This book explores the intersection of ethics and aesthetics. The idea that there is an intersection between ethics and aesthetics has a long-standing history in the West although not much explored. The Greeks posited a typology of philosophical explorations: epistemology involving questions of knowledge, ontology involving questions of existence, and axiology involving two questions rather than one. These two questions are: âWhat is âthe beautifulâ?â and âWhat is âthe goodâ?â The Greeks understood that there was a connection between beauty and goodness but they did not do much with this insight. At the most Aristotle posited that the good life would lead to a beautiful life. Subsequently, in the history of philosophy, this intersection was not explored, except to some degree in the twentieth century by Dewey (who leveraged the processes of imagination as part of the process of pragmatic deliberationâsee Steven Fesmire 2003).
In Western culture we tend to have a narrow view of aesthetics. It is seen, primarily, if not entirely, as synonymous with âthe arts.â I call this a mistake as I will show, in parallel terms to Dewey and drawing upon the work of Mark Johnson (1994), that while the arts are a reasonable venue for exploring aesthetics, they are not the sole site of aesthetic life. Aesthetic life, a life steeped in bodily, emotional, imaginative, intuitive knowing/presence in the world, permeates our everyday experiences. As with hermeneutics, the act of interpreting experiences, which also goes unseen (until, as Paul Ricoeur puts it, we do not understand and then we notice that we are working to understand, we are acting hermeneutically), so, too, with aesthetics: We spend much of our lives making aesthetic decisions or making decisions grounded in an aesthetic response to our circumstances (music, clothing, film, TV, hiking, and more). We simply do not know we are doing that. As aesthetics and the arts have been relegated to a special group of people practicing them, the rest of us do not see that we are, in fact, living aesthetically rather continuously. That is an idea that will ground this book.
Another mistake exists within the Western tradition. Beginning at least with Plato, we dismiss the arts as a location of wisdom and knowledge, much less a location for goodness. The argument goes: The arts as a venue for knowing wisdom are too easily manipulated for persuading people of what is not good. In appealing to the emotions and the body, the arts block proper knowing which is lodged in the mind and the capacity for reason. This is Platoâs prejudice against the arts a rejection which has influenced the development of philosophy even until today. Thus Levinas, whose work will ground the present investigation, agreed with Plato and the West as he, too, suspected of being misleading. (A task of this work is to demonstrate how Levinas, despite his protestations, actually makes room for aesthetics in his thinking.) In rejecting the arts, Levinas also conflates âthe artsâ and âaestheticsâ not recognizing that a person may know aesthetically without being involved in the arts. The arts may be a location for aesthetic exploration but, as already asserted, they are not the sole location for an aesthetic life. (Indeed, this was a fundamental notion of Dewey in Art as Experience.) Ironically, therefore, Levinas does not recognize that he, in fact, leverages aesthetics in his ethics. This contention will be made clear of an exposition of Levinasâs ethics.
The Origin of This Book
I have been involved with the arts my whole life. More specifically, however, I have been involved with dance, as both dancer and choreographer, for the whole of my adult life. Even when I left the arts behind, it was never for long. In providing the following auto-biographical narrative I provide the basis for this project of bringing together aesthetics and ethics. For this I have David Purpel to thank. This will become clear during this narrative.
As with many of my generation I was involved with the anti-Vietnam war movement and was a member of SDS and the Socialist Workers Labor party. I had been raised in a politically leftist home and was steeped in the desire for healing the world of its injustices. At the same time I had determined that my own future would be in the arts, specifically in being a poet. I did not contemplate the intersection of my political and poet life and, in fact, kept them well apart. I never wrote political poetry and I never explored poetry during my political activities.
And then in the spring of my junior year in college I discovered dance. I went to take a dance class at the request of a friend (who did not want to be the only male there, going, as he was, at the request of his wife). I agreed (I did not know why). I went. My life changed instantaneously. Within the first ten minutes of that class I knew something enormous had happened to and for me, something I needed to explore. The next year Margery Turner, the head of the dance program at Douglass College (the all-womenâs sister college to my school, the all-male Rutgers College) persuaded me to attend a lecture-demonstration/concert/master classes of the Nikolais Dance Theater in Trenton, NJ. I did. Again, my life felt itself shifting under me. Margery then persuaded me to take Saturday classes at the Nikolais School in NYC the spring of my senior year. And, again, my life changed. I realized I wanted to dance and that I did not want to attend graduate school in English in order to become an academic who wrote poetry. And, so, that fall after graduation I began my life as a dancer, full-time.
At the same time as I moved into this new life, I entirely ignored my political activities and abandoned them. I could not conceive of how they could intersect and chose dance as my life focus. This separation persisted for many years until 1979. In that year the Communist Workers Party (CWP) of Durham, NC (I was teaching dance at Duke University at this time) held a âDeath to the Klanâ rally in Greensboro, NC. They proclaimed they would march unarmed. They invited the Klan to show up. The Klan did. Both sides were armed. Five CWP marchers were killed. In the subsequent trying of the Klan members responsible for the deaths, all accused were acquitted. The state of North Carolina erupted in protests against the verdicts. Duke University held a protest gathering. At the time I was dancing in my dance studio. My wife came by to invite me to go with her to the protest. I said I could not, that I was busy dancing. She said âSuit yourselfâ and off she went. I danced, briefly, and then thought I needed to attend this protest. I changed into my street clothing, went to West Campus and, with her, joined the protest. That was the beginning of my return to politics but not to my developing an understanding of the intersection of my dance and political selves.
Fast forward to 1986. I had just begun my doctoral studies at University of North Carolina at Greensboro. David Purpel, at the time the chair of the Curriculum Studies and Cultural Studies department in which I was to get my doctorate, asked to meet with me as he did with all incoming doctoral students. During our meeting he said the following:
Donald, I have a question for you I would like you to answer at the end of your time here. This is it: given the terrible state of the world, the huge number of people living in poverty, the ever-increasing degradation of the environment, the ever-present possibility of nuclear holocaust, donât you feel just a little foolish prancing around in a room in front of a mirror with very little clothing on? At the end of your time here I want you to tell me how dance can address this situation because if itâs not part of the solution then it is part of the problem. You know, I always wanted to learn to play the clarinet but there just wasnât time.
This shook me to my core. He was demanding I figure out what I now believe to be the intersection of aesthetics and ethics and, by extension, the meaning for education. How was I to do this? I could not do it at the end of my time with him (I eventually wrote my dissertation under his guidance). I could not do it ten years after that. But now, I think, I have an answer to him and it is in this book. This book is my attempt to show David how the arts and aesthetics, more particularly, can address a situation that has not changed since David posed that question (indeed, even Max Horkheimer voiced precisely these concerns more than 80 years ago). I want to show how living aesthetically with ethics is a route to a world of freedom and justice. It is not the end for that world but a way of living in it.
The Basic Dimension of this Work
This book, as I write in Chap. 2, is a story of relationality. At the end of this book I invoke the notion of âhumilityâ in the face of an ethics that begins in what we do not know and are not and have not yet. These are the two basic dimensions to this work as I couple humility with relationality in aesthetics and ethics. It is to the latter that I will speak in this introduction, setting out why ârelationalityâ is central to aesthetics offering an initial connection to ethics which is also a story of relationality. I will leave humility as the background trope for the whole of the work.
Relationality in Aesthetics and Ethics
What has relationality have to do with aesthetics? Many years ago, while attending a summer dance concert sponsored by the American Dance Festival I noticed that I was experiencing not the isolated movements of the dancers on stage but, rather, the relationships between dancersâ motions and the way they occupied the dance space in relationship to each other. That is, aesthetically, the choreographerâs task was to organize the relationships (motionally, spatially, temporally, and dynamically) between the dancers in the dance space. The dance was âaboutâ these relationships. It might be âaboutâ some specific topic but that âtopicâ was only legible as the dancers were in particular relationships to each other. Years earlier, at a Picasso exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, I had the opportunity to study the ways in which Picasso developed the relationships between the three prostitutes in his iconic Les Demoiselles dâAvignon by examining the displayed studies that led to the final canvas. In both cases I realized the foundational work of thinking in relationship as an artist making art.
When I encountered Levinas I found a parallel image: for Levinas ethics arises between two people who are in a particular relationship to each other. He is very clear about this. Ethics is not a group phenomenon. Politics is a group phenomenon, involving sets of people bound together through common concerns expressed through language that makes sense of the world. As I will show, this is antithetical to a Levinasian view of ethics. Politics is important but it is distinct from ethics.
When I encountered this distinction I instinctually gravitated to it. I had always felt, in my political days, an alienation between myself and others, even those others with whom I agreed and protested. A frozen identity arose around each of us that was, admittedly, necessary to take political action. I had to make common cause with individuals with whom I might not be comfortable for any number of reasons but with whom I needed to be in solidarity in order to accomplish our ends. As I have already asserted, this is important for political action to be successful. And political action is important.
Ethics, however, feels different to me and always has. James Macdonald, the eminent curriculum theorist whose work I encountered well before I found Levinas, declared that there were only two questions worth asking in education: âWhat is the meaning of human existence?â and âHow shall we live together?â This second question is the ethics question. It asks how we are to be in relation to each other. When I found Levinas I felt I had, at last, found a way of addressing âHow shall we live togetherâ that felt human to me rather than the calculations of utilitarianism/consequentialism or what I take to be the hyper-rationalism of Kantian deontology (both to be discussed briefly in Chap. 2) or, frankly, any of the other approaches to ethics discussed in Chap. 2 of this book. I felt I knew this ethics and it released me from being âtoo much in my head.â
âToo much in my head.â With this I close this introduction. When I was learning to choreograph my mentors, especially my most important mentor, Phyllis Lamhut, always told me that I was living too much in my head and that the choreography was not flowing from a bodily knowing, from an aesthetic knowing. One day I presented the beginnings of a new solo to Phyllis. I had my back to her, with no top on so that the muscles of my back were visible. I began in a sitting position. The dance began with simply motions of my back. The whole of the dance, even once I stood and turned around, remained located in âthinking in my back.â I built the dance focused on that and that alone. There was something else going on in that dance for me (something to do with the moon and something feral). But that âsomething elseâ was not how I built the dance. I built the dance through sensing. When I was done Phyllis said âAt last! Iâve been waiting for that. Thatâs what Iâm talking about.â And I began the journey of âthinkingâ in my body, in my senses and not in my intellectual life. There is nothing wrong with the intellectual life. Indeed, you hold in your hands the product of intellectual work. But it is also the product of this bodily/sensed work.
That is where the intersection of aesthetics and ethics begins: in a preintellectual, prerational state that is afforded through a presence to the world in my body, my emotions, and my imagination. This is the work of the artist but it is also the work of each of us that we perform every day. As it turns out, it can also be the work of the ethicist.
Organization of this Book
This book is divided into four chapters that are integral to each other.
Chapter 2
In this chapter I present summations of normative ethical systems (consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics, naturalism, and feminism) to set the ground for understanding how Levinas is different. I then describe Levinasâs ethics in detail, beginning with discussing his form of ethical motivation as the Metaphysical Desire for connection to another and the increase of the good. This is followed by describing Levinasâs phenomenology of self in which a person, in order to craft a self, sees the world as a resource for her/his making of a self, fitting everything into her/his terms, an act of totalizing the world. A person discovers that the world does not fully cooperate with this project and, in escaping the total control of the person, an other arises for the person. This other becomes understood as radically Other (radical alterity) and in this moment responsibility for an Other arises and ethics emerges. The Other is seen in her/his infinity, and Levinas locates this relationship within the image of proximity to a neighbor and an encounter with the face of the other. In presenting Levinasâs account of ethics I do so through discussing a set of dualisms he employs to structure his phenomenology, dualisms not meant to present an essential relationship but a fluid, ever-changing relationship. These dualisms include self/other, totality/infinity, saying/said, expression/action, and sensible/symbol or sign.
Chapter 3
In this chapter I present a set of philosophers who engage with the idea of moral imagination, setting out their arguments along with my Levinasian response to them. These philosophers are John Dewey (through Steven Fesmire 2003), John Paul Lederbach (2010), and Mark Johnson (1994). Mark Johnsonâs work is used...