Volume 2018, Issue 3 -

Kant’s formal conditions for aesthetic judgment do not limit aesthetic reflection to certain aesthetic traditions and cultures. Moreover, these conditions open up the possibility of applying aesthetic reflection in the context of different approaches. From this perspective, Kant’s analytic of aesthetic judgment might furnish a useful basis for trans-cultural dialogues in the field of aesthetics and reflection on the arts. Yet the theory also has its limits, especially insofar as it neglects the somatic dimension of aesthetic experience. These two questions are the primary concerns of the paper.

The contribution examines the aesthetic aspect of cognition in Kant by exploring the central function of the power of the imagination ( Einbildungskraft ) in Kant’s critical epistemology, first featured in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787) and revisited in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790). First, the focus will be on the relationship between the power of the imagination and the two main sources of (theoretical) cognition in Kant, viz., sensibility and the understanding. Second, special attention will be devoted to the distinction between schema and symbol, as alternative products of the power of the imagination in the service of rendering discursive concepts intuitive – with schemata serving to make sensible the concepts of the understanding ( Verstand ) and symbols suited to provide intuitional counterparts to the concepts of reason ( Vernunft ).

This essay introduces ideas from Confucius, Xunzi, the Six Dynasties, and Kant about beauty, music, morality, and what we might today call “aesthetic education.” It asks how beauty and morality are related and how they ideally should be related to each other. We know that beauty and morality can drift apart, and we may wonder how aesthetic education might work best. Should the arts be a means for developing morality? Or should it be the other way around? These questions are still relevant today. But our world has changed, not only since Confucius, but also since Kant. We may ask what to make of their ideas in our present time. I argue that there are good reasons for keeping morality and aesthetics apart, somewhat in the spirit of Kant, and in opposition to the idea of “fusing” the two.

The sculptor Olafur Eliasson produces works together with his team that have two main goals: first, he intends to sensitize our daily perception of the world and our surroundings, and second, Eliasson’s works are not only works of art, but they also explore nature, the physical properties of light, of energy, of water, and other elements. With the famous project Little Suns, small plastic lamps with LED light bulbs and solar cells, he contributes to the amelioration of daily life for those who do not have access to electricity even today. In other works he focuses on elementary phenomena such as the movement of elements in a vortex of water or air, on the properties of light, of mirrored light, or the fascinating world of kaleidoscopes. Some of these works are very popular and often include visitors such as the Weather Project in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London created in 2003. This work is said to have provoked spontaneous meetings, celebrations, and even episodes of civil protest. The work turned the museum into a kind of agora, the public square in Ancient Greek cities that was at the heart of daily life, of politics, of democratic practices.

Plato’s analogy of the ladder in the Symposium involves an inquiry into the love of beauty that pertains to a spiritual phenomenology of love. It is reconsidered in this discussion from both an aesthetic and teleological perspectives, and thus construed as a process of philosophical learning and virtuous cultivation. In the final analysis, this paper argues that it is intended to direct the love of beauty along with wisdom as virtue towards the Platonic ideal of human fulfillment and true happiness for the good life qua its ultimate telos. On this account, both the value of knowledge and the cultivation of personality are emphasized for inter-connected reasons, and meanwhile a pragmatic stance is proposed on the kinds-of-life option in the light of the kinds-of-wisdom stratification.

The world we live in is shaped by technology and its development. This process is observed and debated in the humanities as well as in computer science and cognitive sciences. Narratives of human life being merged with and transcended by technology not only belong to science fiction but also to science: Theorists like Katherine Hayles or Mark B. N. Hansen speak of a technogenesis of consciousness. These accounts hold that our cognitive abilities are deeply influenced by technology and digital media. The digitalization of the lifeworld is a global phenomenon, which unfolds regardless of local cultures. It is art which seeks to explore the experiential aspects of technologically shaped life-worlds. In my contribution I will present examples of artworks which focus on the possibility of aesthetic experiences with new technologies and getting in touch with the so-called technological unconscious. I attempt to investigate the potential of art to unfold experiential aspects of human rapport with technology and thereby develop aisthetic practices for understanding the cultural and political dimensions of digitalized life-worlds.

Through an approach primarily inspired by the Aisthetik (Gernot Böhme) and the Neue Phänomenologie (Hermann Schmitz) I define the atmospheric perception as the first pathic impression and investigate the relationship between this kind of perception (possibly initially immersive, then reflective) and the expressive qualities of our lifeworld. Pathic aesthetics therefore ceases to be just a theory of works of art. It considers the perceiver as a being first of all emotionally and felt-bodily touched by atmospheric feelings widespread in her (lived) space but these atmospheric feelings are also affordances, ontologically rooted in things and quasi-things of her lifeworld. By exploring how she unintentionally exposes herself to what happens in this lifeworld, man turns out to be not a “subject of something” but rather a “subject to something”: a human being who is “sovereign” to the extent she is free from the claim of rational autonomy imposed by the western Modernity.

Classical Chinese philosophy, and Daoism in particular, has emphasized the importance of rhythm for performing actions well. Drawing on this insight, the paper argues that rhythm is an essential element of nourishing life. A focus on the relationship between rhythm, action, and life becomes necessary in societies that are experiencing a crisis of temporal relationships. Modern agents are pressured to adapt to accelerating speeds that are increasingly experienced as undermining the conditions necessary for human flourishing. A critical theory of temporal relationships is committed to (1) revealing and explaining the increase of rhythmic pathologies and to (2) recovering “eurhythms” that enable exemplary action and human flourishing.

In Heidegger, “thinking” and “poetry” are inseparable, and the interpretation of poetry is an important approach for him to express his philosophical thinking. His phenomenological approach is a path to return to the things themselves, i.e, to see the facticity and understand the meaning of existence in the lived experience of existential situations. Themes such as “anxiety”, “alien”, “soul and Earth”, “words” can reveal the existential situations in Chinese and German poems through a cross-cultural interpretation from Heidegger’s perspective.

Hume is perhaps the most skeptical of all the great philosophers; and so it might reasonably have been assumed that he would have doubted the existence of a standard of taste in an area of human activity, the arts, where very many people, not ordinarily considered of a skeptical turn of mind, have doubted the existence of any standard according to his 1757 essay Of the Standard of Taste .

For the later Heidegger, the poet is the messenger of Being, insofar as he speaks after the Saying (Sage) of Being. But only when the poet takes the risk of being mad, can he hear the message of Being and bring it out. As such, the poet does not need any human art of poetry. Heidegger calls this kind of bringing-out “techne” in its original sense – but not in the ordinary sense of human technique. This paper tries to discover how the poet in the state of madness without using any human art can still convey the message of Being. I try to answer this question at first with the help of two dialogues from Plato, i.e. Ion and Phaedrus . I then take two Chinese classical poets, Li Bai (李白) and Du Fu (杜甫), as examples to illustrate such interpretation of Heidegger’s concept of the poet.

This paper attempts to develop a comparative approach to the dream narratives of the Daoist philosopher Zhuang Zhou and the Austrian poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal. The analogous rhetorical function of the dream in their texts links the two authors from different cultures and traditions. As will be argued, in using dreams to stress a challenging and even deconstructive view of the so-called reality, both Zhuang and Hofmannsthal articulate their skepticism against substantial notions of human subjectivity and offer an imaginary life-world which aims to remind us of the contingency of our being-forms. In so doing, they also shape an aesthetic way to keep oneself open to the perception and experience of the unbiased Dao or Being . Thus, their poetic texts can be read in the context of rethinking the boundary between our life and world.

“Fadheit”, im Sinne des französischen Philosophen und Sinologen Françios Jullien, bedeutet nicht Langeweile, Geschmacklosigkeit oder Indifferentismus, sondern stellt einen grundlegenden Wert der chinesischen Kultur dar. Sie beruht auf Harmonie und enthält als das Ursprüngliche – wie das Wasser, “das später als gebräuchliche Referenz der Fadheit dienen wird” Françios Jullien, Über das Fade – eine Eloge zu Denken und Ästhetik in China. Berlin: Merve Verlag 1999, S. 65. – alle Geschmäcke als Möglichkeiten und verbindet sie untereinander. Von Jullien als das Lebensideal der Chinesen bzw. der chinesischen Intellektuellen angesehen, besagt “Fadheit” eine Lebenshaltung, die dem Gesetz des Neutralen folgt.

From Karl Marx to Martin Heidegger, the dialectical relationship between technology and art has become an ontological question of social reality. Marshall McLuhan’s theory of cool-hot media provides an analytical framework for the information age. “Cool-hot media” is McLuhan’s truly original concept. However, while McLuhan determined electronic media to embrace printing media which was regarded as a typical representative of hot media, he could not foresee that electronic media is properly speaking the latest representative of the split type of hot media. Through Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems which underlies formalization and Embodied Cognition Theory, this article argues that there exists an ontological difference between computers and human existence and explores the position of art from the contemporary cool media perspective. This contribution is not only intended to be a philosophical critique of the philosophy of technology of the media age, but also a repositioning of contemporary art and its function from the media perspective. The technological division and abstraction represented in hot media becomes the basic premise for a holistic approach to computer science and artificial intelligence. Their rich information context leads to multiple interpretations of meaning instead of a one-dimensional definition; the everyday actions of cold media have become a type of life art in a broad sense, and manifest their social function as an art of the information age, i.e. to balance the cognitive narrative of hot media and to ensure that its communication does not suppress the audience’s individual creativity, so that they can maintain their subjectivity by tracing the source of information. Art facilitates active audience participation and so allows participants to overcome a one dimensional way of thinking and promotes imagination and creativity in liberal arts education. Following the rules of art, cold media obtains its greatest significance as the guardian of the free subjectivity of all humans, which is alien to modern technology. Cold media and hot media balance each other to create a new way of producing and living that not only discovers but also safeguards the world.

The notion of techné in Husserl’s phenomenology is related to his treatment of the three layers of the “teaching of craft” and the two layers of the science of “life-world.” The superior layer of both is of philosophical significance. Aristotle’s statement in ethics and metaphysics: techné is man-made, but can transit to spontaneity, and then to natural becoming, which manifests physis as the ultimate aim of his philosophical system, enlightens us to notice the following aspects in Husserl’s phenomenology. 1. Pure or formal ethics is of a high-level téchne in the philosophical sense. 2. The concept of life-world leads to transcendental phenomenology. 3. What Ideas II implies – as a technique the method of phenomenology tends to let the pure I and spiritual I as matters appear themselves by the natural attitude – could conduct us to understand the artistic aspect of Husserl’s philosophical theory.

At present, the theoretical approaches of Baumgarten and Kant continue to constitute the framework for discussing the nature of aesthetic judgments about art, including the question of what such judgments are really articulating. In distinction to those two eighteenth-century theorists, today we would largely avoid an assumption that aesthetic judgments necessarily attribute beauty to the objects being judged; we would as a rule take a far more complex approach to the topic. But whatever we say about art, even today many theorists wish to ground aesthetic judgments in particularities of the aesthetic object, like Baumgarten, or in specific moments of the aesthetic experience, like Kant.

This article discusses the traditional approaches to creating images in China and Europe, which basically relate to two different understandings of truth and perception. On the basis of the concept mimesis, classical European paintings concentrate on a rigorous correspondence to the visually perceived reality. In contrast, literary paintings – one of the representational forms of traditional Chinese painting – take a different approach. In order to avoid a radical differentiation between image and phenomenon, it does not strive for a precise imitation of external forms. Given the influence of the concept of change , the primary task of Chinese painters is to reveal the vitality that permeates all existence and the dynamic interaction of opposing elements. This does not mean that imitation can be completely abandoned in the artistic creation. Instead, imitation is a fundamental step towards progress.

The relevance of Heidegger’s existentialist analysis of Dasein does not consist in its exhaustive understanding of man’s existential structure but in its suspension of cultural tradition by means of phenomenological reduction in order to show an existentialist aspect of that structure, namely being-toward-death. The Chinese cultural tradition, however, discloses another existentialist feature of man, namely perpetual thriving or shengshengbuxi . We intend to separate the existential experience from the exposition of that cultural tradition in order to make an existentialist analysis of perpetual thriving and thus to demonstrate a different existential horizon: here Dasein is no longer uncanny but is at home from the beginning; family is not only a basic form of social organization but represents an existential structure that passes from generation to generation; filial piety, the principal virtue in the family, reveals the continuity characteristic of life as well as the generative mechanism of ethics in the Chinese cultural tradition. Moreover, the analysis of the continuity of life in terms of perpetual thriving also shows the existentialist generative mechanism of politics, ethics, Bildung , attitude to life, and sense of history.