Bernd Herzogenrath - Practical Aesthetics

Practical Aesthetics

Thinking in the World

Series editors: Jill Bennett and Mary Zournazi

Thinking in the World combines the work of key thinkers to pioneer a new approach to the study of thought. Responding to a pressing need in both academic and wider public contexts to account for thinking as it is experienced in everyday settings, the Reader and Book Series explore our thinking relationship to everything from illness, to built environments, to ecologies, to other forms of life and technology.

Bringing together phenomenology with recent trends in cognitive science and the arts, this unique, field-defining collection illuminates thinking as a practical activity. It interweaves a series of distinctive chapters and commentaries into a compelling whole, constituting a new framework and set of resources for analyzing thinking in real-world situations. Rather than simply thinking about the world, the authors examine the ways in which we think in and with the world in its physical, material, and social dimensions. A philosophy of thinking in action, it provides a multifaceted but sustained account of neurobiological experience and its inexorable connection to the world.

Other titles in the series:

Thinking in the World , ed. Jill Bennett and Mary Zournazi

An Anthropological Guide to the Art and Philosophy of Mirror Gazing , Lambros Malfouris and Maria Danae Koukouti

Practical Aesthetics

Edited by Bernd Herzogenrath

Contents

I would like to express my gratitude to Bloomsbury (in particular Liza Thompson and Lucy Russell) for giving us and me the opportunity to publish this book, and to all those wonderful people that contributed to this volumeit has been a pleasure!

This book is part of the Thinking in the World seriesthanks to the series editors for including our volume.

Special thanks go out to Louisa Collenberg, for all the work youve put into this!

I dedicate this book to Janna and Claudia, and to the memory of Frank.

A small part of Bernd Herzogenraths introduction already appeared as a part of his introduction to Film as Philosophy . Ed. Bernd Herzogenrath. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2017, vii-xv, with kind permission.

Bernd Herzogenraths chapter already appeared as a part of his introduction to Sonic Thinking : A Media Philosophical Approach . Ed. Bernd Herzogenrath. New York/London: Bloomsbury, 2017, 1-22, with kind permission.

All images in Bill Morrisons chapter are printed courtesy of Bill Morrison.

IN SEARCH OF A SACRED SPACE by John Luther Adams

Taiga Press

Used by Permission

Map

Bernd Herzogenrath

When in 1750 Alexander Baumgarten published the first part of his Aesthetica , he basically reinvented philosophy by defining a new way of how to perceive its objects of inquiry: logical analysis could not cope with the complexity of individual objects. Thus, logic had to be complemented by a nonabstractive way of analysis Baumgarten dubbed aesthetics , a theory of sensate thinking. Sensible or aesthetic cognition, clear-obscure as it is, is of the utmost importance for making sense of the worldthe logic of sense has to be aligned with the logic of sensation.

It might be of interest here that Baumgartens Aesthetics (which he considers both a science and an art: a science of the lower cognitive faculties and an art of beautiful thinking; see 1 in Baumgarten 2007) opens with a chapter on heuristicswhich does not denote a clear-cut method (the term method in fact denotes a , meta-hodos, a way afterward , a retroactive abstraction, a recipe), but is more related to a (nonfinite) inventiveness, an improvisationand here Baumgarten relates to the - (improvisations) of the child that imitates beauty when it sees it, not merely apprehends it (like the adult; see 57). Thus, what is at stake is not so much the issue of method, but rather the question of arts specific potential for expressing sensible cognition, with aesthetics as an analogon rationis , both analogous to and different from rational logics. Aesthetics thus counts as a defense of the Sensual as the Nonrepresentational, and this is not only evident in the content of thinking, but also in new forms of presentation, in which figures of thought reveal themselves.