely to the appearance of things.
Both of these directions circulate in the text s overall sensibility. It is clear not only that Figal has experienced firsthand the artworks of which he speaks, but that he has thought deeply about them. What pervades the book is a sense of astonishment concerning our very ability to have such experiences and converse about them. Readers will thus likely encounter familiar artworks in fresh ways, and glean inspiration to discover and discuss new ones. For those readers interested in the broader conceptual underpinnings of the present volume, I highly recommend Figal s presentation of relational ontology in his prior systematic work, Gegenst ndlichkeit (translated by Theodore D. George as Objectivity: The Hermeneutical and Philosophy and published by the State University of New York Press in 2010).
I have tried throughout the volume to retain the author s tone and style and to maintain his clarity at all costs. This meant, in many instances, formulating terms and phrases that are perhaps not standard English usage but whose meaning is nevertheless immediately apparent. Thus, readers will encounter adjectival locutions like decentered and imagistic, as well as substantivizations such as closedness and producibility. These are often novel constructions even in the original, but they are built from everyday language and are intended precisely to avoid conceptual rigidity.
Much of the book s terminology, moreover, is guided by its dialogical engagement with ideas spanning the history of philosophy. One of Figal s great strengths is to develop his argumentation by way of these ideas, and in the process glean helpful phrasings from his interlocutors. Where these prove crucial or interesting to the argument, I have kept the original term in square brackets. As the primary sources serve mainly to advance the present book s systematic intentions, however, I have chosen not to meticulously align Figal s citations with their counterparts in existing English translations. Thus, unless otherwise specified, all translations of French or German sources are my own. Page numbers in parentheses refer to the source in the note that precedes them.
It has been a pleasure to translate this text and to work with Professor Figal directly in its preparation. I have learned a great deal in the process, and I trust that anyone who reads the book will have a similarly enriching experience.
Jerome Veith Seattle, Washington July 2013
AESTHETICS AS PHENOMENOLOGY
Introduction
The question of the essence of art no longer stands at the center of philosophy. This may have to do with art itself-with the fact that it barely still makes religious or life-reforming claims, or dissolves traditional structures and thus compels reflection. Even the effective but short-lived totalizing of aesthetic relativity under the name of postmodernism, which was also to envelop philosophy, has meanwhile become historical. As concerns art, a state of normalcy has come to dominate. The entrenchments, provocations, and absolutizations of emphatic modernism have passed; the postmodern attempt to replace emphatic modernism with a hodgepodge of styles reminiscent of the Gr nderzeit has remained devoid of consequences and appears in retrospect as no more than a curiosity. By now, the modern artistic problematics developed in the nineteenth and especially in the twentieth century, as well as their corresponding modes of composition, are considered valid without question. One has entered the state of a placid modernism, which need no longer assert itself over against tradition and thus combines casually with it. Unlike emphatic modernism with its challenges, placid modernism appears to be less compelling of philosophical reflection.
There is another reason that art no longer counts as an overriding theme for philosophy. Philosophical reflection on art has been replaced more and mor