Aesthetics as embodyment

My essay proposal will focus on aesthetics and how it has been used in the 20th century to describe the embodyment of the subject. A majority of the discussions in class have been centered around a view of a transcendental subject, but this does not take into account the aspects of being that follow from a subject's embodied subjectivity. Until the 20th century, the philosophic tradition was almost entirely subject centered. Much of the emphasis that has been placed on autonomy or the active consciousness have debased the subject in a way that excludes all passivity, in particular the role of being possed by a body, that may very well be the precondition for any form of consciousnss. Aesthetics in particular is an interesting middle ground between pure subject and object for neither can truely be said to offer the complete meaning of art on its own. What aesethics suggests about the experience of embodiment is not so much what art/artist are, but rather aesethics makes room for 'how' of being that emerges from a body.

Early aesthetic theory regarded art as an extention of our sensual preferences understood through universal concepts like beauty or sublimity. Reason from this standpoint played a central role in the interpretation of art and what was fit to call an aesthetic experience. Emmanual Kant's turn on this practacl interpretation of aesthetics appeared in "Critque of Pure Judgement" and has been regarded as one of his most influential contributions. Kant's interest in the divisions of the mind brought him to question what were the conditions needed for judgment to take place. Using the aesthetic experience as an example, he attempted to find a source of judgment that was common to all rational beings. He argued that aesthetic judgment did not rely on the use of reason, it came out of a deficiency within the faculty of reason that overwhelmed its ability to function. It is in this respect that an interest with merely describing beauty and sublimity as understood sensually were replaced by a concern for the rational subject as a unique potential of will.

Criticism from 20th century movements like Surrealism and Dadaism posed the question of whether the merit of art as a category served other purposes than signalling any clear distinction about what art represented. Instead of regarding the interpretation of art externally as object or concept, there was suddenly a greater emphasis on the content of art as its meaning. Are our everyday experiences in the world significantly different from art, and if not what then does art represent? This question occupies many of the observations about art presented in Martin Heidegger Origins of the Work of Art. Heidegger attempts to establish an understanding of art that is not based on its reference to its substance or conceptual agreement but rather a view of artwork that "opens up in its own way the Being of beings" (p.165). Art, for Heidegger, granted access to this realm of being-in-the-world that was not reducible to any being but offered a description of a truely common condition. Alternatively, other 20th century thinkers turned away from a phenomenological description to render a practacle concern for art, its content and distritbution, along dialectical or historical materialist terms. Both Albert Marcuso and Walter Benjamin represent this view of a transcendental subject that is not based in reason but conditioned by the tension within a given historical context. Through an experience of aura or sublimation, the voice of the individual subject emerges but only by virtue of its repression.

While the phenomenology and critical theory may differ in their point of reference, both attempt to regard art in a way that counters the assumptions of an autonomous subject. Although there has been some contention concerning the end of art in itself, art nonetheless represents a unique possibility where a true respect for being can be formed.