Art transforms how things appear and through this changes our sense of whom and what we are. This self-becoming can be illuminated through an integrated theory of cognition, imagination, and the self in the context of different art forms (including pictorial art, sculpture and assemblage works, architecture, literature, film, and music).
An interesting initial context for this strategy is provided by a conference on âThe State of Aestheticsâ held in London in June 2011. The event was advertised thus:
There are many reasons for this perceived irrelevance. One of them is that the Analytic tradition makes no sustained attempt to negotiate what happens in the making of art, i.e., how art transforms the world and changes it into something new. It focuses, rather, on analysis of the formal conventions whereby, for example, we âreadâ fiction or perceive pictures. The reason why such reading or perception is important in the first place falls awayâor is negotiated through the limited notion of âexpressive qualitiesâ.3 However, these qualities tend to be treated descriptively and recognitionally in terms of the artwork seeming sad, happy, melancholy, joyful, or whatever. But, in the case of art-making, the artist may undergo all sorts of feelings whilst creating the work, and these do not have any necessary bearing on what he or she creates. What is decisive is the way the medium is articulated in terms of the content addressed and the style of composition. Just as decisive is how the work stands vis-Ă -vis our experience of other artworks, and its relation to our common cultural stock of knowledge. Emotion as presented in art has the character of possibility rather than a display of the artistâs psychological state, and it is determined by relational historical factors as well as phenomenal/imaginative ones. In this way, emotion projected through art has a different structure from that which it has in everyday life. Art centers on the enabling of emotionally significant structures rather than the mere recognition that a work possesses them. (We will explore this in much more detail as the book progresses, and especially in the chapter on music.)
The Continental tradition of aesthetics has been rather more focused on the question of artâs deeper existential significance but, again, very much from the audienceâs perspective. I have addressed Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Dufrenne, Lacan, and Deleuze in the greatest depth in a number of books, and have noted how they fail to engage with ontologies of the different media in enough depth.4 Dufrenne is the partial exception, but his approach is then restricted by another problem common to all the aforementioned thinkers and, indeed, to Adorno. It is that they approach art and aesthetic experience very much as an illumination of their own broader philosophical positions. This can, of course, yield important truths, but it tends also to treat artistic meaning only in terms of those features that are most amenable to the position in question. For example, in relation to pictorial art, none of these thinkers understand the constitutive significance of the plane, or the importance of linear perspective (indeed, the latterâs role is especially misunderstood). And, in the case of film, even Deleuzeâs two-volume study Cinema tends to reduce the medium to those effects on the audience that are amenable to description and explanation in specifically Bergsonian terms.5 The ontology of the filmic medium itself is scarcely addressed.
There is also another important historical tradition in Continental aestheticsânamely, the Idealist works of Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Schelling. Hegelâs work in particular presents a wealth of insights concerning the relation between art and the self that have scarcely been developed. However, like the more recent Continental thinkers just mentioned, all these philosophers embed their aesthetic insights within broaderâextremely complexâphilosophical systems. This results in a similar effectâart is presented through features amenable to the system, rather than on its own terms.6
Given all these difficulties, it follows, then, that if aesthetics is to reestablish its philosophical importance, a change is needed. Instead of engaging with art mainly through the notion of expressive qualities, or making it speak through the voice of âauthoritiesâ, we need a Copernican turn. This means a re-orientation of aesthetics towards
The rest of this chapter focuses on the first of these points. It provides a basic theory of cognition and self-becoming that emphasizes the importance of imagination. The theory is then considered in terms of the earliest level of self-becoming, namely, the educational process. It is argued that without initiation into the arts, the human subject is diminished in terms of both practical agency and broader capacities for self-fulfillment. The rest of the book will give substance to this general argument. Specifically, it will be shown how each individual art medium makes its own unique contributions to human self-becoming.
I
We inhabit the present in our distinctive human way only insofar as it is oriented (explicitly or tacitly) by knowledge of other possible times and places, and what it would be like to occupy them.8 This means, of course, that we exist not only in the present of our bodily needs and routes to their satisfaction, but also in and across the present, and its past, future, and counterfactual context. All our choicesâand our valuationsâbreathe through this horizon of factual realities and complex modes of possibility. Feeling and emotions tied originally to encounters with immediate stimuli are redistributed across the subjectâs horizonally structured experiences.9 To be conscious of oneself just is to locate oneself in relation to actual or possible positions within this horizon.
But how is this horizon articulated and negotiatedâhow does one locate oneself in relation to it? Conceptually speaking, there are at least four major cognitive competences involved. Each of them plays its own distinctive role but is involved reciprocally with the genesis and operations of the others. It is to these I now turn.
The first competence is that of symbolic form. It is constituted by language, and related abilities that are enabled by the learning and applying of language in specific ways. It may be that animals have some rudimentary sense of self, but full self-consciousness involves knowing that one is such and such an individual who has inhabited such and such places at different times, and who is kin or not kin (in different senses of kinship) with other identifiable individuals. Symbolic forms also enable knowledge of self and world that can be developed, in principle, to ever higher levels.
Now, the very ability to learn symbolic forms (as I will show in a moment) requires imagination as a cognitive competence.10 However, the necessity of imagination in this respect has scarcely been recognized by philosophers. Kant alone saw its key role, and I will follow his basic sense of itâas a capacity for generating quasi-sensory images of items and states of affairs that are not immediately given in perception.
This trans-ostensive function (as I shall call it) is far from being a mere luxury. At the most basic level, for example, one cannot make sense of the acquisition and application of conceptsâindeed, of the learning of language in generalâwithout presupposing the mediation of imagination as a necessary factor. All sign and concept acquisition at some point presupposes a capacity for engaging with things not immediately present that is not itself merely another variety of sign or concept. If there was not such a capacity, our explanations of the learning of signs and concepts would presuppose more fundamental signs and concepts, and even more fundamental signs and concepts to explain them, and so on, in an infinite regress. Imagination is the feature that allows us to get a trans-ostensive âtakeâ on things not present, thus allowing signs to be learned.
And this centrality of imagination extends equally to memory. In order to recall facts about oneâs life, one must articulate them through linguistic descriptions. This in itself, qua linguistic, presupposes the mediation of imagination for the reason just mentioned. However, much of our rememberingâindeed, the remembering that really counts for us emotionallyâinvolves not just descriptive facts about the past, but the generation of images that are consistent with these facts.
I emphasize the term âgenerationâ here, for such episodic memory does not consist of the retrieval of mere faded âpicturesâ. Our re-living of the past is a creative thingâit is an imaginative interpretation whose character is strongly influenced by our present interests and orientations.11
The phenomenology of the mental image, itself, reveals this intrinsically creative character. When we remember or imagine something episodically, we do not project an exact simulacrum of that which we are positing. Our images select, exaggerate, omit, and sometimes even falsify the appearance of their object. They are interpretations whose character is in large part determined by our personal interests in the present.
And this is all to the good. For if our imagining did not have this character, and our recollections of the past and projections of possibility had the vividness and intensity of present perception, there could be no experience. If moments from the past or projected possible experiences were to be imagined with the same sensory immediacy as present perception, we would lose our sense of reality. It is true that the existence of objects given in perception is not subject to the will in the way that imagined objects are. However, if the sensory intensity of the image were on a par with that of perception, then the very power of willing itself loses its cognitive bearings and lapses into psychosis.
It is through imagination directed by language that we inhabit the past, and project future and counterfactual possibilities in quasi-sensory, episodic terms. Our sense of whom and what we are and our place in the universe is shaped profoundly by the character of these images, and how we link them through descriptions that themselves involve imagination, albeit in less direct terms.
I turn now to the third cognitive capacity that is decisive to the experiential horizonal, namely empathyâthe ability to identify, in affective terms, with how others experience the world.
Initiation into language and the exercise of imagination both enable and draw upon this decisive emotion. No one can be conscious of self except insofar as one has a sense of identity with, and difference from, other members of the same species. In this context, empathy is more than mere intellectual recognition or subjective affective response, because it serves as both a motive for positive action towards others and a basis for mutual felt recognition in relation to, and through, the other. It is the supreme, as it were, reciprocal and societal emotion.
Of course, there are psychopathic personalities devoid of empathy, but even in these cases, such a person must at least know, in principle, what it is like to be another person, even if this does not issue in any positive emotion.
Now, whilst empathy is a relatively straightforward notion, the final cognitive component of the experiential horizon that I will consider is much more complex and controversial. It is the aesthetic. The concept of the aesthetic as such was first formulated in eighteenth-century Europe, and in terms of post-colonial and gender studies orthodoxy, it might be thought to be no more than a reflection of the preferences and dominance of white, male, middle-class, heterosexist patriarchy.
However, there is rather more to it than this. For whilst the theorization of the aesthetic qua aesthetic is historically specific, what is so theorized is an idiom of experience that is intrinsic to the unity of self-consciousness.12
This is because of the extraordinary scope of its basic characterâwhich centers on the enjoyment of, and finding fulfillment in, the harmonious relation between the parts and whole of a sensible or imaginatively intended structure. Because such fulfillment does not logically presuppose any beliefs that the significance of the particular part/whole relation is of practical significance, it has the character of disinterestedness.13 Indeed, this is of special cognitive importance in that it involves judgments whose relation to their object is relatively free, rather than constrained by the discursive rigidity of the means/ends logic of everyday life.
It is often supposed that disinterestedness is one of the features that makes the aesthetic into no more than a culturally specific western âluxuryâ experience. How, for example, can a wild tribal dance intended to invoke victory in battle be counted as disinterested? But this question puts the cart before the horse. The more interesting question is that of why anyone in the first place should imagine that dancing or, indeed, any other mode of artistic mimicry should have the power to influence reality external to the image.
Such a belief presupposes that mimicry and image-making have already been found fascinating in their own right. It allows creator and audience to engage with subject-matter that has been adapted to expression in a medium by human artifice. The subject-matter appears to be controlled, and it is this embodiment that is fascinating.
Of course, one might retort that such an observation shows that the fascination is not aesthetic but just a sense of practical power over what is represented. But again one must press the question of why this should involve belief that real control is at issue when the image or mimicry manifestly has arisen through human artifice alone.
This question is answered by an intrinsic aesthetic satisfaction arising from the creation of, or experience of, a whole of meaning embodied in the parts of an artifact (or, in the case of dance, a quasi-artifact). This satisfaction may be psychologically overwhelmed by uses to which the work is put subsequently, but it remains embedded as its logical core.
These putative objections to the scope of the aesthetic have been considered for a specific reason. The deep-seatedness of the aesthetic in self-consciousness has scarcely been realized by most philosophers and cultural theorists. This is profoundly unfortunate, as there is a case for arguing that our very sense of whom and what we are, and our place in the universe, has a quite specific aesthetic character.
It constellates around the need for life-narrative in the sense of a âreal-lifeâ story (albeit with fictional elements) where what one does, and the things that happen to one, are made sense of, and enjoyed, as factors contributing to, and emerging from, a continually changing meaningful whole of experience.
Of course, it might be argued that the notion of narrative does not have to be invoked here. Surely, the unity of experience can be sufficiently explained by reference to our capacity to recall, and to anticipate the future, as mere dispositions, i.e., things we can do as, and when, circumstances demand. Through such recall or anticipation we identify the continuity of our experience as a self-conscious Being. This sense of continuity is sufficient for grounding the unity of experience.
But again, this just defers the evil day. The factual continuity of experience is not created just by our recall of the past or anticipation of the future. Indeed, if such capacities are not to be overwhelmed by the excess of facts and details concerning oneâs lifeânot to mention the huge complexities introduced by our sense of the future and counterfactual possibilityâthey must access memory or imagination in a form that is already amenable to recall or antici...
