p

Aesthetic Education

p
The Warwick Journal of Philosophy

The Warwick Journal of Philosophy

Articles Volume 33 (2021)
The Ethical Dimension of Everyday Aesthetics
Yuriko Saito

The Intersection of Moral and Aesthetic Factors in the Process of Growing Up

Ronald Moore
Aesthetic Education
Schiller and the Deskilling of Aesthetic Education
Tom Huhn

Art’s Underthought: Art, Presupposition and Immorality

Zoe Walker

Aesthetic Alchemy: Feature Construction and Conceptual Enrichment through Literature

Johan Heemskerk

A Symposium on Catherine Homan’s A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education: The Play of the In-Between
Catherine Homan, Rebecca Longtin, Corey McCall, and Jessica S. Elkayam

Volume 33 (2021)

p The Warwick Journal of Philosophy / Volume 33 (2021)

www.plijournal.com
[email protected]
ISBN 1 897646 31 3
 Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy

Pli is edited and produced by members of the Graduate School of the

Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick.

Volume 33: Aesthetic Education

ISBN 1 897646 31 3
ISSN 1367-3769
© 2021 Pli, individual contributions © their authors, unless otherwise
stated.
Front Cover Image: By Luca Nicoletti,
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Pli, The Warwick Journal of Philosophy
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Email: [email protected]
Website: www.plijournal.com
 Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy

Pli is edited and produced by members of the Graduate School of the

Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick.

Volume 33: Aesthetic Education

ISBN 1 897646 31 3
ISSN 1367-3769
© 2021 Pli, individual contributions © their authors, unless otherwise
stated.
Front Cover Image: By Luca Nicoletti,
https://unsplash.com/photos/O8CHmj0zgAg.

Volume Editors: Ahilleas Rokni and Diogo Carneiro

Copy-editor: Ash Finn

Reviewers:

Matt Chennells Gianluca Lorenzini

Daniel Davis Joe Schafer
Leonello Bazzurro Gambi Zak Stinchcombe
João Lemos Federico Testa
Giulia Lorenzi

Contributions, Orders, Subscriptions, Enquiries:

Pli, The Warwick Journal of Philosophy
Department of Philosophy
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL UK

Email: [email protected]
Website: www.plijournal.com
 1

Aesthetic Education

The Ethical Dimension of Everyday Aesthetics

Yuriko Saito 3

The Intersection of Moral and Aesthetic Factors in the

Process of Growing Up

Ronald Moore 38

Schiller and the Deskilling of Aesthetic Education

Tom Huhn 57

Art’s Underthought: Art, Presupposition and Immorality

Zoe Walker 89

Aesthetic Alchemy: Feature Construction and

Conceptual Enrichment through Literature

Johan Heemskerk 117

 2

A Symposium on Catherine Homan’s A Hermeneutics

of Poetic Education: The Play of the In-Between

Catherine Homan, Rebecca Longtin, Corey McCall,

and Jessica S. Elkayam 147
 3

The Ethical Dimension of Everyday Aesthetics

YURIKO SAITO

Everyday aesthetics was recently established to expand the scope of aesthetics

discourse. Its advocates hold that a faithful reflection of our aesthetic life requires a

more diverse and multi-faceted content than the experience of beauty and fine arts, the

primary subjects of the Anglo-American aesthetics during the twentieth century.

Besides broadening the arena of aesthetics, everyday aesthetics has further agendas,

one of which is to illuminate the significant role aesthetics plays in our ethical life. This

paper discusses several ways in which aesthetic experience and aesthetic sensibility

cultivated through our management of everyday life contributes to supporting the

ethical mode of living.

1. Enrichment of Aesthetic Life and Its Ethical Implications

One contribution everyday aesthetics makes to our aesthetic life is its enrichment. Art

and beauty generally stand out in our life. In particular, art in modern times has been

experienced in a setting, such as in a museum, a concert hall, or a theatre, that is

demarcated from the daily flow of everyday life. Similarly, beauty captivates us,

momentarily takes us out of the mundane humdrum. These aesthetic highlights tend to

overshadow other parts of our life experiences. Everyday aesthetics encourages us to

attend to those objects, environments, and activities that are usually neglected on our
 4

aesthetic radar that has been calibrated to catch memorable standouts. We generally

manage our lives by interacting with objects and surroundings focusing on their

practical values and, when they are working well, they tend to be invisible.1 We take

them for granted and pay little aesthetic attention. Little do we realise that what may

appear to be trivial, ordinary, and nondescript can have fascinating features and stories

behind them, only if we pay attention and seek knowledge about their history.

One of the contributions everyday aesthetics makes is to encourage

attentiveness to those invisible aspects of our daily life that are usually considered to

be aesthetic misfits because of their predominantly utilitarian values. As one of the

advocates of everyday aesthetics, Thomas Leddy, specifies in his book title, everyday

aesthetics promotes appreciation of The Extraordinary in the Ordinary.2 He encourages

drawing inspirations from the artistic vision presented by various artists whose works

help sharpen our sensibility and imagination. By doing so, we find a treasure trove of

aesthetic gems buried in our management of daily life.

In addition, everyday aesthetics makes a case for turning those things toward

which we normally adopt a negative aesthetic attitude into something positive. One of

the best examples is those objects which are deemed imperfect because they show wear

and tear, the material’s own ageing, and accidental damage, the fate of most artifacts,

as well as our own bodies. Particularly today, many of us consumers are manipulated

into thinking of the identity of a manufactured object as its mint condition at the end of

1
I will discuss Martin Heidegger’s view on this point later.
2
Thomas Leddy, The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life (Peterborough:
Broadview Press, 2012).
 5

the production process and regarding any change afterwards as degradation, a fall from

grace, except for items such as jeans and carpentry tools that need to be broken in

through use. This ‘productionist bias’ or ‘production-centred ethos’, terms coined by a

technology scholar Steven Jackson, leads to all kinds of environmental and political

problems associated with over-production, consumption, and disposal.3 Often gaining

inspirations from the Japanese wabi aesthetics and the eighteenth century British

picturesque that created the cult of ruins, everyday aesthetics encourages us to question

our preconceived idea about what the aesthetic value of an artifact amounts to and

challenge the productionist bias that privileges the pristine and perfect appearance of

an artifact.4

Everyday aesthetics thus helps broaden the aesthetic arena not only by going

beyond art and beauty but also by including those which normally do not garner

aesthetic attention or invoke negative aesthetic reactions. Such expansion of the

aesthetic palette cannot but enrich our aesthetic life. In addition, it also promotes an

ethical mode of being in the world. Our aesthetic indifference or negativity toward

many objects and activities in our daily life results from a self-focused mode of our

interactions with them. That is, our primary interest in them is how they serve our

3
Steven J. Jackson, ‘Rethinking Repair’, in Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality,
and Society, ed. by Tarleton Gillespie, et al (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2014), pp. 221-239.
4
Wabi aesthetics, often associated with imperfection and insufficiency, was established to accompany
the art of tea ceremony in Japan during sixteenth century. It celebrates the unique beauty of things such
as a cracked bowl and a lacquerware showing wear and tear. See Kōshirō Haga’s ‘The Wabi Aesthetic
Through the Ages’, trans. by Martin Collcutt. in Tea in Japan: Essays on the History of Chanoyu, ed.
by. Paul Varley and Isao Kumakura (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989), pp.195-230, and my
‘The Japanese Aesthetics of Imperfection and Insufficiency’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, 55 (1997), pp. 377-85.
 6

practical needs and aesthetic preferences. We are not experiencing them on their own

terms, apart from, or irrespective of, our specific interests.

One of the best-known characterisations of aesthetic experience is

disinterestedness proposed by Immanuel Kant. It is because, he claims, that ‘every

interest spoils the judgment of taste and takes from its impartiality’.5 Despite various

criticisms, even the critics of this notion, such as Arnold Berleant, agree that

disinterestedness captures a salient feature of aesthetic experience: ‘directed attention

and open receptivity’.6 Berleant agrees that disinterestedness ‘urges us to an open-

minded acceptance in appreciation, a willingness to accept without prejudice sounds,

colours, materials, images, and forms that may be strangely dissonant with our

customary experience of the arts’.7 This is an attitude that is necessary for an ethical

mode of interactions with others.

John Dewey’s observation about the moral function of art is apropos regarding

the moral value of aesthetic experience in general. He points out that ‘we are now

habituated to one mode of satisfaction and we take our own attitude of desire and

purpose to be so inherent in all human nature as to give the measure of all works of art,

as constituting the demand which all works of art meet and should satisfy’.8 But it is

critical that we not identify our own narrowly circumscribed perspective formed

through a specific set of experiences as the one that applies to all. In our effort to

5
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, tr. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press, 1974), p. 58 (sec.
13).
6
Arnold Berleant, Re-thinking Aesthetics: Rogue Essays on Aesthetics and the Arts (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2004), p. 45.
7
Berleant, Re-thinking, p. 45.
8
John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Capricorn Press, 1958), p. 332.
 7

overcome our ego-centric perspective and life experience, aesthetic appreciation of art

particularly from cultures different from our own, either geographically or historically,

is instrumental. ‘Works of art are means by which we enter, through imagination and

the emotions they evoke into other forms of relationship and participation than our

own’.9 Hence, ‘the moral function of art […] is to remove prejudice, do away with the

scales that keep the eye from seeing tear away the veils due to wont and custom, perfect

the power to perceive’.10 In order for good art to take me out of my own familiar world,

however, I must be able and willing to practise aesthetic engagement. The invitation of

good art for me to enter its world, in the words of Joseph Kupfer, places ‘the burden of

entering into an open-ended, indeterminate creative process’ without any rules to

follow.11 I gain ‘responsive freedom’, but it also comes with an ‘aesthetic

responsibility’.12

The observation that this ethical mode of open-mindedness, respectfulness, and

humility is needed for the aesthetic experience of the other in general, not only art, is

shared by a number of thinkers from different disciplines and cultural backgrounds. Let

me give several examples. Iris Murdoch calls this stance ‘unselfing’. Concerned with

the fact that ‘our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-

preoccupied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals the world’, she claims that

‘anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity and

9
Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 333.
10
Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 325.
11
Joseph Kupfer, Experience as Art: Aesthetics in Everyday Life (Albany: SUNY Press, 1983), p. 71.
12
Kupfer, Experience as Art, p. 73, p. 77.
 8

realism is to be connected with virtue’.13 Consequently, she regards the appreciation of

good art as the reward for successful unselfing, which helps one ‘transcend selfish and

obsessive limitations of personality and can enlarge the sensibility’.14 She uses the term

‘detachment’ to refer to disinterestedness in the sense interpreted above and states that

‘this exercise of detachment is difficult and valuable whether the thing contemplated is

a human being or the root of a tree or the vibration of a colour or a sound’. 15 It is clear

that what we need to detach from is our self-regarding interests, but not from the other,

whether another person or an object.

In her argument for the compatibility of beauty and justice, as well as beauty’s

role in assisting justice, Elaine Scarry discusses how the experience of beauty is

facilitated by ‘radical decentering’.16 This shift of one’s orientation triggered by the

experience of beauty requires understanding of the other on its, not our own, terms:

Letting the ground rotate beneath us several inches, so that when we

land, we find we are standing in a different relation to the world than

we were a moment before. […] We willingly cede our ground to the

thing that stands before us.17

13
Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1970), p. 82. Emphasis in original.
14
Murdoch, Sovereignty, p. 85.
15
Murdoch, Sovereignty, p. 64, emphasis original.
16
Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 109-115.
17
Scarry, On Beauty, p. 112.
 9

For Scarry, beauty can be experienced not only in works of art but in ordinary objects

and persons we meet in our daily life. Furthermore, ‘the way one’s daily unmindfulness

of the aliveness of others is temporarily interrupted in the presence of a beautiful

person’ may also take place ‘in the presence of a beautiful bird, mammal, fish, plant’.18

That this other-regarding stance applies to nature, as suggested by Scarry, is

also recognised by other thinkers as well. For example, Yi-Fu Tuan, a cultural

geographer, states that ‘one kind of definition of a good person, or a moral person, is

that that person does not impose his or her fantasy on another. That is, he’s willing to

acknowledge the reality of other individuals, or even of the tree or the rock’.19

The same theme appears as the most important teaching in Zen Buddhism. A

Japanese Zen Buddhist priest, Dōgen (道元1200–1253), characterises this ethical

stance regarding the other as overcoming, forgetting, or transcending one’s self and as

a process necessary for enlightenment.20 Specifically, in Zen discipline, the respectful

engagement with the other, predominantly natural objects like a rock or a tree but also

an artifact like a broom, requires me to experience its raw individuality or Buddha

nature, without applying the usual categorisations and classifications of normal

experience. I make myself ‘slender’ and enter into the object and become one with it,

experiencing its ‘thusness’ or ‘suchness’.21 The favoured vehicle for Zen discipline is

18
Scarry, On Beauty, p. 90.
19
Yi-Fu Tuan, ‘Yi-Fu Tuan’s Good Life’, On Wisconsin Magazine, 9 (1987).
20
The best primary text is Dōgen’s major work, Shōbōgenzō (正法眼蔵The Storehouse of True
Knowledge). The most important chapters are translated and compiled by Thomas Cleary in Shōbōgenzō:
Zen Essays by Dōgen (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986).
21
The notion of ‘making oneself slender’ so that one can enter into the object was advocated by Matsuo
Bashō in the art of making haiku. See Hattori Dohō’s record of Bashō’s teaching in ‘The Red Booklet’,
 10

artistic practice that aims not so much at acquiring skills, but rather at becoming a

person whose mode of being in the world is other-regarding and ethically grounded.

Commenting on Japanese artistic training, Robert Carter points out that ‘ethics is

primarily taught through the various arts, and is not learned as an abstract theory, or as

a series of rules to remember’.22

Heavily influenced by Zen Buddhism, Sōetsu Yanagi (柳壮悦), a Japanese art

historian who established the folk arts (mingei 民芸) movement in the early twentieth

century after the sudden and rapid Westernization took place, advocates cultivating

one’s capacity of ‘seeing’ or ‘intuition’ by exercising ‘constraints and constrictions’ by

‘rein(ing) in our tongue’.23 He recommends: ‘you should first adopt an accepting

attitude’ and not to ‘push yourself to the forefront but lend an ear to what the object has

to say’.24 As Yanagi himself characterises this mode of open-minded acceptance of the

object of aesthetic experience as ‘self-education’, it is clear from other writers’ uniform

exhortation of minimizing self in listening to the other on its own terms that the

trans. by Toshihiko and Toyo Izutsu, in The Theory of Beauty in the Classical Aesthetics of Japan (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1981), pp. 159–67.
22
Robert Carter, The Japanese Art and Self-Discipline (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), p. 2. I explore this
aesthetic approach to nature in ‘Appreciating Nature on its Own Terms’, Environmental Ethics, 20
(1998): pp. 135–49.
23
Soetsu Yanagi, The Beauty of Everyday Things, trans. by Michael Brase (London: Penguin Classics,
2018), p. 282, p. 283 (I refer to his given name as Sōetsu to reflect the long ‘o’ sound in Japanese). It is
noteworthy that the same idea of ‘reining in the tongue’ is discussed by Annie Dillard in her essay,
‘Seeing’. Dillard states that true seeing can happen when one succeeds in ‘a discipline requiring a lifetime
of dedicated struggle’ to ‘gag the commentator, to hush the noise of useless interior babble that keeps
me from seeing’, so that one can ‘unpeach the peaches’. Annie Dillard, ‘Seeing’ originally in Pilgrim at
tinker Creek (1974), included in Environmental Ethics: Divergence and Convergence, ed. by Richard G.
Botzler and Susan J. Armstrong (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1998), p. 121, p. 119.
24
Yanagi, Beauty, 281.
 11

aesthetic stance taken is also an ethical stance.25 We don’t bring our world and impose

it on the other but we invite the other to bring its world to us.

Whether characterised as unselfing, decentering, or transcending, the ethical

attitude underlying aesthetically experiencing the other has two dimensions. One is

withholding our own worldview and reining in our tongue; it is an act of refraining and

takes discipline. The other is actively listening to the other and entering into its world;

it requires imaginative engagement. These acts are indispensable in our ethical life,

particularly in our social interactions and civil discourses, both of which presuppose

the acknowledgement and respect for the other party’s reality and world. The number

of thinkers I cited share this intimate relationship between aesthetics and ethics, namely

that aesthetic experience is premised upon an ethical mode of relating to the other and

in turn cultivates such an ethical stance.

In addition to helping us practice the ethical mode of being-in-the-world, this

way of experiencing the world aesthetically generates practical benefits, apart from the

utilitarian values we derive from our everyday objects and environments that tend to

prevent us from attending to their aesthetic dimensions. It can contribute to enhancing

the quality of life by providing delight and joy that is free of today’s materialist- and

consumerist-oriented trappings that are often ethically suspect.

For example, Sherri Irvin points out that cultivating everyday aesthetic

sensibility encourages us to gain gratification free of moral cost, such as over-

consumption. She points out that ‘many people are fundamentally dissatisfied with their

25
Yanagi, Beauty, p. 283.
 12

lives, and are perpetually seeking after some outside stimulus, often a consumer

product, to complete them’.26 The multifaceted problems of over-consumption among

affluent nations, particularly in the United States, are well-known: environmental harm

associated with resource extraction, energy consumption, factory production, and

disposal of goods, as well as human rights violation and environmental injustice.27 In

light of these concerns, Irvin proposes that everyday aesthetics can encourage us to

derive satisfaction from our existing surroundings and possessions without seeking new

sources of gratification: “if we can learn to discover and appreciate the aesthetic

character of experiences that are already available to us, perhaps we will be less inclined

to think that we must acquire new goods that make different experiences available.”28

Instead of discarding a piece of still-functioning furniture because it looks shabby and

out-of-style, we can learn to take pleasure in its aged appearance through the aesthetic

value of wabi or we can gain an aesthetic pleasure from engaging in a DIY project of

upholstering and repairing. We can derive a quiet satisfaction from sipping a cup of tea

and petting a cat instead of getting caught up in the frenzy of ‘perceived obsolescence’

which compels us to go out looking for the fashionable clothes or most up-to-date

gadgets that feature merely cosmetic changes without any functional improvement.29

26
Sherri Irvin, ‘The Pervasiveness of the Aesthetic in Ordinary Experience’, British Journal of
Aesthetics, 48 (2008), p. 41.
27
A good and easily accessible overview of various problems associated with today’s industrial
production can be seen in “The Story of Stuff” (2007) at http://storyofstuff.org/movies/story-of-stuff/. I
also explore the aesthetics and ethics of consumer products in ‘Consumer Aesthetics and Environmental
Ethics: Problems and Possibilities’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 76 (2018): 429-39.
28
Irvin, ‘Pervasiveness’, p. 42.
29
Another example illustrating the benefit here is cultivating the taste for vegetarian food, as Sherri Irvin
points out:
 13

There is another way in which cultivating this everyday aesthetic sensibility can

be considered beneficial. This happens when everyday life and the environment are

devastated beyond one’s power to literally change it, such as in a battle-plagued zone.

Consider the case of living in the Gaza Strip. A Palestinian architect Salem Arafat Al

Qudwa points out how its everyday environment damaged by destruction and

constrained by limited resources can still offer aesthetic inspirations that should inform

architectural practice and planning, as well as providing some pockets of respite in

people’s daily life. For example, he illustrates the way in which the concrete bricks are

piled up has the same geometrical appeal as Donald Judd’s construction and how a

windowpane of an apartment can be appreciated for the 2-D pattern similar to

Mondrian’s paintings. In making flat round-shaped breads, ‘women lay clean circular

surfaces of dough and repeat the pieces of dough in rows and columns. The natural light

entering through the aluminium frame of windows into each empty room fills up the

actual space of the house, and the metallic safety designs further enhance the general

sense of simplicity, order, and abstraction that characterizes the room’.30 Given that the

political situation unfortunately cannot be resolved by individual effort, everyday

aesthetic experience can help its residents retain a sense of humanity, dignity, and

resilience. Ultimately, he observes, ‘in a manner that is convergent with minimalist art,

‘Vegetarianism is construed as a simple case of sacrifice, of adopting a certain kind of asceticism which
may seem both aesthetically distasteful and motivationally unsustainable. Attention to the aesthetic
character of everyday experience may substantially alleviate this problem. […] Rather than viewing
vegetarianism as a matter of giving things up, we can view it as a matter of finding different ways to
indulge the tastes that were once satisfied by meat consumption’ (p. 43 of ‘Pervasiveness’).
30
Salem Y. Arafat Al Qudwa, ‘Aesthetic Value of Minimalist Architecture in Gaza’, Contemporary
Aesthetics, 15 (2017), Sec. 4,
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/liberalarts_contempaesthetics/vol15/iss1/14/, accessed October 17,
2021. These examples are illustrated with photographs in this article.
 14

though not necessarily directly informed by it, place- and space-making techniques in

Gaza display resourcefulness, not hopelessness’.31 In such a case, everyday aesthetics’

contribution to their lives can be considerable.

Thus, one way of facilitating everyday aesthetics is to focus on these moments

or pockets of pleasurable experience that otherwise do not receive attention because

they become absorbed into the background of our life. Once we adopt an appropriate

mindset and cultivate a refined aesthetic sensibility, whether it be through an artistic

lens or a Zen-like stance, positive aesthetic values can be found, or constructed, in

almost every corner of everyday life. This move to turn mundane humdrum into an

aesthetic treasure trove is an attempt to extend the time-honored aesthetic attitude

theory to everyday life. This understanding of everyday aesthetics confirms the claims

made by predecessors that ‘anything at all, whether sensed or perceived, whether it is

the product of imagination or conceptual thought, can become the objects of aesthetic

attention’ and ‘anything that can be viewed is a fit object for aesthetic attention’,

including ‘a gator basking in a mound of dried dung’.32 This sharpened aesthetic

sensibility deployed for enriching our everyday aesthetic experience works as a

corrective to one writer’s observation that ‘this catholicity in the denotation of

“aesthetic object” […] has gone strangely unremarked’, as well as Leddy’s assessment

that, ‘although many aestheticians insist that aesthetic qualities are not limited to the

31
Al Qudwa, ‘Aesthetic Value’, Sec. 4.
32
The first passage is by Jerome Stolnitz, ‘The Aesthetic Attitude’, in Introductory Readings in
Aesthetics, ed. by John Hospers (New York: The Free Press, 1969), p. 27. The second passage is from
Paul Ziff, ‘Anything Viewed’, in Oxford Readers: Aesthetics, ed. by Susan L. Feagin and Patrick
Maynard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 29, p. 23.
 15

arts, even those thinkers generally take the arts as the primary focus of their

discussion’.33 Interpreted this way, the strategy to extend the applicability of aesthetics

to everyday life is restorative; it is returning the notion of ‘aesthetic’ to its original

Greek meaning of perception and giving a more faithful account of our aesthetic lives.

2. Negative Aesthetics

I have been stressing the importance of open-minded receptivity so that those aspects

of our environment toward which we normally take an indifferent or negative attitude

can generate a positive aesthetic experience. The cultivation of aesthetic sensibility,

however, does not always bring about positive aesthetic experience. Everyday

aesthetics cautions against indiscriminate aestheticization of everything, because what

appears to be aesthetically negative (or sometimes even positive) may reflect social

injustice or inhuman situation and condition. It is one thing for the Gaza Strip residents

to desperately seek aesthetically positive pockets in their otherwise devastated living

scape, but it is a different story if non-residents like tourists adopt a disinterested

attitude and derive an aesthetic pleasure from a pile of bricks. Such outsiders’ detached

gaze is responsible for today’s so-called ruin porn or poverty tourism targeting the

depressed areas such as Detroit and hurricane-ravaged districts of New Orleans.34

33
Jerome Stolnitz, ‘On the Origins of “Aesthetic Disinterestedness”’, originally published in The Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (1961), included in Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, ed. by George
Dickie and R. J. Sclafani (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977), p. 624. Thomas Leddy, ‘Everyday
Surface Aesthetic Qualities: “Neat,” “Messy,” “Clean,” Dirty”’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 53 (1995), p. 259.
34
It is noteworthy that Mary Wollstonecraft and John Ruskin criticised the British picturesque aesthetics
popularised in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that was primarily advocated by the landed gentry.
See discussion on this point in my Everyday Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 190.
 16

Deriving an aesthetic pleasure from the appearance of destruction seems morally

problematic, while being negatively affected by the appearance of destruction and

devastation seems both appropriate and necessary. The former shares the same attitude

of deriving pleasure from others’ misery, contrary to what our ethical relationship with

the others demand, which is empathy with the affected others and indignation regarding

the cause of such misery. Deriving pleasure from others’ misery damages one’s ethical

integrity and aestheticising the signs of misery and suffering should be called out for

its moral impropriety.

Everyday aesthetics calls attention to what is referred to as negative aesthetics.

If one is wedded to the usual honorific understanding of the term, aesthetics, as Arnold

Berleant points out, ‘negative aesthetics’ may sound like ‘an oxymoron’. 35 By

identifying aesthetics as ‘the theory of sensibility’, he rejects the ‘common association

of aesthetics with art and its connotation of art that is good or great’ and calls attention

to occasions and environments where sensory experience ‘offends, distresses, or has

harmful or damaging consequences’.36 Particularly when it comes to everyday

aesthetics, it is critical that we adopt the classificatory, rather than honorific, sense of

the term so as to allow the possibility of negative aesthetics. It is because everyday

aesthetics has a surprisingly important role to play in humanity’s world-making project,

and one of the most important dimensions of such a project is for us to be able to detect

and explore parts of our lives and environments that are aesthetically negative. Hideous,

35
Arnold Berleant, Sensibility and Sense: The Aesthetic Transformation of the Human World (Exeter:
Imprint Academic, 2010), p. 166.
36
Berleant, Sensibility, p. 155.
 17

offensive, malodorous, dreary, and tedious qualities found in everyday life are aesthetic

qualities insofar as they result from our reactions toward the sensible through

sensibility. While it is possible to adopt a distanced and disinterested attitude toward

them and derive a positive aesthetic experience, it is crucial that these negative qualities

be experienced as negative in the context of what I call world-making project in which

we are all implicated in participating. How else are we going to detect that something

is amiss or wrong with the artifacts and environments with which we interact and

interpersonal relationships? Isn’t it important to recognise these negative qualities,

diagnose the cause of the problem, think of a way to improve the situation, and

ultimately act on it?

Arnold Berleant and Katya Mandoki stand out among everyday aesthetics

advocates for exploring negative aesthetics. Berleant distinguishes two kinds of

negative aesthetics. One is caused by the absence of any positive aesthetic values due

to utter blandness. The examples include: ‘tract housing, big box stores, and ritual

conversation’; ‘the bland anonymity of suburban housing tracts and sterile blocks of

low income housing, […] sitcoms that pander to the emptiness and crassness of

ordinary life, and pulp novels that breed on people’s dissatisfaction by offering escape

into fictional romance or adventure’.37 He calls these instances ‘aesthetic deprivation’

because it ‘extinguishes our capacity for sensory experience’ and ‘conditions of such

37
Berleant, Sensibility, p. 164. The second passage is from Arnold Berleant, Aesthetics Beyond the Arts:
New and Recent Essays (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2012), p. 206.
 18

deprivation may be harmful and produce aesthetic damage either through the loss of

the capacity for perceptual satisfaction or by withholding aesthetic occasions’.38

The other kind of negative aesthetics is ‘the actual presence of negative aesthetic

value’.39 Various forms of intrusion and pollution damage not only the environment

and health but also our sensibility. Examples include ‘cacophony of the roar of traffic

and the blaring of loudspeakers in public places […] the soporific blanket of canned

music and intrusive private conversations over cell phones […] the gaudy, intense

colors of advertising circulars and the bath of all the commercial impingements on our

sensibility […]’, as well as street litter, utility lines, telephone poles, and billboards.40

One may quibble over the specifics of examples, but the important point to be gained

from his discussion is the presence of negative aesthetics in today’s world and in our

lives.

Katya Mandoki also calls attention to ‘aesthetic poisoning’.41 She diagnoses

modern Western aesthetics to suffer from what she calls the ‘Pangloss Syndrome’,

which she characterises as ‘the tendency to deal only with things that are nice and

worthy, good and beautiful’, through ‘a surgical operation of systematic exclusion of

all phenomena that are not positive and useful in their supply of pleasure and nice

thoughts’.42 According to her, this syndrome ‘explains why aesthetics has dealt only

38
Berleant, Sensibility, p. 164.
39
Berleant, Aesthetics, p. 206.
40
Berleant, Sensibility, p. 46. Other examples include “the sound from music systems and television sets
that infiltrates into virtually every public place, from supermarkets to doctors’ waiting rooms, airport
lobbies, restaurants, bars, and even public streets.” Aesthetics, p. 206.
41
Katya Mandoki, Everyday Aesthetics: Prosaics, the Play of Culture and Social Identities (Aldershot:
Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2007), p. 38.
42
Mandoki, Everyday Aesthetics, all from p. 37. The next two passages are from pp. 37-8 and p. 38.
 19

with art and beauty, so when other qualities that are not as pleasing become apparent,

they are either only mentioned superficially or swept under the rug’. But, she observes,

in our daily life, we are confronted with negative aesthetic qualities every day, such as

‘the disgusting, the obscene, the coarse, the insignificant, the banal, the ugly, the

sordid’.

Although I would not use the terms ‘unaesthetic’ or ‘anaesthetic’, Marcia Eaton

also makes the same observation: ‘questions concerning aesthetic value become

particularly daunting when one considers the extent to which the world daily grows not

only more unaesthetic – (ugly, graceless, even repulsive) but also more anaesthetic –

(dulling, numbing, alienating)’.43

Unfortunately, we do not live in an aesthetic utopia. I don’t think anyone would

believe that the world which we inhabit and the life we lead are aesthetically perfect

with no room for improvement. If everyday aesthetics sometimes encourages adopting

a not-so-ordinary attitude toward those aesthetic negatives, it should also encourage

exposing negative aesthetics in our life and in the world as negative. If one does not

pursue this latter option, one fails to acknowledge that the power everyday aesthetics

wields is considerable in determining the quality of life not just for oneself but for the

society and humanity at large. The sharpened aesthetic sensibility should thus be

directed not simply to enhance one’s pleasures and enrichment but, perhaps more

importantly, to detect negative qualities which are impoverishing or harming the quality

of life and environment. We are affected more intensely and viscerally by the direct

43
Marcia Muelder Eaton, Merit, Aesthetic and Ethical (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 210.
 20

encounter with negative aesthetics than a cognitive understanding of the various

problems, such as the poverty rate, the number of houses in a ruinous state, the amount

and kind of mental disorder caused by sensory deprivation, the number of toxins found

in the water, and the like. Being affected profoundly through aesthetic (understood in

the classificatory sense) experience is apt to spur us to act for improvement. I share

Mandoki’s criticism that ‘we as aestheticians have evaded our social responsibility of

contributing to the knowledge of human beings from our particular perspective, and

thus lost for this field of inquiry the relevance it deserves” and that “aesthetic theory

has to deal with social reality here and now to safeguard the quality of life and the

respect for the integrity of human sensibility’.44 In short, everyday aesthetics will be

derelict if it does not recognise the existence of negative aesthetics for what it is and

explore ways in which our aesthetic life and the society at large can be improved.

3. Aesthetic Expression of Moral Virtues

I have been arguing for the moral significance of developing a sensibility to detect

negative aesthetics for what it is. At the same time, the opposite case is equally

significant. That is, exposure to and interaction with positive aesthetics should

encourage us to be grateful for things, phenomena, and environments that are humane,

caring, hospitable, and aesthetically stimulating and delightful, leading to a caring

attitude to maintain its aesthetically positive state. The aesthetic positivity here goes

beyond what is pleasing to the senses. Particularly with objects of daily use, their

44
Mandoki, Everyday Aesthetics, p. 97, emphases added.
 21

aesthetic value is inseparable from their functionality and user friendliness. As

mentioned previously, when things are functioning well in our daily life, they tend to

drop out of our consciousness radar. Here we can refer to Heidegger’s two notions

regarding our relationship with things: ready-to-hand (zuhanden) and present-at-hand

(vorhanden). When things are functioning as they should, the objects themselves

become an extension of ourselves, such as a hammer being a part of our hand, hence,

invisible: ready-to-hand. Only when they break or malfunction do we become aware of

their existence as a material object. They confront us with their reality, present-at-hand,

that is conveniently ignored by us most of the time. ‘The familiarity itself becomes

visible in a conspicuous manner only when what is at hand is discovered circumspectly

in the deficient mode of taking care of things. When we do not find something in its

place, the region of that place often becomes explicitly accessible as such for the first

time’.45 I do believe that these two different ways in which we experience the material

objects capture our experience. Our usual mode of experiencing the material objects is

taking them for granted. This ‘taken-for-granted’ mode of existence relegates objects

to a category of second-class citizens compared to us humans who are considered to be

the true movers and shakers of the world, including being creators of these objects.

However, everyday aesthetics encourages cultivating a sharpened attentiveness

so that we make visible the gifts, both practical and aesthetic, afforded by those objects

which help us with our daily tasks. When the objects are designed to meet specific needs

effectively, our appreciation goes beyond simply appreciating the well-oiled operation

45
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), p. 96.
 22

to savouring the care and thoughtfulness expressed in the design. This appreciation is

aesthetic insofar as such moral qualities are embodied in the sensuous features of the

object, which is different from one gained simply through the object’s attractive

surface. Consider, for example, the OXO brand of vegetable peeler. Its bulky handles

covered by a non-slip, polypropylene plastic and rubber material with flexible fins at

the base are redesigned from a commonly found metal peeler with a thin handle that

rotates with use. The new design accommodates those whose dexterity is compromised

due to arthritis, which afflicted the re-designer’s wife who struggled with using the

metal peeler. While not stunningly beautiful in the conventional sense, Akiko Busch

observes that the OXO peelers are ‘instruments not simply of food preparation, but of

human behavior, coordinates that can help us calibrate our place in human relations’;

they embody ‘consideration, empathy, and comfort’ and ‘the small agents of human

decency’.46 Although this redesign was motivated by addressing the special needs of

the dexterity-challenged users, it does not compromise the users without such

challenges. Furthermore, any users enjoy the ease of firm grip, which helps make the

operation smooth.47

This kind of aesthetic appreciation of the care behind the design of objects can

be experienced quite frequently in our daily life if we exercise a sharpened aesthetic

sensibility. It can be experienced, for example, during an ordinary urban stroll. In many

parts of the globe, we can enjoy variously designed manhole covers that depict the

46
Akiko Busch, The Uncommon Life of Common Objects: Essays on Design and the Everyday (New
York: Metropolis Books, 2004), p. 87, p. 84, p. 87.
47
This is a good example of ‘universal design’ that accommodates different capabilities of people.
 23

objects, such as flowers, historical figures, landscapes, or architectures that are

associated with the place; a decorative theme such as a wave-like pattern on the

pavement, bus stop shelter, and other street furniture seen in the city of Seattle that

unifies and gives coherence to its various parts; metal grills featuring an elegant

geometrical pattern or a cut-out shapes of leaves around the base of trees on the

sidewalk that protect them as well as allowing rain water to seep in; the beautifully-

arranged protection for trees and bushes from the weight of snow made with bamboo

poles and straws seen in the snowy parts of Japan. Without knowing the designers or

creators behind these things, let alone their intention, we appreciate the sense of care

and thoughtfulness for providing strollers with a sense of place, hearty greetings for the

visitors, and delightful visual feasts, not to mention the expression of care and

gentleness toward the trees and bushes.

These experiences certainly enrich our aesthetic life, particularly with today’s

fast-paced life which tends to render these objects invisible as we negotiate urban streets

to reach the destination as quickly as possible. However, once made visible, these

objects enrich not only our aesthetic life but also our moral life by encouraging us to

note the expression of care embodied in the objects’ features. We appreciate the fact

that our experience is taken seriously and attended to care-fully. In contrast, if our

environment does not reflect any care or thoughtfulness and is deficient in aesthetic

amenities, even if our practical needs are met, we become demoralised that our

experience is not taken seriously. The rich aesthetic resources indicative of care
 24

cultivates aesthetic sensibility that is not only tuned into sensory features but also the

way in which care is embodied in the sensory appearances of objects and environments.

4. The Aesthetics of Doing Things

Such recognition of care is bound to nurture a caring attitude toward those objects

around us. That is, it invites a reciprocal relationship inspired by care or a “pay it

forward” attitude to spread the care toward others. This brings up another contribution

everyday aesthetics makes to the traditional aesthetics discourse: the aesthetics of

doing. I have previously mentioned everyday aesthetics’ challenge to the art- and

beauty-centric mode of conventional aesthetics. Another dominant theme of

conventional aesthetics is its spectator-oriented approach. According to it, we gain an

aesthetic experience as a spectator of an object, phenomenon, or event, although, as

Arnold Berleant maintains in his notion of engagement, it is never a static and passive

process. However, what has not received enough attention is the aesthetics involved in

literally doing things, experienced from within as an active agent. For example, food

aesthetics has been dominated by the judgement on the food, but not enough has been

explored about the aesthetics of cooking and eating. Sports aesthetics is also about the

graceful movement of an athlete and the drama of a tight game discussed from the

spectator’s perspective, but not the first-person account of engaging in a sports activity.

The experience involved in ‘doing’ things tends to fall outside of the traditional

aesthetic radar for three reasons. First, doing things almost always involves physical

activities, thus involving bodily engagement, and the Western philosophical tradition
 25

has long neglected issues related to body. Second, doing things in everyday life often

involves chores, such as cooking, cleaning, laundering, taking care of the yard, and the

like, which also get excluded from the worthy subjects for philosophical examination.

Recent developments in philosophy, particularly feminism, as well as in art, help

challenge this neglect of the body and daily chores. Third, the experience of ‘doing’ is

not recognised as part of aesthetics because it is not amenable to an evaluative aesthetic

judgement. There is no clear ‘object’ of experience which makes it possible to form an

aesthetic judgement. For example, Jane Forsey points out that ‘cleaning, chopping, and

repairing are clearly quotidian but not clearly objects of any kind’.48 We can dispute

about whether a garden is pretty, but can we dispute about whether or not the pleasure

I am having while gardening qualifies as an aesthetic experience? Is it rather a trivial

and purely subjective feeling that lacks ‘aesthetic credentials’ and intersubjectivity, as

pointed out by Christopher Dowling?49 But is it appropriate to apply the judgement-

oriented mode of aesthetic inquiry to an object-less activity experienced from within?

Let me take three ‘chores’ from our everyday life, namely cooking, laundering,

and repairing, and explore the aesthetics of performing these tasks. As mentioned

before, the quintessential candidate for aesthetics regarding food is the judgement we

make on what we eat. Is the pad thai at the new Thai restaurant delicious? Is the new

recipe I tried for meatball better or worse than my usual one? Does sushi made by Jiro

48
Jane Forsey, The Aesthetics of Design (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 237, emphasis
added.
49
Christopher Dowling, ‘The Aesthetics of Daily Life’, British Journal of Aesthetics 50 (2010), pp. 225-
242.
 26

deserve three Michelin stars? What is overlooked is that there are many other

dimensions of experiencing food besides tasting and making an aesthetic judgement on

it. Let me compile some accounts given for the activities (in the most literal sense)

associated with food.

Buffalo Bird Woman describes planting and caring for corn in great details. The

experience includes a careful observation of nature to determine the best time for

planting, bodily movements required in planting, pattern for planting the seeds, the care

that goes into protecting it from crows, treating corn as children by singing to them, and

communal reciprocity and support. Some of the descriptions are as follows:

I cultivated each hill carefully with my hoe as I came to it; and if the plants were

small, I would comb the soil of the hill lightly with my fingers, loosening the

earth and tearing out young weeds.

We cared for our corn in those days as we would care for a child, for we Indian

people loved our gardens, just as a mother loves her children, and we thought

that our growing corn liked to hear us sing, just as children like to hear their

mother sing to them.50

50
Buffalo Bird Woman, ‘Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden,’ in Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative
Philosophies of Food, ed. by Deane W. Curtin and Lisa M. Heldke (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1992), p. 274, p. 275.
 27

Many of us lack similar experience (like singing to the plants in our garden), but does

this fact make it impossible to empathise with her expression of care embodied in her

interaction with the soil, seeds, and singing?

As for the activity of cooking, let us hear from women writing about their

everyday home cooking. Consider Luce Giard’s ‘Doing Cooking’ in which the title

itself is indicative of her interest in and attention to the activity, separate from the joy

of eating.

[…] the everyday work in kitchens remains a way of unifying matter and

memory, life and tenderness, the present moment and the abolished past,

invention and necessity, imagination and tradition – tastes, smells, colors,

flavors, shapes, consistencies, actions, gestures, movements, people and things,

heat, savoring, spices, and condiments. Good cooks are never sad or idle – they

work at fashioning the world, at giving birth to the joy of the ephemeral; they

are never finished celebrating festivals for the adults and the kids, the wise and

the foolish, the marvelous reunions of men and women who share room (in the

world) and board (around the table). Women’s gesture and women’s voices that

make the earth livable.51

51
Luce Giard, ‘Doing Cooking’, in The Practice of Everyday Life, Volume 2: Living & Cooking, ed. by
Luce Giard, trans. by Timothy J. Tomasik (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 222.
 28

Audre Lorde also recounts her experience of helping her mother grind spices in a

mortar, which includes rhythmic body movement punctuated by the muted sound of

thump and the tactile sensation of pressing around the carved side of the mortar. All

these sensory experiences ‘transported me into a world of scent and rhythm and

movement and sound that grew more and more exciting as the ingredients liquefied’.52

Verta Mae Smart-Grosvenor’s account of her so-called ‘vibration cooking’ explicitly

relates the daily home cooking to aesthetics: ‘I’m talking about being able to turn the

daily ritual of cooking for your family into a beautiful everyday happening’.53

What can be noted in all these descriptions of engaging in activities is that the

experience narrated is synaesthetic based upon bodily engagement (body movement,

tactile sensation of dealing with soil, handling a mortar, feeling the heat, and the like,

in addition to sound, smell, taste, as well as vision) and it is imbued with memory and

associations. It is also inseparable from other values permeating our everyday life such

as fellowship, reciprocity, care, and love. If one were to follow a typical trajectory of

the aesthetic discourse, these features tend to disqualify these experiences from entering

the realm of aesthetics. Bodily engagement is not a typical subject matter for spectator-

oriented aesthetics, there is no resultant aesthetic judgement to speak of, and bodily

sensations and memory are too subjective and personal to be readily sharable. I can do

my best to describe my childhood memory of helping my mother in the kitchen and

how my current activity of cooking in my own kitchen conjures up all the sweet

Audre Lorde, ‘from Zami: A New Spelling of My Name’, in Curtin and Heldke, Cooking, p. 288.
52
53
Verta Mae Smart-Grosvenor, ‘from Vibration Cooking: or the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl’, in
Curtin and Heldke, Cooking, p. 294, emphasis added.
 29

memories associated with it and how the tactile sensation and the crisp staccato of

chopping vegetables give me a pleasure. However, others can only proximate my

feeling but cannot share in with my very personal and private experience, unlike the

way we can all share our experience of watching a film and debate over its artistic merit.

Ultimately, therefore, are such experiences simply pleasurable and enjoyable without

being specifically aesthetic?

It may be the case, as Dowling points out, that ‘mere first-person reports […]

are of little interest of others because others can never share them’, hence lacking

aesthetic credentials.54 But does that mean that a substantial part of our everyday life

falls outside of the aesthetic purview? Does the experience of the pleasure, often bodily

engaged, we derive from daily activities lack aesthetic credentials because we do not,

nor do we expect to, make a judgement about it?

When reading the above first-person accounts of cooking, however, we can

share in their experience based upon our own experience of cooking. Their accounts

resonate with us and we join an imaginary community of home cooks across the globe

and history and enjoy a kind of camaraderie. With such an imaginative engagement,

the activity gains a dimension that goes beyond a simple chore to be performed in a

solitary confinement, but rather experienced as taking part in a time-honoured and

intimate activity that has been shared by so many. Even those who have never

experienced these different activities associated with cooking are not excluded from

joining this community with shared experience of cooking, because the door is open for

54
Dowling, ‘The Aesthetics’, p. 238.
 30

them to gain relevant experiences but, perhaps more importantly, they are invited to

participate by activating imagination. This imaginative sharing of experience is what

we often go through by the experience of art. Intersubjectivity is thus possible in this

way, although it is not a means to or results from any judgement-making.

Another home chore many of us engage in regularly is laundering. Not only

from my own experience, but also from various people’s (not surprisingly all women)

writings regarding laundry, it is clear that there can be a quiet pleasure felt when the

task is well done. Such delight is subtle and felt quite frequently as we engage in this

chore regularly, but it is hidden in plain sight because it is all-too-familiar and all-too-

ordinary. Pauliina Rautio’s research on the place of beauty in everyday life provides a

wealth of materials in this regard.55 Her research consists of her monthly letter

correspondence with a mother of three in a rural area of northern Finland. It is

noteworthy that this woman, Laura, chose the act of laundry hanging as the focal point

of reflecting on the place of beauty in her daily life. Laura’s narrative covers a wide-

ranging reflection on seasons, nature, family, life, the purely sensuous experience of

colours, scents, and sounds gained during this chore, constantly changing according to

the season, weather, and time of the day. Rautio summarises the nature of such an

aesthetic experience that is folded into daily life as follows:

55
Pauliina Rautio, ‘On Hanging Laundry: the Place of Beauty in Managing Everyday Life’,
Contemporary Aesthetics 7 (2009) at
http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=535, accessed October 18,
2021.
 31

Everyday life is a contextual process but one that nevertheless defies definitions

bound in time and space. This is because as subjectively experienced it entails

simultaneously the past, the present, and the future as necessary for managing

it. By managing everyday life I mean a practice that consists of constant

reflection, evaluation and steering, but one that we are mostly unaware of

engaging. In a way we are making our everyday lives. This makes the everyday

a subjective construct instead of an objectively definable unit.56

For the author of a book titled Laundry, Cheryl Mendelson, laundry is ‘sensually

pleasing, with its snowy, sweet-smelling suds, warm water and lovely look and feel of

fabric folded or ironed, smooth and gleaming’.57 She feels similarly about ironing by

declaring that it

gratifies the senses. The transformation of wrinkled, shapeless cloth into the

smooth and gleaming folds of a familiar garment pleases the eye. The good

scent of ironing is the most comfortable smell in the world. And the fingertips

enjoy the changes in the fabrics from cold to warm, wet to dry, and rough to

silky.58

56
Rautio, ‘On Hanging’, Sec. 4.
57
Cheryl Mendelson, Laundry: The Home Comforts: Book of Caring for Clothes and Linens (New York:
Scribner, 2005), p. xiv.
58
Mendelson, Laundry, p. 99.
 32

She characterises such experience as ‘modest, quiet, private pleasures’ and ‘valuable

even though they are nothing that there ever could — or should — be a buzz about’.59

The additional reward of such a humble delight is further ‘physical pleasures – the look

of favourite clothes restored to freshness and beauty, the tactile satisfaction of crisp

linens in beautifully folded stacks’; ‘crisp, smooth sheets (that) dramatically change the

aesthetic appeal of your bed and heighten your sense of repose’; and ‘the anticipation

of feeling good or looking good in garments and linens restored to freshness and

attractiveness through one’s own competence and diligence’.60 Other writers join this

observation: ‘there’s something so satisfying about the fresh, steamy scent of just-

ironed linens’.61 Note that there are two layers of aesthetic pleasure described here. One

is the physical delight in the process of washing and ironing, and the other regards the

end result of such physical labour. The former tends to be neglected in the usual

spectator-based aesthetic discourse. The latter is also generally excluded from the

aesthetic domain because the pleasure gained by freshly laundered and ironed items is

predominantly derived from proximal senses of touch and smell.

Furthermore, writings on laundry indicate that there is a satisfaction in

participating in the same task that women over the centuries and across the globe have

undertaken: ‘the lifting, hauling, pinning and folding connects me to the generations of

59
Mendelson, Laundry, p. xv.
60
Rick Marin, ‘A Scholar Tackles the Wash’, New York Times (Sept. 29, 2005); Mendelson, Laundry,
p. 99 and p. xiv-xv.
61
Irene Rawlings and Andrea Vansteenhouse, The Clothesline (Layton: Gibbs Smith, Publisher, 2002),
p. 59.
 33

women who came before me, those who had fewer choices in their chores’.62 This

theme of sharing the camaraderie with women throughout ages and across geographical

borders is recurrent in most writings on laundry, as indicated by another writer: ‘over

the years I have come to realize that, throughout shocking political and cultural

upheavals, one thing that connects women over the generations is the making and

tending of cloth’.63

The sense of satisfaction and quiet delight thus experienced are woven into the

fabric of daily life and as such rarely stands out from the rest of our lives. However, I

characterise such sense of satisfaction as aesthetic insofar as it is rooted in the sensuous

feelings gained from the bodily engagement with the activity as well as the condition

of the objects resulting from our accomplishing the task.

Finally, let me give one more example from our mundane chore: repairing and

mending. While the contemporary capitalistic enterprise systematically discourages us

from engaging in these activities in favour of us consumers discarding broken objects

and purchasing new ones, the practice of repair is seeing a comeback as a part of the

sustainability initiative to promote the longevity of everyday objects. Sometimes repair

regards only the functionality, as in automobiles, home appliances, or computers, most

of which require specialists and normally do not alter the appearance. The repair and

mend that concern me here are those which we can practise without too much

specialised knowledge and transforms the sensuous appearance, such as mending a

62
Marcia Worth-Baker, ‘HOME WORK: The Quiet Pleasures of a Line in the Sun’, The New York Times
(July 23, 2006).
63
Rawlings and Vansteenhouse, Clothesline, p. 8.
 34

ripped clothing item and fixing a broken cup. Such an activity is directed by both

practical and aesthetic considerations.

First, when repairing an object, we need to involve an aesthetic sensibility in

determining whether the sign of repair should be invisible or visible. Invisible repair is

the traditionally preferred mode, guiding us to apply a transparent glue to put broken

pieces together, match the paint colour when painting over the scratch on a car, and sew

in a same-coloured patch to cover a hole on the jeans. Recently, however, repair

activists advocate visible repair as a challenge to the conventional aesthetic standard

regarding material objects that puts the defect-free, mint condition of an object to be

aesthetically superior to those that show signs of their own ageing, wear and tear,

accidental damage, breakage, and their repair. They often derive inspiration from the

traditional Japanese method of kintsugi (金継), repair by gold, that was originally used

to mend a cracked or broken tea bowl used in the tea ceremony established in the

sixteenth century. Glued by lacquer, which is then adorned by gold flake, the sign of

the repair is made prominent and constitutes a new chapter in the object’s history, often

given a title of a new landscape, such as the “snow-clad mountain peak” piece by a

well-known craftsman, Hon’ami Kōetsu (本阿弥光悦1558-1637).64 The wabi

aesthetics involved here regards what is generally considered as imperfection and defect

to be a springboard for a new aesthetic possibility. Thus, the mender has an aesthetic

64
The visual image of this piece is the third one at
https://www.ebara.co.jp/foundation/hatakeyama/information/collection.html, accessed October 17,
2021.
 35

choice to make, depending upon the nature of the material, damage, and the expected

result.

Second, the mending activity engages bodily movement in giving shape to the

desired outcome. Similar to the way in which cooking and laundering involve bodily

as well as sensory engagement, the mender has to pay close attention to the body’s

interaction with the material and the tool used in repair. It occurs where ‘this active

space of at/tending – assessing, touching, thinking, and intuiting – entwines into an

embodied knowledge, a soft technique, during which the ameliorative thread is sewn

this way and that’.65 Insofar as the activity of mending requires an embodied

knowledge, skills, and working according to the material’s dictate, the process can be

considered an apt example of the reciprocal, cumulative, and continuous relationship

of ‘doing’ and ‘undergoing’ proposed by John Dewey when characterizing an aesthetic

experience.66 In addition to providing a possible occasion for ‘an’ experience, such

active and care-full engagement with the object cannot but nurture one’s affection for

the object, rendering it not only an object of aesthetic appreciation but also a cherished

object destined for longevity.67

65
Morgan, ‘Kate Kittredge’s Stockings’, p. 70.
66
‘An experience has pattern and structure, because it is not just doing and undergoing in alternation, but
consists of them in relationship’. John Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 44. I thank Ivan Gaskell for calling
attention to this passage.
67
Tatsushi Fujiwara, a Japanese agricultural historian, observes: ‘Clothes, houses, bicycles, and cars are
all repaired, used, and repaired again when broken again. They are cleaned, washed, polished, and
maintained. After repeating these activities, we develop attachment to these objects and want to keep
them with us as long as possible. Attachment does not mean not hurting. Rather, it is to appreciate
thoroughly the scars and frays as much as possible and as long as functionality is not lost.’ Bunkai no
Tetsugaku: Huhai to Hakkō o meguru Shikō (Philosophy of Decomposition: Thoughts on Decay and
Fermentation) (Tokyo: Seidosha, 2019), p. 285, my translation.
 36

The mending practice also cultivates humility and respect because we have to

work with the particular damage and material, rather than forming a preconceived idea

about how to mend and impose on the material. For example, Katrina Rodabaugh

characterises her fabric mending practice as ‘respond[ing] to each individual repair as

the garment demands. It means that every patch, stitch, darn, or other combinations of

mending techniques can be in response to that particular damage’.68 Another

practitioner states that ‘every stitch requires listening and responding to what the fabric,

and the hole, might need’.69 This way of mending is echoed by a denim repairer: ‘Rather

than having a predetermined vision of the finished garment, we let the contours of the

damage dictate the repair’.70 This deference to the object and working collaboratively

with it shares with appreciation of art which, as explained in Section 1, requires our

willingness to transcend our own worldview, expectations, and desires and enter its

world.

We have thus excavated those mundane activities of household chore that tend

to be buried with their practically-oriented character and thus not caught by the aesthetic

radar calibrated to capture standout experiences that we have as spectators. One way in

which their invisibility becomes visible is to derive an aesthetic appreciation from the

cooked food, cleaned laundry, and repaired objects. But I specifically want to call

attention to the aesthetics of engaging in the activities of cooking, cleaning, and

repairing. They all involve aesthetic sensibility in interacting with the objects with care,

68
Katrina Rodabaugh, Mending Matters (New York: Abrams, 2018), pp. 141-2.
69
Lisa Z. Morgan, ‘Kate Kittredge’s Stockings’, in Manual: a Journal about Art and its Making
(Providence: Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design) 11 (2018), p. 70.
70
Matt Rho cited by Rodabaugh, Mending Matters, p. 119.
 37

imagining how best to go about effecting the desired result, and moving our body

effectively and efficiently to perform the task. In addition, these house chores are often

infused with emotional investment of love and care for the loved ones, as well as for

the objects themselves. We cherish and try to take good care of the materials and

instruments used for cooking, the linens and clothing items that have served us well so

we can maintain them in good stead, and those objects that we have lived with through

use and with which we plan to grow together by sharing history. These care acts amount

to an aesthetic and moral investment we make in the people and objects with whom and

with which we interact in our daily life. They reflect our commitment to living together

by nurturing, cherishing, and honouring the relationship through handling of objects.

In other words, our ethically-grounded relationship with others is enacted not only by

direct interactions by our actions with them (which themselves require aesthetic

engagement), but also is conveyed by creating certain results, such as home-cooked

meals, clean laundry, and beautifully-mended clothes.

Thus, developing aesthetic sensibility regarding everyday life enriches our

aesthetic life by increasing resources and diversifying its content, thereby enhancing

the quality of life. More importantly, it contributes to developing an ethically-grounded

mode of being-in-the-world through aesthetically engaging with the world around us.
 38

The Intersection of Moral and Aesthetic Factors in the

Process of Growing Up

RONALD MOORE

In a recent Peter Robinson’s novel, Detective Annie Cabbot offers this response to her

colleague’s suggestion that a suspect’s artistic talent counts against his likely

criminality:

[J]ust because you can draw doesn’t mean you’ve got ability in any

other department. Believe me, I’ve known a few artists in my time,

and I could tell you a story or two. There’s absolutely no connection

between art and personal morality. Or art and emotional intelligence.

Quite the opposite, mostly. You just have to study the lives of the

great artists to see that.1

Hers is not an uncommon view. A great many people — perhaps most people — think

of aesthetic awareness and moral awareness as being so different from each other that

neither can have any real influence on the other. After all, they say, moral awareness

involves actions, principled judgment, and engagement with communities, while

aesthetic awareness centres on reflection, moody delectation, and a kind of

1
Peter Robinson, When the Music is Over (New York: Morrow, 2016), p. 379.
 39

individualistic attentiveness, even detachment. It is this perceived dichotomy that is

invoked when we hold certain artworks to be morally despicable while at the same time

aesthetically commendable, or when we deem uplifting public monuments to fail

artistically. Behind such claims of axiological independence lurks a sense that,

whatever else it involves, the business of ethical engagement involves bodies of thought

and frames of mind that simply don’t connect up with whatever ideas and frames of

mind are pertinent to aesthetic judgment. The two can coexist in a given individual; but

they needn’t do so. It seems that they are no less contingently related than talents in fly-

casting and crossword puzzle solving.

In this essay, I take issue with this way of thinking about ethics and aesthetics.

I will argue that, once we turn our attention away from the fully formed adult mind and

consider the processes of moral2 and aesthetic development, the dogma of axiological

independence loses its plausibility. In its place we can recognize a conception of

personal and social maturity that is built upon, and strengthened by, a combination of

factors that contribute jointly to moral and aesthetic growth. This conception reflects

the multi-dimensional way in which humans develop as deliberate products within

frames set by social practices and bodies of belief. Growing up aesthetically and

growing up morally are complementary enterprises. Knowledge and awareness gained

in one domain foster knowledge and awareness in the other. Sometimes the aesthetic

2
In this essay, ‘moral’ should be understood to be refer to normative characteristics of human social
interaction generally. ‘Moral education’ is simply a less cumbersome way of denoting one’s increasingly
deliberate involvement in the complex process of growing up ethically, socially, politically, spiritually,
etc.
 40

factors are propaedeutic to moral development; sometimes factors of both types are

jointly constructive and mutually reinforcing.

1.

The process of moral development is one whose general trajectory and stages have

attracted the attention of social theorists throughout the course of Western philosophy.

Obvious highlights of this history include Plato’s prescription in The Republic for

training future leaders in the craft of moral authority,3 Rousseau’s argument in Emile

that moral education should capitalize on students’ natural propensity for goodness and

sympathy,4 and the accounts of stages of moral development constructed by Jean Piaget

and Lawrence Kohlberg5 and their followers. More recently, scores of social scientists

have refined the study of moral development through laboratory research and

interviews with young people. The results of their work can be perused in a good many

professional journals6.

The parallel process of growing up aesthetically has been less extensively

reported, but its general contours have also been known for centuries. Here again, Plato

3
Although parts of this account are distributed throughout the text, its key elements are presented in
Books II, III, and X, especially sections 376 E – 392 C.
4
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, trans. by Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books,
1979). The key elements in the account of sentimental training as it relates to the socializing of
autonomous individuals appear in Book IV.
5
Two of Piaget’s prominent contributions on this theme appear in The Moral Judgment of the Child
(London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Tubner & Co., 1932), and Intellectual Evolution from Adolescence to
Adulthood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Kohlberg’s theory, elaborating Piaget’s
account identify six distinct stages of moral development, is presented in Essays on Moral Development
(New York: Harper and Row, 1981) and The Philosophy of Moral Development (New York: Harper and
Row, 1984).
6
Among them, Child Development, the Journal of Child Psychology, and Developmental Psychology.
 41

is the cornerstone. In the Republic, he makes it clear that education in the arts is a vital

component of the intellectual preparation of leaders, guiding them to distinguish

between what is and what merely seems to be. Renaissance scholars, as well as the

earliest universities, organized curricula of studies around Plato’s conception of the role

of art in public practice.7 Kant’s defence of the notion that aesthetic awareness is both

deeply subjective and expansively communal came to set the tone for generations of

Romantic educational philosophers and practitioners.8 John Dewey’s contention that

aesthetic experience introduces key articulations of the contours of life’s natural

development9 laid the cornerstone of education theory in America. And since his day,

a steady stream of scholars and teachers have sought to confirm Dewey’s views or, in

the alternative, to fight clear of their influence.10

In the individual, growing up morally and growing up aesthetically are

contemporaneous. Each process begins with infant innocence, moves through various

phases of awareness and socialization, and culminates in some level of sophisticated

appreciation of the roles of norms and values in life (or in a good life). If we take process

alignment to be a matter of point-to-point, chronological correspondence of

developmental features, then it is clear the processes of growing up morally and

7
The foundational Renaissance texts for instruction of young noblemen, Marsilio Ficino’s Commentaries
on Plato and Baldassare Castiglione’s Art of the Courtier both weave together aesthetic, moral, and
social advice.
8
This idea, one that set the tone for several successive waves of Romantic art theory, is chiefly developed
in his Critique of Judgment trans. by J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951). (orig. 1790)
9
The clearest expression of Dewey’s ideas on this topic appears in Art as Experience (New York:
Putnam, 1934).
10
Among prominent contributors to the discussion are Harry Broudy, Maxine Greene, Bennett Reimer,
and Ralph Smith. The Journal of Aesthetic Education is the leading repository of theoretical
development on this theme.
 42

growing up aesthetically are not aligned. But this doesn’t mean that they don’t intersect

in ways that have formative effect. In what follows, I identify several elements and

nodes of cross-influence, and I argue that the cross-influence can induce alterations of

perspective, leading to consequences for choices and actions. Although I believe that

moral recognitions often conduce to the intensification and deepening of aesthetic

appreciation, I confine my attention here to ways in which factors in aesthetic

experience influence the development of moral awareness. I do not claim that they

always do. Nor do I claim that every aesthetic factor I identify has the same effect, or,

for that matter, any effect, on moral development in every individual. The connections

I discuss vary widely in force and effectiveness across populations. We all realize that

there is no one set of virtues that makes someone a moral (or highly moral) individual.

Likewise, there is no one set of sensible features that makes anything beautiful. So, we

shouldn’t be surprised to find that there is no simple, uniform relation between the two

value domains that insures their effective intersection. The important thing to realize is

that, in various ways and to varying degrees, they do intersect, and often with salubrious

results. Detective Abbott was right to assert that artistic sensibility is disconnected from

moral conscience in some individuals, but wrong to conclude that the two are utterly

and always disconnected. Some people never grow into moral adulthood; quite a few

more don’t do so fully. But in instances where people develop the cognitive and emotive

capacities leading to moral adulthood, it is often possible to discern contributions of

 43

elements of aesthetic awareness that help create those capacities, contributions that both

intensify and deepen the process of growing up morally.11

2.

I will focus on six factors in aesthetic experience that conduce to constructive advances

in moral thinking.12 The first is a fundamental element in setting conditions for aesthetic

engagement with arrays of objects in both the artifactual and the natural worlds:

framing. Framing is the learned capacity to appreciate aesthetic objects as compositions

of multiple components in which attention is circumscribed by limiting conditions. It is

the limiting conditions that make it possible to regard parts as parts of wholes, and to

take stock of their relations to each other within the whole. Traditional easel paintings,

for example, are surrounded by frames that set limits on our range of visual attention

and invite us to see their contents as intelligently organized. Similarly, novels are

framed by their covers, dramas and dances by the geometry of the stage, orchestral

music by their scores, and so forth and so on. Aesthetic framing is by no means limited

to the art world. Gardens are framed by their perimeters and internal delineations,

vacations by their itineraries, seascapes by the visual limitations imposed by foliage,

rocks, strands of sand, etc. As we take stock of the jumbled world about us, we take

pleasure in assembling various of its aspects and elements into comprehensible wholes,

11
I discuss the business of growing up aesthetically, at greater length in Natural Beauty (Peterborough,
Ontario: Broadview Press, 2008), at pp. 227-234.
12
It is, I believe, equally feasible to show that certain moral recognitions conduce to the intensification
and deepening aesthetic appreciation, but that is a project for another day, as is the project of analyzing
negative (destructive and disrupting) influences.
 44

experiencing them as assembled against a limited background. Although this process

can take place accidentally (as when, for example, we see a forest’s contours as we

emerge from a cave), we can learn to impute frames to many of our experiences,

deliberately limiting attention, and thus creating the possibility of coherence 13. Life

regarded as a vast, undifferentiated panorama of sensibilia is incoherent and

unintelligible. It is only when we set (or accept) limits on attention that we can begin to

appreciate, even savour, what we sense. The same holds for social relations. The

attention we pay to others is circumscribed by frameworks of understanding and

interpretation, and we deal with others — people, institutions, families, etc — within

those frameworks. By practicing the operation of framing in relation to perceived things

we build a foundation for the thoughtful comprehension of social and moral

relationships.

Frames give us a way of intelligently apprehending the other; but sometimes

what appears within the frame are images of ourselves. The second factor connecting

aesthetic and moral perspectives involves this quality of mirroring. We come to be

aware of our own images through various mechanisms of reflection. Mirrors, of course,

are the obvious, and most common means. But, before mirrors, there were pools of still

water, sheets of ice, and the eyes of others. The arts are instruments of mirroring in that

they — in countless ways — inspire and provoke self-reflection on the parts of their

audiences. Those dramas, songs, movies, etc. that move us most are frequently the ones

13
John Dewey conceives of this sort of cognitive framing as the conversion of experience into
experiences, i.e. lived units with distinctive beginnings, middles, and ends. His account appears in
Experience and Nature (New York: Dover Books, 1958).
 45

in which we recognize or discover something about ourselves. Aristotle argues that

tragedy works on its audience to call up emotions — especially pity and fear — that,

lurking within us, need to be exposed and confronted with a cathartic antidote.14 Just as

we can face our weaknesses in art, we can learn our strengths. It is a familiar fact of

primary school education that students become quickly engaged with artworks in which

they find themselves, their communities, or ethnic groups.15 We take pleasure in finding

ourselves in a place outside our skins. We awaken to our failings when we read novels,

watch movies, or hear songs in which they appear. The pleasures of self-recognition

and the pains of self-blame are virtues central to moral development.

Non-artefactual aesthetic features also can provide a powerful stimulus to self-

awareness, leading in turn to self-reflection and self-appraisal. Kant and many

subsequent Romantic philosophers held that the sense of sublimity evoked by

overwhelming natural objects--mountain peaks, ocean vistas, starry night skies, and the

like — contained a distinctly moral intimation. Initially overwhelmed by the sublime

object, perceivers recover from apparent cognitive defeat by recognizing that we, as

humans, have minds capable of putting all this — the vastness of the object itself, the

mind’s capacity to apprehend it, and the contrapuntal relationship of bounds and

limitlessness — into a comprehensible order. Kant held that this discovery has a

14
The argument is developed in chapter 6 of Poetics, Ch. 6, in Aristotle’s Works, ed. Richard McKeon
(New York: Random House, 1941).
15
I was told by Barry Gaither, then director of the Museum of African-American Art in Boston,
Massachusetts, that when sixth graders from the adjacent Roxbury neighborhood were invited to act as
docents, leading visitors through the collection of African and African-American artworks, any initial
hesitancy they had was soon overwhelmed by enthusiasm stemming from pride in a shared heritage on
display. This enthusiasm spilled over into dramatically improved performance in almost all of these
students’ classes.
 46

profound moral value in that it reveals a basis of human dignity.16 One needn’t embrace

this grandiose conclusion to agree that aesthetic appreciation of overwhelming natural

objects can conduce to an edifying sense of humility in relation to natural forces as well

as to a liberating intimation of the comprehensive power of thought. These self-

reflective realizations can be powerful elements in developing a moral awareness

wedding humility to aspiration.

The third factor is, in a way, a converse correlative to the second. It has often

been referred to as aesthetic distance, the ability to set aside one’s immediate and

practical interests in order to appreciate qualities disconnected from those interests.

Where mirroring was concerned with self-discovery, distancing is concerned with the

disintegration of egocentricity, a willingness to lose oneself in the object of attention.

Many of us have encountered, and have come to treasure, transformative moments in

beautifully performed concerts where, as T. S. Eliot put it, music is ‘heard so deeply/

that it is not heard at all, but you are the music while it lasts.’17 Similar moments are to

be had, of course, in an endless range of experiences — walks in the park, vigils to

observe solar eclipses, and certain powerfully affecting plays, movies, paintings, and

musical performances, etc. Such moments stand out against the vast background of

quotidian personal awareness, a world in which the objects of our attention are wrapped

in the packaging of our personal desires, anxieties, concerns, and hopes. Shedding these

16
Kant’s account can be found in The Critique of Judgement, trans. J. C. Meredith (Oxford University
Press, 1952), p. 60.
17
T. S. Eliot, ‘Dry Salvages,’ in The Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace
and Company, 1956), p. 136. Here, Eliot seems to be echoing Schopenhauer who, in The World as Will
and Representation, centers his entire theory of aesthetic experience on the loss of individual self-
awareness and will in contemplation of objects of rapt attention.
 47

desires, anxieties, etc. — or at least setting them aside — permits us to savour features

of experience we would otherwise miss.

A particularly vivid illustration of a distancing transformation of this sort is

Edward Bullough’s account of nineteenth-century passengers on a ship in a fog at sea.

At first, the voyagers are filled with anxiety and dread, worrying about the hazards of

collision. Eventually, they are able to abstract themselves from the immediate dangers

at hand and focus their attention on the aesthetic qualities of the shapes in the fog —

the water’s creamy smoothness, the veiled, blurry outlines of nearby objects, the curious

carrying power of sound, and so on. When this happens, the passengers find that they

are able to nullify their fears and take a distanced delight in the phenomena about

them.18 To become social beings in any real sense, we need to able to appreciate a wide

variety of things, acts, and persons without having a personal stake in them. This

posture is required if we are to be dispassionate and impartial in our relations to others.

Likewise, when we lose ourselves in settings of natural beauty, we find our minds

opening to a wide range of non-human needs and priorities.

When we make an aesthetic judgment about something, it may seem we are

doing no more than rendering a verdict, declaring that it falls into a certain place on a

scale of beauty-to-ugliness (or some other scale of valuation). But aesthetic judgments

are not only verdictive; they are dispositive. They tacitly declare that, in light of a value

found in an object, the person making the valuation is disposed to act in certain ways

regarding the object. If the value is positive (beauty, elegance, or daintiness, say), the

18
Edward Bullough, “Psychical Distance as a Factor in Art and as an Aesthetic Principle,” British
Journal of Psychology, Vol, 5 (1912), pp. 88-89.
 48

actions implied will be protection, promotion, preservation, or the like. If it is negative

(ugliness, grotesqueness, or clumsiness, say), the actions implied will be more in the

line of rejection, denunciation, or censorship. We can call this fourth factor

dispositiveness.

Aesthetic judgments, like moral judgements but unlike many others, ‘don’t

leave us cold.’ To say this is to say that they implicitly express emotive attitudes

regarding their objects of attention and imply the transmission of those attitudes to

others through actions and policies. The claim that the Mariana Trench is the deepest

part of Earth’s Ocean is a conclusion scientists have reached after a good deal of

research and controversy; but acquiescing in this claim does not, by itself, call for a

responsive action on the part of the declarer. In contrast, to say that J. S. Sargent’s The

Daughters of Edward Darley Boit is a beautiful painting is at once to recommend the

work to others and to be prepared (in the absence of countervailing considerations) to

endorse social measures in its favour — measures aimed at insuring the continued

prospects of its viewing, say, or its protection from harm. The degree and extent of

disposition toward action entailed will vary, of course, with the objects of aesthetic

attention. To say that a jazz tune is lovely may entail no more than that one is positively

disposed to encourage others to listen to it. To say that a mountain vista is sublime may

entail that one is prepared actively to oppose its ruination by a mining enterprise. In all

instances — whether positive or negative, intense or modest — aesthetic valuing

involves an adjustment of one’s pattern of living-and-willing in relation to the valued

objects.
 49

Moral behaviour similarly combines verdictive and dispositive elements. The

familiar Humean dictum that moral judgments never leave us cold implies that

recognizing deeds to be right or wrong is already a move toward doing or promoting

them, and recognizing them to be wrong is already a move toward discouraging or

blaming them.19 Following up aesthetic judgments with actions promoted by the

dispositions those judgments entail blazes a trail for following up moral valuation with

actions, and in this way to give our moral beliefs social consequences. If I am drawn

by the beauty of a rose garden to urge others to join me in visiting it, or to contribute to

a fund for its maintenance, I am contributing to a community of valuation, joining with

others in feeling and action. In doing so, I am also promoting fellow-feeling and

community purpose. Here we can see how moral and aesthetic dispositions blend in the

development of a person’s deliberative lifestyle.

In the course of ordering our lives, we inevitably find ourselves trying to bring

the parts that are under our control into coherent relationships with each other. We want

to foster appropriately cordial connections between relatives and between friends. We

want to balance our financial accounts. We want to spend our time and our money in

ways that are neither extravagant nor niggardly. In these and countless other

undertakings, the target is harmony, the fitting together of parts of a complex whole in

in a pleasing, successful way. Harmonizing, the general project of working toward

satisfactory equilibrium, is our fifth factor. We are likely to feel good about our lives

when their ingredients and activities seem harmonious in the way music may be

19
The price of failing to acknowledge the dispositiveness in these instances is incoherence: ‘It’s the right
thing to do, but I don’t care whether you or anyone else does it’ is a nonsense sentence, on this account.
 50

harmonious. Things within a scope of attention may hang together well, or may come

to be arranged well, and we develop a sense for the harmonious outcome. A good novel

has a convincing narrative arc, with a beginning, middle, and end. A beautiful flower

garden exhibits a balanced display of colour, spacing, plant elevation, etc. In growing

up, we learn how to arrange and rearrange countless things, forming patterns that, in

their balance and coherence, conduce to a sense of aesthetic satisfaction. The

harmonizing of things and activities in our lives paves the way for harmony’s role in

the growth of moral sensibility.20

It was Plato who insisted that the good for the individual as well as for the state

was a matter of the deliberate, careful balancing of parts. He recommended that both

psyche and polis be tuned like musical instruments, finding the fine point of equilibrium

where every part can do its part. Aristotle presented his famous ‘golden mean’ as a way

of reckoning the appropriate balance between excess on one side and defect on the other

in all manner of contexts. Neither of these balancing schemes turns on an algorithmic

calculation. Instead, they rely on a sense of harmony we develop in our lives relative to

order in the world around us. Flower arrangements look right, or they don’t. We can

see that that vase is just right for the end table; or maybe it’s too large. We keep tasting

the stew to find whether the all the ingredients have harmonized. Similarly, social

virtues require harmonization of roles and actions within a community. In making the

moral judgements that put together school districts, criminal codes, marriages, and

other social institutions, we rely on an intuited sense of rightness or fitness. The

20
We do, of course, enjoy discord and irregularity in music and many other things. But this enjoyment
is parasitic on the establishment of a prior appreciation of harmony.
 51

intuition involved very likely arises out a notion of harmony we acquire through

aesthetic appreciations all along the paths of our development. In Merit, Aesthetic and

Ethical, Marcia Eaton deftly describes the interlocking of aesthetic and moral frames

within which harmony operates:

Harmony — elements fitting together in appropriate and pleasing

patterns — is achieved by reconciling oneself to one’s role and

striving for control not of others or the world, but of oneself as one

seeks integrity and meaningful relations with family and friends. […]

This insight [is built on the] ability to experience the world

aesthetically, [and it leads to] sensuous and cognitive satisfaction.21

Experiencing the world aesthetically is not, however, simply a matter of harmonizing

elements into pleasing patterns. It is also a matter of seeing those elements, or at least

in some of them, in multiple ways. The capacity for constructing various interpretations

on a single object foundation is vitally important in our appreciation of works of art,

and it is a key element in sensible moral reckoning. Aestheticians sometimes refer to

this capacity as aspection, as seeing the same thing in differing guises. It is our sixth,

and final, factor. Wittgenstein took this capacity to be a centrally important function of

the interpretation of visual experience and of meaning generally. He alluded to

ambiguous images, such as the famous duck-rabbit, as revealing how, when we look at

21
Marcia Eaton, Merit, Aesthetic and Ethical (Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 111.
 52

a thing, we can see that, in one sense, it has not changed, yet in another, it has changed

entirely.22 I see the dandelion in my lawn first as a pretty flower then as a weed, and

then again, maybe as a source of home-made wine. In one sense, it’s the same humble

flower all along; but in another, it is transformed by the mode of its apprehension into

something beautiful, something ugly, and then again, as something practical or

productive.

Young people often take a good deal of pleasure in the practice of aspection. A

cloud may be a dragon, a leaf in a stream a speedboat, a teacher a bear, and a stuffed

sock the Queen of England. The immense popularity of visual illusion books in the

1990s is a testament to this pleasure. The appeal of metaphor and simile as literary

devices turns on the reader’s willingness to regard things first as this, then as that, and,

at the same time, as both. As youngsters grow older, the role of aspection in their lives

expands and deepens. They see more sides of things, more ways in which a thing may

be many things at once. A beautiful sunset may turn ugly when it is seen to owe a good

deal of its brilliant colour to pollution. The cop on the local beat has many roles to play,

and is many persons wrapped up in one. Political maturation is often a process of

coming to recognize the many-sidedness of leaders, and indeed of leadership itself.

Art teaches us that seeing a subject first one way and then another is generally

not simply a matter of neutrally flipping through interpretive readings. Polysemy often

demands that the readings play off against each other to a cumulative effect. A good

example of this is apparent in the painting, Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg as St.

22
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), p. 212.
 53

Jerome, by Lucas Cranach the Elder.23 It is a portrait of the named prelate seated at a

table in a study, surrounded by a veritable menagerie of animals — a lion, partridges, a

beaver, a parrot, among others. On first glance, this work looks to be a standard high

mannerist studio portrait, flattering to its subject. The cardinal is, to be sure,

handsomely wrought, gazing out from his comfortable surroundings, scripture in his

hands. But on second glance, we notice that he is paying no attention to the scripture

before him, nor are the animals paying any attention to him.24 Moreover, the sheer

luxuriousness of the clerical garments, etc., strikes a discordant note relative to the pose

of humble piety. Given that Cranach was a friend of Martin Luther, and thus an ally of

the Reformation, we can see that the painting is at once a compliment to its sitter (who,

after all, commissioned it) and an insult to him, suggesting as it does that he is more

absorbed in luxury than piety. So, in this case, one reading of the painting (that it’s an

insult) depends on, and plays off against, another (that it’s a compliment); it tells us that

the first impression is created by the painter to invite a second, superseding, impression,

and that the cardinal isn’t just the cardinal; he is his Church.25 As young people grow

up, they will need to manage multiple, cumulative interpretations of all sorts of things

— people, institutions, bank accounts, dinner parties, etc. Aesthetic experience lays a

good foundation for this management.

23
The painting is on display in the Ringling Museum, Sarasota, Florida.
24
We know from another Cranach painting of the same subject that the animals are stand-ins for
parishioners.
25
We can extend the aspection. In addition to being a compliment and an insult, Cranach’s painting is
an homage to Dürer’s engraving, St. Jerome in His Study (1514), as well as an advertisement to potential
customers of the painter’s own remarkable talent.
 54

3.

Consider now how these six factors come together as an individual grows up both

aesthetically and morally. Although the two developmental processes are

complementary in that elements in the one induce changes in the other, it is important

to recognize that the cross-fertilization is not a uniform process. The factors do not play

the same role at the same developmental stage in each individual. Nor does each factor

contribute the same degree of influence in all cases. Rather, these elements cumulate in

the way most other elements of personal growth cumulate--gradually, unpredictably,

and piecemeal. Together, the aesthetic factors facilitate, rather than insure, the

achievement of moral maturity. Just as a person who has learned one foreign language

usually finds it easier to learn a second and a third, a person who has developed certain

elements of aesthetic awareness is likely to find it easier to develop the personal features

that constitute moral maturity. But the aesthetic elements aren’t mere training wheels.

They continue on in the growing-up process, ultimately coalescing with other high

values in the reflective consciousness of the mature individual.

In A Defence of Poetry, Shelley declared that ‘the great instrument of moral

good is the imagination’ and that ‘a man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely

and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others;

the pains and pleasures of his species must be his own.’26 As Shelley saw it, poetry (and

by extension, all of the arts) feeds the process of moral development by forcing engaged

readers to abandon egocentricity for a broadly sympathetic outlook. Moral imagination,

26
Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defense of Poetry (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1904), p. 34.
 55

the business of learning to see with others’ eyes, is a fundamental feature of aesthetic

appreciation. You can’t really understand a novel like Charles Johnson’s Middle

Passage27 until you put yourself imaginatively in the position of a slave being

transported to the new world. You can’t get the point of Rodin’s Burghers of Calais

until you absorb the atmosphere of political oppression in mid-fourteenth-century

France. You can’t fully enjoy the film Casablanca until you feel your way into the

joyful defiance of Rick’s patrons singing La Marseillalise. Moral imagination emerges

in early youth but expands substantially as one comes to realize the vast range and

multiplicity of others’ minds, feelings, and practices. It is built upon a foundation of

talents of the kind we have discussed: an ability to set frameworks that compose

meaningful social wholes; an ability to appreciate acts and institutions without having

a stake in them; an ability to set aside immediate and practical concerns; and an ability

to see oneself reflected in the world of one’s doings.

Growing up is a process in which layers upon layers of imagination and

reflection are accumulated as individuals establish their adult aesthetic and moral

identities. It is also a process of growing into, and through, one’s culture, a process that

involves both adopting and amending what the culture hands down. Moral maturity and

aesthetic maturity jointly entail making a personal decision to live one’s life one way

rather than another after having considered a range of alternatives. This decision will

be more than staking a claim about the relative values of things. It is, again, dispositive.

It is a declaration of intention to act in certain ways with respect to the things and people

27
Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (New York: Scribner’s, 1998).
 56

in one’s life. As we grow older, we repeatedly frame and reframe our views, taking

stock of the views of others as we forge our own. We become increasingly self-aware

even as we learn to distance ourselves from things we have a stake in; we are committed

to what we care about, but also respect what others care about. In the end, the choices

we make and the actions we take are almost always holistic. They reflect ideas we have

formed about what life is most worth living, ideas saturated with aesthetic no less than

moral values. Drawing them together over the course of a lifetime is a continual process

of composition. Plato was right to think that the ultimate artwork is the art of living.
 57

Schiller and the Deskilling of Aesthetic Education

TOM HUHN

Introduction

When we reflect on education, and especially on what it should aim to do, we often

assume some lack or need that education will remedy. Friedrich Schiller, in his series

of 27 letters published as On the Aesthetic Education of Man, does indeed imagine a

particular goal of education but without presupposing any distinct lack or human need.1

He rather imagines that human beings should aim their education at a restoration of

what we once had and once were, that is, self-possessed and replete, whole, and each

of us composing a unity with, and within, ourselves.2 Schiller here follows in the

footsteps of that other renowned 18th-century theorist of education: Jean Jacques

Rousseau, whose many writings on education also distilled the great variety of needs

and desires that education might fulfil to the simple proclamation that human education

might be complete in the lesson of how to be kind to one another.3 So though Rousseau

provides Schiller with the crucial backdrop according to which human beings might

1
Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, ed. and trans. by Elizabeth
M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), hereafter AE.
2
An earlier attempt to contend with the notion of capacity in Schiller and how it impacts his ideas about
freedom, can be found in my essay, ‘Aesthetic Education, Human Capacity, Freedom,’ in The Aesthetic
Ground of Critical Theory: New Readings of Benjamin and Adorno, ed. by Nathan Ross (London:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), pp. 177-89.
3
‘What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?’ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, trans. by
Barbara Foxley (New York: Dutton, 1974), p. 43.
 58

recover their original wholeness and unity, it was the dyad of Immanuel Kant and

Johann Joachim Winckelmann that more directly inspired him to formulate by what

means a return to the unity of human life might proceed. What unites Winckelmann and

Kant’s apparently very different aesthetic theories is that both formulate aesthetic

experience or judgment as the expression of a very particular human capacity, even if

Winckelmann explains aesthetic expression as a burgeoning forth, a flowering even, of

the whole complex of a human culture embedded within its natural environment, while

Kant shrinks that complex by locating it within the individual human breast. What the

pair share in their aesthetic theories that becomes so fruitful for Schiller is the

understanding of the aesthetic primarily as a capacity as well as, equally important, a

very particular relation to that capacity.4

What I hope to explore here, and what I believe contains the ongoing value of

Schiller’s aesthetic as well as epistemological theorizing (he would of course also at

once include its political and moral relevance), is how the great question of where to

point human education is to be answered by a curriculum of unlearning.5 We have, in

sum, progressed too far, expanded our abilities beyond ourselves and in such a way that

4
Here is how Josef Chytry explains this development: ‘Through Winckelmann “one becomes
something,” Goethe later expressed the effect to Eckermann: the reader underwent a conversion. In
Hegel’s estimation one acquired a new “organ,” a capacity to intuit the artwork through the concept
[emphasis added].’ See Chytry’s exhaustive study, The Aesthetic State; A Quest in Modern German
Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 34.
5
Jonathan M. Hess explains: ‘Schiller constructs the aesthetic as a domain that in its explicit autonomy
from the political is called on to perform precisely that essential political task – the production of political
freedom – that politics cannot manage on its own. If Schiller’s aesthetics represents a politics, the
characteristic feature of this politics is that it is not political, properly speaking [….] Schiller represents
the final goal of politics within the domain of the aesthetic, offering up aesthetic autonomy as a substitute
for the political emancipation is was supposed to bring about.’ Reconstituting the Body Politic:
Enlightenment, Public Culture and the Invention of Aesthetic Autonomy (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1999), p. 81.
 59

these very same abilities have turned about and taken aim back at us. Shades here of

course of Marx’s notion of alienation, of human activities that have been cleaved off

from whatever it is that maintains the human as a whole, and as a holistic project. There

is no content to the education proposed by Schiller, it is instead an education entirely

in service of form, of the adjusting of human capacity to its objects, and still more

importantly, adjusting - or let us call it regulating and maintaining - human capacity

with itself, with its own proper shape and objects. Here too Schiller shares with

Rousseau the conviction that human capacity begins as wholly undetermined and that

each subsequent determination, each separate capacity developed, can’t help but

diminish the integrity of the whole human being.

Form and Disinterest

In his essay ‘On the Sublime’, Schiller returns once more to the question of form, and

specifically how it comports itself in relation to human ability: ‘A mind sufficiently

refined as to be moved more by the form than the matter of things and, without any

reference to possession, to experience disinterested pleasure in sheer reflection upon

the mode of their appearance - such a mind contains within itself an inner irrepressible

fullness of life, and since it does not need to appropriate to itself those objects in which

it lives, neither is it in danger of being despoiled by them.’6 First note how keen Schiller

is to dismiss the value of property, of possession, in order to have the mind place itself

6
In Friedrich Schiller, ‘Naïve and Sentimental Poetry’ and ‘On the Sublime,’ ed. and trans. by Julius A.
Elias (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1966), hereafter OS, pp. 193-212 (p. 196).
 60

in a non-acquisitive mode. So too the qualification of pleasure as disinterested, a term

that comes to Schiller from Shaftesbury by way of Winckelmann, as well still more

forcefully through Kant’s aesthetic theory.7 Disinterest signals the suspension of the

acquisitive orientation to objects, and by extension, through Kant, denotes the capacity

to acknowledge and to take things in that are purposive but without any particular

purpose. But note too in the passage that what Schiller identifies as form has less to do

with any particular shape or structure in the thing perceived and more to do with the

manner of its appearance. In other words, form is not a characteristic of an object but

rather of its appearance. It’s just here where Schiller takes up the key notion of

representation (Vorstellung) in Kant’s aesthetics and translates it, or better, displaces it,

with the term semblance (Schein). This transition, from representation to semblance -

and recall that the latter term will become absolutely central to the aesthetics of

Nietzsche8 - shifts the gravity away from a Kantian mental phenomenon (however

subjectively universal, as he theorizes it in the Critique of Judgment) and toward an

actual feature of human life. Semblance, regardless how ephemeral and fleeting within

human experience, has a real analogue in the world: human beings make and experience

7
Paul de Man reads Schiller’s Letters as the model and preeminent example of regression, of the failure
to come to terms with the critical potential of Kant’s ‘original’ Critique of Judgment: ‘There seems to be
always a regression from the incisiveness and from the impact, of the original. … something very directly
threatening is present there which one feels the need to bridge – the difficulties, the obstacles which Kant
has opened up. So there is a regression, an attempt to account for, to domesticate the critical incisiveness
of the original. …Out of a text like Schiller’s Letters…has been born: a way of emphasizing, of
revalorizing the aesthetic, a way of setting up the aesthetic as exemplary, as an exemplary category, as a
unifying category, as a model for education, as a model even for the state.’ See his ‘Kant and Schiller’
in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. by Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996),
pp. 129-62 (p. 130). For a compelling analysis and critique of de Man having made ‘Schiller’ into a
‘signifier of aesthetic ideology,’ see Karen Feldman, ‘De Man’s Kant and Goebbel’s Schiller: The
Ideology of Reception’, MLN 124 (2009), 1170-87.
8
See Timothy Stoll, ‘Nietzsche and Schiller on Aesthetic Semblance’, The Monist, 102 (2019), 331-48.
 61

semblances. We often call them works of art. Consider how this fact resonates in the

continuation of the passage from Schiller: ‘But in the final analysis even semblance

needs a physical substance in which it can be manifested; therefore so long as a need is

present, if only for beautiful semblance, then, too, there remains a need for the existence

of objects, and thus our satisfaction is still dependent upon nature as a power, for she

rules over all existences….That mental temperament which is indifferent whether the

beautiful and the good and the perfect exist, is above all called great and sublime

because it contains all the realities of the beautiful character without sharing any of its

limitations.’9 It’s just these limitations which Hegel will take up in his aesthetics and

thus declare that he will confine the scope of his investigations to a philosophy of art,

which is to say, to a philosophy of the character of the existing things that happen to be

beautiful rather than to the character of the judgments that denominate them so. Schiller

will instead move past the limitations of beauty, and beautiful things, by way of his

account of the sublime, whose key component includes the absence of any semblance

or appearance.10 Perhaps the best way to formulate this is to say that the sublime is free

of appearances, for it is just the freedom from nature as a compelling force that most

marks the sublime. We might also say that the freedom which Schiller finds himself

most often arguing for is not the freedom from nature and its necessities and limitations

but instead freedom from the ways in which we have reinstalled and reconstituted

9
Schiller, OS, p. 196.
10
A compelling argument to the effect that beauty and the sublime, as outmoded modes of aesthetic
experience, ought now to be replaced by the zany, cute, and interesting - our far more profound, or at
least prolific categories of contemporary aesthetic experience – is deftly presented by Sianne Ngai in Our
Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).
 62

nature within ourselves as what he terms forces and capacities. Our final and most

substantive liberation is thus to free ourselves from the constraints that we have

mimetically reimposed upon ourselves as masters of nature. This explains why beauty

remains for Schiller a problematic phenomenon, as well as an opportunity for

demonstrating the dialectic within human development.

Sensuousness and Capacity

It is our creatureliness that makes us susceptible to beautiful things; it is a fault and

blessing of our sensuousness that we have become eligible to being moved by - indeed

taken up by - that which appears beautiful to us. And yet beauty also signals the

possibility of the overcoming of our own determination as sensuous creatures. Beauty

is the highest expression, indeed achievement, of sensuous life, and so too thereby also

indicates the possibility of what might exist on the other side of our thralldom to beauty,

to a sensuousness on the cusp of overcoming itself by having become totally suffused

by what Kant calls the agreeable. It’s important to note that Schiller follows Edmund

Burke here in the latter’s characterization of beauty as having a ‘melting’ effect.11

Burke’s formulation of the sublime, forty years prior to Schiller’s, underlines the

contrary enlivening effect of the sublime in response to those experiences of beauty

which threaten to undo - not to mention unman - us. The agreeableness of nature is just

that which presents the possibility that we might slip back into nature, an unforeseen

return to what Freud terms the oceanic, the condition of existing without differentiation

11
See Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,
ed. by James T. Boulton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), pp. 91-118.
 63

from all that otherwise surrounds and penetrates us. That nature and sensation might

arrive in us as a state or condition of agreement (and hence pleasure) indicates our full

accord with nature, or we might say even an excess of nature. When sensation becomes

more than utility, when it suffices as well as exceeds what we need it to be for our mere

survival, it then points to the possibility of nature becoming - in us - something more

than what it merely provides. The pleasure of the senses is then already an early

indicator that nature resides in us, and yet, that we might also be on the verge of

ourselves becoming in excess of nature itself. And yet the agreeable state, a kind of

equilibrium between us and nature that already points beyond the equilibrium, also

shows the extent to which we might become still more in thrall to nature.

The agreeable state is then also a liability, a vulnerability within us of our very

connectedness to nature. Nature becomes a threat to us when it appears within us as the

power - Schiller calls it a force - to make us still more in thrall to it. The elevation of

the agreeable to beauty is at once both a concentration of the force of nature’s

agreeableness as well as the potential overcoming of that same agreeableness - our very

continuity with nature - by exaggerating and extending the range of the gravity of how

nature provides us pleasure. This formulation returns us precisely to the role of

disinterest. We might imagine beauty as an idea, an image of what a concentrated

excess of sensuous pleasure would become in us. It’s then easy to imagine that such an

experience would in fact undo us, or more precisely: it would undo us as primarily

sensuous creatures. And in undoing us as just such creatures beauty then presents the

possibility of our becoming something other than primarily sensuous creatures. Our
 64

sensuousness, in being fulfilled and exceeded, transforms itself into another capacity.

This is where Schiller’s account of the relation between human capacity and nature

becomes most consequential. Human action is for him separable from human capacity.

The former is what we do in response to our environment and to our perceived needs

and desires. Capacity, on the other hand, is a kind of agency installed within the human

creature as a standing ability to act and to respond. Each capacity exists for him as both

instrument as well as source of power. As an instrument it has a limited scope of what

it can act upon; as a force, however, it is a reservoir of energy and potentiality. Schiller

thus formulates capacity as a re-inscription of nature within human existence. As a

mimetic re-making of nature within the human, Schiller proposes that with what we

might also call second nature, the human is at once both liberated from certain

limitations of the natural as well as re-confined as a repetition, another instance and

iteration of nature. The history of our making and becoming thereby sinks us back into

nature insofar as the boundaries of what we have become are inscribed, and re-

inscribed, as likewise those of nature. There is then no single capacity, however

advanced we might become, that could lift us out of the cycle of scarifying ourselves

as ever more elaborate, and powerful, instances of nature. Every capacity is then but

the insistent return of nature.

Capacity and Education

What might well lift us out of the vicious cycle of any and every capacity advancing us

beyond a natural limit only to reimpose in us a still more powerful instance of nature,
 65

would be an education, and a life, that composes itself within the confines of the

aesthetic rather than within the bounds of nature. What makes the boundaries that

constitute the aesthetic the only ones from within which human freedom might occur is

their existence as semblance rather than as nature, and secondly, the aesthetic refuses

to become a capacity by disavowing its own power, and thus forfeits any claim to truth.

The aesthetic then in both these regards refuses to bind itself to human existence. It

remains only in its tentative, ephemeral state. We might think of an analogue here to

the condition of music as the ideal form of aesthetic appearance - already but semblance

- and also transitory. Or perhaps also akin to Adorno’s analogue of fireworks, a

prototype or model of aesthetic appearance insofar as fireworks appear in the sky as a

kind of writing, and yet not a writing that we can make any sense of, and thereby also

an apt illustration of the Kantian purposiveness without a particular purpose.

This brings us to a key feature of Schiller’s aesthetic education: the fact that it

is endless and never to be completed. It’s as if aesthetic education is the perpetual

approach toward and withdrawal from the instituting of aesthetic responsiveness as a

completed and whole event. We are always only on the way toward, or in retreat from,

committing ourselves to the aesthetic, just as semblance, the material correlate to

aesthetic experience, inexorably falls short of becoming actual. A ready illustration of

this phenomenon is the distinction between a painting and a picture. The former is the

physical material object, the latter is what Schiller would call the form of the painting,

that is, the nature of its appearance as semblance. A picture might well depend upon
 66

the existence of the painting, as its support so to speak, but the picture hovers just above,

or alongside, or perhaps orthogonally, to the painting.

A proper aesthetic education is an education in suspense, in learning how to be

alive in the suspension of our capacities. Schiller’s justly renowned play drive

(Spieltrieb) is only in part a recommendation toward the light-heartedness, the lack of

seriousness, in play. Indeed, Schiller writes that the play drive is when human beings

are most serious. Play is more central to his conception of human freedom because it

instantiates the dynamism of being in the midst of an activity or game. The play drive,

and the aesthetic education that would teach how to sustain oneself in it, is not human

action without purpose - it is not simply the playful versus the goal-oriented - as it is

rather the subordination of the goal of any event or action to the state of being actively

on-the-way-toward something or other. And the priority of that state of being on-the-

way, when it comes to take precedence over the end toward which it aims, is to allow

oneself to be suspended in the activity of one’s capacity, though without the capacity

being harnessed to this or that end. Put differently: play is characterized by a refusal to

be or become an image or instance of nature.

In the very first letter Schiller presents the dilemma regarding how the intellect

as a capacity achieves its understanding of the world but at the same time thereby

removes whatever is gained by knowledge from any further experience of the object:

‘intellect must first destroy the object of inner sense if it would make it its own. Like

the analytical chemist, the philosopher can only discover how things are combined by

analysing them, only lay bare the workings of spontaneous nature by subjecting them
 67

to the torment of his own techniques. In order to lay hold of the fleeting phenomenon,

he must first bind it in the fetters of rule, tear its fair body to pieces by reducing it to

concepts, and preserve its living spirit in a sorry skeleton of words. Is it any wonder

that natural feeling cannot find itself again in such an image, or that in the account of

the analytical thinker truth should appear as paradox?’12 Philosophy, which stands here

as the most consolidated form of intellect, operates as a double-edged sword. It truly

penetrates its object to discover something about it, and yet in doing so it destroys the

integrity of the same object. Schiller is less concerned about the violence done to the

object of knowledge by the ‘torment’ of the techniques of mind and more interested in

how the object of knowledge comes to be removed from the possibility of feeling,

which is to say: some other kind of experience.13 Mind, and especially the analytical

understanding, has come to dominate the approach by human beings to their encounters

with the world, and we have thereby greatly diminished our ability, or let us say our

openness, to allowing the object of experience to make its impress on us in some way

other than through the portals of analytical instrumentalization. This criticism of the

power of mind, or rather the one-sidedness that it seems to insist upon, will in the 20th

century be termed instrumental reason. The dilemma for Schiller can be put as follows:

how might the mind become an instrument without mind thereby reducing itself to

12
Schiller, AE, p.5.
13
Paul de Man’s early reading of Schiller struggled with just this question as to what kind of knowledge
the aesthetic might consist of: ‘in Schiller, the aesthetic, is not a separate category of articulation between
various known faculties, and modes of cognition. What gives the aesthetic its power and hence its
practical, political impact, is its intimate link with knowledge, the epistemological implications that are
always in play when the aesthetic appears over the horizon of discourse.’ ‘Aesthetic Formalization:
Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheater,’ in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1984), pp. 263-90 (pp. 264-5).
 68

nothing but an instrument. Schiller’s remedy for our having arrived at this juncture is

of course an ongoing, endless aesthetic education, whose goal cannot be set by the

arrival of some new capacity, even the capacity to moderate oneself. Aesthetic

education has instead as its goal the constant reigning in of the dominance of any one

capacity or another. It is then not intellect, or philosophy even, against which Schiller

proposes his alternate education, but rather against the sweep and mastery that every

capacity brings in its wake.

Second Nature

The second letter immediately enlarges the scope, as well as the character, of the

limitation that human beings have imposed upon themselves by their very development.

Recall that for Schiller the growth of human capacity is likewise the imposition upon

ourselves of a kind of second nature. Second nature is then not merely the static

artifacts, and built environment all about us, but is rather more deeply implanted in us

as the means by which we imagine and conceive the environment we come to build and

inhabit. Second nature, in other words, is a dynamic within us, a force that exercises

itself not only in the products we make and the actions we take but still more so in the

very orientation that we have toward what might be possible for each of us, as well as

all of us together. Second nature, that force which we have implanted in ourselves, has,

for Schiller, but one possible telos: ‘that most perfect of all the works to be achieved by
 69

the art of man: the construction of true political freedom’.14 Note that the political

orientation here is not a programme trained on how we are to get along with one

another. Such an education would fall on fallow ground if we have not first learned how

to enact a non-adversarial relationship within ourselves. We cannot hope to make peace

and find comity with others unless we are at peace with ourselves. The aesthetic state,

the polis in which each is self-attuned, arises when we come to provide one another

with the opportunity and occasion for self-moderation. In this light, the artwork exists

in effect as a fellow-citizen, a member of a free society in which each individual is

likewise a model to others of playful engagement. Imagine a traditional Hobbesian-

style state, in which each citizen is naturally aligned against every other citizen, and

then transplant this war-of-each-against-all scenario into the interior of each citizen,

and we have arrived at Schiller’s conception of where political strife is truly located: in

the conflict of the faculties with one another. Schiller’s solution to this strife is not to

install as sovereign over all human faculties one or another faculty, reason say, or the

understanding, or even feeling, but rather to imagine a regime (an aesthetic regime) in

which no faculty might ever become sovereign. One key goal of aesthetic education is

to teach how not to allow any one faculty to become dominant. However noble it might

be for reason to reign supreme, one unfortunate and unavoidable corollary lesson is in

the efficacy of dominance. Schiller would have us instead learn the aesthetic pleasure

of non-dominance.15 Our neighbours, near or far, are not what impede us from a more

14
Schiller, AE, p. 7.
15
‘Schiller took the side of reason against reason, intending to counter the dialectic of enlightenment by
way of aesthetics. Aesthetic semblance, which he conceived in terms of Kant’s free play of reason, is to
recuperate reason. …Adorno’s writings follow Schiller in the specific sense of conceiving the solution
 70

free expression of our lives; our enemy is rather utility: ‘Utility is the great idol of our

age, to which all powers are in thrall and to which all talent must pay homage.’ 16 We

find ourselves here not so very far removed from Rousseau’s contention that

convenience is the first great yoke that we place on ourselves. Utility functions as a

premier example of ideology, of a set of beliefs and an orientation that by seeming

obvious come to be taken for granted. But Schiller would have the work of aesthetic

education disorient us, or better put: disorient our dominant capacities, and put back

into play just those actions previously harnessed only for the sake of their usefulness.

Schiller concludes his second letter as follows: ‘if man is ever to solve that

problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the

aesthetic, because it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom. But

this cannot be demonstrated without my first reminding you of the principles by which

reason is in any case guided in matters of political legislation.’17 Famously, for Schiller,

beauty serves at once as both a guide toward - as well as an image of - freedom. It’s as

if unaided we cannot simply enter the condition of true human freedom.18 We are

impeded from entry into a free state by our very capacities and faculties, whose nature

to the dialectic of enlightenment, the realization of reason, as dependent on aesthetic semblance. Just as
for Schiller the aesthetic is the play of reason, so Adorno conceives of reason as inextricable from art.’
Robert Hullot-Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 34-5.
16
Schiller, AE, p. 7.
17
Schiller, AE, p. 9.
18
In the context of freedom and political liberty we might well pose Schiller as offering a more radical
version of Shaftesbury’s notion of liberty, as explained by Jonathan I. Israel: ‘In his post-aristocratic
philosophy, “liberty” is the basis for a new and more enlightened culture – “liberty” not just in the
constitutional sense defined by the Glorious Revolution, but liberty as a political and social condition,
liberty defined by debate, criticism, and cultural exchange.’ Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the
Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 67.
 71

it is to be useful and pragmatic. This is what Schiller understands as the compulsion of

nature, that nature impels us just as it impels every other organic and inorganic

substance.

Everything exists under the rule, the dominance, of nature. And reason, as Kant

led Schiller to see it, is a faculty of desire, a faculty of choosing apart from the dictates

of nature. Reason is then a kind of agency, or potential agency within us that asserts

itself as the contrary of the demands of nature. It comes to be, we might say, as the

adversary, the other to nature, even if it also begins in a mimesis of nature: ‘But what

makes him man is precisely this: that he does not stop short at what nature herself made

of him, but has the power of retracing by means of reason the steps she took on his

behalf, of transforming the work of blind compulsion into a work of free choice, and of

elevating physical necessity into moral necessity.’19 It may be of some help here in

understanding more about the role of beauty by locating it in Schiller’s schema of nature

and reason, with the latter acting as a retracing of the actions of the former. We might

then well substitute beauty for nature and thus understand beauty as the model upon

which freedom is to arise.20 Beauty is of course but the image of freedom - and one

can’t help but recall here Stendhal’s famous definition of beauty as the promise of

happiness - just as nature provides and supports human life without the latter becoming

free.

19
Schiller, AE, p. 11.
20
Jürgen Habermas acknowledges the Letters as the ‘first programmatic work toward an aesthetic
critique of modernity,’ whose aim is political freedom: ‘The formulation of the question [how to achieve
political freedom] already suggests the answer: art itself is the medium for the education (Bildung) of the
human race to true political freedom.’ ‘Excursus on Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of
Man,’ in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity; Twelve Lectures, trans. by Frederick Lawrence
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1987), pp. 45-50 (p. 45).
 72

Beauty and Semblance

Important to acknowledge here is that beauty appears under constraint. And the

constraint is that of sensuousness, for beauty - however much it comes to be as

semblance - nonetheless appears, if only momentarily, in the apparitions of

deliquescing musical sounds. Semblance itself is thus a dialectical indicator of the need

to overcome in the first place the constraint of appearance, so that even if semblance

merely undoes the actuality of appearance, it nevertheless shows the motion toward

freedom. But note that the force of nature’s ‘blind compulsion’ is not entirely undone

by reason, for the latter mimetically installs the ‘necessity’ of moral life in place of

nature. Compulsion, in other words, merely loses its blinders while the echo of its force

continues in free moral life. This is akin to Kant’s notion of duty.

‘Every individual human being, one may say, carries within him, potentially

and prescriptively, an ideal man, the archetype of a human being, and it is his life’s task

to be, through all his changing manifestations, in harmony with the unchanging unity

of this ideal.’21 We are already well aware that harmony is central to Schiller’s image

of the person reconciled with herself. What is perhaps just as important to note here is

the role of unity in his conception of a human life in congruence with the state. The

content of the image of the ideal person, of the archetype human being, is of little

interest to Schiller, just as the direction of any particular capacity or talent holds no real

purchase for him. It is rather, with unity as it is with form, that the character and shape

of the whole is what is paramount in aesthetic life and education. Unity as the central

21
Schiller, AE, p. 17.
 73

feature of artworks as well as of aesthetic experience harks back most prominently to

Aristotle who in his Poetics gives so much force to the techniques and means by which

unity comes to be created. In the Poetics the emphasis on plot, but so too on action over

character, as well as the vaunted - and seemingly obvious - insistence on the value of

staging beginning, middle, and end, are all expressions of how the work of art comes

into being by means of its appearing as a unity. We need not pause to consider whether

unified things, or indeed images of unity, are thereby more effective and attractive, but

instead ask what it is for Schiller that unity alone is capable of providing. A key to

answering this is provided by his own characterization of reason as a force that

‘demands unity.’22 Nature, on the other hand, insists upon multiplicity. Reason, in its

quest for unity, demands singularity, a distilling of variety into a composed whole. This

question regarding unity supplies us with an opportunity to highlight a key feature of

semblance while at the same time coming to understand why Schiller also emphasizes

it as the goal of aesthetic education. Semblance is not merely illusion or fantasy, a

made-up picture of things. Far more important to the character of semblance is that it

take place as an image, that is, as a unity of composed parts. Unity is in fact that which

makes an image into a whole out of a jumble of marks and colours, shadows and lights.

Semblance, like all aesthetic phenomena, has its grounding in the unity that is the

necessary condition for any and all images. Every semblance thus holds a two-tiered

lesson: it liberates one from the condition of actuality, by modelling just that, and

22
Schiller, AE, p. 19.
 74

likewise modelling the second lesson, that of the wholeness achieved by dint of the

process of becoming a unity.23

A still more telling reminder of the value of semblance is to consider in contrast

what comes in the wake of the development of each new power. Here Schiller proceeds

to summarize this tendency as one belonging to civilization in general: ‘Civilization,

far from setting us free, in fact creates some new need with every new power it develops

in us.’24 So, in addition to the limitation carried in the development of each new

capacity, that capacity is accompanied by the appearance of a new need.25 Each of our

powers limits us - by condensing what we are capable of to the boundaries of that power

- and so too each power likewise limits us by producing its own special need. If we

think of a power or capacity as akin to a tool, and we take up the example of the hammer

as a premier tool, then we soon arrive at the oft-repeated adage to the effect that to the

person who has a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But now we might add, given

Schiller’s claim that each new power brings a new need, that the existence of the

23
For an intriguing and compelling account of how the meaning and scope of freedom – precisely that
which a unified being is capable of – shifts over the course of the Letters, see Martha Woodmansee’s
chapter ‘Aesthetic Autonomy as a Weapon in Cultural Politics: Rereading Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters’,
where she writes, ‘by the end of the Letters what had been designated the indisputable instrument of
emancipation seems to have become identical with it: the experience of beauty in art has thus become a
terminal value. For at the end of the Letters aesthetic experience is portrayed as itself the locus of
freedom.’ In The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994), pp. 57-86 (p. 59).
24
Schiller, AE, p. 27.
25
These new modern needs drive the fragmentation of the self. And Terry Eagleton credits Schiller as
the primary inspiration for ‘the whole radical aesthetic tradition from Coleridge to Herbert Marcuse,
lamenting the inorganic, mechanistic nature of industrial capitalism, [which] draws sustenance from this
prophetic denunciation.’ Eagleton continues with his own lament for the affirmative side of Schiller’s
aesthetics: ‘What must then be emphasized is the contradictory nature of an aesthetic which on the one
hand offers a fruitful ideological model of the human subject for bourgeois society, and on the other hand
holds out a vision of human capacities by which that society can be measured and found gravely
wanting.’ The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 118.
 75

hammer brings as its companion the need for things to be struck by the hammer. The

hammer works well as a tool and an ability, and yet we cannot fail to acknowledge that

in a world stocked with hammers, many more things have come to appear to be in need

of hammering. Schiller continues in the following letter (the sixth) to sharpen his attack

on civilization: ‘It was civilization itself which inflicted this wound upon modern man.

Once the increase in empirical knowledge, and more exact modes of thought, made

sharper divisions between the sciences inevitable…then the inner unity of human nature

was severed too, and a disastrous conflict set its harmonious powers at variance.’26

Schiller employs here the Winckelmann-infused image of the ancient Greeks as living

not only amidst beautiful nature, which they reproduced in beautiful art, but so too that

natural and artistic beauty were expressions of the harmonies within each person.27 This

individual harmony likewise resonated with the harmony of the Greek polis and the

natural environment. And in that classical ideal state, ‘At that first fair awakening of

the powers of the mind, sense and intellect did not yet rule over strictly separate

domains; for no dissension had as yet provoked them into hostile partition and mutual

demarcation of their frontiers.’28 These passages require us to refine our earlier

characterization of the development of human capacities as necessarily leading to a

fragmentation of the unity of the human being, of the loss of integrity solely through

26
Schiller, AE, p. 33.
27
A fruitful path along which to view the growth of this model is according to the notion of the beautiful
soul, and although the Letters ‘does not contain the phrase “beautiful soul,” does assume, as its title
suggests, its reality. The Letters amounts to an attempt to move from the exclusive concentration on the
“beautiful” individual to the level of the whole social sphere. Such a consideration of the social dimension
of moral beauty had always been an essential element of the ideal, for morality can of course only make
sense within the context of a larger civil order.’ Robert E. Norton, The Beautiful Soul; Aesthetic Morality
in the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 244.
28
Schiller, AE, p. 31.
 76

the empowerment of one ability or another. But now we can conclude that human

development need not be adversarial or fragmenting; it is rather, for Schiller, that the

demands of the political state nudge the development of capacities into a fragmenting

force. It is the needs of the state that put human abilities at odds with one another. And

since for Schiller the state means the whole of the civil environment that human beings

inhabit, we can readily appreciate that his discussion here of fragmentation will find a

direct parallel in Marx’s notion of alienation. The concern for both thinkers is to

determine how the organization of human capacities brings discord, fragmentation, and

an adversariness within and among human beings.

For both Schiller and Marx the root problem lay in just those demands made on

human capacities that turn those same capacities against the human beings in which

they reside. How then might a human capacity come to develop itself in opposition to

the very host of the capacity? For Schiller the answer has to do with a certain degree of

coercion imposed upon the capacity. Alienation occurs when human development

happens at the expense of the human being. We note here an interesting parallel with

the problem of ideology, which is thinking put in service against the real interests of

the thinker, we might then see that the crux of the problem with both alienation and

ideology lies in the curtailment of human freedom, in one case the freedom of a capacity

to develop according to its own lights, and in the case of ideology it is the curtailment

of the freedom of thinking in the act of constraining thought to overly restrictive

measures. This formulation then neatly returns to the problem of freedom, absolutely
 77

central to Schiller’s formulation of aesthetic education as the most fruitful path to return

to a former but now lost freedom.

Freedom and Sublime Incapacity

A little odd perhaps to phrase it this way but it might be put that the greatest impediment

to our freedom is not other people but the potential for incapacity that lies at the heart

of our existence as beings with ever-expanding capacities: ‘It must, therefore, be wrong

if the cultivation of individual powers involves the sacrifice of wholeness. Or rather,

however much the law of nature tends in that direction, it must be open to us to restore

by means of a higher art the totality of our nature which the arts themselves have

destroyed.’29 We shall return to the topic of sacrifice when we consider Schiller’s

formulation of the sublime and therein encounter Kant’s own formulation of the

sublime in which sacrifice plays a key role. But for now it will suffice to provide an

illustration, by means of an image of the human body, of how the exercise, or better:

control, of human activity results in quite different effects. I have in mind Schiller’s

brilliant illustration of the difference between athletic bodies and beautiful bodies. Both

types of bodies - we leave aside the question of whether athletic bodies can be beautiful

- exercise the same capacity, the active engagement of as many parts of the body as

possible. And yet, for Schiller, athletic bodies are created by the opposition of parts of

the body to one another, think of isometric exercise here - whereas beautiful bodies

come to be out of the harmonious engagement of the parts of the body with one another.

29
Schiller, AE, p. 43.
 78

This dynamic that brings about beautiful rather than merely athletic bodies can also be

glimpsed in Schiller’s account of the sublime: ‘nothing is so unworthy of man than to

suffer violence, for violence undoes him.’30 To phrase this in the terms of Schiller’s

discussion in Aesthetic Education, we might say that violence is a force or power

directed against the human individual that results in suffering, and that the primary

force of that suffering is directed against the integrity of the individual.31

The specific character of the sublime is that it contains both suffering and relief.

Recall that for Kant the sublime is a two-stage phenomenon that begins with an initial

experience of a threat to the integrity of the person. It thereby becomes a model for how

to maintain a life within the aesthetic that also points beyond it. ‘The feeling of the

sublime is a mixed feeling. It is a composition of melancholy which at its utmost is

manifested in a shudder, and of joyousness which can mount to rapture and, even if it

is not actually pleasure, is far preferred by refined souls to all pleasure. This

combination of two contradictory perceptions in a single feeling demonstrates our

moral independence in an irrefutable manner.’32 We might think of the sublime for

Schiller as a properly post-aesthetic phenomenon. The limitations of the aesthetic have

for him everything to do with the power and proximity of the experience of beauty to

30
Schiller, OS, p. 193.
31
A more contemporary, though quite similar treatment of force is found in the well-known analysis of
it by Simone Weil in her essay ‘The Iliad, Poem of Force:’ ‘From the power to transform him into a thing
by killing him there proceeds another power and much more prodigious, that which makes a thing of him
while he still lives. He is living, he has a soul, yet he is a thing. …The soul was not made to dwell in a
thing; and when forced to it, there is no part of that soul but suffers violence.’ Schiller’s term translated
as force is die Kraft, Weil’s is la force. Both thinkers share the insight that the primary direction of force
is toward reification, and that the most treacherous feature of force is its attempt to reify that which
remains most alive in the human being. In The Simone Weil Reader, ed. by George A. Panichas (Mt.
Kisco, New York: Moyer Bell Limited, 1977), pp. 153-83 (p. 155).
32
Schiller, OS, p. 198.
 79

our sensuousness: ‘Through beauty alone, then, we should never discover that we are

destined and able to manifest ourselves as pure intelligences. But in the sublime,

however, reason and sensuousness do not accord, and precisely in this contradiction

between the two lies the magic with which it captures our minds.’33 The very thing in

beauty that recommends it to us as a genuine expansion of our capacity to move beyond

sensuousness, that is, disinterest toward sensuousness, nevertheless becomes an

obstacle to our further growth toward freedom insofar as the proper aesthetic disinterest

toward beauty remains one-sided. However noble our cultivated disinterest in regard to

sensuousness, the scope of the disinterest remains limited to sensuousness. The sublime

provides the occasion to expand our disinterest beyond sensuousness to the greatest

possible realm of self-interest, that of self-preservation: ‘Thus the sublime affords us

an egress from the sensuous world in which the beautiful would gladly hold us forever

captive.’34 The most consequential freedom that we might win for ourselves is the

freedom from our thralldom to the sensuous world. Beauty is at once both an

intensification of that thralldom as well as a dialectical overcoming of it.

Art and Aesthetic Capacity

Beauty recapitulates our bond with sensuousness, elevates it and thereby provides a

glimpse, via disinterest, of what freedom from it might look like; or we might more

properly say that beauty not only signals how to be free of sensuousness but is also in

33
Schiller, OS, pp. 199-200.
34
Schiller, OS, p. 201.
 80

itself an image of that freedom insofar as it is attractive in such a way that we need not

be in thrall to it.35 Here is where semblance plays such a key role insofar as it provides

an image rather than the actuality of sensuous fulfilment. We should thus not lament

that beauty is only a promise of happiness, for in being but a promise beauty thereby

indicates how we might free ourselves from the spell of nature: ‘The sublime, like the

beautiful, is prodigally diffused throughout the whole of nature and the capacity to

apprehend both is implanted in all men; but the potentiality to do so is unequally

developed and must be aided by art.’36 So although the capacity is implanted in all of

us, it is art that is necessary in order to develop it. This also means that art is a peculiar

kind of tool, one that serves not only as an instrument to leverage our potential

capacities for apprehending beauty and the sublime, but so too is art itself perhaps a

kind of capacity and not merely an aid to wholly inward human capacities. In this light

art comes to appear as a quasi-capacity, as an agency with the ability not only to aid but

to inaugurate the coming into existence of a capacity. It’s no mere projection on our

part to perceive works of art as doing things like addressing viewers, or making

propositions, or even containing truth claims. These and many other activities - likewise

a residue of art’s origins in magic - are evidence of art being no mere adjunct to social

life but a vibrant participant in it. It’s as if we have off-loaded, onto a sort of art

35
John Dewey formulates a remarkably similar path to human happiness, as Martin Jay explains:
‘Aesthetic experience was in fact for Dewey the teleological goal of authentic experience tout court, in
which it attains its “consummatory” character. Here means and ends come together in one organic unity.
Or as he put it in Art as Experience, “experience in the degree in which it is experience is heightened
vitality….Because experience is the fulfillment of an organism in its struggles and achievements in a
world of things, it is art in germ. Even in its rudimentary forms, it contains the promise of that delightful
perception which is aesthetic experience.”’ Songs of Experience: Modern American and European
Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 164.
36
Schiller, OS, p. 202.
 81

subcontractor, the development of a capacity which we cannot on our own quite fully

fashion. How else might we account for the experience of art as being at once in such

proximity - its pleasure suffusing us - while at the same time so utterly foreign, marked

by our complete ignorance as to the meaning of the beautiful. This formulation helps

explain Kant’s preference for natural beauty over artistic beauty; the latter places in the

artifact a capacity that ought better remain wholly within the human. The sublime then

becomes the logical extension of this bias against the artifact as the seat of a human

capacity. Or, put differently, we might well understand the sublime, and in particular

Kant’s formulation of it, as the return of capacity away from the work of art, or even

bit of nature in the case of natural beauty, and toward its proper home exclusively within

the human being. Recall here the Longinian formulation of the sublime as the echo of

a noble soul.37 Leave aside the question regarding the emptiness, which allows the noble

soul to have an echo, and attend instead to the echo as wholly interior to the human

being as well as in need of an external device or artifact, however hollow.

Freedom and Determinacy

What we are encountering here in Schiller’s insistence upon the moral character of

aesthetic experience is his affirmation that the true goal of human development is an

ever-expanding capacity for freedom.38 One of his clearest expressions of this

37
See Longinus, On Great Writing (On the Sublime), trans. by G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett
Press, 1991), p. 12.
38
Anthony Savile addresses directly this question as to whether for Schiller the ‘full aestheticization of
experience is an ideal that we might set ourselves.’ Savile instead suggests, ‘An alternative conception
of Schiller’s strategy…which still retains a tinge of Kantian colour, is this. While it is no longer advanced
as a constitutive truth about human experience that it is imbued with the aesthetic, it may still be
 82

conviction appears early on in his 1795 essay on ‘Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,’ where

he explicitly cites Kant’s illustration of the person who perfectly impersonates the song

of the nightingale.39 In Kant’s telling, an innkeeper hires a nightingale impersonator to

hide in the bushes and sing in order to entertain the guests at the inn. 40 Kant avers that

the deception, in other words the unrevealed imitation of nature, is perfectly acceptable

unless and until the deception is revealed to the guests. Kant argues that the pleasure of

the nightingale’s song is then destroyed.41 Schiller seemingly agrees with this line of

argumentation but he places a still greater gravity on the situation: ‘From this it is clear

that this kind of satisfaction in nature is not aesthetic but moral, for it is mediated by an

idea, not produced immediately by observation; nor is it in any way dependent upon

beauty of form.’42 Schiller argues that it is not merely the natural form of the flower, or

the humming of bees, or the chirping of birds that makes them beautiful, it is rather that

all these natural phenomena represent an idea to us, and further, that it is this idea which

is the thing we love in these beautiful natural phenomena. And yet, fittingly, it is as if

the idea has no genuine content but only form, for Schiller declares the aspects of the

idea as inner necessity and eternal unity. We find ourselves again quite close to

Winckelmann here and thus it is no surprise that Schiller’s account next moves to a

regulative of experience that it be so.’ See Savile’s Aesthetic Reconstructions: The Seminal Writings of
Lessing, Kant and Schiller (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), pp. 202-03.
39
In Friedrich Schiller, ‘Naïve and Sentimental Poetry’ and ‘On the Sublime,’ ed. and trans. by Julius A.
Elias (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1966), hereafter NS, pp. 83-190.
40
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, translated by Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987),
§42, 302, p. 169.
41
Kant’s anecdote of the innkeeper and the song of the nightingale might well be considered an early
formulation of what later comes to be called the culture industry, if we understand the focus of that
industry as the strategic attempt to create the effects of art, rather than the thing itself.
42
Schiller, NS, p. 84.
 83

description of what we once were. We love beautiful natural objects because ‘They are

what we were; they are what we should once again become. We were nature just as

they, and our culture, by means of reason and freedom, should lead us back to nature.

They are, therefore, not only the representation of our lost childhood, which eternally

remains most dear to us, but fill us with a certain melancholy.’ And what truly separates

us from the idea represented to us by beautiful natural things is that ‘We are free, they

are necessary; we change, they remain a unity.’43 Childhood represents an era of

integrity and wholeness, and Schiller is happy to deploy it in both its literal sense as

well as apply it the Greeks, whose culture and way of life were often likened to be the

childhood of the species. What our presumed maturity has brought us is not freedom

but the potential for it; and what we have lost is the unity of our existence. The aesthetic

is the semblance of the moral insofar as the former functions as the model and

deployment of the harmony of the faculties, and the latter, the moral realm, is something

we cannot directly aspire to without the aid of both imagery and practice, which is to

say: semblance and play. Thus for Schiller our true life would consist of reattaining our

lost unity while thereby fully embodying our potential freedom. ‘We are touched not

because we look down upon the child from the height of our strength and perfection,

but rather because we look upward from the limitation of our condition, which is

inseparable from the determination which we have attained, to the unlimited

determinacy.’44 It is then not the limitation of the child that lends its charm to us but

rather the expanse glimpsed of our possible future determinability as we witness the

43
Schiller, NS, p. 85.
44
Schiller, NS, p. 87.
 84

combination in the child of the freedom from compulsion alongside its burgeoning

capacity. We perceive at once in the idea or form of the child an image of our not yet

being fully determined: ‘The child is therefore a lively representation to us of the ideal,

not indeed as it is fulfilled, but as it is enjoined: hence we are in no sense moved by the

notion of its poverty and limitation, but rather by the opposite: the notion of its pure

and free strength, its integrity, its eternality.’45 What we see in the child is the standing-

ready of capacity, and still more importantly, we see the wholeness and integrity -

Schiller might in another context call this dignity - of that condition of indeterminacy.

But this is to put it just the opposite as Schiller has it, for it is not the lack of determinacy

in the child that lends it its ideal character for us but rather its very determinacy, though

without yet any very evolved determinations.46

Return to Sensuousness

Childhood holds for Schiller still another analogy, in addition to that of the ancient

Greeks, which is sensuousness. If the Greeks are the childhood equivalent of the

historical and social development of the human being, then sensuousness might be

considered the childhood in the development of the species. And for Schiller the

45
Schiller, NS, p. 87.
46
Another way to understand Schiller’s strategy here is to consider that he wants to avoid the Kantian
move whereby reason – as a premier developed capacity – comes to have authority over other human
inclinations. As Frederick Beiser well explains, ‘While he [the human being] is free as a rational being,
he is not free as a whole being, for the simple reason that part of his self is under the domination of his
reason. It is this thesis – the very idea that reason can dominate or create a lack of freedom – that is
completely alien to Kant’s moral philosophy, and that plays a fundamental role in Schiller’s thinking
about freedom.’ See Beiser’s comprehensive study, Schiller as Philosopher: A Re-Examination (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 217.
 85

historical and species development of the human being coincides, or overlaps, in the

period of the ancient Greeks. This follows directly the lead from Winckelmann who

imagined the Greeks as capable of attaining an aesthetic ideal only by dint of the deep

correspondence between the existence of the individual and the natural environment in

which it found itself. An aesthetic garden of paradise, if you will. Harmony all around,

inside and out, which naturally leads to the Fall, the fragmentation of the unity and

integrity of the person, the introduction of disharmony and discord. A key strategy of

Schiller’s agenda is to tell the story of the Fall in such a way that the seeds of a recovery

might already be planted in the very dynamic that inaugurates the Fall. We have already

witnessed this dynamic in his account of the advance of the sublime beyond that of

beauty, with the latter having its limitations in its sunkenness in nature. Now we might

turn to yet another illustration of aufheben in Schiller’s account of naïve and

sentimental poetry, where we’ll find a ready kinship between the two modes of poetry

with the relation between beauty and the sublime. What characterizes naïve poetry is

precisely its unselfconscious affinity with nature; such poetry is an expression of the

continuity with nature, very much in keeping with Winckelmann’s account of ancient

Greek art. Naïve poetry, to be sure, is for Schiller an expression from childlikeness.

Sentimental poetry, on the other hand, positions itself as being in relation to nature; it

cannot help then but be self-conscious of itself as art, and as artifact. Schiller’s division

of poetry into two camps maps neatly onto the present-day distinction between fine art

and what’s called folk or outsider art. At the heart of the latter is the coming into being

of the work of art without it knowing itself as art: ‘Our childhood is the only
 86

undisfigured nature that we still encounter in civilized mankind, hence it is no wonder

if every trace of the nature outside us leads us back to our childhood.’47 We might then

think of sentimental poetry as an attempt - beginning with the acknowledgment that we

are no longer in nature - to return to childhood, to the condition in which nature still

appeared to be present in us. Poets thus, ‘will either be nature, or they will seek lost

nature.’48 And yet, strictly speaking, it is not the return of an appearance of nature in

us that Schiller truly seeks. It is rather the feeling of nature in us that we wish to recover;

any image will always remain - regardless how beautiful - only a likeness of nature. We

might best appreciate the importance of this distinction in the light of Schiller’s notion

of dignity: ‘Humanity has lost its dignity; but art has rescued it and preserved it in

significant stone. Truth lives on in the illusion (Täuschung) of art, and it is from this

copy, or after-image (Nachbilde), that the original image (Urbild) will once again be

restored.’49 The first point to note is the curiosity, the irony, of truth living on in illusion.

And next, we might acknowledge that the restoration of the original image will not

signal our return to nature. There is no single image of us, or for us, that will restore

our dignity and integrity, for we are dynamic, evolving creatures. The purpose of play,

and semblance, is to help us learn to withdraw from our thralldom to the image, the

spell of its unity, which is but a mere projection of our own lost unity. Our relation to

the image, as a category of phenomena, is not unlike how we comport ourselves in

relation to each of our capacities. The stasis of the image supports our longing after

47
Schiller, NS, p. 103.
48
Schiller, NS, p. 106.
49
Schiller, AE, p. 57.
 87

unity, just as we corral our potentiality into individuated capacities, each seemingly

with its own integrity.

Conclusion

We exist, and indeed thrive, in the in-between. This is the state that aesthetic education

hopes to restore. The role of semblance and play, again, is to aid us whenever we fall

prey to one affirmation or another of what we are: ‘Man, as we know, is neither

exclusively matter nor exclusively mind. Beauty, as the consummation of his humanity,

can therefore be neither exclusively life nor exclusively form.’50 We contain - we are -

if not multitudes then at least multiplicities. We lose just that feeling and mode of

existing, of life, when we retreat into one image, or one capacity, or another. If our

potentiality is not to be diminished, if we are to remain who we are as beings in freedom

and suspension, then we must learn, via aesthetic education, how not to fall prey to our

own affirmations. The role of the image in aesthetic education, or more precisely, that

of the beautiful image, is twofold: it works first to conjure up the allure of the image -

indeed we might say the beautiful image is in fact the image in its most beautiful, and

thus realized, manifestation, the ideal image - and then, second, to puncture the very

affirmation of the status of the image, disavowing its own actuality, in other words: as

semblance. The notion of the sublime thus enters here with the secondary action of the

beautiful image. We might say the beautiful image prepares us for the still more

sweeping disavowal of the sublime, in which all imagery, and indeed the imagination

50
Schiller, AE, p. 103.
 88

itself, is surpassed. The sublime is the dialectical advance upon the beautiful by its

undoing of any and all remaining ties to sensuousness.

There is a passage in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory where he acknowledges the

kinship between Schiller’s aesthetic education and how modernist art takes up the role

of the sublime: ‘This is touched on by Schiller’s dictum that the human being is only

fully human when at play; with the consummation of his sovereignty he leaves behind

the spell of sovereignty’s aim. The more empirical reality hermetically excludes this

event, the more art contracts into the element of the sublime; in a subtle way, after the

fall of formal beauty, the sublime was the only aesthetic idea left to modernism.’51 In

Adorno’s telling it is not as if the sublime simply triumphs over the limitations of beauty

and the image; it is rather that the dominance of the sublime is a by-product of the

historical event of empirical reality shrinking in such a way that it could no longer

sustain the illusions of beautiful imagery.

51
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. by Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 197.
 89

Art’s Underthought: Art, Presupposition and

Immorality

ZOE WALKER

For the young are not able to distinguish what has a deeper meaning and what

hasn’t. Whatever opinions they have formed at their age are hard to wash out

and usually become ingrained.

Plato, Republic, 378d-e1

Art is dangerous — because of its ‘deeper meanings’. So Plato argues in Book II of the

Republic, claiming that 1) artworks have deeper meanings, 2) these are sometimes

immoral, and 3) as such they can be morally corrupting, and of children in particular.

My project in this paper is to vindicate these claims: art — both literary and visual —

is indeed dangerous, and in just the way Plato feared.2

In Section I, I propose that we understand ‘deeper meanings’ as the

presuppositions of artworks, because both are inexplicit and hard to identify. This

account puts me in a position to consider how the deeper meanings of artworks could

morally corrupt audiences.

1
Plato, Republic, 378d-e.
2
Or at least, in just the way Plato feared in Book II of the Republic.
 90

In Section II, I discuss artworks’ capacity to confirm evaluative commitments

we have already via presupposition, as Noel Carroll argues. Carroll sees this as a

resource, offering potential for moral benefit — but this means there is equal potential

for moral harm. In particular, I will argue that we can expect artworks to confirm

attitudes of its audiences that constitute and maintain oppression.

In Section III, I argue for art’s capacity for informative presupposition. If

presupposition can be informative, this means the ‘deeper meanings’ of artworks can

not only confirm existing attitudes, as Carroll allowed, but also convey new attitudes. I

offer some suggestions for why we might expect artworks to seem particularly

authoritative, and so their messages particularly compelling.

Plato ultimately concludes that artists should be banished from the state

altogether. My own conclusion is less drastic, but I do offer some suggestions as to how

we might mitigate the dangers of art I have outlined.

Section I: Hyponoia as Presupposition

Artworks, according to Plato, sometimes have a deeper meaning. What does he mean

by this? The Greek word here translated as ‘deeper meaning’ is hyponoia — literally,

‘under thought’. On one level, then, we might naturally understand hyponoia as being

something which is not asserted explicitly in the story, but is implied by what is said:

the thought lying under what is explicit. This is why Plato has Socrates assert that ‘[n]or

are any of those stories at all suitable that tell of the gods making war, plotting against

and fighting other gods […] if those who are going to guard our state are to consider it
 91

most shameful to fall recklessly into enmity with each other’.3 The idea seems to be

that if stories depict gods warring with each other, this implies to audiences that such

behaviour is permissible rather than shameful: the ‘under thought’ is a message of

permissibility about something which is in fact impermissible.

But there seems to be, as Jonathan Lear points out, another way in which

hyponoia is ‘under thought’: ‘it enters the psyche beneath the radar of critical thought’.4

It is here that the real danger of artworks resides. Given that hyponoia is not explicitly

asserted by artworks, audiences (and particularly children) are – Plato suggests — less

likely to subject it to rational scrutiny before adopting, for example, the belief that

constant fighting and enmity with one’s peers is morally permissible.

So hyponoia, as Plato conceives of it, has two key features: a) it is implicit rather

than explicit in artworks, and b) it is prone to passing beneath the radar of critical

thought. It seems that we do commonly acknowledge the existence of something which

has these very same features: presupposition.

When speakers perform speech-acts, there are often many things they do not say

explicitly but rather take for granted: they presuppose things. So for example, when I

say “the former president of the United States was terrifyingly underqualified”, I require

the presupposition that there was a former president of the United States, and when I

say “even Joe Biden will do a better job”, I require the presupposition that Joe Biden

will not do a fantastic job either.5 The acceptability of many of the things that are said

3
Plato, Republic, 378c.
4
Jonathan Lear, ‘Allegory and Myth in Plato’s Republic’, p.27.
5
I have adapted this discussion of presupposition from David Lewis, ‘Scorekeeping in a Language
Game’.
 92

in a conversation will depend in part, then, on which presuppositions there are in the

shared pool of beliefs and attitudes between interlocutors: what, following Robert

Stalnaker, I will call the ‘common ground’ between interlocutors.6

Moreover, it looks as though, just like speakers in a conversation, artworks

make presuppositions that must have corresponding attitudes in the common ground

between artwork and audience if the audience is to be able to fully engage with the

artwork. Take narrative artworks in the first instance. As Noel Carroll puts it, ‘[i]t is of

the nature of narrative to be essentially incomplete. Every narrative makes an

indeterminate number of presuppositions that the audience must bring, so to speak, to

the text’.7 Narrative artworks do not spell out, nor would it be feasible for them to spell

out, everything that is supposed to be true in the fictional worlds their characters inhabit.

Rather, they ‘depend […] upon the audience to fill in a great deal and that filling-in is

an indispensable part of what it is to follow and to comprehend a narrative’. 8 When

Virginia Woolf writes, on the first page of Mrs Dalloway, ‘[Peter] would be back from

India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which’,9 she does not explicitly state

that, as in the real world, India is a country, and one that is far away from the United

Kingdom, and June and July are consecutive months; rather, the reader brings this

knowledge to the text. This ability to ‘fill in’ the presuppositional gaps and thus fully

engage with the narrative depends on the relevant presuppositions having

corresponding attitudes in the common ground between artwork and audience, such as

6
Robert Stalnaker, ‘Common Ground’, p.701.
7
Noel Carroll, ‘Art, Narrative and Moral Understanding’, p.138.
8
Carroll, ‘Art, Narrative and Moral Understanding’, p.138.
9
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, p.3. (Page one is the title page, and page two is blank.)
 93

certain beliefs about India, June and July: if they do not, the audience cannot fill in the

gaps and thus cannot fully engage with the artwork.10

The examples of presupposition so far mentioned have all been of propositions

whose corresponding attitudes in the common ground would be beliefs; for example,

the proposition that June and July are consecutive months would correspond to the

belief that June and July are consecutive months. However, presupposed propositions

may correspond to other kinds of attitude too. For example, in Mrs Dalloway, if we are

to respond to Septimus’ death in the manner solicited by the work,11 we must not just

believe the presupposed propositions that the avoidable death of a young man is sad,

and that being in some way responsible for it is morally condemnable, but also have the

attitudes of sadness towards the death and condemnation towards Dr. Holmes

respectively.12

I have hitherto been focusing on presupposition in narrative artworks, using

examples that are exclusively literary, but I also want to argue that images are capable

10
Note that here the audience are taking propositions that are true in the real world, for example the
proposition ‘June and July are consecutive months’, to also be true in the fiction. That artworks
sometimes demand us to import beliefs – and other related attitudes – we have about the real world into
the fiction in this way is all I want to establish at this point. In the final section of this paper, when I
discuss the capacity of artwork for informative presupposition, I will look at the reverse process:
exporting beliefs and attitudes from the fiction to the real world.
11
In this paper I will be assuming that there is a way to engage with and respond to the artworks with
which I am concerned that is solicited by the work in question, where clues to the solicited perspective
include the elements that are foregrounded in a depiction and those that are backgrounded, the
aestheticization or not of certain elements, and whether the narrative ultimately rewards or punishes the
characters depicted in it. I hope that the examples of solicited responses I give throughout – sadness at
the death of Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway, viewing the rape as erotic in Rape of Europa, condemnation of
Andrea Sachs in The Devil Wears Prada, and so on – will demonstrate my assumption’s intuitive appeal.
I do not wish, however, to equate the solicited response to a work with the response the artist intends, as
there are at least some cases where the two come apart (see e.g. Levinson, J., ‘Intention and Interpretation
in Literature’). To avoid implying this, I will talk throughout of what the work presupposes, rather than
what the artist presupposes.
12
This point about presuppositions sometimes corresponding to attitudes other than belief is made about
the presuppositions of hate speech and pornography in Langton, R., ‘Beyond Belief’.
 94

of presupposition in just the same way that linguistic representations are. I will illustrate

this with Anne Eaton’s useful discussion of the female nude. She notes that the female

nude typically ‘calls upon its audience to ‘see’ […] the woman represented […] as

primarily a sex object’.13 So for example, in Titian’s Rape of Europa, the rape in

question is eroticized by Titian’s use of beautiful glowing paint to depict Europa’s body

and sumptuous colours for the scene around her, the erotic positioning of her body, and

the backgrounding of her distress at what is happening to her. In this way, the audience

is called on to find it sexy, and view Europa, qua woman, not as a person, who might

be afraid of her impending rape, but rather as a sex object. Failure to view the work in

this way is failure to fully engage with it. ‘A viewer could’, Eaton notes, ‘be either

unable or unwilling… to look upon the nude in the way that the pictures prescribe […]

but such resistance is bound to interfere with one’s appreciation of the work in

question’.14

This ‘way of seeing’15 the woman represented, constituted of attitudes such as

the belief that the rape of Europa is sexy, has a similar role to the belief that the

avoidable death of a young man is sad in Mrs Dalloway. Although neither is explicitly

asserted by the work, both need to be in the common ground between artwork and

audience if the audience is to respond to the work in the manner solicited by the work.

13
Anne Eaton, ‘What’s Wrong with the (Female) Nude?’, p.293.
14
Eaton, ‘What’s Wrong with the (Female) Nude?’, pp.294-5. This unwillingness/incapacity to engage
with artworks in the prescribed way is closely linked to the phenomenon known in the literature as
‘imaginative resistance’ (see e.g. Gendler, T.S., ‘The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance’).
15
This is John Berger’s phrase (Berger, J., Ways of Seeing), and I take the application of it here from
Eaton, ‘What’s Wrong with the (Female) Nude?’.
 95

In other words, Rape of Europa presupposes this objectifying way of seeing, just as

Mrs Dalloway presupposes the belief about the sadness of death.

A good contrast with Rape of Europa, which makes vivid what is presupposed,

is the film The Accused. As Lynne Tirrell puts it, ‘although [The Accused] graphically

depicts the abuse and degradation of a woman being gang-raped, it does not glorify the

rapists. It does not portray rape as providing pleasure to the woman or as something she

sought or deserved’.16 Crucially, unlike Rape of Europa, it ‘[p]resent[s] the woman as

a person’.17 Although both artworks depict rape, they differ in how they call on the

audience to see the rape: The Accused does not presuppose seeing rape as something

erotic.

These remarks about how a work calls on its audience to see the work suggest

that in fact, many of the beliefs and attitudes one might be required to share with a work

in order to fully engage with it can be systematically related into a whole outlook on

the world and the people in it. For instance, an artwork might presuppose Langton’s

‘objectifying attitude’ towards one or more of its characters: an attitude where a person

is viewed as ‘something to be looked at, to be pursued, to be consumed, to be used, to

be possessed’.18 This objectifying attitude is constituted by a number of beliefs and

other attitudes, all of which connect to form a whole perspective on a person. Similar

16
Lynne Tirrell, ‘Aesthetic Derogation: Hate Speech, Pornography and Aesthetic Contexts’, p.299.
17
Tirrell, ‘Aesthetic Derogation: Hate Speech, Pornography and Aesthetic Contexts’, p.299.
18
Rae Langton, ‘Sexual Solipsism’, p.331. Langton’s ‘objectifying attitude’ functions in a similar way
to Strawson’s ‘objective attitude’ in P.F. Strawson, ‘Freedom and Resentment’, only with different
relational gerundives: when one adopts the objective attitude one views a person as ‘something… to be
managed or handled or cured or trained’ (p.9). The objective attitude is then a further instance of a
particular ‘way of seeing’ someone, although it is less readily imagined as being presupposed by an
artwork than the objectifying attitude is.
 96

to the objectifying attitude is the attitude commonly referred to as ‘the male gaze’,19

which, as Eaton puts it, ‘refers to the androcentric attitude of an image; that is, its

depiction of the world, and in particular of women, in terms of male or masculine

interest, emotions, attitudes, or values’.20 Again, the male gaze is an attitude constituted

of a number of beliefs and other attitudes which connect to form an outlook on the

world: an outlook which may be presupposed by an artwork.

So both literary and pictorial artworks can, just like speakers, make

presuppositions which are not asserted explicitly by the artwork. In other words,

presupposition has the first of the two features of hyponoia noted above: it is something

which is implicit (rather than explicit) in artworks. Moreover, as a result, presupposition

also has the second feature of being prone to passing beneath the radar of critical

thought. As Rae Langton notes, presuppositions are in a sense ‘stronger than assertion,

presenting information as uncontroversial and not at issue—as shared knowledge or

received wisdom, to be taken for granted’.21 As such, we can imagine that audiences,

and in particular children, will be more likely to accept presuppositions without critical

scrutiny than they would explicit assertions which are not presented as to be taken for

granted. Indeed, Langton uncannily echoes Lear’s claims about hyponoia when she

remarks that speech acts enabled by presupposition ‘can have an under-the-radar quality

absent in assertion’.22 I will offer more support for this claim in due course but for now

it suffices to note that it is at least plausible that presupposition has the second of the

19
The term was coined by Laura Mulvey in her ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’.
20
Anne Eaton, ‘Feminist Philosophy of Art’, p.878.
21
Rae Langton, ‘Blocking as Counter-Speech’, p.28.
22
Langton, ‘Blocking as Counter-Speech’, p.28.
 97

two features we wanted from hyponoia. I take it that this is enough to show that

presupposition is a plausible cashing out of hyponoia.

If we understand Plato’s concept of hyponoia or ‘deeper meaning’ in this way,

we can see that the first of his three claims about art listed above has been vindicated:

artworks do sometimes have deeper meanings.

Section II: Confirmatory Presupposition

Having answered these questions of scope, I am now in a position to turn back to the

main task of this paper: vindicating Plato’s claims and showing that art can indeed be

dangerous. Thus far we have seen that Plato’s first claim is true: artworks can indeed

have deeper meanings, when we understand deeper meanings as presuppositions. What

remains to be seen is whether these deeper meanings can corrupt in the way Plato

feared.

An initial response to the admission that artworks can have deeper meanings in

the way described above might go as follows: so artworks require us to fill in

presuppositional gaps — so what? Are we not just filling in the gaps with attitudes that

we already have? In which case, it does not look as though we are going to acquire any

immoral attitudes from engaging with artworks in this way, so we have no need to

worry that this gives artworks the potential to be morally corrupting.

In the next section, I will argue that in fact, the attitudes we use to fill in the

presuppositional gaps need not be ones we already have. But for now, I will assume, as

Carroll does, that they are attitudes we already have. I will argue that even when this is
 98

the case, artworks have the potential to be morally corrupting. I will start by outlining

an account Carroll proposes of how the presuppositions artworks require us to make

can be morally beneficial, by confirming our pre-existing moral attitudes. I will then

argue that if we buy into this plausible account, we are by the same token equally

committed to the possibility of artworks being morally corrupting: we must concede

that art can, as Plato feared, be dangerous.

So let us assume that the presuppositions we use to fill in the gaps are all

attitudes we already have. Even still, Carroll argues, engaging with artworks by

employing these presuppositions can be morally beneficial for us:

[I]n order to understand a narrative properly, we must use many of

the same beliefs and emotions, generally rooted in our common

culture, that we use to negotiate everyday human events for the

purpose of filling in and getting the point of stories. In this sense, it is

not the case that the narrative teaches us something brand new, but

rather that it activates the knowledge and emotions, moral and

otherwise, that we already possess.23

In Carroll’s view, narrative fiction can confirm24 moral beliefs and concepts we

already hold in a number of different ways. Engagement with artworks constitutes

23
Carroll, ‘Art, Narrative and Moral Understanding’, p.141.
24
Carroll’s own term for this confirmatory process is clarification (‘the clarificationist view’, p.142), but
while this term suits the morally beneficial side of the process, it is less suited to the morally corrupting
version I am arguing for, hence my use of the more neutral ‘confirm’.
 99

practising applying our moral attitudes to specific situations, and might require us to

‘reorganise the hierarchical orderings of our moral categories and premises, or to

reinterpret [them] in the light of new paradigm instances and hard cases, or to reclassify

barely acknowledged phenomena afresh [my italics]’.25

An illustration of a couple of these confirmatory processes can be found in

feminist novels such as Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room. In the novel, French

details the dull, time-consuming and back-breaking work of a housewife in the

seventies in excruciating detail. The reader may already believe that getting no

recompense for one’s labour is an injustice, but engaging with the novel could

encourage them to practise applying this to the thankless lives of housewives, or even

to reclassify this familial structure as an injustice if they did not already.

We are not acquiring any new propositional moral knowledge in engaging with

artworks, but we are reorganising, practising, extending — in short, confirming — the

moral knowledge we already have. We are deepening our moral understanding, where

understanding is understood as ‘the activity of refining what we already know, of

recognizing connections between parts of our knowledge stock, of bringing what we

already know to clarity through a process of practice and judgment’.26

What Carroll has given us here is a plausible account of how engaging with the

presuppositions of an artwork can be morally beneficial. However, if we buy it, then it

looks as though we are equally committed to the possibility that art can, in the same

way, morally corrupt us.

25
Carroll, ‘Art, Narrative and Moral Understanding’, p.142.
26
Carroll, ‘Art, Narrative and Moral Understanding’, p.144.
 100

Activating and putting into motion our existing moral attitudes does seem to be,

as Carroll argues, a way of confirming them. However, whether confirming them is

morally beneficial or morally corrupting will depend on the moral attitudes in question.

What of artworks which presuppose immoral propositions? We have already seen that

the female nude for example typically seems to presuppose objectifying propositions

about women, such that viewers are required to adopt the male gaze/objectifying

attitude in order to properly engage with works like Rape of Europa. If Carroll is right

about the confirmatory potential of artworks, then, it looks as though proper

engagement with Rape of Europa could confirm objectifying views of women one has

in one or more of the ways suggested above: viewing the painting may constitute

practising the adoption of the male gaze, reorganising the hierarchical ordering of our

moral categories and premises in such a way as to privilege objectifying attitudes, and

perhaps even reclassifying cases of rape as cases of normal or unobjectionable sex.

Rape of Europa may not give us new immoral attitudes, but it could deepen our

commitment to and extend the scope of immoral attitudes we already have.

Another example from a different medium is the film The Devil Wears Prada.

The protagonist, Andrea Sachs, prioritizes her very demanding and career-advancing

job at an influential fashion magazine over her boyfriend, and for this offence he ends

up breaking up with her: “You know, in case you were wondering, the person whose

calls you always take — that’s the relationship you’re in. I hope you two are very happy

together.”27 In its depiction of the break-up scene in particular, the film encourages us

27
David Frankel, dir. The Devil Wears Prada.
 101

to condemn the apologetic Andrea and side with her self-righteous boyfriend – an

interpretation supported by the narrative, which ends with Andrea ultimately quitting

her job and telling her now ex-boyfriend he was ‘right about everything’.

In other words, it looks as though the film presupposes something like the

proposition that a woman choosing her career over her family life is condemnable, and

so to fully engage with the work we are required to fill in the presuppositional gap with

the belief that a woman choosing her career over her family life is condemnable, and

perhaps with the attitude of condemnation towards Andrea’s actions. The exercise of

filling in the gaps in this way again looks like it might constitute, for example,

practising applying this belief and attitude, and perhaps reclassifying specific cases like

Andrea’s as instances of this broader condemnable behaviour.

These examples serve to vindicate Plato’s claims that artworks can be morally

corrupting by virtue of their deeper meanings. The presuppositions of artworks —–

their deeper meanings — can be immoral, and when they are, engagement with the

artwork requires audiences to practise applying their own immoral attitudes in such a

way as to deepen their commitment to those attitudes.

However, it might be thought that this phenomenon is rare, and so not overly

troubling, because it relies on a big coincidence: that a work will presuppose immoral

attitudes and its audience will have those very same immoral attitudes already. What I

want to argue now is that this confirmation of a reader or viewer’s immoral attitudes is

neither infrequent nor coincidental, but rather that we can expect artworks to frequently

confirm a particular variety of immoral attitude in audiences: those that constitute and
 102

maintain oppression.28 This argument will require a brief segue into the nature of

oppression and the ideological framework that underpins it, which will then put me in

a position to show that we can expect artworks to consistently confirm oppressive

attitudes in audiences.

Tirrell describes oppression as being a matter of how the social system ‘grants

power to members of one group because they are members of that group and denies it

to those who are not members of that group.’29 Marilyn Frye illustrates this well in the

case of the oppression of women by enumerating many instances women face of ‘the

double bind — situations in which options are reduced to a very few, and all of them

expose one to penalty, censure, or deprivation’.30 For example:

It is common in the United States that women, especially younger

women, are in a bind where neither sexual activity nor sexual

inactivity is all right. If she is heterosexually active, a woman is open

to censure and punishment for being loose, unprincipled, or a whore,

[such as] criticism, snide and embarrassing remarks, being treated as

an easy lay by men, scorn from her more restrained female friends…

On the other hand, if she refrains from heterosexual activity, she is

fairly constantly harassed by men who try to persuade her into it and

28
I am plausibly assuming here that attitudes which constitute and maintain oppression are immoral.
Perhaps this assumption will be contested; however, I take it that at the very least, oppressive attitudes
are just as worrying as immoral attitudes, so the point about the danger of artworks to one’s beliefs and
attitudes goes through, even if not in quite the way Plato envisioned.
29
Tirrell, ‘Aesthetic Derogation’, p.303.
30
Marilyn Frye, ‘Oppression’, p.11.
 103

pressure her to “relax” and “let her hair down”; she is threatened with

labels like “frigid,” “uptight,” “man-hater,” “bitch” and “cocktease.”

[…] Women are caught like this, too, by networks of forces and

barriers that expose one to penalty, loss or contempt whether one

works outside the home or not, is on welfare or not, bears children or

not, raises children or not, marries or not, stays married or not, is

heterosexual, lesbian, both or neither.31

These barriers and penalties are ones women face by virtue of being women, and they

serve to trap women into situations in which they are powerless.

These systems of oppression are (partially) constituted and maintained by

people’s attitudes towards people in the subordinating and subordinated groups. For

example, the sexual activity double bind is largely constituted and maintained by the

widespread beliefs and corresponding evaluative attitudes — held by both men and

women — that a young woman who is sexually active is loose and unprincipled and

‘easy’ and deserving of censure, and that a young woman who is not sexually active is

repressed and uptight and in need of sexual activity. In other words, the said attitudes

will be part of the dominant cultural ideology: ‘the background cognitive and affective

frame that gives actions and reactions meaning within a social system and contributes

to its survival’ as Haslanger puts it.32 The dominant ideology, including these attitudes

that constitute and maintain oppression, will be found everywhere, from art, the media

31
Frye, ‘Oppression’, p.11.
32
Sally Haslanger, ‘Ideology, Generics and Common Ground’, p.447.
 104

and advertising to the minds and mouths of employers, parents and friends, such that it

is ‘pervasive and unavoidable’.33 For example, the sexually objectifying way of seeing

women is found in artworks like Rape of Europa which eroticize the rape of women,

newspapers which constantly report on how women look and whom they are dating

rather than what they do, adverts like the recent Protein World ‘The Weight Loss

Collection’ advert which depicted a slender, fair-skinned and fair-haired woman in a

bikini next to the words ‘Are you beach body ready?’, and employers who demand that

women wear high heels.34

What this means is that if an artist and her audience are from social systems with

the same or a relevantly similar dominant ideology, we can expect that frequently they

will share oppressive attitudes. In such cases, artworks will confirm immoral – namely,

oppressive – attitudes in audiences.35 The very same ideology by virtue of which The

Devil Wears Prada presupposed that it is condemnable for a woman to prioritise her

job over her family life, and thus made a film containing that same presupposition, is

the one which frames the lives of hundreds of thousands of viewers of the film, and as

such all these viewers are likely to share the presupposed attitudes.

All of this suggests we should be particularly wary of artworks that do not

disagree with us: as Lynne Tirrell puts it, ‘the less a film or image seems to have a

perspective, the more likely it is that the perspective matches the dominant cultural

33
Haslanger, ‘Ideology, Generics and Common Ground’, p.447.
34
See the following articles for discussion of the latter three examples: ‘Five things about women in the
press’, ‘Are you beach body ready? Controversial weight loss ad sparks varied reactions’, ‘Is it legal to
force women to wear high heels at work?’ (full references in bibliography).
35
See footnote 28 on the inference from oppressive to immoral.
 105

ideology’. 36 When we are unaware of being morally challenged by an artwork is when

this process of immoral attitude confirmation is most likely to be in effect. In this way,

the confirmation of our oppressive attitudes is a process of which we are not conscious:

the moral corruption happens under the radar, just as Plato feared.

We have seen then that the deeper meanings of artworks can sometimes be

immoral, because of the oppressive attitudes of the dominant cultural ideology.

Moreover, as such, they can sometimes be morally corrupting, because audiences are

likely to share the immoral attitudes of artworks, and when they do, their immoral

attitudes are confirmed. As for Plato’s concern about the particular danger to children,

if the confirmatory process is a deepening of one’s commitments, then presumably there

is more potential for harm to people whose commitments do not already run deep. It

seems plausible that children will typically be such people.

Section III: Informative Presupposition

Thus far, we have assumed, with Carroll, that one can only fill in the presuppositional

gaps in artworks with attitudes one already possesses,37 and hence that one cannot

acquire any new attitudes, immoral or otherwise. In this section I will argue that this

assumption is false, as presupposition can be informative, and therefore that one can

acquire new immoral attitudes from artworks. I will start by noting a feature of

36
Tirrell, ‘Aesthetic derogation’, p.299.
37
‘[T]he successful author requires an audience that can bring to the text… what is not explicit in it. This
further dictates that, to a large extent, the author and the audience need to share a common background
of beliefs about the world and about human nature’ (Carroll, p.139).
 106

presupposition in conversation that Carroll overlooks, and then show what the

implications are for art.

We have seen that the acceptability of many of the things that are said in a

conversation will depend in part on which presuppositions there are in the common

ground. But as Lewis notices, in conversation, it turns out to be rather difficult to say

something which lacks a presupposition. If I say “even Joe Biden will do a better job”,

and my interlocutors tacitly acquiesce (i.e. no one jumps in with “Whadda ya mean,

‘even Biden’?”), then that presupposition ‘springs into existence, making what [I] said

acceptable after all’.38 This feature of presupposition leads Lewis to formulate a rule of

accommodation for presupposition: ‘If at time t something is said that requires

presupposition P to be acceptable, and if P is not presupposed just before t, then —

ceteris paribus and within certain limits — presupposition P comes into existence at

t.’39

Clearly, this phenomenon will have implications for our account of

presupposition in art, too. If we are right to construe engagement with an artwork as a

conversation of sorts between artwork and audience, then it looks as though the artistic

engagement process too will obey a rule of accommodation for presupposition,

whereby typically, if an attitude that is presupposed by the artwork is not already shared

by the reader/viewer, then it will, at the moment it is needed, become part of the

common ground. In other words, it looks as though an artwork could actually, via

38
Lewis, ‘Scorekeeping in a Language Game’, p.339.
39
Lewis, ‘Scorekeeping in a Language Game’, p.340.
 107

presupposition, give us new attitudes, and, most pertinently, could give us new immoral

attitudes.

The first point of contention is surely whether I am right to construe artistic

engagement as a conversation: is this not just metaphorical, in which case we should

not expect the rule of accommodation to apply here? To respond to this concern, it will

be useful to get clear on why exactly presuppositions in conversation do obey this rule

of accommodation, as it will then become evident that we should expect

presuppositions in artworks to obey it too.

Marina Sbisà suggests we consider presuppositions as ‘assumptions which

ought to be shared’;40 that is to say, we take it to be a norm of discourse that

presuppositions are to be shared. This suggestion is compelling because ‘if the hearer

takes the objective context not to contain the presupposed propositional element, he or

she will be bound to consider the speaker not only as being wrong about the facts… but

also as violating some norm of discourse. Violating norms of discourse […] is in fact a

kind of behaviour which makes it difficult to continue conversational cooperation’.41

The idea, then, is that refusing to allow a presupposition into the common ground brings

communication to a grinding halt. We are forced either to end the conversation

altogether, or to change the subject to a discussion of whether or not the contested

presupposition should be allowed into the common ground. But this latter solution ‘is

laborious, because it involves a change of topic from what was explicitly at issue to

what was merely presupposed, as well as being risky, because it amounts to openly

40
Marina Sbisà, ‘Ideology and the Persuasive Use of Presupposition’, p.501.
41
Sbisà, ‘Ideology and the Persuasive Use of Presupposition’, p.502.
 108

challenging the entitlement of the speaker to issue the utterances he or she has issued,

which may once again lead to a breakdown in the communicative relationship’.42 This

is why, ceteris paribus and within certain limits, ‘the hearer will avoid treating the

speaker as someone violating norms of discourse’43 and will instead allow the

presupposition into the common ground: not doing so risks stymieing and perhaps

ending communication altogether, which will come at the cost of any useful information

the hearer might have gleaned.

This explanation of the rule of accommodation for presupposition in

conversation makes it clear that we should expect the same phenomenon in the artistic

engagement process. Just as in conversation, if the reader/viewer does not accept an

artwork’s presupposition into their shared common ground, then they are bound to

consider the artwork as violating some norm of discourse. The difference in the artistic

engagement case is that the second course of action is not available to the reader/viewer

of the artwork: there is no possibility of changing the conversation to a discussion of

whether or not the presupposition should be accepted into the common ground. Rather,

the reader/viewer must either accept the presupposition into the common ground, or

end communication and walk away. This will come at the cost of the aesthetic

enjoyment of the work, and is hence, ceteris paribus, undesirable.

It is important to note that this is a pro tanto phenomenon: to the extent that one

refuses to accept a presupposition into the common ground, one stops engaging with

42
Sbisà, ‘Ideology and the Persuasive Use of Presupposition’, p.502.
43
Sbisà, ‘Ideology and the Persuasive Use of Presupposition’, p.502.
 109

the work. That is not to say that refusing one presupposition means one cannot engage

with any aspect of the work at all.

So it does look as though artworks will obey Lewis’ rule of accommodation for

presupposition.44 It does not straightforwardly follow though, that this means they can

give people beliefs and attitudes, immoral or otherwise, for two reasons. First, as Lewis

says, in the case of conversation, the presuppositions in the common ground are taken

for granted by interlocutors either ‘sincerely or just “for the sake of the argument”’.45

Why not think, then, that when people engage with artworks that presuppose things

they do not already believe, they accept these presuppositions into the common ground

just for the sake of argument — or in other words, merely entertain them — without

permanently adopting them? Second, this problem is compounded by the fact that

artworks are fictions, whose presuppositions are about things that are true in fictions,

not in the real world. This suggests that we are even less likely to sincerely accept

presuppositions of artworks than we are to accept presuppositions of conversations

about real life.

I take the second problem first. Audiences might take the presuppositions of

artworks to be true in the real world as well as the fiction because, as Langton and West

point out, ‘most fictional stories play out against a background […] of purported fact.’46

Often, this background of purported fact will be actual fact, and we can learn from it:

as Gregory Currie observes, ‘the reader of Patrick O’Brien will learn a good deal about

44
For a detailed discussion of how the rule of accommodation applies to attitudes other than belief, see
Langton, ‘Beyond Belief’.
45
Lewis, p.339.
46
Rae Langton and Caroline West, ‘Scorekeeping in a Pornographic Language Game’, p.191.
 110

Nelson’s navy, and the reader of Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety will learn

about revolutionary France’.47 But Langton and West are right to note that if authors

(and presumably other kinds of artist) ‘are ill-informed, indifferent, or outright

deceivers […] then some propositions belonging to the background class [of purported

facts] may well be false’.48 In this case, it looks as though readers/viewers could take

background propositions in fiction that are false in the real world to be ones that are

true in the real world, and thus acquire false beliefs49 about the real world from fiction.

For example, viewers of The Devil Wears Prada might take the proposition that it is

condemnable for a woman to choose her career over her family life to be one that is

true about the real world as well, as they mistake this proposition for a background fact

in the fiction. It is particularly likely that audiences will take moral propositions to be

true in the real world in this way because moral propositions are more often taken to be

necessary truths — true in all possible worlds, including the worlds of fictions — than,

for example, geographical or biological facts. Moreover, plausibly children are at

particular risk of acquiring false beliefs here, because they have less experience of the

real world and so will struggle more to identify which propositions in fiction are

(supposed to be) true in the real world, and which are not.

So it seems plausible that audiences, and particularly children, will often take

artworks to be presupposing propositions that are supposed to be true in real life as well

47
Gregory Currie, ‘The Moral Psychology of Fiction’, p.250.
48
Langton and West, p.191.
49
It is worth making clear that while I talk about belief here, false propositions could lead one to acquire
other attitudes about the real world too — such as an attitude of condemnation towards women who
prioritise work over family life — which, while they will not be false per se, because they are not truth-
evaluable, could be immoral or inappropriate in other ways.
 111

as in the fiction. The question that remains, then, is why we should think that people

will adopt these presuppositions sincerely, rather than merely entertaining them. In

other words, what, if anything, gives the presuppositions of artworks credibility?

It is here that the inexplicit and under-the-radar nature of presupposition really

comes to the fore. Recall an example of an assertion containing a presupposition that

we saw earlier: “Even Biden will do a better job”. The explicit assertion is that Biden

will do a better job. The inexplicit presupposition is that Biden will not have do a

fantastic job either. If I respond by saying: “That’s false!” or “You’re wrong!”, then

unless otherwise specified I will be taken to be denying the explicit assertion rather than

the implicit presupposition; I will be taken to mean that Biden will not do a better job,

rather than that he will not do a fantastic job either.50 This is because when I make an

assertion containing a presupposition, it is the explicitly asserted part that I am

proposing as new information and presenting as at-issue. The presupposition is

something I am taking for granted as being common knowledge already, and is

presented as not-at-issue.51 As Sarah Murray puts it, the at-issue content is ‘information

proposed to be added to the common ground’,52 whereas not-at-issue content, such as

presupposed content, is ‘information directly added to the common ground’. 53 A

proposal can easily be blocked (“You’re wrong!”), but it is much harder to block

content that is taken for granted.

50
This point is made — although not first made — by Jason Stanley in Stanley, J., ‘Language as a
Mechanism of Control’.
51
This point is also made in Stanley, J., ‘Language as a Mechanism of Control’.
52
Murray, S., ‘Varieties of Update’, p.4.
53
Ibid.
 112

This is why, as I suggested above, it follows from the inexplicit nature of

presupposition that it is prone to passing under the radar of critical thought. By virtue

of being not-at-issue, presupposed content can easily pass a hearer by unnoticed,

slipping directly into the common ground without them noticing and questioning

whether to accept it as true or not. And even if they do notice, the presentation of the

presupposed content as not-at-issue/taken for granted/common knowledge, means that

the hearer will likely feel they are already supposed to believe what is presupposed, and

as such, the presupposed content is more compelling than it would be had it been

asserted explicitly. This is particularly likely in the case of children, who are typically

more credulous than adult hearers.

These remarks on the nature of presupposition suggest that we should be wary

of presupposition in any context, be it in art, advertising, journalism, pornography or

wherever else presupposition is possible. In the last part of this paper I want to

tentatively suggest some grounds for thinking that (at least some of) the presuppositions

of (at least some) artworks are particularly compelling, in part because (many) artworks

have a perceived authority that other media lack.

To do this, I will expand on some remarks Eaton makes in her discussion of the

female nude, in which she claims that ‘[t]he female nude not only eroticizes but also

aestheticizes the sexual objectification of women, and it does so from on high’.54 Here,

Eaton identifies two features of the female nude which make its messages particularly

compelling: first, its aestheticization of the way of seeing women that it presupposes,

54
Anne Eaton, ‘What’s Wrong with the (Female) Nude?’, p.307.
 113

and second, the venerated status of the female nude in the artistic canon. I will discuss

these in turn.

First, then: artworks aestheticize their messages. As Eaton says, ‘the nude

demands to be looked at as art, to be appreciated for its composition, textures, portrayal

of light and shadow, and other formal and material features’,55 and this high artistic

value of the works ‘makes the message of female inferiority and male superiority more

compelling’.56 Eaton does not spell out exactly what is compelling here but I take it she

means that it is the beauty of these works that lend their messages power. Perhaps one

way of cashing this out is that the more beautiful the vision of the world the artwork

presents to its audience, the keener the audience is to inhabit it.

A further suggestion about the effect of artworks’ aestheticization of their

messages, is that perhaps the skill these works demonstrate could suggest to the

audience the ingenuity of the artist. This might in turn lend the artist an apparent

authority as a source of information, and as such make the message(s) of their artwork

more compelling.

Moreover, these remarks about aestheticization seem applicable to at least some

other art forms. Many films are shot with stunning cinematography, many novels

written with dazzling prose, many ballets performed with staggering feats of grace and

athleticism. It seems plausible that the high artistic value of these works of art also serve

to make what these works say or imply more compelling, in both of the ways I have

suggested.

55
Eaton, ‘What’s Wrong with the (Female) Nude?’, p.307.
56
Eaton, ‘What’s Wrong with the (Female) Nude?’, p.307.
 114

I now turn to Eaton’s other point about the venerated status of art: ‘Art with a

capital ‘A’ is a hallowed category of works that demands our undivided attention,

respect, special care and maintenance […] [and] Art’s venerated status invests this

message of male superiority and female inferiority with special authority, making it an

especially effective way of promoting sex inequality’.57 The idea is that the respect and

awe with which we treat works like Rape of Europa grants them an authority that, say,

adverts, simply do not have. Of course, this status is not attributed to all artworks alike

— an airport romance novel will not have this canonical, venerated status — but it is

not restricted to the female nude, nor painting more generally; many works of literature

and indeed some films are similarly hallowed.

As a final, extremely tentative suggestion, I want to point to a possible

connection between the authority of artworks and the speech acts they are able to

perform. As Langton notes, subordinating speech acts such as ranking some people as

inferior to others, and legitimating discriminatory behaviour, ‘require that the speaker

occupy a position of authority in a relevant domain’.58 If someone without the requisite

authority attempts to perform a speech act legitimating a certain form of behaviour, that

speech act will ‘misfire’,59 and the behaviour in question will not be taken by hearers

to have been legitimated. Not just anyone, then, can legitimate discrimination.

However, if we think artworks are perceived to have some sort of special authority —

by virtue of their venerated status, and so on — then we might think them capable of

57
Eaton, ‘What’s Wrong with the (Female) Nude?’, p.308.
58
Rae Langton, ‘Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts’, p.37.
59
This is J.L. Austin’s term. See J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words.
 115

being taken by audiences to have legitimated certain kinds of behaviour that media

without this authority are incapable of legitimating. Again, this indicates that (certain)

artworks might have more power to influence audiences’ beliefs and evaluative

attitudes – for better or for worse – than other media. There is much more to say here,

and I mention this primarily to indicate an avenue for further discussion.

I do not of course intend these remarks as definitive proof that artworks have

greater attitude-influencing power than other media, but merely to suggest the

plausibility of this claim. In any case, as long as one accepts that sometimes, people will

adopt new immoral attitudes that have been transmitted to them via the presuppositions

of artworks, then once again, Plato’s claims are vindicated: artworks have deeper

meanings which are sometimes immoral, and as such they can be morally corrupting.

We have seen that this seems particularly plausible in the case of children, given that

they tend to be more credulous than adults.

Section IV: Concluding Remarks

My projects in this paper have been multiple. Principally, I have tried to vindicate the

concerns with art that Plato voices in Republic Book II. To this end, I have proposed a

cashing out of ‘hyponoia’ as presupposition; I have turned Carroll’s account of the

moral benefits of art on its head to argue for the possibility of art confirming our

immoral attitudes, and particularly oppressive ones; I have drawn on discussion of

presupposition in the philosophy of language to argue that art is capable of transmitting

new attitudes to us; and I have argued that these new attitudes are plausibly made
 116

compelling by particular features of presupposition and of art. Throughout, I have

emphasized that, as Plato suggests, there is a particular danger posed to children here.

In the Republic, Plato ends up concluding that we should banish artists from the

ideal state altogether. This seems extreme, but what less drastic measures can we take

to try and mitigate the morally corrupting potential of art?

Broadly speaking, the moral is surely that we should be more mindful of the art

to which we expose our children. This is not necessarily to advocate censorship, just

care, and perhaps an intention to try and match every potentially damaging book, film

or painting with one coming from an entirely different perspective, to ensure that at

their impressionable age children are subject to a variety of different impressions, and

nothing is impressed too deeply, and ‘become[s] ingrained’.60

I think Adeimantus, in Republic Book II, gets to the crux of the matter:

“My word,” he said, “these stories are dangerous stuff!”61

60
Plato, Republic, 378e.
61
Plato, Republic, 378b.
 117

Aesthetic Alchemy: Feature Construction and

Conceptual Enrichment through Literature

JOHAN HEEMSKERK

Introduction

Aesthetic experience often takes the form of a revelation, a feeling of gaining something

valuable, even when we have no words to articulate what is gained. In what follows I

focus on literature and argue that this form of aesthetic experience is bound up with the

creation of new conceptual features. I suggest that certain literary aesthetic experiences

induce the reader to construct representations of non-obvious features such as unique

shapes, exotic sounds, or novel multisensory complexes. Initially engendered by the

requirement to step beyond existing conceptual vocabulary, the aesthetic experience

then guides the reader through the process of constructing new featural representations.

These constructed features are sub-lexical: they are parts of concepts rather than

wholes, and cannot be straightforwardly expressed in words. Once created, conceptual

features can be deployed in concepts, enriching our expressive vocabulary and adding

nuance and depth to our thoughts and experiences in a few key ways. This is what we

gain.
 118

I begin by briefly introducing the theoretical framework of feature

representation, explaining how feature representations are typically thought to be

created, and the role they play in our cognitive lives. I then argue that conceptual

features can be generated by two literary techniques, which I call reduction and

combination: literary techniques which shape perceptual representations into novel

features. I finish by suggesting that this process has profound effects on cognition more

broadly, enriching our concepts and providing the means to cut new, subtle joints in

nature.

1. Features and categorisation

Mentally representing features of objects is crucial for categorisation . We use feature

representations to discriminate between otherwise similar objects, and to find

similarities between otherwise distinct objects1. As a prosaic example, consider the

features of frogs and toads. They have similar skin colour, texture, pupil shape, tongue

and so on. However, we can discriminate frogs and toads based on a feature of their

back legs – frogs have longer back legs than toads. Storing two representations, of legs

of different lengths, each associated with their respective animal concept, facilitates

discriminations between frogs and toads. We can also see the sub-lexical nature of the

stored features: both feature representations could be expressed by the word ‘leg’ but

1
Schyns, P. G., Goldstone, R. L., and Thibaut, J. P., ‘The Development of Features in Object Concepts.’
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 21 (1998), pp. 1-17.
 119

they nonetheless differ along the metric of size, the representation of which receives no

linguistic marker.

Conversely, representations of features can be used to categorize two

superficially distinct objects as the same type. Although there are many design

differences between chairs, one can still categorize a chair based on knowledge of a

functional feature which belongs to chairs — you can sit on them. In fact, though I

shan’t labour the point, this is presumably what allows the creative extension of the

word ‘chair’ to things such as tree stumps or the ground. These diverse objects have the

crucial feature of being something you can sit on. Featural representations are central

to the conceptual apparatus required for categorisation, in both its ordinary and creative

use.

1.1. The theory of features

Theoretical accounts of the representation of features typically make two basic

assumptions. First, they assume that new featural representations are only acquired, if

they are acquired at all, from direct perceptual experience with objects. Second, it is

assumed that featural representations form a fixed set2. That is, either the stored set of

features is acquired early in ontogeny or is innate and immutable. Either way, once you

have your set, you are stuck with it. If this were true, one could not expand the

2
For a classical fixed-set ‘geons’ view, see Biederman, Irving, "Recognition-by-Components: A Theory
of Human Image Understanding." Psychological Review, 94.2 (1987), p. 115. For a theoretical statement
of this position see Fodor, Jerry A., The Language of Thought, Vol. 5, Harvard University Press (1975).
 120

expressive power of their feature set beyond what can be represented by the conjunction

of existing features. Both of these assumptions will be questioned in what follows.

Schyns et al. question the second assumption. They argue that novel feature

representations can be dynamically created during categorisation, leading to feature sets

being flexible. They speculate that ‘features could be progressively extracted and

developed as an organism categorizes its world’3. This view is shared by Lawrence

Barsalou4 who argues that feature representations are constructed by selective attention

over parts of perceptual scenes5. Selective attention, in addition to isolating the feature,

allows for storage in long-term memory6.

I will endorse this position, though we lack the space to assess the empirical

evidence which is typically brought to bear on the proposal. Luckily, there are some

compelling theoretical reasons to endorse the position.

First, Schyns et al. note that empirical studies which purport to provide evidence

for fixed feature sets7 are compatible with flexible feature sets. Researchers typically

argue for fixed feature sets on the basis that the features posited would be advantageous

for categorisation. However, Schyns et al. argue that a feature set which facilitates

categorisation is a feature set that would be dynamically constructed to facilitate

3
Schyns et al. ‘The Development of Features in Object Concepts.’, p. 4.
4
Barsalou, L. W., ‘Perceptual Symbol Systems’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22 (1999), pp. 577-
660.
5
For evidence of selective attention see e.g. Shiffrin, R. M. ‘Attention’, Stevens’ Handbook of
Experimental Psychology: Vol. 2. Learning and Cognition, eds. Williams, B. A., Atkinson, R. C.,
Herrnstein, R. J., Lindzey, G., and Luce, R. D. (1988).
6
See e.g. Nelson, Douglas L., John R. Walling, and Cathy L. McEvoy, "Doubts About Depth." Journal
of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 5.1 (1979), p. 24.
7
For example, Biederman, I., ‘Recognition-by-Components: A theory of Human Image Understanding’
Psychological Review, 94 (1987), pp. 115–47.
 121

categorisation. Thus, ‘evidence in favour of a particular set of features does not entail

that the set of features is hard wired’8. While not an argument in favour of flexible

feature sets, this addresses concerns of incompatibility with existing research. Flexible

feature sets can address existing evidence — and more.

Second, considerations of efficiency speak against views in which feature sets

are fixed. Schyns et al. maintain that ‘most features of the fixed set would never be

used; they would keep waiting for their “Godot category”’9. If we store a fixed feature

set but never have any need for half of the features we store, we are unnecessarily using

vital resources for tasks we will never carry out. Conversely, the ability to flexibly

create new conceptual features as and when they are needed means that efficiency can

be maximised — features will only be created for tasks they are used in.

It may be thought that flexibility is in fact at odds with efficiency; fixed

representations surely allow for ease of processing, since cognitive effort is required to

construct a new feature. Perhaps flexible sets require less initial storage, the thought

goes, but occurrent cognition requires fixed representations. This can be conceded with

the following caveat. It may be that much occurrent processing relies on stored features,

but this is not at odds with the current proposal. Fixed features no doubt play an

important role in facilitating effortless cognition, but fixed feature sets face a serious

limitation when it comes to occurrent processing, as set out in (1), below. This point

bears emphasising: certain fixed representations may be crucial for any cognitive

system. What is being rejected is that only fixed representations are required.

8
Schyns et al. ‘The Development of Features in Object Concepts’, p. 10.
9
Schyns et al. ‘The Development of Features in Object Concepts’, p. 10.
 122

Positive arguments for flexible construction of features are that they (1) allow

for straightforward categorisation rules and (2) allow for ongoing refinement in

categorisation. As an example of (1), consider that we are asked to categorize a new

type of object with a strange shape. I can either combine my existing shape-based

feature representations together according to some complex rule, or I can create a new

shape-based feature matching the shape of this new object. The former is cognitively

demanding, especially as I need to reinstate this rule every time I encounter a token of

the newly encountered type. If, however, I can create a new feature to add to my

repertoire, I simply need to token this representation each time I encounter the strange-

shaped object, reducing the complexity and hence cognitive effort. In short, feature

construction requires an inaugural bout of cognitive effort with a resulting ease of future

processing, while combination of existing features requires cognitive effort upon each

successive categorisation.

As for (2), imagine that you have a featural representation roughly

corresponding to leaves in your feature set. Or, if you prefer your features more fine-

grained, imagine that you have features representing leafy colours, and vaguely leafy

shapes. Now imagine you take up botany. As you become more and more involved with

botany, you will be able to discriminate between trees and leaves with increased

reliability and speed10. A natural explanation of this improvement is that you have

refined your set of features, creating much more specific and differentiated leaf shapes

10
For explicit evidence of this, see Medin, D. L., Lynch, E. B., Coley, J. D., and Atran, S., ‘Categorization
and Reasoning Among Tree Experts: Do All Roads Lead to Rome?’, Cognitive Psychology, 32 (1997),
pp. 49-96.
 123

and colours. When encountering a tree with leaves with a subtle but distinctive shape,

the fact you have created and stored a representation of just this shape associated with

this tree allows for quick and accurate categorisation. You see the leaf: you token your

new feature and bring along the concept of the tree.

The argument from (2) demonstrates the indispensability of flexible feature sets

throughout ontogeny as we develop more sophisticated categorisation s. However, it

might be thought that cognitive flexibility is proprietary to early ontogeny, with fixity

becoming the norm during development. It is often thought, for instance, that there is a

‘critical window’ for first language acquisition. However, we need not be in general

pessimistic about the persistence of flexibility. To cite just one example from another

area of research: while it appears that categorial colour boundaries are present from 17

weeks’ old11 new discriminative abilities can be generated far into adulthood12.

These arguments are inferences to the best explanation: more complex models

may be available, but simplicity favours the creation of new features. In addition to the

foregoing considerations, the content of the next section should make the rejection of

the second assumption (that feature sets are fixed) more attractive in light of the

plausibility of the analysis on offer.

Neither Schyns et al. nor Barsalou reject the first assumption – that new features

are derived from direct perceptual experience of external objects. They contend that

new features are generated via categorisation during occurrent perception. In the next

11
Franklin, Anna, and Ian, R.L. Davies, "New Evidence for Infant Colour Categories." British Journal
of Developmental Psychology, 22.3 (2004), pp. 349-377.
12
Drivonikou, Gilda, et al. "Category Training Affects Colour Discrimination but Only in the Right
Visual Field." New Directions in Colour Studies, 112.3 (2011), pp. 251-264.
 124

section I reject this assumption. The basic structure of the argument is: reading elicits

perceptual representation. Creative sentence constructions, unique to literature,

manipulate these perceptual representations to create novel features. During aesthetic

experience these featural representations stick in long term memory, creating a store of

new features for use in future categorisation. In this way, literary experience adds to

our conceptual repertoire without the requirement of occurrent perception of some

object in the world.

2. Literature and the construction of novel features

2.1. Reading elicits perceptual representation

I do not dispute that some form of perceptual experience is required for the creation of

new features. After all, it is natural to think of features in terms of perceptual properties

such as shape, colour and texture. However, I contend that direct perceptual experience

of the world of objects is not required for the elicitation of perceptual representation. In

this subsection I present some evidence which suggests that reading elicits perceptual

representation.

A number of studies attest to the activation of sensory systems in the brain

during reading13. However, activation of sensory systems alone does not indicate that

perceptual representations are being deployed – it is just possible that the activation of

sensory systems may be entirely unrelated to representation. Perhaps more convincing

13
For a review see Kiefer, M., and Pulvermüller, F., ‘Conceptual Representations in Mind and Brain:
Theoretical Developments, Current Evidence and Future Directions’, Cortex, 48 (2012), pp. 805-825.
 125

are studies which indicate striking behavioural similarities between perception and

reading comprehension.

One such study14 found that when subjects are required to verify whether an

object has certain properties, switching costs are incurred for switching between

modalities. For example, verifying whether ‘blender’ has the property of ‘loud’ after

verifying whether ‘cranberries’ have the property of being ‘tart’ takes longer than if the

property of ‘rustling’ has just been verified of ‘leaves’. This is consistent with what has

been found for processing costs when switching between processing in different

modalities during perception15.

Similarly, Solomon and Barsalou16 found that a feature (e.g. mane) takes longer

to verify of an animal if the subject has just read the name of an animal in which the

same feature has a different look (e.g. lion versus horse) than if it has the same look

(e.g. pony versus horse). This is to be expected if the represented feature, MANE17, is

perceptual, since thinking about manes in relation to a different-looking animal will

involve a perceptual representation which is not obviously the same in both cases,

requiring more processing time to note the sameness of the feature.

14
Pecher, D., Zeelenberg, R., and Barsalou, L. W., ‘Verifying Different-Modality Properties for
Concepts Produces Switching Costs.’, Psychological Science, 14 (2003), pp. 119-124.
15
For example, Spence, C., Lloyd, D., McGlone, F., Nicholls, M. E., and Driver, J., ‘Inhibition of Return
is Supramodal: A Demonstration Between All Possible Pairings of Vision, Touch, and Audition.’,
Experimental Brain Research, 134 (2000), pp. 42-48.
16
Solomon, K. O., and Barsalou, L. W., ‘Representing Properties Locally.’, Cognitive Psychology, 43
(2001), pp. 129-169.
17
Throughout, I use capitalisation to refer to conceptual representations.
 126

This cursory glance at the empirical literature provides good reason to think that

reading activates perceptual representations18. If so, literature is well-placed to provide

the conditions for the construction of feature representations. To anticipate: by forcing

us to combine these perceptual representations in complex ways, or by inviting us to

focus on just some crucial element of a representation, literature enables the

construction of new feature representations from perceptual representations.

2.2. How literature generates features

Literary feature construction is the process by which new representations of features

are created by a reader through aesthetic experience. In the remainder of this section I

will provide a close reading of a few texts, which provide examples of some of the

conditions under which literature can facilitate the construction of new feature

representations. The examples will of course lose some of their force in the process of

being detached from their original context. I therefore begin by spelling out two of the

general introspective phenomena which isolate the relevant aesthetic experience, and

the interpretation these phenomena receive on the current theory. I can only appeal to

the readers’ own aesthetic experiences to confirm my characterisation.

First, there is a feeling of resistance: the text defies superficial interpretation.

We must push through aporia to join the text in a place where our usual conceptual

vocabulary does not allow us to go. Many different strategies may be employed to

18
Although for an alternate view see Weiskopf, D. A., ‘Understanding is Not Simulating: A Reply to
Gibbs and Perlman.’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 41 (2010a), pp. 309-312.
 127

achieve this, including explicit visualisation, although how the process consciously

manifests will surely be unique to each reader.

It is here that aesthetic experience plays its first and crucial role in the

construction of feature representations. It is not enough that we exert cognitive effort

to parse the meaning of the text. The uniquely contorted literary constructions explored

in this paper certainly begin the process: parsing the text can often be difficult, and

require new conceptual resources. However, the construction of these resources is a

subtle affair, which must be guided. Below (2.2.1) I consider aesthetic experience as a

variety of metacognition. Consistent with this characterisation, aesthetic experience

plays the role of subtly guiding one through the feature construction process. Not only

do we monitor the tension involved in generating new conceptual vocabulary, we then

become involved in a feedback loop as the aesthetic experience develops over time.

The increasing richness of the experience reflects our increasing success as we are

nudged towards the construction of novel features.

The result of following this aesthetic experience through is the complement of

the feeling of revelation, which is the second element: we have gained something,

perhaps intangible, but there is an acquisition. We know something a little more than

we did before. We may not be able to express precisely what it is, and this is the third

element: the inability to articulate what has been revealed. This is unsurprising in the

light of the current theory; we have created a sub-lexical feature, not a whole concept,

not expressed by a word, but a perceptual feature to be used in future categorisation.19

19
One may wish to extend the term ‘concept’ to cover feature representations. I am using the term as
shorthand for a representation which can be lexicalised.
 128

Last, we ruminate. Features are stored in long term memory, and we place them

there by pausing over a passage or line. The aesthetic experience, induced, so I will

contend, by exactly this mechanism of effort and revelation, causes us to provide

ourselves with adequate time and attention to process and store the newly created

feature. I do not pretend at deep understanding of the mechanisms of memory.

However, as mentioned previously, studies suggest that attention naturally leads to

storage in long-term memory20. In addition, we may hypothesise that the positive

valence of the experience provides motivation to retain what we have acquired.

2.2.1. Metacognition

How should we characterise the aesthetic experience bound up with these introspective

phenomena? It is helpful to think in terms of metacognition, the name given to the

‘awareness and understanding of one’s own thought process’21 facilitating cognitive

control. Joëlle Proust distinguishes between attributive and evaluative accounts of

metacognition22. In short, attributive theories require that one have concepts of what

one’s cognitive process involves, to explicitly represent the mental process as the

process it is. Evaluative accounts, on the other hand, require only that one possess

feelings about the mental process which do not require determinate representations of

the mental process those feelings are about.

20
For example, Nelson et al. “Doubts About Depth”.
21
Smith, J. David, Michael J. Beran, and Justin J. Couchman. ‘Animal Metacognition.’ The Oxford
Handbook of Comparative Cognition, eds. Zentall, T.R., and. Wasserman E.A., Oxford, Oxford
University Press (2012), pp. 282-305.
22
Proust, Joëlle. ‘Metacognition’ Philosophy Compass, 5.11 (2010), pp. 989-998.
 129

Aesthetic experiences of the sort identified here can then be defined as purely

evaluative metacognitive states, since the experience is associated with no determinate

propositional content. Indeed, we are unlikely to have concepts of the cognitive

mechanisms at work. The term ‘purely’ is intended to convey that the content literature

operates over can only result in this form of metacognition. I spell this out later (2.3).

In terms of cognitive control, this aesthetic experience reflects our tenebrous awareness

of the first stages of the construction of a representation, and guides us towards its

fulfilment and storage. In the remainder of this section I posit two literary techniques

which give rise to this variety of aesthetic experience. The first is information reduction,

and the second is conceptual combination.

2.2.2. Information reduction

It has been found that certain representations can be created through information

reduction23: aspects of rich perceptual representations can be processed and

independently represented, often in service of further cognitive goals. A concrete

example of this in the domain of perceptual processing is found in the P-I pathway of

V1, an early part of the visual system. The P-I pathway contains representations of

differences between perceived colours, without maintaining the information required

to specify colour values. The visual system can represent that there is a significant

difference between two adjacent colours without representing what those colours are.

23
Tovée, M. J., An Introduction to the Visual System, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press (2008),
p. 67.
 130

This is thought to be used in edge detection24. It has also been suggested that perceptual

information can be reduced in order to facilitate motoric function25. Part of the

incoming perceptual information is siphoned off, leaving only information relevant to

location and size, which is then passed on to motor systems to guide action. It does not

matter what the colour of the mug is for the purposes of picking it up.

The claim of this section is that poetry and prose can both function to produce

representations with reduced information. Indeed, Milan Kundera suggests that a key

function of the modern novel is to reduce information. Kundera argues that, in response

to the increasing complexity of the world, the author must employ the ‘technique of

ellipsis, condensation’26. The overall information contained in the novel is reduced

relative to the world, but we do not affect a simple omission. Instead, information is

processed and compacted. Thereby, uniquely literary constructions are formed. We

should not, of course, view this as a normative requirement for the novel, and we shall

see in the next subsection that it is not universal. However, the employment of this

technique aids in the construction of novel features. Let us view a few examples.

In leaving an impression, a poem can direct attention to subtle features which

cannot be captured by our existing feature set. What is left when we read Wallace

Stevens’ description of the flight of a blackbird in ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a

Blackbird’? ‘When the blackbird flew out of sight, / It marked the edge / Of one of

24
Tovée, M. J. An Introduction to the Visual System, p. 67.
25
For example, Zhan, J., Ince, R. A., Van Rijsbergen, N., and Schyns, P. G., ‘Dynamic Construction of
Reduced Representations in the Brain for Perceptual Decision Behavior.’, Current Biology, 29 (2019),
pp. 319-326.
26
Kundera, M., The Art of the Novel, London, Faber and Faber (1988), p. 71.
 131

many circles’27 There is no concept which has been conveyed, or no concept which can

be expressed either in a sentence or with a lexeme. There is a unique geometry to the

blackbird’s flight — a natural, spontaneous exercise — when considered as an

intersection of static, precise circles. This is emphasised by the specification of the

‘edge’ of the circles, explicitly bringing out the feature to be entertained or to be

‘marked’. If our existing perceptual representations cannot capture this unique edge

form, we will be forced to construct a new perceptual feature. If the poem induces the

particular aesthetic experience we are interested in, we will retain our new feature. Our

future categorisation s of the movement of birds, of metaphorical movements of

metaphorical birds, will attain new specificity.

Negation works to remove information. It is as though one is being admonished

(‘no, not like that. Or that’) when holding up new perceptual features for appraisal. An

initial statement supplies a picture, the negations reduce information until we arrive at

a feature. Stevens describes ‘Tomorrow’ as ‘Brightly empowered with like colours,

swarmingly, / But not quite molten, not quite the fluid thing’28. The use of the

neologism ‘swarmingly’ forces us to search for features, to bring them before us

explicitly, especially when applied to a day, especially when the neologism is combined

with terms which do not correspond to the associations we already make with the word

the neologism is constructed from. Swarmingly, empowered, but with colours. The

negations are, of course, not simple negations — they first invite additional

constructions before dismissing them. Would we have considered that ‘Tomorrow’

27
Stevens, Wallace, Selected Poems, Kent, Faber and Faber (1953), p. 45.
28
Stevens, Selected Poems, p. 88.
 132

which is ‘empowered’ in a manner which is ‘swarmingly’ to be ‘molten’ or a ‘fluid

thing’? Not obviously. One might think not at all. So what is the effect of this

introduction and negation? Precisely to sheer off the relevant aspect of the introduced

feature. It is not molten, but one cannot help but maintain some feature of what is

molten, since it has been introduced at all: it must be relevant, somehow.

Other times reduction is not so simple: not a case of a single line or passage

which encourages one to directly remove features of features. There is no prescription

for reduction: features may be generated by some, not by others, from purely

serendipitous passages which are merely the accidental occasions for feature

generation, which in reality are induced by the impression of the whole. At no point

does Hemingway, for example, explicitly instruct us to remove information. He

removes information as a point of methodology. When we read his terse descriptions

of the land, of people, or of war, we are not directed to any particular feature. It is up to

us how we demarcate the descriptions, but it is certainly true that lacking the richness

of ordinary experience of the world, vectors of featural integration become more stark.

Hemingway discretises nature and people, leaving us with reduced representations as

the lasting impression.

Sometimes, reduction is more straightforward: Sartre asks us to find nothingness

in being.

They would come and slap me on the back and say to me: “Well, what’s

special about that glass of beer? It’s just like all the others. It’s bevelled,
 133

and it has a handle and a little coat of arms with a spade on it, and on the

coat of arms is written Spatenbräu.” I know all that, but I know that there’s

something else. Almost nothing. But I can no longer explain what I see. To

anybody. There it is: I am gently slipping into the water’s depths, towards

fear.29

Again we have the pattern of introduction — in this case deliberate, detailed — and

negation. We almost have too much information; it’s a beer glass, we get it. But Sartre

does not just want to tell us about a glass. He invites us to construct the representation

in full, the raw material which negation whittles down to the features. There is a good

reason Antione, the narrator, cannot explain what he then sees. Certainly, in one sense

he cannot explain it because he feels himself alienated from the quotidian world and its

inhabitants. They would never understand. This should not be overlooked, it is an

important element of the novel. However, there is a further reason with which we are

more concerned: he ‘cannot’ explain it to others simply because there is no concept for

his experience: he has isolated a feature which is sub-lexical.

The feature in question is unlike the features we have so far been considering:

it is not a visual or auditory feature of the beer glass. Indeed, intuitively the feature is

not ‘perceptual’ in any ordinary sense. The isolated feature is what we may call the

29
Sartre, Jean-Paul, Nausea, trans. by Robert Baldick, Aylesbury, Penguin Books (1965), p. 19.
 134

Being of the glass. This observation provides us with an opportunity to say some more

about the nature of the features we construct during aesthetic experience.

Any feature constructed during aesthetic experience is a feature derived from

an original perceptual representation, whether or not this representation corresponds to

a real object with those features. In this sense we can construct representations of

features which have no correlate in the external world. It is not required that a beer glass

actually have a phenomenologically accessible Being for one to represent it as such.

Nonetheless, if the representation is supposed to be derived from a perceptual

representation, there had better be some sense in which the resulting representation of

Being is perceptual. But we have said that intuitively what Sartre is describing is not

perceptual. It is therefore crucial to make it clear that ‘perceptual’ is being used here in

a technical sense. Following Lawrence Barsalou30, I expand the scope of the perceptual

to include introspective phenomena. On this reading, representations of emotions and

cognitive operations are considered perceptual (for instance, I might represent to myself

the mental act of deciding). Although I cannot defend this usage here, it is the one I am

using.

How does this relate to the Sartre quote? There are many ways of thinking about

how essence or Being is represented. To mention just one way which is compatible with

the current approach: Susan Gelman31 hypothesises that we represent essences — the

dogginess of the dog, the glassiness of the glass — in the form of emotions. There are

30
Barsalou, L. W., ‘Perceptual Symbol Systems’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22 (1999), pp. 577-
660.
31
Gelman, S. A., The Essential Child: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought, Oxford, Oxford
University Press (2003).
 135

feelings associated with dogs or with glasses which pick them out as that specific thing,

quite independently of any physical properties. However, while Gelman forcibly argues

that simple categories developed during childhood are structured around these feelings,

there is no reason to think we have these specific feelings for each possible category. I

am suggesting that reading Sartre can provide precisely this feeling for the beer glass.

By running through the physical properties of the glass and negating them, Sartre leaves

us with only a residual feeling, an uneasiness (or ‘fear’) perhaps, which can be stored

as a new feature associated with beer glasses. The aesthetic feeling we gain from

Sartre’s work induces this construction by subtly guiding us through the careful process

of representational merging and reduction – leading us towards our goal.

2.2.3. Conceptual combination

Feature representations can also be created through conceptual combination. This can

be achieved in two ways. First, features of two or more concepts constituent to the

combination can interact and produce emergent properties, thereby generating a new

feature. Second, features of two or more concepts can be transformed so as to force an

otherwise impossible analogy. This second mode of feature creation is unique to

literature. Literature abuses the specificity of language together with its productivity —

our capacity to productively recombine and understand novel conjunctions — to drive

through new constructions.

 136

An example of the former type of feature construction is given by Wisniewski

and Wu32, who suggest that concepts combine according to ‘interactions’ between

features which naturally give rise to further emergent features. For instance, the concept

ZEBRA FOOTBALL may contain a representation specifying stripes which become

smaller towards one point on the ball’s surface. Neither ZEBRA nor FOOTBALL

contain such a representation. Wisniewski and Wu argue that the feature STRIPES

taken from the concept ZEBRA interacts with the representation of FOOTBALL, which

entails that the represented shape of the latter constrains the pattern represented by

STRIPES. In this case, there is no suggestion that the created feature is new: we have

all seen precisely the kind of stripes Wisniewski and Wu are referring to. It is literature

which is in a better position to offer conceptual combinations with unique constraints.

Unique combinations create specific perceptual features by overlaying several

perceptual representations: a Venn diagram with our feature perched at the intersection

of myriad circles. For example, Thomas Pynchon describes the ‘sound of hoofbeats

through a metal speaker across a hundred yards of oildrums’33. Different readers can of

course interpret this sentence in different ways. We may first constrain the sound of

hoofbeats through a metal speaker, then project this out across the oil drums, just as in

the order of the text. It is also open to us to construct the sound of hoofbeats across the

oil drums before passing this sound through a metal speaker. A metal speaker will have

multiple interpretative realisations — one may be the representation of a tinny sound,

32
Wisniewski, E. J., and Wu, J., ‘Emergency!!!! Challenges to a Compositional Understanding of Noun–
Noun Combinations’, in The Oxford Handbook of Compositionality, eds. Werning M., Hinzen W., and
Machery, E., Oxford: Oxford University Press (2012), pp. 403-417.
33
Pynchon, Thomas, Gravity’s Rainbow, London, Vintage (2000), p. 293.
 137

another a low, deep brass. How far is a hundred yards? I might simplify to one hundred

meters, a distance I know much better. Perhaps — and there is nothing inherently

contradictory about this — the reader may have heard the sound, in which case there

will be ‘extensional feedback’ — associations unique to that reader’s experience34.

The point is that the sound eventually represented, which — if stored, if the

surrounding passage induces that signal aesthetic experience — can serve as a feature

in future categorisations, will be a result of interactions between the constraints imposed

on each of the elements of the sentence by the other elements of the sentence. The

perceptual representations elicited by the text in the reader will interact in previously

inaccessible ways, producing novel features. It is not impossible that the sound can be

heard, as we have noted. However, only literature systematically delivers such

distinctive configurations of elements. The CLACK of a hoofbeat, the TINNY sound

of the speaker, the hollow PANG of the oildrums, the CLACKING TINNY PANG

echoing across a hundred yards. There is an emergent element to this aural

representation, another sub-lexical, which the concepts themselves cannot capture,

because they are above it (are super-lexical).

Pynchon’s description makes sense. It might be unusual, but our cognitive effort

is not dedicated to parsing the surface-level meaning of the sentence. Rather, it consists

in producing an aural representation within the constraints which we have interpreted

as given. The second variety of conceptual combination is quite different. It forces

together words which are difficult to interpret, leading one to search out which features

34
Machery, E., and Lederer, L. G., ‘Simple Heuristics for Concept Combination, in The Oxford
Handbook of Compositionality, pp. 454-472.
 138

of the constituent concepts could possibly be relevant, and once one has settled on the

features, to transform them to make the sentence meaningful. Gertrude Stein produces

the following definition of ‘malachite’: ‘The sudden spoon is the wound in the

decision’35. A spoon SCOOPS, it can make a wound, a ROUND, CONVEX wound.

The spoon is sudden, it is UNEXPECTED, the decision is wounded, it is, perhaps, a

decision which is IRRESPONSIBLE, REGRETABLE, or otherwise BAD. How can

the scooping spoon unexpectedly make a convex wound in a decision and render it bad?

What relation does this have to malachite, an ore used to produce copper (a copper

spoon?)? Some feature of decisions, spoons, or malachite falls out of careful reading of

this passage, although it resists lexicalisation.

Of course, one may interpret Stein in any number of ways. The suggestion is

just that forcing through an understanding can produce a new feature representation.

This representation is the result of sampling a little from each input representation —

the parts one takes to be relevant given the constraints imposed by the act of

interpretation — which are combined to create a new feature.

The two varieties of conceptual combination can occur together, along with

reduction. This is (one way) Stein defines a box:

Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same

question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection comes painful

cattle. So then the order is that a white way of being round is something

35
Stein, Gertrude, Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, New York, Vintage (1990), p. 471.
 139

suggesting a pin and is it disappointing, it is not, it is so rudimentary to be

analysed and see a fine substance strangely, it is so earnest to have a green

point not to red but to point again.36

Stein once again forces together words the combination of which is hard to parse.

Cognitive effort is required to grasp even a surface-level meaning. She combines this

with the Venn-like overlap of Pynchon, redoubling the effect at every level. Only

moments after we have finished constructing a representation corresponding to ‘a white

way of being round’ we are told, as an ‘order’, to consider this as ‘something suggesting

a pin’ which is ‘disappointing’. Not an easy task. It is almost certain that the

representation will be unique to each reader, unable to be presented in lexemes. It is

equally clear that not all readers will develop conceptual parts, but those who do will

have something ineffable. Who can say where the part will end up, which concepts it

will play its part in? To ensure it is a part we have created, not a whole, Stein makes

sure that what we have is too ‘rudimentary to be analysed’ by also employing the tactic

of reduction, by immediately negating the order to consider what we have as

disappointing: no, ‘it is not’.

It is clear that what Stein aims for is not conventional truth or falsity: there is

no that-clause involved such that we are invited to believe, for instance, ‘that out of

selection comes painful cattle’. Rather, the literature we are considering differs

fundamentally from other types of writing and linguistic comprehension. We are not

36
Stein, Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, p. 463.
 140

looking to evaluate the truth of the proposition under consideration. Indeed, the

inexpressibility of precisely what it is that we are invited to entertain provides some

compelling evidence that the content of Stein’s work is non-propositional in nature.

The explanation for this given in this paper is that the content, which is constructed by

the reader, is of perceptual featural representations. I explore this in more detail in the

next section.

2.3. The specific role of literature

What these examples suggest is an effect inherent to the production of literature.

Perceptual representations, elicited by reading, are disassembled and fused, are

‘gathered, packed, transmuted, realigned’ into ‘rewoven molecules’37. By the dual

processes of information reduction and combination we expand our conceptual

vocabulary in ways previously unavailable.

What distinguishes literature from other textual works such as textbooks?38

Insofar as this question concerns the aesthetic experience, it can be rephrased as the

question why literature evokes a (type of) purely evaluative metacognitive state. There

are many possibly relevant reasons that literature would be distinct from other forms of

text. In this essay I wish to isolate just two of these distinct aspects of literature as

relevant for feature construction. We saw the first above (2.2); literature guides one

through the subtle art of feature construction due to the unique nature of the aesthetic

37
Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, p. 698.
38
Thanks to the editors for asking this question.
 141

experience. Now we can answer why it is that this form of aesthetic experience is

generated.

Literature operates, at least in part (2.1), on perceptual representations. More

broadly, the relevant literary content is non-propositional. As mentioned above (2.2.3),

the literary works under consideration do not aim at fully articulated belief.

Propositional content is typically understood as contributing to the truth value of a

sentence, and in belief contexts is taken to be expressed by that-clauses. It is clear that

what we gain from reading Stein, for example, does not fit this profile. Which belief is

generated which can feature in a that-clause? Rather, we may consider that the

representation produced operates according to compositional principles which

fundamentally differ from those which generate propositions. Instead, as has been

argued throughout, they give rise to feature representations.

Of course, literature can operate over metacognition itself — over feelings,

ideas and all mental phenomena including beliefs. Sartre’s Being is an example of this

— the feeling sometimes thought to be a stand-in for essence in thinking39. However,

even this form of literature is about metacognition, not about the content of the

cognitive states themselves, as one would expect in a textbook. In general, the aesthetic

experience isolated above (2.2.1) will be associated with non-propositional content with

transformation rules40 unlike those associated with propositions. It is for this reason that

literature generates purely evaluative metacognition, since the lack of propositional

content ensures attributive metacognition cannot arise.

39
Gelman, The Essential Child: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought.
40
Perhaps, for instance, geometrical transformation rules.
 142

3. Implications: creativity, categorisation, and concepts

3.1. Creative categorisation

What do we gain from literary construction of features? Typically, featural

representations facilitate categorisation. As Schyns et al. point out, and as we discussed

in section one, mental representations of features allow us to ‘detect and internally

represent commonalties between members of the same category as well as differences

between categories’41. Ordinary features facilitate ordinary categorisation, allowing us

to group the world into everyday things like trees, chairs, paving slabs. These

categorisation s are pragmatic, they enable us to navigate our world effectively. It is not

so clear what categorisation s could be facilitated by features derived from literature,

and what those categorisation s are for.

A greater part of creativity — in art, science or the humanities — consists in

connecting disparate ideas in new and interesting ways. Armed with an expanded set of

rarefied features, previously undiscovered featural overlaps between categories will

reveal themselves. An object in the world can be brought under a new category in virtue

of it being interpreted as possessing a strange feature, a feature which we would never

have created via perceptual attention. Once these initial connections have been made in

virtue of featural overlap, new and important comparisons can be made, revealing a

network of previously undiscovered relations.

41
Schyns et al. ‘The Development of Features in Object Concepts’, p. 16
 143

Conversely, non-obvious distinctions may present themselves between

categories previously taken to be similar or the same. If we represent a feature which

we passed by in silence before, which had not entered our minds, two superficially

identical categories can be discovered to be the distinct entities they are. The discussion

of this section is of necessity schematic, lacking concrete examples. Ordinary examples

abound; consider the frog and the toad, or alligators and crocodiles (the difference is in

the shape of the head). Examples available following creative categorisation are more

subtle, and none will be convincing without detailed analysis, a paper of their own.

However, this lack of specificity is not problematic and should, in fact, be

expected if we have correctly identified the role of features created by aesthetic

experiences. It is not always clear how one makes the creative distinctions and

connections one makes. Creativity is often described by those who have it, no matter

the discipline, as coming from elsewhere, from a source they cannot describe. When

we cut a new joint in nature, the subtle move which makes the cut can seem

inexplicable. I proffer one source among many: the creation of novel features

engendered by reading literature.

3.2. Conceptual enrichment

In cognitive science and psychology, theorists typically treat concepts as entities which

decompose into features. Consider traditional theories of concepts42: prototype theories

42
For reviews see Margolis, E., and Laurence, S., eds. Concepts: Core Readings, Massachusetts, MIT
Press (1999) and Margolis, E, and Laurence, S., eds. The Conceptual Mind: New Directions in the Study
of Concepts, Massachusetts, MIT Press (2015).
 144

treat concepts as containing features which are weighted according to how typical they

are of the category the concept is about (sweetness is a more typical feature of fruit than

the feature of bearing seeds). Classical and neo-classical theories treat concepts as lists

of definitional features. However, while each of these theories do treat concepts in this

way, they do not necessarily consider the features to be psychologically real elements

of concepts. Rather, they are often taken to be theoretical models which the cognitive

scientist can use to explain how concepts function.

On the other hand, increasing in popularity are theories which do treat features

as psychologically (and neurophysiologically) real. Theorists such as Barsalou43,

Connell and Lynott44 and Koriat and Sorka45 take concepts to be distributed across

featural representations, which are combined into conceptual representations proper. If

they are right, and while I cannot defend their proposals here — they are, the

implications for the generation of novel features goes further than categorisation.

If esoteric features generated by literature can be built into the fabric of our

concepts, the potential benefits are widespread. Daniel Weiskopf46 points out that

psychologists typically use concepts to explain a wide range of phenomena such as

planning, linguistic comprehension, inference-making, decision-making, and theory

construction. Again, I will not undermine the subtlety of the contribution features can

make to our cognitive lives with prosaic examples. Instead, I submit that conceptual

43
Barsalou, L. W. ‘Perceptual Symbol Systems’.
44
Connell, Louise, and Lynott, Dermot. ‘Principles of Representation: Why You Can't Represent the
Same Concept Twice’, Topics in Cognitive Science, 6 (2014), pp. 390-406.
45
Koriat, Asher, and Sorka, Hila ‘The Construction of Category Membership Judgments: Towards a
Distributed Model.’, in Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science, Elsevier (2017), pp. 773-794.
46
Weiskopf, Daniel A., ‘The Theoretical Indispensability of Concepts’, Behavioral and Brain
Sciences, 33 (2010b), pp. 228-229.
 145

enrichment benefits us in myriad ways. Concepts are the building blocks of thought. A

diverse and expressive array of concepts unlocks the potential for ever more complex

thought. Adding features to these concepts multiplies the complexity, providing a set

rich in information which can be exploited in thought for all manner of cognitive tasks.

Beyond this, richness in our conceptual repertoire is an intrinsic good. In representing

the world, richness becomes depth of meaning in experience. Literature can quite

literally add more meaning to the world.

4. Conclusion

Implicit categorisation s along subjective lines, using esoteric features derived from

experience with literary works, imbue experience with a new depth. Categorisation s of

ideas, of the world, along creative lines can open us to important associations and

distinctions which can ground new theories in science and the humanities, or engender

a new round of artistry, continuing the chain of featural generation. I began by spelling

out reasons to think that new feature representations can be constructed. I then

presented evidence that literature elicits perceptual representations, so satisfies a

requirement for the construction of feature representations. I then speculated that a

certain form of aesthetic experience is caused by cognitive effort resolving into the

construction of representations. At least, aesthetic experience of this form facilitates the

storage of feature representations. I then performed close readings of several literary

texts to bring out the mechanisms of information reduction and conceptual

combination. I claim these are mechanisms which bring about the construction of new
 146

features. This claim is wholly speculative and its plausibility depends on the plausibility

of the close readings, as well as the psychological validity of the proposed mechanisms.

I hope, at the very least, to have motivated interest in one potential role literature plays

in our wider cognitive lives.

 147

A Symposium on Catherine Homan’s A Hermeneutics

of Poetic Education: The Play of the In-Between
(Lexington Books, 2020).

1. Introduction to A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education: The Play of the

In-Between (p.150)

Catherine Homan

2. ‘Poetry, Play, and the Space of Meaning-Making: A Response to

Catherine Homan’s A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education’ (p.154)

Rebecca Longtin

3. ‘Some Political Considerations of Catherine Homan’s A

Hermeneutics of Poetic Education’ (p.167)

Corey McCall

4. ‘Propriety to the Measure: A Response to Catherine Homan’s A

Hermeneutics of Poetic Education’ (p.176)

Jessica S. Elkayam

5. ‘Imagining New Futures: The Politics of Poetic Education’ (p.185)

Catherine Homan
 148

This author-meets-critics symposium on Catherine Homan’s book, A Hermeneutics of

Poetic Education: The Play of the In-Between, was hosted by the Society for

Philosophy of Creativity. Homan proposes that whereas aesthetic education emphasizes

the cultivation of taste, poetic education, as responding both to finitude and tradition,

calls for giving shape to oneself though holding open sites of meaning with others

through conversation. The papers in this symposium explore the implications of poetic

education, focusing particularly on the political implications and potential limitations

of such education. If tradition has both marginalized and liberated, how can and should

we respond to a poetic education this fraught and ambiguous? How might these

limitations point toward possibilities of better futures?

Rebecca Longtin takes up Homan’s description of poetic education as a

conversation that requires us to be open and attuned to our shared world, but challenges

the ontological framework of hermeneutics insofar as it emphasizes unity and

wholeness. Taking up Homan’s description of the space of play — which is essential

to poetic education — as textured by various social frictions, Longtin suggests there is

an irreconcilable tension between tradition and resistance. She asks whether a liberatory

poetic education remains within the hermeneutic tradition or in opposition to it.

Corey McCall considers the political significance of Homan's project. McCall

worries that Gadamer's account of play assumes equal partners, and considers how we

might extend Gadamer's account (and Homan's reconstruction of it) to non-egalitarian

accounts of play. He draws on the work of Ariella Azoulay, James Baldwin, and Maria

Lugones in order to consider play from a non-egalitarian perspective.

 149

Drawing on Homan’s discussion of poets Friedrich Hölderlin and Paul Celan,

Jessica Elkayam traces the question of what it means for the human being, like the

poem, to be underway. She suggests that the analogous relation between poetry and

life implied in Homan’s argument may help us to see how poetry both embodies and

teaches the appropriate measure for the movement of life. On this basis, she inquires

whether the central role played by Hölderlin’s poetry in Homan’s account may rely on

nostalgia for a singular or pure origin potentially inappropriate to the measure.

Catherine Homan responds to these invitations for conversation regarding

concerns about marginalization and problematic traditions while still holding open

possibilities for new futures. She turns to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s discussions of the

speculative nature of language to argue that because language must be attuned to what

remains unsaid, we must also remain open to what is other. Poetry, as teaching us to

listen, furnishes us with a critical stance that protects against totalization and reminds

us that we are always already in interdependent relations of meaning and action.

Moreover, because poetry and play open possibilities we could not otherwise engage,

they allow us to begin to give shape to the future in our own present. Poetic education’s

political dimension lies in this giving shape to the conversation that we are
 150

Introduction to A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education:

The Play of the In-Between

CATHERINE HOMAN

In reading Friedrich Hölderlin’s plan to create “New Letters on the Aesthetic Education

of Man”1, I began to wonder what it would mean for aesthetic education to be new.

Although Hölderlin agrees with Friedrich Schiller that art and beauty possess

harmonizing and educative capacities, he remains concerned that the harmony achieved

through play relies on self-forgetting. Such play is frivolous in its escapism. Poetry,

conversely, is serious because it unites a people not through self-forgetting, but through

a recognition of manifold differences within the Absolute. The Absolute, as the

primordial unity that grants each thing its existence, is beyond all comprehension.

Poetry, he explains, gives form to what is formless, thereby providing a finite

instantiation of the movement of the Absolute. Poetry is ‘teacher of humanity’2 because

it allows us to attune ourselves to that original unity in which we are all equal. Whereas

aesthetic education emphasizes judgments of taste and rational autonomy, poetic

education foregrounds self-formation and openness to the other. The “new” here is as

1
Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 68.
2
Hölderlin, p. 155.
 151

much an instantiation of new modes of orientation as it is a hearkening to what has

always already existed and gives rise to our own existence.

Hölderlin’s vision of education is not the aesthetic education of Kant and

Schiller that emphasizes the cultivation of taste, but a poetic education that teaches us

how to give shape to ourselves and our lives and to orient ourselves in our finitude to

the infinite. Because poetry is not held to the laws of logic, it can speak what could not

otherwise be articulated in philosophy or political thought. Yet, while poetry is

speaking, it is also listening. To articulate what cannot fully be articulated, such as the

infinite, poetry must preserve what is other. Poetry teaches us to give shape to ourselves

through openness to alterity.

Following Hölderlin’s outlines, I suggest that poetic education is a process of

learning to cultivate ourselves in response to this poetic existence. Although this

cultivation develops out of what we are, we must create anew in our own way, using

tradition as a model for how to think about and respond to what is our own. Thus, our

attitude toward the past would not be nostalgia, but transfiguration. The role of tradition

in education is not static, but dynamic. In this way, education also seems to be a kind

of conversation that listens to tradition while giving voice to our current age.

Despite Hölderlin’s misgivings, I argue that poetic education is fundamentally

playful. Play is not frivolous, but quite serious. Because play is for its own sake, it is

not beholden to the structures of reality in the same way as other activities, such as

production, would be. Play takes up objects, themes, experiences from the everyday

world, but is also able to engage them in ways not otherwise possible. Play does not
 152

escape reality, but returns to it in different ways. Following Hans-Georg Gadamer and

Eugen Fink, I demonstrate that play is a liminal site of the in-between as the space and

movement between self and other. Play, like poetry, tries not to collapse but to respond

to difference.

To respond to difference, I must remain open to what addresses me. This is as

true of my encounter with another human as it is with a work of art. In recognizing the

claim to truth, my own understanding is transformed. Through the movement of

question and answer, a free, playful space is held open. One of the central tasks of the

book is to think through and along with this liminality. How is it that we can attune

ourselves meaningfully to what is beyond us? To what we do not yet understand? In

what way is this liminality transformative? Paul Celan writes of poetry as the meridian

between self and other, between past and future, that crosses and returns. It is like a

message in a bottle, a form of address, that requires us to respond. Rather than

collapsing dualisms or ruptures, poetry opens new sites of meaning and navigation

between self and other, familiar and foreign. If I take seriously what addresses me, I

cannot remain unchanged.

Human existence shares in this playful in-between. We are finite, but aware of

our finitude. We have multiplicitous identities that are founded in and through our

relationships to others and what surpasses. We are born into traditions and practices

that inform our development, but, again, our relation to tradition is dynamic. We

continue to create tradition as we respond to what is past but give form to new avenues

for the future. Education is not so much an epistemic project as an ontological one of
 153

developing ways of being in the world that reflect our in-between condition. Such an

education never comes to an end, but is a ceaseless task of vision and revision, of

holding out and creating new spaces of meaning through conversation.

 154

Poetry, Play, and the Space of Meaning-Making: A

Response to Catherine Homan’s A Hermeneutics of
Poetic Education

REBECCA LONGTIN

Catherine Homan’s 2020 book A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education: The Play of the

In-Between invites us into a conversation that reveals who we are, how we relate to

others, and who we can become. For Homan, we are poetic beings with a drive to create,

we are a conversation in a shared world that requires us to be open and attuned to others,

and we are an ongoing and open-ended process of becoming ourselves. At the centre of

her book is the role of art and poetry in education. For Homan, poetry contributes to

education and the cultivation of society because it creates a more expansive way to

ground ourselves in the world and to encounter conflicts that arise in philosophy,

politics, and life. As Homan describes, poetry orients us toward ‘the opening of a space

for possible encounters, that allows the possibility of doing otherwise, and thus the

possibility of freedom’.1 Poetry invites new possibilities that transform ourselves, our

relations to others, and the world in which we live. A poetic education channels this

power toward the cultivation of freedom. In other words, ‘poetry teaches us what it is

to be ourselves’.2

1
C. Homan, A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education, p. 97.
2
C. Homan, A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education, p. 61.
 155

As the title suggests, play — an important concept within German aesthetic

theory and the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Eugene Fink

— is central to Homan’s concept of poetic education. Her main argument rests on the

meaning and value of play, which she describes as ‘a bridge, or threshold, between

poetry and education’.3 For Homan, play allows poetic education because it orients us

to others in ways that are more open, receptive, and transformative than our ordinary

modes of being. While I find Homan’s account of play and poetic education insightful

and promising, I am suspicious of some philosophical commitments that come from her

adoption of the hermeneutic tradition — specifically, its ontological framework. In the

last chapter Homan responds to recent critiques of hermeneutics and revises the theories

of play that Gadamer and Fink offer by taking up contemporary Latinx decolonial

theory. I would argue that within A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education, there is a tension

between tradition and resistance, between what we inherit from the past and the vision

we have for the future.

My essay addresses this tension. The first section will summarize Homan’s

poetic account of play, especially in relation to Fink and Gadamer. The second section

will explain the limits of the hermeneutic tradition that require Homan to introduce a

different concept of play-space. I will also suggest a more radical concept of poetic

education is available through the decolonial concept of world-travelling in Anzaldúa’s

and Lugones’s works. My conclusion will reflect on the challenges of developing

resistance within a tradition.

3
C. Homan, A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education, p. 97.
 156

1. Poetry, Play, and Meaning-Making

For Homan, poetry and play share a common comportment toward the world in the

sense that both allow expressions and engagements that are creative and generate

meaning without determinate rules and concepts. Both poetry and play are activities of

freedom, and part of this freedom comes from their relation to ambiguity. She notes

that both poetry and play are ambiguous in the positive sense of the word: ‘Like poetry,

play possesses its own logic, yet this logic is at times ambiguous.’4 Ambiguity is

important to poetic language. Rather than providing the clarity and distinctness of a

logical proof, a poem offers a more complex and nuanced expression. Poetic ambiguity

often captures the mysterious contours of experience — what it’s like — without

overdetermining it. For example, Carl Sandburg’s poem somehow captures the exact

experience of seeing fog roll into a harbour.5 Poetic ambiguity also allows for multiple

interpretations. It invites conversation and multiple perspectives and requires us to

continually revisit something. It shows us that there is always more to understand and

that meaning-making is a shared activity. We see this in Audre Lorde’s poem

‘Recreation,’ which plays with both meanings of the term—re-creation as ‘making

anew’ and recreation as a pleasurable activity—as well as the relations between these

two ideas. In this poem about poetry, she writes, ‘my body / writes into your flesh / the

poem / you make of me. / Touching you I catch midnight / as moon fires set in my

throat / I love you flesh into blossom / I made you / and take you made / into me.’6 For

4
C. Homan, A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education, p. 9.
5
“The fog comes / on little cat feet. / It sits looking / over harbor and city / on silent haunches / and then
moves on.” Carl Sandburg, “Fog” Chicago Poems (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1916), p. 71.
6
Audre Lorde, The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (W. W. Norton and Company, 1997).
 157

Lorde, poetry is not simply words. It is a practice that touches us, connects us, makes

us, and remakes us. We do not just write poetry, we are poetry. Rather than a concept

to be pinned down, poetry allows us to play with an experience or idea or with meaning

itself.

Play also delves into the richness of ambiguity rather than trying to simplify or

clarify it through concepts. Like art and poetry, play unfolds freely. There are guidelines

to play, but if we engage in it fully, we invent as we play along. Moreover, learning the

rules of a game is a very different experience than playing a game. We only understand

the game in playing it, seeing how it unfolds, and responding to the other players.

Homan writes, ‘because of its fundamental ambiguity, play resists conceptualization,

yet it is not devoid of knowledge or content. Rather, play is also always a movement of

understanding, but because there always remains something more to be said and

understood, it evades the mastery of concept.’7 Like art and poetry, play allows us to

participate in the world in ways that cannot be fully conceptualized or laid out. Play is

spontaneous and free, not fixed and determined. When we play, we must be open and

respond to what happens. There is vulnerability in that openness. Yet in playing, we

discover new things and are transformed by those discoveries. For this reason, Homan

describes play as a mode of self-formation.

Like poetry, play transforms us by reorienting us and shifting our horizons. Play

allows the world to be bigger, broader, and stranger than we normally experience it.

Gadamer, as Homan explains, considers the task of play ‘to actively attune oneself to

7
C. Homan, A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education, p. 10.
 158

what surpasses the self, rather than to solve a predetermined problem with a definite

solution’.8 Rather than a res cogitans or disinterested spectator, the person who plays

must be actively engaged. Yet the activity of play does not involve interest in the sense

of having a specific purpose or outcome. Homan uses conversation as a primary

example of play. A conversation between two people unfolds in a concrete way that is

grounded in their relationship, former interactions, and shared history, and yet there is

no determined path the conversation must follow. As Homan describes, ‘the

conversation grows out of and grounds itself.’9 Both participants in the conversation

must be open and responsive to what the other says. The engagement is what matters,

not a specific goal that is determined in advance, and both people walk away

transformed. The conversation moves to-and-fro. It exists in-between. Play involves a

fluid mode of relation to others.

Homan’s account of play takes on a more cosmic, ontological meaning when

she discusses its ability to make the familiar unfamiliar. Here her analysis rests on

Fink’s hermeneutical phenomenology. In his lecture course World and Finitude (Welt

und Endlichkeit), Fink emphasizes the way that play inverts the familiarity of the world.

As Homan explains, ‘Although the world is the most familiar thing we encounter, we

have very little understanding of what it is.’10 Play, like philosophy, evokes our sense

of wonder by unravelling our assumptions about the world to reveal its complexity and

mystery. For Fink, we make the familiar unfamiliar by relating our finite existence to

8
C. Homan, A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education, p. 97.
9
C. Homan, A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education, p. 101.
10
C. Homan, A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education, p. 135.
 159

the Absolute. As Homan describes, the Absolute is ‘the groundless totality that gives

rise to all being […] the play between being and nothing, presence and absence’.11 Here,

Fink’s Absolute serves as a description for the space of the in-between, a non-totalizing

totality that describes the world as resting on a groundless ground, which he calls the

earth.12 The world reveals, while the earth conceals. While the world brings beings into

appearance and provides the conditions for experience, the earth conceals and

withdraws so that we can never grasp anything completely. Homan describes the earth

as the site of alterity and explains, ‘There always remains something that resists

totalization.’13 Fink’s phenomenology rests on this tension between world and earth,

which describes the idea that there is always a surplus of meanings and interpretation

is an ongoing and infinite task. Not everything is available to our experience and

understanding, so we often find ourselves in ambiguous in-between spaces. For Homan,

this ambiguous in-between is the space of play.

I, however, would argue that the ontology of the Absolute and the description

of the world as a singular totality demonstrate conceptual limitations within the history

of philosophical hermeneutics, which tends to bring relations into a whole through

frameworks that emphasize coherence and unity, rather than alterity. These appeals to

the Absolute and totality seem to limit the ability of hermeneutics to serve as a site of

resistance — which this book intends it to be — particularly for those who are so often

excluded or harmed when conversations about culture and tradition arise. In the

11
C. Homan, A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education, p. 137.
12
Fink’s description echoes the strife between earth and world in Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of
Art.
13
C. Homan, A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education, p. 138.
 160

following section, I will develop this critique of hermeneutics and argue that Homan

introduces a more radical concept of play than Gadamer or Fink and in doing so offers

more possibilities for poetic education.

2. The Complicated and Troubled Space of Play

The last chapter of A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education offers a panoramic view of

hermeneutics by looking at how contemporary thinkers like Anzaldúa, Lugones,

Yancy, hooks, and Alcoff expand and redefine some of its central concepts. I will focus

on how Anzaldúa and Lugones challenge the hermeneutic tradition by writing from the

perspective of someone who finds themselves in between cultures and in between

worlds.

Anzaldúa’s works emphasize how one can simultaneously have multiple ethnic

and racial identities (the new mestiza) and explore the meaning of crossing boundaries

and occupying spaces that are in-between (nepantla). As Homan notes, Anzaldúa

frequently places her various identities with her name — ‘Chicana, tejana, working-

class, dyke-feminist poet, writer-theorist’ — to convey her plural sense of self.14 Her

writing also interweaves multiple languages (English, Spanish, Aztec, Nahuatl, and

Toltec) to express each culture, perspective, and voice of her multiplicitous identity. In

Borderlands/La Frontera = The New Mestiza, Anzaldúa defines the new mestiza as a

complex identity that weaves or kneads (amasamiento) together multiple conflicting

14
G. Anzaldúa, The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, edited by AnaLouise Keating (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2009), p. 164. C. Homan, A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education, p. 166.
 161

selves.15 Being American, Mexican, and indigenous brings together conflicting cultures

and perspectives, particularly between the oppressor and oppressed, the colonizer and

colonized. She describes this plurality as a ‘clash of voices’ that results in ‘mental and

emotional states of perplexity’, insecurity, and indecisiveness.16 For Anzaldúa, the

‘mestiza’s dual or multiple personality is plagued by psychic restlessness’.17 This is

because, as Anzaldúa explains, ‘we perceive the version of reality that our culture

communicates.’ 18 She describes that having multiple cultural perspectives leads to

‘multiple, often opposing messages. The coming together of two self-consistent but

habitually incompatible frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision.’19

The Aztec term nepantla means a state of being in-between, which Anzaldúa says

conveys being ‘torn between ways’.20 Her later works discuss nepantla (a liminal in-

between terrain or state of being) and nepantlera (someone who crosses borders and

lives in-between cultures or identities), rather than la mestiza. 21 In these works, she

considers how crossing borders and occupying liminal spaces create a multiplicitous

self that does not easily resolve into one identity. Throughout her works Anzaldúa

describes la mestiza and la nepantlera as restless but creative, as conflicted but able to

tolerate the contradictions and ambiguities of life. It is important to note that she sees

la mestiza consciousness as participating in divergent thinking, which challenges

15
G. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera = The New Mestiza, edited by Norma Cantú and Aída Hurtado.
4th edition. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012), p. 81.
16
G. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, p. 78.
17
G. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, p. 78.
18
G. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, p. 78.
19
G. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, p. 78.
20
G. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, p. 78.
21
G. Anzaldúa, The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, 180, 302.
 162

hierarchical frameworks and does not try to resolve conflicting points of view — unlike

the convergent thinking that characterizes Western traditions.22

For Anzaldúa, the poet, theorist, writer, ‘Living in a state of psychic unrest, in

a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create. It is like a cactus needle

embedded in the flesh.’23 Like Homan, Anzaldúa sees poetry as a way to engage with

and understand the complex contradictions and ambiguities that life presents. However,

Anzaldúa describes poetry as a way of grappling with a deep pain that has pierced the

body. It is a way of transforming pain into new life.

Both Anzaldúa and Lugones describe their experiences of belonging to multiple

worlds and existing between cultures. Lugones explores this idea through playfulness,

which is important for Homan’s development of the play of the in-between. Lugones

describes playful world-traveling as a process of shifting between different worlds of

meaning-making that fundamentally transform the self — which is a creative process

of undoing and remaking oneself. For Lugones, a world is not a collection of things, a

definitive place, or a worldview, but a ‘construction of life’. 24 People are constructed

differently by different worlds such that moving between worlds changes the

construction of self. For this reason, Lugones describes traveling as the ‘shift from

being one person to being a different person’.25 Lugones argues that traveling between

worlds shows us ‘we are not fixed in particular constructions of ourselves’ but instead

22
G. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, p. 79.
23
G. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, p. 73.
24
María Lugones, ‘Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception’, Hypatia 2 (1987), 3-19 (p.
10).
25
Lugones, ‘Playfulness’, p. 11.
 163

‘we are open to self-construction’.26 Moreover, for Lugones such travel must be playful

and loving, rather than self-centred and arrogant. Playful world-traveling is about going

outside of oneself and identifying with others by entering their world. At the same time,

the stakes and challenges of doing so are very different. Lugones acknowledges that

she is unable to be playful in certain worlds, particularly when she is not at ease. One

has to have a sense of belonging and comfort to feel at home in a world.

Anzaldúa and Lugones’s concept of border-crossing and world-traveling as

transformative activities of self-construction clearly describe the hermeneutics of poetic

education developed throughout Homan’s book. Play involves attunement to others and

an openness to being undone and remade. Anzaldúa, Lugones, Fink, and Gadamer all

understand the self as an on-going, creative project and reject dualism and false

binaries. Yet Homan introduces a new idea here when she acknowledges that border-

crossing, world-traveling, and self-creation are radically different challenges for the

marginalized and oppressed. Homan addresses these challenges by describing the play-

space of the in-between as more complicated, difficult, and disruptive than past thinkers

have allowed. She states that we should think of this space as textured insofar as

meaning-making does not ‘happen without friction or without some attention to the

environment’.27

For Homan, play-spaces are not unproblematic. They involve conflict and

complications that draw us toward recognition and call for greater responsibility.

Homan also explains that hermeneutics necessarily involves recognizing the limitations

26
Lugones, ‘Playfulness’, p. 16.
27
C. Homan, A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education, p. 174.
 164

of understanding. In the introduction, Homan describes poetry as formative and

educational because it is world-disclosing in a way that ‘never fully lays bare its

subject.’28 This is a way to acknowledge alterity, rather than trying to encompass all

cultures, all perspectives, all experiences into one totality — which would express a

colonial mindset. Homan recognizes the limits of play and poetry, but I am concerned

about whether this recognition is sufficient, especially when we think about education’s

role in preserving some cultures and erasing others. How does a hermeneutic

understanding of limits resolve issues of marginalization? Or does hermeneutics merely

point toward possibilities that could resolve such issues?

Here I want to emphasize why I question Fink’s appeal to the Absolute. Given

Anzaldúa’s and Lugones’s descriptions of multiple worlds and multiple selves that

travel between those worlds, does it make sense to speak of a singular world at all? Do

we need to revise the framework of hermeneutics or does it allow for worlds whose

horizons do not intersect or fuse into one totality? Can hermeneutics assert a shared

world without asserting it from a dominant position? My second concern is that

extending the concept of play to a ‘cosmic metaphor’ for all of time and space like Fink

does not ground our ways of engaging with others, but instead elevates this idea into an

ontological stratosphere purified of politics. Perhaps Homan’s sense of the textures and

contours of the poetic in-between offers a smaller scope but also greater possibilities

for concrete sites of resistance.

28
C. Homan, A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education, p. 5.
 165

3. Education and Meaning-Making — Resistance within Tradition?

In the introduction, Homan explains that poetry is situated within a tradition but that it

also invites us to ‘create anew in our own way’ with an attitude that calls for

transfiguration rather than nostalgia.29 Her concept of poetic education takes up

tradition in a dynamic way, rather than a static method that merely preserves the past.

Yet one of the enduring critiques of hermeneutics is its rootedness in tradition. In the

last chapter, Homan defends hermeneutics from a variety of critics, all of whom raise

the issue of tradition because it asserts a sense of authority and belonging that can justify

— or simply ignore — social and political inequality. Habermas argues that

hermeneutics lacks a critical edge by privileging the authority of tradition.30 Caputo

thinks Gadamer should be more suspicious of power plays within tradition,31 and

Fleming questions Gadamer’s use of an all-encompassing ‘we’ because it ignores

important differences in who is included or excluded from the conversation.32 Homan

acknowledges these problems while asserting that hermeneutics has the tools for

preventing and recognizing oppressive and exclusionary attitudes.33 Homan asserts

throughout her book shortcomings of the thinkers she references, so her work

approaches tradition critically, which she argues hermeneutics encourages. Tradition is

29
C. Homan, A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education, p. 4.
30
J. Habermas, ‘A Review of Gadamer’s Truth and Method’, The Hermeneutic Tradition: From Ast to
Ricouer, ed. by Gayle L. Ormiston, Alan D. Schrift, and Thomas McCarthy, trans. by Fred Dallmayr
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), pp. 213 – 44.
31
J. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 108.
32
M. Fleming, ‘Gadamer’s Conversation: Does the Other Have a Say?’, Feminist Interpretations of
Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. by Lorraine Code (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2003), 109-32 (p. 119).
33
Homan, A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education, p. 156.
 166

not a set of rules or unquestionable values, but conversations we belong to and

transform through our participation. At the same time, a poetic education seems to

demand resistance to tradition in a way that is more unsettling and revolutionary.

Homan suggests that hermeneutics is a tradition that constantly calls tradition

into question. She states that ‘hermeneutics challenges the very tradition to which it

belongs’.34 Yet, I would argue that a tradition challenging itself is not the same as a

tradition being challenged from the outside, especially when that challenge comes from

a radically different cultural perspective that has been ignored, erased, or subordinated.

I am not convinced that questioning oneself is a form of resistance. However, Homan’s

concept of play — especially in relation to Lugones’ playful world-traveling, which

requires us to see with love rather than arrogance—offers a stronger sense of how

education can be a site of resistance. Tradition focuses on one’s identity in relation to

cultural heritage, while play can happen between cultures and between worlds.

Tradition describes a foundation that grounds a culture, but play, as Homan describes

it, grounds itself and unfolds in unexpected ways. Tradition has an orientation to the

past — even if we must take it up in the present and use it for the future — but play

seems less attached to what has happened and more open to possible futures. For these

reasons, I see tension between the hermeneutic tradition and playful resistance in

Homan’s project.

34
Homan, A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education, p. 174.
 167

Some Political Considerations of Catherine Homan’s

A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education

COREY MCCALL

A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education is a wonderful book that engages the concept of

play within various German philosophical traditions in order to formulate a poetic

pedagogy focusing on self-formation within the context of a world. Extending from the

German Idealism of Kant, Schiller, and Hölderlin through the hermeneutic and

phenomenological tradition of Fink and Gadamer, Homan shows that this philosophical

tradition can itself be read as a series of reflections on worldmaking through Bildung.

Homan answers Nietzsche’s question regarding how one becomes who one is with a

reflection on self-formation in nineteenth and twentieth century German thought. One

fully becomes oneself by becoming part of a shared historical world; in other words, by

becoming part of a tradition. Put differently, one fully becomes an ‘I’ by becoming part

of a ‘We’, though this identification with an historical tradition also entails that I

recognize those who are ‘not us’, hence an ‘I-We-Them’ triad is basic to identity

formation. This identity rests upon a recognition of difference. Homan uses Gadamer’s

hermeneutic model of conversation to make sense of how individuals become part of a

tradition. I argue that the exclusive focus on this hermeneutic model disregards models

of tradition-formation that depend upon domination.

 168

I sketch three alternatives to Gadamer’s egalitarian model of tradition-formation

through conversation. I begin with Ariella Azoulay’s recent account of imperialism and

the invention of art in order to present an eliminationist model that seeks the

assimilation of cultures through the elimination of traditional worlds. Second, I turn to

James Baldwin to sketch a model of exclusionary misrecognition, according to which

one realizes that one is not part of a world in which one had previously thought oneself

a member. Finally, I look at Maria Lugones’s work to show how participation in

dominant cultures can prove burdensome for those who are not part of a dominant

world. With these three models, I merely seek to supplement the conversation model,

which functions as an ideal. Furthermore, these are not meant to exhaust the modes of

cultural encounter and transmission. Of course, these are sketches that would need to

be fleshed out more fully.

In these reflections, I want to extend Homan’s political discussion that

concludes her book, and I wish to focus on Gadamer’s hermeneutic account of play.

Put simply, I worry that Gadamer pays insufficient attention to the political dimension

in his account of world-building through play. Drawing upon Homan’s engaging

analysis, my critique of Gadamer focuses on his hermeneutics of play, for I worry that

this inattention to the political dimension of play represents a more fundamental

problem for Gadamer’s hermeneutics at the same time it signals another, more political,

way to reflect on this German philosophical tradition of poetic play.

This critique of Gadamer’s inattention to the political dimension is certainly

not new. Homan cites critics of Gadamer such as Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida,
 169

John Caputo, Marie Fleming, and Robert Bernasconi who argue that Gadamer’s

account of tradition espouses a model of conversation between equals at the expense of

an agonistic account of tradition in which a dominant tradition is imposed on some in

ways that prioritise identity at the expense of difference. Homan summarizes this

critique: ‘One of the primary objections to Gadamer’s hermeneutics is that an insistence

on the fusion of horizons and the priority of traditions precludes the possibility of

difference. Indeed, one of Hölderlin’s primary concerns is that tradition stifles the

creativity and formation necessary for becoming who we are. Habermas famously

charges Gadamer with fusing hermeneutics and tradition into a single point, thus

sacrificing the potential critical dimension of hermeneutics to the authority of

tradition.’1 By prioritising conversation as the basis of tradition, Gadamer ignores the

fraught political dimensions entailed in becoming part of a tradition.

Whereas conversation implies two conversation partners talking on equal terms,

there are often inequalities that structure the encounter between self and other that this

ideal situation of conversation (even an open-ended conversation) fails to capture. In

other words, we must consider how tradition can, and indeed often does, entail a failure

to understand and interact with another on equal terms and thereby make another person

a part of my world on their terms instead of on mine. To reiterate, I briefly consider

three different ways that inequality and dominance (or the threat of dominance) can

structure one’s initiation into a tradition. First (and most extreme) is the attempt at world

destruction that Ariella Azoulay has recently argued is one of the primary technologies

1
Catherine Homan, A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education: The Play of the In-Between (Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books, 2020), p. 155.
 170

of imperialism. Second is the exclusionary misrecognition that one discovers when one

is not part of a tradition that one had previously thought oneself a part. Finally, I want

to consider how dominant traditions are necessarily burdensome for those who do not

belong.

Ariella Azoulay’s Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism conceives of

imperialism as a project of world-destruction. In addition to the incalculable devastation

wrought in terms of lost lives and mangled bodies, empire works through the erasure

of material worlds and the cultural identities that these material worlds support. Agents

of empire erase worlds through the establishment of political and academic institutions

that advance imperial aims, the two most important of which are the museum and the

archive. Azoulay argues that scholars and soldiers are both agents of empire. While

soldiers use power to advance imperial aims, scholars have used knowledge to erase

traditional worlds and impose a unified imperial one. Museums appropriate artefacts

that performed definite functions within traditional societies and transmute them into

artistic objects that are now meaningful only within the context of an art historical

account, their utilitarian or ritual function within the traditional world of their origin

utterly forgotten.

This means that imperial violence is a condition for the possibility of the

institution of art, which Azoulay claims is both a modern and an imperial invention.

She discusses the work of scholar and activist Kwame Opoku, who seeks to rescue

looted objects from French museums and return them to Benin. ‘In his advocacy of the

restitution of the looted objects from Benin, Kwame Opoku refutes legal claims to
 171

ownership of these objects by Western museums, as well as the connoisseurs’ approach

that recognizes art in looted objects rather than the genocidal circumstances of their

museal display, making the blood of the people who were expropriated of these objects

invisible to them […] Imperial violence is not secondary to art but constitutive of it.’2

Museums serve to whitewash the violence that made it possible for these artefacts to be

included in their collections. Imperialism demands the destruction of traditional worlds

of meaning and the imposition of a standard, hegemonic context of meaning derived

from the world of the imperial power that can only figure the identity of the oppressed

as someone inferior in order to justify the oppressive practices of empire.3

Nevertheless, despite this desire to erase traditional worlds of cultural meaning

through the imperial encounter, world destruction is never complete. Remnants of these

lost worlds persist and form new hybrid worlds within the context of the dominant

imperial identity (think about the ubiquity of American culture today, and how various

cultural artefacts of film and advertising are reinterpreted within various local cultural

contexts). Despite the aspirations of empire, world destruction is rarely total. Another,

brief note on Azoulay’s book that might prove relevant here: she presents a negative

pedagogy, and argues that Americans and Europeans have already been initiated into

this world of imperial meaning, so that a project of unlearning imperialism will be a

necessary first step if we are to have any hope of overcoming imperialism.

2
Ariella Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London: Verso, 2019), p. 59.
3
This paragraph draws on my review of Azoulay’s book. See Corey McCall, ‘Ariella Aoulay, Potential
History: Unlearning Imperialism’, Contemporary Political Theory (2021).

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057%2Fs41296-020-00454-w
 172

Let me illustrate a second dimension of asymmetrical tradition-formation, that

of exclusionary misrecognition, by drawing upon the work of James Baldwin. In his

famous Cambridge debate with William F. Buckley in 1965, he discusses an instance

of misrecognition that remains all too common among African Americans and members

of other marginalized groups who grow up in a world that prioritizes whiteness:

In the case of the American Negro, from the moment you are born

every stick and stone, every face is white. Since you have not yet seen

a mirror, you suppose you are, too. It comes as a great shock around

the age of 5, 6, or 7 to discover that the flag to which you have pledged

allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to

you. It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the

Indians and, although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, the Indians

are you.

It comes as a great shock to discover that the country which is your

birthplace and to which you owe your life and identity has not, in its

whole system of reality, evolved any place for you. The disaffection

and the gap between people, only on the basis of their skins, begins

there and accelerates throughout your whole lifetime.4

4
James Baldwin, Collected Essays, ed. by Toni Morrison (NY: Library of America, 1998), pp. 714-715.
 173

Here Baldwin recalls his realization as a child that the white cultural and political world

of the United States to which he had previously and mistakenly believed he belonged,

in fact was not his world at all. The only way to overcome that terrible realization is to

seek out or create other worlds of cultural meaning within (and often in opposition to)

the long shadow of the hegemonic white world that had no place for him. The result is

a hybrid African-American identity that can only be achieved through the painful

realization that you have no place within the dominant white world of the United States.

This is where Azoulay’s concept of unlearning becomes important: in order to become

part of the African-American cultural world, Baldwin had to unlearn the things that had

made him mistakenly believe himself a part of the white cultural world. Of course, he

still must move through this world, thus enacting the condition of ‘double-

consciousness’ that W.E.B. Du Bois had diagnosed in Souls of Black Folk (1903).

Remaining within the cultural contexts of the United States, the negotiation of

this dominant cultural identity invariably places a burden on those who must negotiate

it that is not borne by Americans who enjoy the privilege of this white identity (and a

similar sort of dynamic is at work if we look at the German cultural context of the

Enlightenment that demanded assimilation on the part of Jews and other ethnic

minorities or Middle Eastern refugees in Germany today). Homan concludes her book

with a discussion of Maria Lugones and her concept of world-travelling, but it must be

remembered that world-travelling is demanded specifically of those individuals who

must negotiate the dominant cultural world in a way not necessary for those privileged

to be a part of a dominant culture. For example, learning to speak English is often

 174

necessary for first-generation immigrants, but there is not a reciprocal demand that I

learn to speak Spanish. In specific cases, this may be demanded of me, but typically it

is not. Laws that mandate English-only classrooms enforce this burden by forcing

children to speak the dominant language. World-travelling is often not done on equal

terms. Consider how Maria Lugones begins her essay ‘Playfulness, World-Travelling,

and Loving Perception’:

The paper describes the experience of ‘outsiders’ to the mainstream

of, for example, White/Anglo organization of life in the U.S. and

stresses a particular feature of the outsider’s existence: the outsider

has necessarily acquired flexibility in shifting from the mainstream

construction of life where she is constructed as an outsider to other

constructions of life where she is more or less ‘at home’. This

flexibility is necessary for the outsider but it can also be wilfully

exercised by the outsider or by those who are at ease in the

mainstream. I recommend this wilful exercise which I call ‘world’-

travelling and I also recommend that the wilful exercise be animated

by an attitude that I describe as playful.5

Lugones responds to her outsider status with a loving and playful flexibility, but her

outsider status is a given. She makes the choice of how to respond to this status; other

5
Maria Lugones, ‘Playfulness, World-Traveling, and Loving Perception’, Hypatia, 2:2 (1987), p. 3.
 175

responses, those of anger or resentment, for example, are certainly possible and perhaps

even common. Note that she begins with the burden of this outsider status as a given

— it is something that must be negotiated (she characterizes world-travelling as ‘a

necessity’ for women of colour), and it is therefore a burden that members of the

dominant white culture need not face.

In my response to Homan’s thought-provoking book, I have briefly examined

three ways that self-formation can be complicated and rendered burdensome once we

attend to the political dimension implicit within her examination of the German

tradition of Bildung or self-formation as poetic education. Gadamer privileges the

reciprocity of conversation. In an ideal world, we would always encounter one another

on equal terms, but in this messy, non-ideal world this does not always happen. In

addition to urging that we examine the oppressive and unequal political dimensions to

which this tradition does not always adequately attend, I hope to have also shown how

we might begin to apply Homan’s careful reconstruction of this worldly pedagogy to

other cultural contexts.

 176

Propriety to the Measure: A Response to Catherine

Homan’s A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education

JESSICA S. ELKAYAM

A good book reminds us that we can delight in our finitude. Though there is never

enough time to travel to all places and parts unknown, should we accept the invitation

to self-transformative discovery issued by a good book, we may realize that in the end

we were invited not only to travel from cover to cover, but — to favour Homan’s

formulation — to play, as if reading could afford us that risky glance at the abyss to

which the spirit of all adventure is undoubtedly attuned.

Suffice it to say, Catherine Homan’s A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education is

both one such ‘good book’, and a formative analysis of what it means for any book to

be good — i.e., to invite us to delight in rather than decry our finitude by reconnecting

to play. Play, Homan argues, is fundamentally a liminal, to-and-fro movement open to

encounters that exceed us. Therein does its transformative potential lie. Likewise, the

exegetical efforts front and centre in A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education subtly call

attention to the play between author and reader underway in and as the unfolding of its

central argument for self-cultivation. Unterwegs, underway — a fundamental

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characteristic of poetry as conceived by Paul Celan,1 and, indeed, of the human

condition, as Homan encourages us to recognize.

But what does it mean for human being to be underway? In the remarks to

follow, I will explore the meaning of this key term so as to open the possibility that

poetry and life may be analogous, i.e., that the analogy that obtains between them might

furnish a proportion or measure that helps us to understand when poetry has indeed

approximated (the dynamics of) life. Bearing this in mind, I suggest, could better situate

us to negotiate some of the political pitfalls of a nostalgic relationship to the origin I

worry may result from Homan’s choice to make Hölderlin the figural axis around which

her project turns.

1. Time, Poetry, and Life

Returning now to the meaning of being underway (Unterwegs), we might begin with

the claim that the spatio-temporal interval opened by the allotment of time to all mortals

as a stretch to occupy is singular insofar as it originates and ends chaque fois unique.2

In other words, because the human being is, strictly speaking, (underway as) a span or

stretch of spatialized time and temporalized space — or, put another way, a liminal

movement between spatio-temporal boundaries — the play of time and space in poetry

1
Homan, A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education, p. 60.
2
Referring to Derrida’s formulation, chaque fois unique, la fin du monde, whereby the death of each
person is singular, each time the end of the world. See the volume of the same title, ed. by Pascale-Anne
Brault and Michael Naas (Paris: Galilee, 2003).
 178

attunes us to our own conditions of possibility and expands our self-awareness,

initiating growth. Summarily:

[…] poetry, because it spans between past and future, teaches us that

education, as self-formation, is nonlinear. Poetry discloses the world

and what exceeds us, but in a way that never fully lays bare its

subject…education requires a movement and negotiation between

past and future, self and other, familiar and foreign. Here again, we

find that the path of human life is eccentric and expansive […].3

Two key claims take shape here. First, the poem spans past and future, reaching through

time in remembrance (Andenken) — casting out and returning to itself — home, but

altered. Accordingly, education requires a movement enacted as negotiation of past and

future that transforms the educated, not into someone wholly different, but into a more

cultivated version of themselves. The fundamental activities that define both poetry and

education, therefore, align. And yet, ‘parallel’ fails to capture their relation.

Hence second, because the human condition, the ‘path of human life’, is

eccentric4 — not merely as unusual or unconventional, but as not having its axis in the

centre, or stretching out away from and returning to a groundless source — poetry

3
Homan, A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education, p. 61.
4
Cf. Homan’s discussion in Chapter Two, pp. 39-41 especially. In explaining the inner workings of
Hölderlin’s titular character Hyperion, Homan writes, ‘[Hyperion recognizes] that the world consists in
‘an alternation between opening and closing, between going forth and returning (H 29). If this is the
nature of the world, then then so too must it be “so with the heart of man’ (H 29)”’ (p. 41).
 179

accomplishes something singular for self-formative education (Bildung). Poetry is

capable of this accomplishment for (or perhaps as) education insofar as it embodies the

very conditions that make human life what it is.5 Though we might be tempted to call

the function of poetry a kind of mimesis, an imitation by poetry of the movements of

life, I wonder whether we better serve the spirit and the letter of Homan’s argument by

naming the relation between poetry and life an analogy.

2. Analogy and Propriety to the Measure

Etymologically, analogy, from the Greek analogos, means proportion. As the meaning

evolves over time and the term is incorporated into Latin, French, and late Middle

English, analogy acquires the sense that the measure of likeness between the terms it

compares is considered (on the basis of a proportion or measure), appropriate.6 Thus, if

we explore the connection Homan elaborates between poetry and life to ground poetry

as central to education (self-cultivation), and if we posit this connection as an analogy,

we might wager that life is to breath as poetry is to the breath-crystal that turns it

5
Homan writes of poetry, as indeed we might say of life, ‘Poetry, as the in-between, is fundamentally
liminal in this traversing between past and future, self and other, imagined and realized, said and unsaid’
(p. 7).
6
This analogy wager gains some ground in light of Hölderlin’s reversal from the aesthetic to the poetic,
to which I return in the closing of these remarks. As described by Homan (A Hermeneutics of Poetic
Education, p. 2), ‘rather than progressing from aesthetic taste to moral universals, [Hölderlin] wants to
move from reason to the harmonizing, utopic nature of poetry…[which] gives us access to this already
existing [primordial] unity [of subject and object].’ In other words, because the individuated human
being is able to get in touch with the whole from which she is (tragically) sundered in being born (i.e., in
being allotted time and death), what we seek for education as self-cultivation is the way to get in touch.
For Hölderlin, this way is poetry – but not as an instrument, a mere means subordinated to the end it
serves. Instead, poetry is that activity that embodies the playful, albeit tragic, movements of life through
an articulation that never fully captures the whole, but hearkens to it nonetheless.
 180

(Atemwende).7 Life, as breath, has a rhythm to which the poet becomes attuned.

Correspondingly, a poem that merits the name crystallizes life by turning breath

corporeally with language — by inflection, meter, rise, fall, sound, and silence.

Moreover, this corporeal turning of breath, concretized as the poem’s dynamic of

address and response, underscores poetry’s fundamental openness to alterity. In

Homan’s words, ‘The poem teaches the turning of the breath and the comportment

necessary to understand what is addressing us.’8 Put simply, poetry is integral to

education because poetry is intimately attuned to life, which — given a robust

understanding of life as finite — means poetry is at the same time, attuned to death.9

Thus, our task, borrowing from a formulation of Gadamer’s, is to ‘return to what has

been allotted…to the measure’ [of the human], i.e., to be subject to the measure and,

thereby, free. Such a return to the measure Homan argues is ‘what it is to live in poetry,’

attuning ourselves to our finitude while remaining open to encounters with the other.10

Recalling that the appropriateness of the measure, i.e., the proportion, is what

grounds the comparison undertaken in analogy, it seems we could say with some

confidence that poetry is analogous to life. We’d have to be careful with this, however,

because it is tempting to stop there. Instead, if we take the analogy seriously, we have

to consider another question, one that I think points to an unresolved tension in the book

that Homan contends with at numerous intervals, viz. the question of the extent to which

7
Cf. Chapter Two, pp. 77-79.
8
Homan, A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education, p. 91.
9
Homan, A Hermeneuics of Poetic Education, p. 91. Notably, Homan emphasizes this double
attunement with the imperative not to split the ‘no’ from the ‘yes,’ which issues from Hölderlin, but
which, she holds, is a common thread between Hölderlin and Celan (62-65).
10
Homan, A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education, p. 91.
 181

the analogy between poetry and life is, in any instance, indeed appropriate. How and

when are we to know we have ‘returned to the measure’, subjected to which we find

ourselves free? The matter comes to a head in Chapter Two, in the encounter Homan

stages between Hölderlin, Heidegger, and Celan.

3. Is Nostalgia Inappropriate to the Measure?

In response, I frame my question with the following distillation: Hölderlin, for Homan,

clearly plays a key role in grounding her turn away from aesthetic and toward poetic

education. She argues, ‘rather than progressing from aesthetic taste to moral universals,

[Hölderlin] wants to move from reason to the harmonizing, utopic nature of poetry.’11

Thus, rather than overcoming our animal nature to attain to reason, we should stretch

reason to its limits via poetry so as to reconnect to the abyssal ground of our origin.

Because our origination is individuation from a primordial unity, it is tragic, and the

poetry that reconnects us to that unity (however without ground it may be) is likewise

tragic. That said, for Homan, Hölderlin falls prey to the prevailing conception of play

in the aesthetic tradition, i.e., as a kind of frivolity that makes space for freedom but

that cannot be taken seriously. However, Homan stipulates, if we are faithful to

Hölderlin, we will discover that it is precisely in his understanding of tragedy that we

can locate the dynamics of play, that liminal movement between past and future, birth

11
Homan, A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education, p. 2.
 182

and death. Play recast by Homan (to save Hölderlin) is then, perhaps paradoxically,

serious business.12

Such a conception of play is the common thread between Hölderlin, Heidegger,

and Celan as theorists of tragic poetry. But whereas Homan cites a certain affinity

between her primary figure and Celan, she argues for a divergence from it in the work

(and, more or less intentionally, the politics) of Heidegger. Though all three figures

have a keen sense of the recuperative liminal play of past and future that enriches life

and gives form to self-cultivation, Heidegger, on Homan’s reading, elides conversation

and the historical, fixing conversation through his epochal destining of history.13 Put

plainly, Heidegger in effect closes his ears to the entreaty of Celan’s poetry to listen, to

attune to the burned-out meanings left behind from profound exile at the edge of

annihilation. Heidegger is too busy attending to the destining of the history of being to

recognize not just the alterity of Celan (and of his experience), but the radical space of

possibility Celan’s poetry holds open.

For Celan, on Homan’s reading, ‘when the poem speaks, it is ‘mindful of all of

our dates’ because what is its ownmost is time.’14 Celan’s poetry thus embodies the

dynamics of the spatio-temporal movement of human life, but it goes further even than

12
Further meditation on this theme leads the curious reader to Chapter Three, and specifically to the sub-
section ‘Playful Freedom’. Therein, Homan reintroduces her reader to the “as if” dimension of play in
her treatment of Kant’s categorical imperative. She writes, ‘This ‘as if’ is serious, though, even if it is
playful (or, perhaps, because it is playful).’ Noting prior associations of play and a tragic orientation to
life/human reality, we might say that the ‘as if’ is serious because it is playful. Thus, the question
becomes: is the comedic denoted by the reverse of this formulation? If tragedy is serious because it is
playful, is comedy playful because it is serious? Cf. Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium for one
example that might answer in the affirmative.
13
Homan, A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education, pp. 81-82.
14
Homan, A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education, p. 63.
 183

this: what is beyond the given (that futural stretching of poetry and of the human)

remains open, as possibility (hence utopia, the not yet of a possibly different world).

Instead of delineating a history/source to be more originarily recovered, Celan

submerges the source underwater, choking the breath whose speech would turn to

recuperation/recovery. It seems, then, that Celan not only breaks from Heidegger but

also from Hölderlin, insofar as recovery of the original ‘source’ — usually affiliated in

the German idiom with self-withdrawing or hiding earth — becomes impossible.

Accordingly, the movement (of poetic play) becomes, for Celan contra Heidegger and

perhaps Hölderlin, a traversal of not just a finite but of a strangulated space between

burned out ashes/traces and annihilation (of both language and person).15 But as soon

as that ‘beyond the given’, that space of possibility poetry strives/stretches toward,

moves to recovery of the original — as soon as that striving is nostalgic for an actual

past, a remembrance that intuits an actualized forgotten (as a species of anamnesis)16

— we end up in a conservative ethos that drives poetry to the imaginings of totalitarian

ends. If we capture the past in fixity, it seems we foreclose the future, eventuating a

future of nightmare proportion.17

My question to Homan, then, is this: if it is clear that Celan’s radical possibility

— the possibility opened up in the strangled space and breath of the poet’s exile — is

simultaneously a utopic space of play that returns us most appropriately to the measure,

15
Homan, A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education, p. 74.
16
See the first paragraph of ‘Do Not Split the No from the Yes: The Language of Life and Death’ in
Chapter Two, 62.
17
Like, for example, the Shoah – the initiation of which though not reducible to, nevertheless cannot be
divorced from, a nostalgia for a German past to be remembered or recovered by German tragic poetry.
 184

why does Hölderlin remain the central pillar of a project with such liberatory aspirations

as yours? Is Hölderlin not subject to further criticism on the grounds that he, too, is

nostalgic for a German past, a recovery of the Greeks by the German Volk that

deradicalizes the possibility to which he otherwise argues we should remain open? Does

not Celan’s plunging of the source under water suggest a fluidity to origins we would

do well to counterpose to the roots or soil of the German nationalist imaginary? I see

hints that you may be headed in this direction, and thank you for the occasion to

consider this more deeply. To close with the question, once more, what say you to

poetry as analogous to life and Hölderlinian nostalgia as potentially inappropriate to the

measure?
 185

Imagining New Futures: The Politics of Poetic

Education

CATHERINE HOMAN

The very soul of hermeneutics, says Gadamer, lies in recognizing the limits of our own

perspective and in understanding another by seeing ‘the justice, the truth, of their

position. And this is what transforms us’.1 In this spirit, I begin with sincere gratitude

to the respondents for taking up and advancing our conversation in significant ways.

Each prompts me to see the justice and truth in their position and each is in turn

transformative. The questions and challenges raised are invitations of friendship and

learning as much as they are critical engagements, particularly in pointing to the

implicit political dimensions of my work. I see this in two ways. The first follows what

Gadamer takes to be the soul of hermeneutics, namely a political consideration, a call

to do justice, in interpretation. The second follows from concerns regarding the

oppressive elements of tradition. I aim to take up these suggestions to show how poetic

1
Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Interview: The 1920s, 1930s, and the Present: National Socialism, German
History, and German Culture’, in Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History: Applied
Hermeneutics, ed. by Dieter Misgeld and Graeme Nicholson, trans. by Lawrence Schmidt and Monica
Reuss (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), pp. 135–53 (p. 153).
 186

education sheds light on these political concerns and contains the resources to work

toward more liberatory futures.

To reiterate some of the central questions from my respondents, if my claim is

that play and poetry create new worlds of meaning, how do we determine whether we

have replicated oppressive conditions or whether we have made possible something

more liberatory? Does appealing to the mutuality of play and conversation obscure

differences in power and access? What do we do with the tradition and figures that are

problematic or at odds? How do we know when we have found the proper proportion

and not fallen into nostalgia?

To address these questions, I would like to argue that doing justice to another’s

position is the very basis of responding to our current conditions and working toward

better futures. Gadamer suggests that being a thinker and practicing the free exercise of

judgment is already sufficiently political because judgment finds its limits when

encountering another who also exercises their power of judgment.2 Here, justice is not

the preservation of autonomy or personal liberties, but a recognition that the self can

develop only out of an interdependent context through shared language and meaning

and that another may be correct in their position. Self-cultivation is a political project.

The speculative character of language affords this recognition and cultivation.

In a speculative proposition, the predicate does not add on to the subject, but rather

mirrors the subject to show what is otherwise unseen. Gadamer argues language itself

is speculative. As finite, each word points both to itself and to what is beyond it. The

2
Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Von Lehrenden und Lernenden’, in Das Erbe Europas (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1989), pp. 158–65 (p. 158).
 187

unsaid is always contained within the said. One who speaks also speaks the whole of

being.3 Speculative thinking is an act of memory that moves us out of our everyday

forgetful state toward deeper understanding. It reminds us of our own finitude.

Hermeneutic experience, as the movement of question and answer, is speculative in

continuously reaching toward the totality of meaning. Yet, speculative experience also

reveals that things can always be otherwise and are at risk of further rupture. The point

is not to protect against disruption, but to remain open to it.

For Gadamer, poetic speech epitomizes the speculative because it ‘represents

the new appearance of a new world in the imaginary medium of poetic invention.’4

Poetic speech is an intensification of everyday speech. Both speak the whole, but the

poetic word is aware of its limits and what is beyond. As such, poetry teaches us that

we are also limited. Gadamer identifies this dynamic at play in Plato’s dialogues. In

‘Plato and the Poets’, he argues that the Republic is not an actual guide for education,

but instead holds up a mirror to the current conditions of Athens. 5 Plato’s target is not

poetry, but sophism. As the play of question and answer, the poetic dialogue reveals

that education and the development of the just citizen occur not through aesthetic

consciousness, but through philosophy. The dialogues initiate a speculative experience

by disrupting the current order and pointing to a different future. The ideal city is utopic

not as perfect, but as the non-place that does not yet exist. We reach closer to that ideal

3
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. by Joel Weinsheimer (New York: Continuum
Publishing Group, 2004), p. 465.
4
Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 466.
5
Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Plato and the Poets’, in Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies
on Plato, trans. by P. Christopher Smith, Reprint edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp.
39–72.
 188

not through nostalgia, but a recognition of the limits of our current conditions and a

listening to the other.

As one respondent notes, ‘In an ideal world, we would always encounter one

another on equal terms, but in this world this does not always happen.’ I agree. We

should neither pretend we already exist in an ideal world nor abandon hope for the

future. The speculative experience of hermeneutics shows that we can attune ourselves

to the past and present without accepting them uncritically. Our current traditions do

entail failures to understand and initiation into them may be due to world destruction

or exclusionary misrecognition. If Gadamer is correct, then our task as humans requires

us to call our presuppositions into question. Members of dominant groups must

critically investigate practices and beliefs that may otherwise seem self-evident or

given. Current conditions are challenged by listening to, doing justice to, perspectives

that have been marginalized. Attempting to get outside of tradition is self-defeating;

our own linguistic practices that allow for understanding give rise to and derive from

tradition. Gadamer clarifies that he does not defend any particular tradition, but rather

believes that ‘there is a horizon of tradition, which always constitutes the background

for change’.6 Tradition exists not as a monolith, but through dynamic creation and

recreation. What appears as continuity is often much more complicated, fraught, or

ambiguous.

Still, it is not obvious that listening to the other automatically improves

conditions. I admit this is a real challenge. Poetic education, as the teaching of how to

6
Gadamer, ‘The Verse and the Whole’, p. 150.
 189

listen, could at least move us in better directions and help us identify which directions

are indeed better. Here I would follow Alexis Shotwell’s argument that we can and

should work to create better futures not by rejecting the past, but by ‘remembering for

the future’.7 We take responsibility for the future through collective, relational

unforgetting.8 We find ourselves amid traditions and practices, yet we can continue to

give shape to understanding and actions that prefigure better futures.

Shotwell locates imaginative possibilities in the speculative fiction of Octavia

E. Butler ‘because it offers another world — many another worlds — that are better in

certain key ways, more liveable for more people, but not completely fixed’.9 Such

worlds are yet to come, but even as better, they are imperfect and dynamic. Similarly,

although Butler opens these imaginative possibilities, they rely on themes, such as

biological determinism, that remain worrisome and which we must confront.

While Shotwell may not employ ‘speculative’ exactly as Gadamer does, she

similarly demonstrates the speculative experience of engaging with literature and

tradition. Works of art point to new futures by orienting us in different ways to our past

and present. Moreover, any movement toward the future is necessarily imperfect. There

is no perfect primordial ground we can rehabilitate, nor is there an authority who stands

beyond criticism. We can draw from figures like Butler or Hölderlin while also

retaining critical attitudes. Prefiguration is not predetermination. Our imagined futures

are likewise open to constant revision. We cannot guarantee the future, but we must

7
Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times (U of Minnesota Press, 2016),
p. 48. Shotwell draws this idea from Sue Campbell.
8
Shotwell, p. 39.
9
Shotwell, p. 191.
 190

still seek out places of freedom where we can open, even imperfectly, new futures

through remembering the past. I agree that play provides precisely such opportunities

to reimagine the future.

Yet, how can we tell whether have remembered the past or prefigured identities

in non-oppressive ways? How would we distinguish between bad forms of play and

those that open new futures? After the January 6th U.S. Capitol insurrection, some

commentators suggested that the insurrectionists were merely playing, or that their play

acting failed in mistaking fiction for reality.10 What I would argue, though, is that the

insurrectionists surely were not playing, at least not in the way I understand play. The

insurrectionists get it wrong in several ways. First, play requires awareness that one is

playing; such knowledge allows for the transformative relation to reality. If the

insurrectionist mistakes fiction for reality, that is not play, and I would hazard that the

insurrectionists were also not simply engaged in fantasy. Second, there is no listening

to the other. There is no exchange or movement between self and other, whereas

genuine play requires openness to alterity. Third, play is groundless and for its own

sake, meaning that it cannot be predetermined or derived. The insurrectionists,

however, sought to achieve very specific, predetermined aims. Fourth, many

insurrectionists called to rehabilitate a purity that never existed in the first place.

Gadamer contends that ‘Whoever appeals to authority and tradition will have no

10
John Ganz, ‘Costumes at the Capitol Can’t Disguise the Ugly Truth of Far-Right Violence’, The
Guardian, 13 January 2021 <http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/13/costumes-
capitol-far-right-violence-washington-dc> [accessed 1 July 2021];
Spencer Kornhaber, ‘The Superhero Fantasies of Trump’s Mob’, The Atlantic, 2021
<https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/01/alternate-reality-trump-capitol-mob/617596/>.
 191

authority. Period. The same goes for prejudgments. Anyone who simply appeals to

prejudices is someone you cannot talk with’.11 Authority derives not from dogmatism,

but from the willingness to grant that another may be correct. While I do not know

precisely what the insurrectionists were thinking, it does seem that an insistence on

conspiracy and a pure tradition reflects a misunderstanding of the meaning of the past

and a failure to do justice to another’s position. On my account, we can distinguish

between bad, pseudo-play that refuses openness and the more liberatory, genuine play

that preserves difference.

Returning to the theme of justice, we can see how the hermeneutic experience

as speculative is also political. The recognition of the possible correctness of another

and the pursuit of understanding hold open both disruptive and unifying moments. If

our experiences with art and poetry are speculative, then they also open possible worlds

of transformation. Gadamer holds that ‘The task of our human life in general is to find

free spaces and learn to move therein’.12 As free spaces, art and poetry allow us to learn

to move within them. The spirit of hermeneutics that recognizes its own limits also

marks the limits of play and poetry. Both, as finite human activities, are limited while

also uniquely bearing this limit in mind. Poetic education fosters listening and the

practice of interdependent cultivation.

11
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Carsten Dutt, and Glenn W. Most, Gadamer in Conversation: Reflections and
Commentary (Yale University Press, 2001), p. 44.
12
Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘The Idea of the University-Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow’, in Hans-Georg
Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History: Applied Hermeneutics, ed. by Dieter Misgeld and Graeme
Nicholson, trans. by Lawrence Schmidt and Monica Reuss (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), pp. 47–60 (p.
60).
 192

In ‘The Verse and the Whole’, Gadamer reflects that we exist in ‘essential

futurity […] in expectation and hope’.13 Aware of our finitude, we find ourselves

outside of ourselves and on the way back out to ourselves. The symbol for this

movement is nomos, law, measure. To become who we are is to orient ourselves to that

measure through an act of remembrance. We cannot cling to what was or what is, but

must renew what we hold to be true and to live in the totality of existence. Learning to

live in poetry moves toward this renewal because poetry is such a play between verse

and whole and a rhythm appropriate to the measure. Our education, our capacity to do

justice to new futures, will have to learn again what living in poetry means. To become

who we are is to preserve and do justice to what is other.

13
Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘The Verse and the Whole’, in Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry,
and History: Applied Hermeneutics, ed. by Dieter Misgeld and Graeme Nicholson, trans. by Lawrence
Schmidt and Monica Reuss (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), pp. 83–91 (p. 90).
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