![]() Whereas the body with its needs and drives worked according to so-called 'natural' laws, the mind, including the putatively higher senses of sight and hearing, belonged to the realm of freedom and imagination. Working within the rationalistic, anthropological, mind-body hierarchy of his time, the body belonged to the inferior realm, pertaining to the lower needs and appetites, clearly distinguished from the higher, mental faculties. ![]() For him, as it was to be for Kant, sense perception was first and foremost associated with mental operations. This is because he considered the higher senses of sight and hearing as not primarily belonging to the body but belonging to the mind. However, as Richard Schusterman correctly points out, despite his emphasis on sense-perception Baumgarten did not in fact take the body seriously. Because of these characteristics, poetry and, by extension, all art is able to provide us with a form of condensed knowledge that captures our concrete and lived experience in ways that escape discursive prose. ![]() On his account, poetry has both an intensive clarity, to the extent that it takes concrete objects or images as its focus and an extensive clarity, in so far as it is able to evoke a wide range of allusions and associations. Poetry, as Baumgarten argued, with a nod to Descartes, was able to give us clear and 'con-fused' knowledge, the latter not to be taken in the sense of 'muddled' or 'fuzzy,' but as 'fused,' condensed or converging. ![]() Indeed, the father of aesthetics was eager to show that such 'cognition of the senses' was not, as Spinoza and Leibniz believed, subordinate to logical knowledge, but possessed an autonomy and perfection of its own. This is somewhat surprising, since aesthetics as a discipline was originally conceived by its founder, Alexander Baumgarten (1714-1762), as a science of sense perception, to be considered as a source of knowing, a scientia cognitionis sensitivae (a science of knowledge by means of the senses). ![]() Introduction: The Body as Site of the SensesĪlthough the body and its 'objects': saliva, urine, hair, nails, and so forth, now have a prominent place in contemporary art and art theory, they are still largely ignored in philosophical aesthetics. This paper argues that while some biologically based theories have drawn legitimate attention to the potential role of art in human evolution, their reductive tendencies need to be corrected and complemented by both a phenomenological and a 'symbolic' approach, which situates art in a web of culturally mediated affective encounters with the world in the context of a broader horizon that lends it its meaning.Īrt, embodiment, biology, phenomenology, Baumgarten, Dissanayake, Langer, Merleau-Ponty 1. Tracing some of the current positions in such diverse thinkers as Dissanayake, Langer, and Merleau-Ponty, this paper will examine their shared interest in art as a pre-reflective, non-discursive mode of knowing, symbolizing, and being-in-the-world. The shared emphasis on the role of the body re-connects these contemporary theories of art to aesthetics' pre-Kantian origin as a science of sense-perception ( aesthesis) and feeling. Increasing awareness of the crucial and complex role of the body in making and experiencing art has led to a diverse range of biological and phenomenological philosophies of art. ![]()
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