Abstract
In this paper, I suggest an aesthetic model that is consistent with anti-foundational scientific knowledge. How has an aesthetics without foundation to be configured? In contrast to the conventional subject/object model, with idealistic and subjective aesthetics, but also with object-oriented assumptions, I suggest that aesthetics has to be characterized as relational aesthetics in terms of process-oriented perception and that this leads to an Aesthetics Without Objects (AWO) approach. The relational nature of processes means that they do not happen inter-, that is, between ontologically delimited and stable entities, but rather they correspond between relations. I will try to show that AWO matches well with the onto-phenomenological-epistemic and relational models proposed by recent theories in different fields of science, especially in the relational interpretation of quantum physics. The field of aesthetics, then, does not indicate perceptual fixed contents—either subjective or objectual properties—rather it emerges from a correspondence occurring in an engaged and situated perceptual movement, an agencing that is prior to any sharp distinction between a perceiver and a perceived. I propose to call haptic this perceptual agencing. In the first section, I describe the reasons according to which the adoption of AWO seems more correct and advisable, both with respect to contemporary scientific models and to the current ecological changes on the planet. In the second section, I portray some characteristics of AWO. In the third section, I argue that AWO calls for haptic perception. In the fourth section, I briefly draw some meta-aesthetics consequences concerning, on the one side, socio-political issues of AWO and, on the other side, the possibility for a theory in an anti-foundational model. I conclude with a proposal: a process-oriented aesthetics approach has to be understood mainly as an art of thinking. This means rethinking and re-evaluating the idea of aesthetics as an artisan thought.
Highlights
In this paper, I suggest an aesthetic model that is consistent with anti-foundational scientific knowledge
Beyond its practical utility and its countless applications, beyond its undoubted necessity as an orientation and organization instrument for human life, scientific knowledge has a wider and even more decisive importance: it allows us to broaden imagination and to think about new ways of living. This is one of the reasons according to which philosophy, in its different articulations, should always at least cast a glance on scientific knowledge
The relational and process-oriented view of aesthetics we aim to suggest takes the radical intertwining of ontology, epistemology and ethics seriously and, at the same time, tries to develop the consequences of the previous observations: cooperating is not implementing interaction policies but ongoing correspondences in a whole and more-than-human-world
Summary
Beyond its practical utility and its countless applications, beyond its undoubted necessity as an orientation and organization instrument for human life, scientific knowledge has a wider and even more decisive importance: it allows us to broaden imagination and to think about new ways of living. The most convincing contemporary discoveries of science speak to us of symbiogenesis, of holobiont, of cooperation, of a more-than-human world, of ontogenetic turn, of extended mind overcoming the intracranial niche, of the dismissal of the rigid dichotomy subject/object If all these different theories and disciplines, on the one hand, emphasize the cooperative and relational aspects of reality, on the other, and consistently, they profess an anti-anthropocentric view. The relational and process-oriented view of aesthetics we aim to suggest takes the radical intertwining of ontology, epistemology and ethics seriously and, at the same time, tries to develop the consequences of the previous observations: cooperating is not implementing interaction policies but ongoing correspondences in a whole and more-than-human-world.
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