Aesthetics in a persecutory time: introducing Aesthetic Critical Realism

ABSTRACT

We are living through a time when simplistic notions of good/bad, right/wrong, and us/them, have come to dominate our encounters with each-other and our planet. Against this ‘persecutory’ backdrop, this paper considers the promise of a more relational and mutually supportive way of living. Introducing Aesthetic Critical Realism (ACR), I present a laminated explanation of ‘aesthetics in a persecutory time’. This is founded on our capacity for aesthetic experience (the emergent experience of being-in-relation with the natural necessity of the world); doing art (giving shareable form to our aesthetic experiences); and caring for culture (as our system(s) of value recognition). Far from being of interest only to artists and the arts, ‘aesthetic reason’ bridges theoretical (scientific/philosophical), practical (political/ethical) and productive (creative/artisanal) knowledge. In living ‘artfully’ we both ‘give and get recognition’, and this is a requirement for human flourishing.

KEYWORDS:

• Aesthetic Critical Realism
• aesthetic experience
• art
• value
• culture
• aesthetic reason

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Nick Wilson is Professor of Culture & Creativity at CMCI, King’s College London. His teaching and research focuses on culture, creativity, authenticity and artful living. His most recent publication (2020) is The Space that Separates: A Realist Theory of Art (Routledge). Nick is a Trustee and Editorial Board Member of the Centre for Critical Realism.

Notes

1 As Hartwig notes (2007, 16) there are many varieties of actualism besides the dominant empiricist form (including Plato’s eidetic actualism, Aristotle’s kinetic actualism and forms of conceptual actualism).

2 Natural necessity refers to the ways of being of the world, or more formally, the relationship between a thing’s intrinsic structure and the way it behaves. Another term for ‘the real’ – it is that domain of the world that extends beyond (whilst embracing) our direct observations, and comprises relations, structures, mechanisms, powers, possibilities, forces, values, energy – ways of being.

3 Desmond refers to this betweenness as ‘metaxological’ after the Greek metaxu.

4 Bhaskar introduces the co-occurrence of the absence and presence of something in his Dialectic (1993). In his Philosophy of MetaReality he deepens this referring to ‘where some other thing is enfolded or implicit within a being’ (Bhaskar 2012 [2002], xlix.)

5 A TINA syndrome is a ‘truth in practice combined or held in tension with a falsity in theory’, which issues in emergent error and illusion (Bhaskar 2002, 84–5; quoted in Hartwig 2007, 465). The term is named ironically after British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s slogan, ‘There Is No Alternative’ (TINA) – to the free market.

6 https://iacrsoton.wordpress.com/ [accessed 20th February, 2020.]

7 ‘Laminated explanation’ is a term introduced by Andrew Collier (1989, 98f) and subsequently taken up by Roy Bhaskar. ‘The idea of a “lamination” is designed to underwrite the irreducibility of, and necessity for, the various levels used in an applied or concrete interdisciplinary investigation' (Bhaskar 2016, 16).

8 August von Schlegel 1809-11; 182–3.

9 Levinson 2003, 3. Roger Scruton 1998, 2) notes that ‘philosophical aesthetics seems to divide into two parts: firstly, there is the study of aesthetic appreciation, the aesthetic attitude, taste, the aesthetic emotions, and so on. … Secondly, philosophers attempt to analyse our judgements about the objects of aesthetic feeling and appreciation. We make value judgements about these objects and we describe them in various ways which seem to have a peculiar relation to their aesthetic significance.’

10 ‘Some of the hallmarks of aesthetic property status include: having gestalt character; requiring taste for discernment; having an evaluative aspect; affording pleasure or displeasure in mere contemplation; being non-condition governed; being urgent on lower-level perceptual properties; requiring imagination for attribution; requiring metaphorical thought for attribution; being notably a focus of aesthetic experience; being notably present in works of art' (Levinson 2003, 6).

11 Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck, Kant 1987, §10, 220/65).

12 The 2019 IACR conference was no different – my two papers were the only ones amongst more than 80 in total.

13 Other critical realist contributions, not discussed here, include Cashell (2009; 2012; 2014); McDonald (2008); Nellhaus (2010, 2017); Norrie (2014); Pitt (2010); Verstegen (2013; 2016); Wilson (2007; 2014).

14 See Archer (2003; 2007; 2012) on reflexivity and the internal conversation; Hartwig and Morgan (2012) on spirituality; Bhaskar, Danermark, and Price (2018) on health and wellbeing; Norris (2002; 2005) on epistemology and realism; Archer (2000); Smith (2010; 2015) and Haley (2019) on being ‘human’.

15 To be clear, all experience is dependent upon, though not reducible to, such perception.

16 For discussion of ‘recognition’, embracing the ideas of Hegel, Rousseau, Marx, Honneth, Fraser, Taylor and many more, see Schmidt am Busch, and Zurn (2010).

17 Elliot’s (2008) Handbook of Approach and Avoidance Motivation provides a very comprehensive overview and history of the concept.

18 Archer is explicit about the CS and the S-C being empirically encountered conjointly, whilst ontologically they constitute different strata.

19 See Elder-Vass 2008; 2010a; 2010b.

20 I follow Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher’s (1990) definition of caring as ‘a species activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our “world” so that we can live in it as well as possible' (p. 40). According to this definition, I define creativity as a structured practice of care (see Wilson 2018).

21 In this respect, what I term ‘aesthetic reason’ is closely allied to what Jeremy Bendik-Keymer (2018) discusses in terms of ‘relational reason’. He suggests that this is ‘the latest to be discovered and still largely inarticulate, despite the constructions and findings of intersubjectivity, phenomenology, communicative action, feminist theory, environmental philosophy, and Africana, Chinese, Buddhist, and much Indigenous philosophy' (p. 14).

22 Benjamin 2018. Jessica Benjamin contrasts the doer/done-to position with the mutuality/thirdness position.