Intercultural Aesthetics: A Worldview Perspective

215 Pages·2009·11.25 MB·English

by  Antoon Van den Braembussche

Intercultural Aesthetics
EINSTEIN MEETS MARGRITTE: An Interdisciplinary Reflection on Science,
Nature, Art, Human Action and Society
Series Editor
Diederik Aerts, Leo Apostel Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies,
Brussels Free University, Belgium
VOLUME 9
For other titles published in this series, go to
www.springer.com/series/5914
Intercultural Aesthetics
A Worldview Perspective
Edited by
Antoon Van den Braembussche
Heinz Kimmerle
Nicole Note
Editors
Antoon Van den Braembussche Heinz Kimmerle
Brussels Free University Foundation for Intercultural Philosophy
Brussels, Belgium Erasmus University Rotterdam
The Netherlands
Nicole Note
Leo Apostel Centre for Interdisciplinary
Studies
Brussels Free University
Brussels, Belgium
ISBN 978-1-4020-4507-3 e-ISBN 978-1-4020-5780-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008935475
© 2009 Springer Science + Business Media B.V.
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Table of Contents
1. Intercultural Aesthetics: An Introduction 1
Antoon Van den Braembussche, Heinz Kimmerle
and Nicole Note
2. An Intercultural Approach to a World Aesthetics 11
Grazia Marchianò
3. Living – in between – Cultures: Downscaling Intercultural
Aesthetics to Daily Life 19
Henk Oosterling
4. Living (with) Art: The African Aesthetic Worldview
as an Inspiration for the Western Philosophy of Art 43
Heinz Kimmerle
5. The Origins of Landscape Painting: An Intercultural
Perspective 55
Heinz Paetzold
6. Nishida, Aesthetics, and the Limits of Cultural Synthesis 69
Robert Wilkinson
7. Identity and Hybridity – Chinese Culture and Aesthetics
in the Age of Globalization 87
Karl-Heinz Pohl
8. The Rasa Theory: A Challenge for Intercultural Aesthetics 105
Rosa Fernández Gómez
9. Presenting the Unpresentable. On Trauma and Visual Art 119
Antoon Van den Braembussche
v
vi Contents
10. Visual Archives and the Holocaust: Christian Boltanski,
Ydessa Hendeles and Peter Forgacs 137
Ernst van Alphen
11. A Distant Laughter: The Poetics of Dislocation 157
Jean Fisher
12. Where You End and I Begin – The Multiple Ethics
of Contemporary Art Practice 177
Pam Johnston
13. The Ethics of the Wound 191
Everlyn Nicodemus
Name Index 205
Subject Index 211
Intercultural Aesthetics: An Introduction
Antoon Van den Braembussche, Heinz Kimmerle and Nicole Note
This volume is part of a new series called Einstein Meets Magritte Again, edited by
the Center Leo Apostel of the Free University of Brussels.1 A very specific incen-
tive to include this volume in a series dedicated mainly to the interdisciplinary
study of worldviews was our conviction that a field such as intercultural aesthetics
(formerly called comparative aesthetics) is indispensable to enrich the nature and
scope of current concepts of worldview. According to Leo Apostel, one of
Belgium’s most prolific philosophers in the twentieth century, ‘A worldview is a
coherent set of bodies of knowledge concerning all aspects of the world. This
coherent set allows people to construct a global image of the world and to under-
stand as many elements of their experiences as possible. A worldview can in fact
be perceived of as a map that people use to orient and explain, and from which they
evaluate and act, and put forward prognoses and visions of the future’.2 This original
definition is extremely valuable, but still largely privileges the role of knowledge
and cognitive mapping.3 If we consider, however, that worldviews in general also
reflect the pre-conscious and pre-conceptual experience of the world, and that such
an insight is more prevalent in many non-Western cultures, intercultural aesthetics
embodies an important tool to refine and expand our notion of worldview.
Intercultural aesthetics also implies transcending the limits of current Western
aesthetics, dominated as it is by Western categories of thought. In the last few
decades, the main body of aesthetical thinking in the West has been fairly well
established. Time and again, imitation theory, expression theory, formalism, theories
about aesthetical experience, the interrelation between art and society, phenomeno-
logical and semiotic theories have been consolidated as standard items on the
agenda of aesthetics.3 This has only recently been changed, and only to a certain
extent, thanks to French thinkers such as Lyotard or Derrida. However, even this
recent renewal is quite dependent on the older theories, as the most significant
changes concern reinterpretations and deconstructions of the existing body of
knowledge. So Western aesthetics, as it was invented and emancipated itself as a
distinct discipline in the nineteenth century, became increasingly isolated from
important intercultural developments within the international art world and even, to
some extent, within philosophy itself.
So, firstly, current aesthetics has become somewhat outdated and detached from
significant developments within the international art world itself. One can hardly
A. Van den Braembussche et al. (eds.) Intercultural Aesthetics: A Worldview Perspective 1
© Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009
2 A. Van den Braembussche et al.
ignore the increasing worldwide cross-fertilisation and interpenetration of different
cultures, which is mostly referred to by using the umbrella term of ‘diaspora and art’.4
The traditional leitmotiv of cultures that are profoundly embedded in nationalism
is increasingly being challenged by new modes of post-national or even cosmopolitan
citizenship. This globalising tendency towards differentiation and heterogeneity
seems to be driven by new notions, experiences and expressions of cultural identity.
In this sense, contemporary art could be considered worldwide as a laboratory for
building and exploring new hybrid worldviews. In this situation, one is not only
confronted with multiple identities, with new aesthetic possibilities, strategies and
in-betweens, but also with problems of estrangement and dislocation, with limits of
representation and an ethics of the wound that challenges the translatability of the
Other. Therefore, this book was conceived as an incentive to develop a truly inter-
cultural aesthetics, which looks at art and the aesthetic experience in a cross-cul-
tural setting, making room not only for new conceptual articulations but also for a
new awareness of the pre-conscious and pre-conceptual ways of world making.
Current aesthetics is also, as we already briefly suggested, estranged from recent
developments within philosophy itself. Indeed, the prospect of intercultural aesthetics
is also intimately linked with the intercultural turn in Western as well as in non-
Western philosophy. In our view, the whole enterprise of intercultural aesthetics
remains indebted to both the Indian notion of rasa and Kant’s notion of sensus
communis. In both theories, aesthetic judgments are not only seen as purely subjec-
tive, but also as universal. Therefore, the idea of the impersonality or transpersonality
(sadharanikarana) presupposed in aesthetic experience is a real leitmotiv in Indian
theory of rasa. It is this transpersonal nature of aesthetic experience that explains
why aesthetic experience presupposes a shared experience. Alternatively, as Eliot
Deutsch affirms, ‘this sharing is achieved in art only when there is an intense
impersonality which, paradoxically because of its intensity, is at the same time
highly individual. This is the case for aesthetic experience because aesthetic interest,
in contrast to mere practical interest, is not given to the individual qua individual,
but to the individual as it embodies, becomes, represents, expresses – whatever you
will – a universal, inter-personal – and thereby – transcendent quality’.5 Important
differences notwithstanding, this Indian viewpoint reminds us of Kant’s transcen-
dental claim that aesthetic judgments are not a question of personal preferences, but
implicitly call on others to share them. This presupposition about the subjective
universality of all aesthetic judgments finally led to the transcendental postulation
of a sensus communis, which guaranteed the universal communicability of aesthetic
judgments. Both rasa and sensus communis refer to a consensus in the literal meaning
of the word: a shared feeling, a consent, an agreement or Einstimmung, whether it
is postulated as a transcendental presupposition (Kant) or as a transcendent realisation
of unity (Abhinavagupta). Both point to a kind of universal, cross-cultural measure
of understanding, a kind of pre-conceptual common ground. However, genuinely
intercultural reflection should not take any universal ground for granted. In view of
the conditions of contemporary thought, we can no longer maintain Kant’s claim
that all others should share our aesthetic judgments. We have to find out the real or
concrete extent of the claim to generality. We have to find out where we come upon
Intercultural Aesthetics: An Introduction 3
the limits of cultural synthesis. We must continue to be sensitive to the particularities
of aesthetic experiences within different cultures. Even then, a certain common
background can help to determine which groups in the same culture or in different
cultures are characterised by a relatively high or low commonality of aesthetic
judgments, respectively. Intercultural aesthetic research could even come to the
conclusion that there is sometimes a higher degree of common aesthetic judgements
between certain social groups in different cultures than between different social groups
in the same culture. There are still a large number of strategies to be explored.
Anyhow, one can hardly deny that the older tradition of comparative aesthetics,
which used to be rather marginal to mainstream Western aesthetics but showing an
internal development of its own,6 has in the last decade become an extremely
dynamic research field. Since a decade or so, the number of international confer-
ences and books in this field has not only increased rapidly, but also introduced new
perspectives. At the same time, new names have been given to the field, with the
adjectives multicultural, transcultural and intercultural being widely used. An
example of this ongoing renewal is, for instance, the intercontinental forum held at
the University of Bologna in 2000, on Frontiers of Transculturality in Contemporary
Aesthetics. This forum highlighted transcultural issues either in terms of aesthetic
theories in East and West or in terms of hermeneutics and art criticism.7 This led to
splendid syntheses of older and newer developments. Another, earlier, example is
the international conference on Sensus Communis in Multi- and Intercultural
Perspective. On the Possibility of Common Judgments in Arts and Politics, held at
the Erasmus University in Rotterdam in November 1997, and organised by the
Rotterdam research group on intercultural philosophy. In this conference, for
instance, Hannah Arendt’s broadening interpretation of Kant’s theory of aesthetic
judgments in his Third Critique was elaborated and clearly related to politics. This
gave rise to a new field of research, opening up critical perspectives in which politi-
cal and social dimensions of aesthetic judgments are taken into account.8
This volume on intercultural aesthetics is divided into two main parts. In Part 1,
Towards an Intercultural Aesthetics, authors either reflect on the history and foun-
dation of an intercultural aesthetics and/or focus on the intertwinement and differ-
ence between specific worldviews and specific aesthetical points of view or
traditions (Marchiano, Oosterling, Kimmerle, Paetzold, Wilkinson, Pohl and
Fernandez). More particularly, authors look at the relevance of these specific tradi-
tions to intercultural aesthetics in general.
In the first contribution, ‘An Intercultural Approach to a World Aesthetics’,
Grazia Marchiano (University of Siena-Arezzo) discusses the intercultural approach
to aesthetics in the historical context of the philosophical encounters between the
Eastern and Western worlds. She underlines the immense but still underestimated
value of Indian aesthetic theories, the rasavada, which are much older than the
European endeavours in this field. They provide deep insights into the aesthetic
experience and its embeddedness in a psychology, which, unlike traditional
Western ways of thought, does not make a distinction between intellectual and
sensory faculties as high and low functions, but distinguishes gross and subtle levels
of perception, cognition and insight. Rather than brain-centeredness, it emphasises
4 A. Van den Braembussche et al.
a heart-centred picture of inner life. If aesthetics based on this kind of psychology
is taken into account, Eastern and Western philosophies are brought together at a
turning point of their histories. After universalist and comparative encounters, the
hermeneutic attitude makes an intercultural approach possible, which is in tune
with Dante’s adagium of ‘intelligence out of love’.
In ‘Living – in between – Cultures. Downscaling Intercultural Aesthetics to
Daily Life’, Henk Oosterling (Erasmus University of Rotterdam) relates his own
conception of radical mediocrity to Japanese aesthetics and French philosophies of
difference. All this throws a specific light on Heidegger’s conversation with his
Japanese visitors, among whom is Earl Kuki. The aestheticisation of life becomes
a common issue in Western and in Japanese thought. On the basis of a detailed
analysis of Japanese aesthetic categories, he argues that they are not, as such, trans-
latable into Western languages. Nevertheless, Oosterling tries to show the precise
ways in which French philosophers of difference have been inspired by the Japanese
way of thought. This leads to the conclusion: ‘In Japanese aesthetics this turning
inside out reveals the suchness of things in emptiness, in Western aesthetics of
existence it exposes the emptiness in radical mediocrity’. However, he admits that
‘it is a long way from Shinto purification rituals and Japanese Zen ethics to the
interactive imperative of current media and information society’.
A third contribution to Part 1 is focused more specifically on African aesthetics.
In his contribution, ‘Living (With) Art. The African Aesthetic Worldview as an
Inspiration for the Western Philosophy of Art’, Heinz Kimmerle (Prof. em. of
Erasmus University of Rotterdam and Director of the Foundation for Intercultural
Philosophy and Art) argues that in traditional African communities art is not a sepa-
rate domain of life but permeates all spheres of communal and personal life. In the
cosmos as a whole, in nature on earth and in the human world, life is full of certain
rhythms, of a specific sound. By dancing and by shaping their ways of life, espe-
cially by actions that are ethically relevant, humans answer to the cosmic sound and
rhythm; they participate in the harmony of the universe and they share the respon-
sibility to maintain it. In the Western tradition, Kimmerle finds comparable ideas in
the aesthetics of early Romanticism, as it was worked out by young Schleiermacher,
for example, who summoned everybody to make his life into a piece of art. In more
recent debates, Marcuse, Beuys and, on a cosmopolitan level, Appiah have worked
in this direction of not only living with art, but also living art.
In the fourth contribution to this Part, ‘The Origins of Landscape Painting: An
Intercultural Perspective’, Heinz Paetzold (University of Hamburg and current
president of the International Association of Aesthetics) compares European-
Western and Chinese landscape painting both historically and systematically.
Chinese landscape painting is about 1,000 years older than the European landscape.
Different cultural and philosophical embeddings of this kind of art in the West and
in China have thus to be taken into account. Western landscape painting expresses
a dualistic way of thought. On the one hand, nature is used for technical purposes,
and on the other, it is seen as a source of aesthetic experience. In Chinese cultural
history, however, humans remain part of nature. This unity is expressed in their
landscape painting. Paetzold enlightens these differences by giving many examples