On Why We Need Art - The Aesthetics of Self-Becoming (original) (raw)

This discussion is the basis of Chapter 1 of my book The Aesthetics of Self-Becoming: How Art Forms Empower, Routledge, 2019. The book develops all the ideas presented below, in much greater detail. If aesthetics is to re-establish its philosophical importance a change is needed. Instead of engaging with art mainly through the crude notion of expressive qualities, or making it speak through the voice of ‘authorities’, we need a Copernican turn. This means a re-orientation of aesthetics towards i) those experiential needs which give rise to art, ii) the way they are articulated through artistic creation, and iii) a clarification of the unique effects consequent upon this creation. In the present discussion I offer an approach to all these issues. My starting point is the origin of art. This question is usually approached from an ontogenetic or phylogenetic viewpoint. However, my approach is different – centring on why human beings need to create art in the first place. This has ontogenetic and phylogenetic implications, but as expressions of a greater experiential whole - where the need for art can be seen to emerge from factors conceptually basic to self-consciousness as such. Part One, accordingly, outlines the horizonal basis of our experience of time and space, and then four key cognitive competences which are necessary to this experience. Emphasis is given to the importance of the aesthetic in its narrative form, as a further necessary feature emergent from these competences. Part Two outlines how literature, music, and pictorial art engage with this narrative feature in unique ways on the basis of their distinctive individual ontologies. They transform the aesthetic narrative of experience by embodying it in a more enduring and lucid form than can be attained at the purely experiential level. In this way, art embodies self-becoming, i.e. the developing of one’s own individuality in relation to others, and symbolic compensation for things otherwise lost in the passage of time. (This is a much extended and revised version of a paper on The Need for Art, and the Aesthetics of Self-Consciousness done a s a keynote address at the European Society of Aesthetics annual conference, Dublin Institute of Technology, 11th June, 2015)