Somaesthetics at the Limits

Abstract

IMorten Kyndrup kindly invited me to open this conference by sketching how the problematic question of limits has pervaded the contemporary field of aesthetics, and he suggested I do so by sketching how the issue of limits has shaped my own trajectory from analytic philosophy to pragmatism and continental theory and into the interdisciplinary field of somaesthetics.* Reviewing my almost thirty-year career in philosophical aesthetics, I realize that much of it has been a struggle with the limits that define this field, though I did not always see it in those terms. When I was still a student at Oxford specializing in analytic aesthetics, my first three publications were papers protesting the limits of prevail ing monistic doctrines in that field: theories claiming that poetry (and by extension literature in general) is essentially an oral-based performative art without real visual import, and theories arguing that beneath the varying interpretations and evaluations of works of art there was nonetheless one basic logic of interpretation and one basic logic of evaluation (though philosophers differed as to what that basic logic was and whether it was the same for both interpretation and evaluation). When I proposed contrastingly pluralistic accounts of interpretive and evaluative logic, while suggesting that literature could be appreciated in terms of sight as well as sound, I was not consciously aiming at transgressing prevailing limits. I was more interested in being right than in being different or original, and I saw myself as working fully within the limits of analytic aesthetics. 1 When I expanded my horizons to embrace pragmatism in the late 1980s, I became conscious of pushing at the limits of analytic philosophy, though I considered my work to be largely an extension of treating familiar questions and forms of reasoning in analytic aesthetics and philosophy, much in the way that Nelson Goodman, Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty, and Joseph Margolis were combining pragmatist insights with analytic styles of argument. 2 And in using some continental philosophy for inspirational insight (from Nietzsche and Adorno to Foucault and Bourdieu), I