Confirmations of ‘life’ in a Phenomenology of Poetic Images

Abstract

Throughout the Platonic, rationalist, and empiricist traditions in philosophy, art and poetry have been relegated to a position either excluded from, or subordinate to, the highest of human aspirations. Until recently (and perhaps even now), in the ‘‘ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry’’ to which Plato referred in the Republic, philosophy has predominated, in its attempt to free thought from rhetoric and from the unreflective influence of the senses. The inheritance of the Platonic view – despite its complexities, and the oft-pointed out literary quality of Plato’s own writings – has survived in some dominant strains of contemporary philosophy, where aesthetics is a secondary operation of epistemology, metaphysics, or semiotics, or where it is as ripe for deconstruction as any other set of cultural signs. One scholar notes that despite the ubiquity of efforts at defining aesthetic criteria, ‘‘aesthetics today is at a loss for words . . . a loss of understanding and a dearth of strategies for understanding artistic practice. . . . Aesthetics has lost its sense of how to read a text, how to interpret a painting, how to experience a poem.’’1 From one perspective, Anglo-American aesthetics has suffered most from the absence of a fundamental theory of aesthetic practice and experience, despite the carefulness of its arguments about criteria for beauty, its debates, particularly in the light of contemporary art, for ontological criteria for the art-object, or its understanding of art institutions and their role in our appreciation of art. In all of these cases, art remains a privileged object for observation, but is subordinate to a philosophy itself wholly undetermined by the aesthetic; and it lacks a sensitivity to the more profound connections between art and life. One notable exception remains Dewey’s classic work, Art as Experience, where aesthetic experience is regarded as a culmination or consummation of experience as such; aesthetic experience, he writes, ‘‘is experience in its integrity,’’ it is ‘‘pure experience . . . freed from the forces that impede and confuse its development as experience; freed, that is, from factors that subordinate an experience as it is directly had to something beyond itself.’’ Art and poetry unify the elements of experience – doing and undergoing, perceiving and making, matter and method – thus correcting the haphazardness or one-sidedness of other kinds of human endeavors. For this reason, Dewey claims, it is