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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. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 springer.com 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

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In this book the editors brought together outstanding articles concerning intercultural aesthetics. The concept ‘Intercultural aesthetics’ creates a home space for an artistic cross-fertilization between cultures, and for heterogeneity, but it is also firmly linked with the intercultural turn wi
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