Aesthetic Phenomenology Research Articles

Touched by beauty: a qualitative inquiry into phenomenology of beauty

Philosophy of aesthetics and beauty has traditionally prioritized the sense of vision while deprioritizing the more basic-bodily and thus less “noble” sense of touch. This paper examines bodily aspects of how beauty appears in the experience of visual art and motivates the view that touch is fundamental to such experiences. We appeal to Merleau-Ponty to show the relevance given to touch in his phenomenology of aesthetics, to unfold the meaning of touch as “reversible,” and to understand how vision can be conceptualized as a form of touch. Further, we present four cases of feeling touched by beauty in experiences of visual art collected through interviews with art museum visitors. The descriptions of these experiences show that when people open themselves to an artwork they also open themselves to themselves. Based on the qualitative descriptions, we discuss how Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of touch is revelatory of the meaning of feeling “touched” in experiences of beauty.

Exploratory Essay Writing

This paper presents a practice—exploratory essay writing—as well as conditions for evidence and arguments that substantiate the categorization of this practice as an aesthetic-phenomenological research practice. Four different strategies have been chosen in order to publish this practice. The first and most relevant was to perform this practice, that is, to write a new exploratory essay to be published in this Special Issue. To read this essay may allow the reader to enter in contact, retroactively, with the practice that generated it and, on this basis, achieve intuitively a sense of how the process of writing might have been developed. The second strategy consists in recording my reading of the new exploratory essay. The change of medium and the consequent aural presence of the essay provides on the one hand another access to the practice and, on the other hand, a bridge to the reflection about this practice as an aesthetic-phenomenological practice. The third strategy presents three different “scores” for writing exploratory essays. These instructions or guidelines disclose step by step the actions that constitute this practice. Eventually, the fourth strategy of publication presents some reflections about exploratory essay writing as an aesthetic practice and as a phenomenological practice as well as about the possibility of conceiving and practicing—or better, of conceiving through practicing—an “aesthetic phenomenology” as complementary to a “philosophical phenomenology.”

Exploring the benefits and challenges of administrative clinical supervision in nursing and midwifery

Objective: To explore the benefits and challenges of administrative clinical supervision at the unit.Methods: Clinical Supervision has been recognised as a core component of professional support for present-day nursing and midwifery practice. Effective administrative clinical supervision is beneficial to employees by providing support leading to the development of self-esteem, reducing emotional stress and improving commitment to an organisation’s vision and goals. Using aesthetic phenomenological approach, nurses' lived experience with administrative clinical supervision in a clinical unit of the hospital was explored and allowed in-depth description of administrative clinical supervision thoroughly. The participants were purposively sampled from six hospitals in Accra and comprised supervisors (n = 18) and supervisees (n = 12).Results: The benefits of administrative clinical supervision include reduction in infection rates, improved competence, client satisfaction, reduction in negligence, efficiency, accountability and feeling of being appreciated. Challenges of administrative clinical supervision were managerial challenges, limited time, interpersonal conflict with colleagues, and increased workload.Conclusions: Practical Implications: Administrative clinical supervision has implications for nursing and midwifery education and practice. This calls for measures that promote practitioners’ personal and professional development through fostering a supportive relationship and working alliance. Originality: This study employed the use of Aesthetic Phenomenology to tell the stories of clinical supervision from the personified interpretations unlike other studies that simply adopt descriptive phenomenology. It is the first of its kind in Ghana to the best of our knowledge.

Aesthetic practices of very slow observation as phenomenological practices: steps to an ecology of cognitive practices

This exposition presents three aesthetic research practices (framed dialoging, wiriting exploratory essays and the reading circle), one framework for realizing another aesthetic practice of research (notation) and the outline of four concepts originated by pefroming these practices and that, in turn, frame and underpin their performance (aesthetic practices of very slow observation, aesthetic research, aesthetic cognition and aesthetic phenomenology). All these practices and conepts converg towards the central idea in this exposition: the ecology of cognitive practices.

CHALLENGING INGARDEN’S “RADICAL” DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE REAL AND THE LITERARY

Ingarden’s phenomenology of aesthetics is characterised primarily as a realist ontological approach which is secondarily concerned with acts of consciousness. This approach leads to a stark contrast between spatiotemporal objects and literary objects. Ontologically, the former is autonomous, totally determined, and in possession of infinite attributes, whilst the latter is a heteronomous intentional object that has only limited determinations and infinitely many “spots of indeterminacy.” Although spots of indeterminacy are often discussed, the role they play in contrasting the real and literary object is not often disputed. Through a close reading of Ingarden’s ontological works and texts on aesthetics, this essay contests the purity of Ingarden’s ontological approach and the ensuing disparity between real and literary object, particularly on the question of spots of indeterminacy. I do this by demonstrating the following five theses: 1) Ingarden’s claim that the real object has an infinitude of properties belies an epistemology, and we should instead conclude that ontologically the real object’s properties are finite. 2) Ingarden’s a priori argument that absent properties of real objects are ontologically determined is unsound. 3) The radical difference between the infinitude and finitude of givenness and absence of the real and the literary object ought to be relativised. 4) Indeterminacies within the novel are concretised in much the same way that absent properties of real objects are intended. 5) Literature makes claims that have a truth value that we can attribute to their author.

Shankh-er Shongshar, Afterlife Everyday: Religious Experience of the Evening Conch and Goddesses in Bengali Hindu Homes

This essay brings together critical archetypes of Bengali Hindu home-experience: the sound of the evening shankh (conch), the goddess Lakshmi, and the female snake-deity, Manasa. It analyzes the everyday phenomenology of the home, not simply through the European category of the ‘domestic’, but conceptually more elastic vernacular religious discourse of shongshar, which means both home and world. The conch is studied as a direct material embodiment of the sacred domestic. Its materiality and sound-ontology evoke a religious experience fused with this-worldly wellbeing (mongol) and afterlife stillness. Further, (contrary) worship ontologies of Lakshmi, the life-goddess of mongol, and Manasa, the death-and-resuscitation goddess, are discussed, and the twists of these ambivalent imaginings are shown to be engraved in the conch’s body and audition. Bringing goddesses and conch-aesthetics together, shongshar is thus presented as a religious everyday dwelling, where the ‘home’ and ‘world’ are connected through spiraling experiences of life, death, and resuscitation. Problematizing the monolithic idea of the secular home as a protecting domain from the outside world, I argue that everyday religious experience of the Bengali domestic, as especially encountered and narrated by female householders, essentially includes both Lakshmi/life/fertility and Manasa/death/renunciation. Exploring the analogy of the spirals of shankh and shongshar, spatial and temporal experiences of the sacred domestic are also complicated. Based on ritual texts, fieldwork among Lakshmi and Manasa worshippers, conch-collectors, craftsmen and specialists, and immersion in the everyday religious world, I foreground a new aesthetic phenomenology at the interface of the metaphysics of sound, moralities of goddess-devotions, and the Bengali home’s experience of afterlife everyday.

Contemporary Ukrainian visual art in the categories of the theoretical aesthetics (phenomenological aspect)

The principal characteristics of the development of the contemporary Ukrainian art are surveyed through the prism of the category apparatus of the theoretical aesthetics as a philosophical science. The principles and laws of the creative activity are investigated as an aesthetical experience in the individual and collective embodiment. For the first time the study of the interaction between the subject and the object of art activity is undertaken with the help of the phenomenology of aesthetics and its main method and principle hermeneutic approach. The phenomenology of the interpreting and uncovering of the deep senses of the ontological foundations of the visual art is applied for the interpretation and determining key points of objectivizing hidden substantial characteristics of art objects and mechanisms of its entrance into the reality. The principal algorithms of understanding and philosophical presentation of art texts of the contemporary Ukrainian visual art are enlightened. The ways of the mirroring in the art images and symbols of the individual and social consciousness, self-identification are regarded. The creative self-consciousness is described as a subject and object of the creative activity. The transformations of the social and individual consciousness are explained on the examples of the creative results of activity by famous representatives of the Ukrainian contemporary art. The possibilities of the conceptual painting to eliminate alienation and contradiction between the aesthetic ideal and being, thus their dynamic interaction is shown. The essential core of the conceptual visual symbols is unveiled in explicating the prior to reflexing experience in the art works. The special attention is paid to the application of the paradigms, laws, categories, regularities and notions of the phenomenology of aesthetics and a scientific strategy in the field of the contemporary visual art of Ukraine. The perspectives of the hermeneutic approach in the further study of the dynamics of the aesthetic activity are identified.

Interpretative phenomenological analysis and embodied interpretation: Integrating methods to find the ‘words that work’

AbstractBackgroundThis article identifies one enduring and coherent strand within the phenomenological tradition, which recognises the intertwined relationship between the lifeworld and the lived body. The understanding that our body shapes our fundamental view of the world is also considered important within IPA. Embodied interpretation has been developed in response to a growing trend towards an aesthetic phenomenology, which aims to ‘carry forward’ the meaning of a phenomenon in all its complexity and texture.Aim and MethodWith the aim of facilitating the development of emotionally receptive forms of understanding, it is proposed that an embodied interpretation can be successfully integrated into IPA via the application of Gendlin's method of focusing. An application of the method is demonstrated, and its contribution is evaluated.ConclusionAttendance to the researcher's bodily response to the research data is understood as enabling the production of ‘words that work’ for the participant, author, and reader alike.

Understanding Extraordinary Architectural Experiences through Content Analysis of Written Narratives

This study a) identifies how people describe, characterize, and communicate in written form Extraordinary Architectural Experiences (EAE), and b) expands the traditional qualitative approach to architectural phenomenology by demonstrating a quantitative method to analyze written narratives. Specifically, this study reports on the content analysis of 718 personal accounts of EAEs. Using a deductive, ‘theory-driven' approach, these narratives were read, coded, and statistically analyzed to identify storyline structure, convincing power, and the relationship between subjective and objective experiential qualities used in the story-telling process. Statistical intercoder agreement tests were conducted to verify the reliability of the interpretations to approach the hard problem of "extraordinary aesthetics” in architecture empirically. The results of this study confirm the aesthetic nature of EAE narratives (and of told experiences) by showing their higher dependence on external objective content (e.g., a building's features and location) rather than its internal subjective counterpart (e.g., emotions and sensations), which makes them more outwardly focused. The strong interrelationships and intercoder agreement between the thematic realms provide a unique aesthetic construct revealing EAE narratives as memorable, embodied, emotional events mapped by the externally focused content of place, social setting, time, and building features. A majority of EAE narratives were found to possess plot-structure along with significant relationships to objective-subjective content that further grounded their storylines. This study concludes that content analysis provides not only a valid method to understand written narratives about extraordinary architectural experiences quantitatively, but also a view as to how to map the unique nature of aesthetic phenomenology empirically.

Nature’s Transcendental Creativity: Deleuze, Corrington, and an Aesthetic Phenomenology

Nature’s Transcendental Creativity: Deleuze, Corrington, and an Aesthetic Phenomenology

Research based empathic knowledge for nursing: A translational strategy for disseminating phenomenological research findings to provide evidence for caring practice

We are interested in the kind of knowledge that is particularly relevant to caring practice and the way in which qualitative research findings can serve such knowledge. As phenomenological researchers we have been engaged with the question of how findings from such research can be re-presented and expressed more aesthetically. Such a movement towards a more aesthetic phenomenology may serve the communicative concern to express phenomena relevant to caring practice in ways that appeal to the ‘head, hand and heart’. The paper first offers some thoughts about the complex kind of knowledge relevant to caring that is not only technical or propositional, but actionable and aesthetically moving as well. We call this kind of knowledge ‘embodied relational understanding’. Further, the paper outlines the development of one way of serving a more aesthetic phenomenology whereby research findings can be faithfully and evocatively translated into more empathically impactful expressions. We call this process ‘embodied interpretation’. It is guided by an epistemological framework grounded in the philosophies of Gadamer and Gendlin. We finally illustrate the process with reference to the experience of living after Stroke, and consider the value of this translational process for nursing education and practice.

Embodied interpretation: a novel way of evocatively re-presenting meanings in phenomenological research

This article contributes to a growing trend in articulating an aesthetic phenomenology that exercises more evocative and poetic forms of writing. Our task is to give ontological weight to our common humanity, thereby facilitating experiences of recognition and `homecoming'. This developing trend could benefit from Gendlin's philosophy of the body and his practice of `focusing', which finds words that carry forward the textural dimensions of experience. We apply this practice of embodied interpretation to research about caring for a lifelong partner with Alzheimer's disease. We conclude that the value of embodied interpretation is that it serves the kind of knowledge that is particularly important in human sciences — it provides understandings that live in ways that touch both `head' and `heart'.

THE BODY OF SUBLIME KNOWLEDGE: THE AESTHETIC PHENOMENOLOGY OF ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

THE BODY OF SUBLIME KNOWLEDGE: THE AESTHETIC PHENOMENOLOGY OF ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER