The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought: The Bodily Roots of Philosophy, Science, Morality, and Art

By Mark Johnson

All too often, we think of our minds and bodies separately. The reality couldn’t be more different: the fundamental fact about our mind is that it is embodied. We have a deep visceral, emotional, and qualitative relationship to the world—and any scientifically and philosophically satisfactory view of the mind must take into account the ways that cognition, meaning, language, action, and values are grounded in and shaped by that embodiment.

This book gathers the best of philosopher Mark Johnson’s essays addressing questions of our embodiment as they deal with aesthetics—which, he argues, we need to rethink so that it takes into account the central role of body-based meaning. Viewed that way, the arts can give us profound insights into the processes of meaning making that underlie our conceptual systems and cultural practices. Johnson shows how our embodiment shapes our philosophy, science, morality, and art; what emerges is a view of humans as aesthetic, meaning-making creatures who draw on their deepest physical processes to make sense of the world around them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9780226539133

Mark Johnson

Mark Johnson is a health and science reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where he has worked since 2000. He was a member of the Journal Sentinel team that won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting on the Nic Volker story in 2011. He is also a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and has won numerous other awards for his reporting. He lives with his wife and son in Fox Point, WI.

Book preview

The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought

The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought

The Bodily Roots of Philosophy, Science, Morality, and Art

Mark Johnson

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2018 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-53880-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-53894-5 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-53913-3 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226539133.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Johnson, Mark, 1949– author.

Title: The aesthetics of meaning and thought : the bodily roots of philosophy, science, morality, and art / Mark Johnson.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017024330 | ISBN 9780226538808 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226538945 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226539133 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Aesthetics. | Meaning (Philosophy) | Experience. | Pragmatism. | Philosophy and cognitive science. | Ethics.

Classification: LCC BH39 .J63 2018 | DDC 111/.85—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017024330

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Ted Cohen (in Memoriam),

who helped me see the arts as fundamental expressions of our need for meaning; and for Tom Alexander, who taught me to worship at the altar of pragmatist aesthetics of experience

Contents

Introduction: The Aesthetics of Embodied Life

PART I:  Philosophy and Science

1.  Pragmatism, Cognitive Science, and the Embodied Mind

2.  Philosophy’s Debt to Metaphor

3.  Experiencing Language: What’s Missing in Linguistic Pragmatism?

4.  Keeping the Pragmatism in Neuropragmatism

5.  Metaphor-Based Values in Scientific Models

PART II:  Morality and Law

6.  Cognitive Science and Morality

7.  Moral Imagination

8.  Mind, Metaphor, Law

PART III:  Art and the Aesthetics of Life

9.  Identity, Bodily Meaning, and Art

10.  Dewey’s Big Idea for Aesthetics

11.  The Embodied Meaning of Architecture

12.  What Becomes of Philosophy, Morality, and Art?

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

INTRODUCTION

The Aesthetics of Embodied Life

The Need for an Aesthetics of Human Meaning and Understanding

We human beings are animals—highly complex, inescapably embodied, intrinsically social, and sometimes even intelligent, animals—who live, move, and have our being via our ongoing relations with our environments. As such, we have a deep visceral, emotional, and qualitative relation to our world. As a result of our embodied nature, meaning comes to us via patterns, images, concepts, qualities, emotions, and feelings that constitute the basis of our experience, thought, and language. This visceral engagement with meaning, I will argue, is the proper purview of aesthetics. Consequently, aesthetic dimensions shape the very core of our human being.

Unfortunately, much traditional aesthetic theory has overlooked many of these deeply embodied aesthetic processes. It is typically assumed that experience can be divided up into distinct kinds (moral, political, economic, religious, aesthetic, etc.), with each kind separate from the others and having its own unique character. Having fragmented experience into these types, aesthetic theory then focuses narrowly on the conditions of possibility for, and the cognitive status of, these so-called aesthetic experiences and the aesthetic judgments allegedly appropriate to aesthetic objects. The fields that came to be known as aesthetics and the philosophy of art in the twentieth century consequently end up limited mostly to definitions of art, theories of beauty, attempts to explain aesthetic judgment, and accounts of how aesthetic experience differs from other forms of experience. Once the aesthetic gets compartmentalized and reduced to a unique feeling-based type of experience, its pervasive operations in all the goings-on of our daily lives come to be almost completely overlooked.

Following John Dewey ([1934] 1987), I contend that we need to transcend this overly narrow, fragmenting, and reductionist view in order to recognize that aesthetics is not merely a matter of constructing theories of something called aesthetic experience, but instead extends broadly to encompass all the processes by which we enact meaning through perception, bodily movement, feeling, and imagination. In other words, all meaningful experience is aesthetic experience.

In this book, I therefore construct an argument for expanding the scope of aesthetics to recognize the central role of body-based meaning in how we understand, reason, and communicate. The arts are thus regarded as instances of particularly deep and rich enactments of meaning, and so they give us profound insight into our general processes of meaning-making that underlie our conceptual systems and our cultural institutions and practices. Humans are homo aestheticus—creatures of the flesh, who live, think, and act by virtue of the aesthetic dimensions of experience and understanding.

From this embodied cognition perspective, it becomes possible to see the aesthetic aspects of experience as giving rise to mind, meaning, and thought. The view of meaning that emerges highlights the body-based, affective, and imaginative dimensions of our interactions with our environments as they shape the ways we make sense of, and reason about, our world. Once we develop what might be called an aesthetics of meaning and understanding, we then have the resources necessary to explore how meaning actually works in a broad range of arts and expressive and communicative practices (e.g., painting, sculpture, architecture, music, dance, theatrical performance, spontaneous gesture, and rituals). What emerges is a view of humans as aesthetic, meaning-making creatures who draw on their deepest sensory, motor, and affective processes to make sense of, and orient themselves in, their world (Alexander 2013). Such an exploration of embodied cognition should give renewed and deepened meaning to the profound metaphor of the art of living.

It follows from an aesthetics of embodied cognition approach that our highest creative achievements of thought are matters of aesthetic understanding. If this is so, then all our conceptual systems and forms of symbolic interaction are rooted in body-based meaning structures, such as images, bodily schemas, emotions, feelings, and metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson 1999; M. Johnson 2007, 2017). Consequently, the essays collected in this volume illustrate and explain what it means to say that meaning and thought are embodied aesthetic processes, and they then explore some of the ways these deep dimensions of meaning operate in philosophy, science, morality, law, and the various arts. In short, I argue for the pivotal role of aesthetic components in human meaning-making and understanding.

However, in order to make this case, we must first retrieve aesthetics from the philosophical dustbin into which it was discarded, especially as a result of Enlightenment views about the subjective character of aesthetic experience. My brief and selective analysis of that devaluing and narrowing of aesthetic dimensions of experience then opens the way for a recovery of aesthetics, but now understood from the perspective of an embodied cognition view of mind, thought, and language. However, since an embodied view challenges some deeply entrenched notions of mind and reason, we first need to understand the cluster of problematic assumptions that have led to the marginalization of the body and aesthetics in Western intellectual traditions.

The Folk Theory of Disembodied Mind and Reason

The mistaken idea that aesthetic considerations are mostly irrelevant to how we conceptualize and reason is based on a deeply rooted but profoundly mistaken conception of disembodied mind and reason. This model constitutes what is known as a folk theory: a cluster of related assumptions that underlie cultural ideas, values, institutions, and practices. For the most part, these assumptions are taken to be matters of common sense, and thus acquire an aura of self-evident truth. Simply stated, the folk theory I will be criticizing asserts that (1) humans are unique by virtue of their rational capacities; (2) reason is radically separate from emotion and feeling; (3) art and aesthetic experience are feeling based, and hence subjective; and therefore, (4) aesthetics has nothing significant to do with reason. Here is a more detailed and nuanced statement of the view:

The Folk Theory of Disembodied Mind and Thought

1. Humans are the quintessentially rational animals. Humans are unique among the animals in possessing a rational capacity (including language) that transcends, and is independent of, any of our bodily processes.

2. There are discrete types of experience. It is assumed that all human experience comes to us separated into discrete functional types. For example, there are alleged to be perceptual, imaginative, moral, political, economic, religious, aesthetic, and technological kinds of experiences, each with its own unique character and correlative forms of judgment.

3. Mind consists of different faculties. The mind is an integrated collection of independent faculties or powers, each geared toward performing different functions. A typical list of faculties would include sensation, feeling, understanding, reason, imagination, and will, at the very least. Since the Enlightenment, it has been popular to assume that each distinct type of experience could be explained as the product of a specific unique relation of one or more of the faculties. For example, aesthetic judgments were thought to be feeling based, whereas theoretical judgments in the sciences are the product of our capacity to receive sense impressions (sensation), to form concepts (understanding), and to draw inferences based on those concepts (reason).

4. Thought is conceptual and propositional. From the perspective of Enlightenment faculty psychology, thought involves the combining of concepts (as products of understanding) into propositional judgments (with a subject-predicate structure). Either the constituent concepts arise from perceptual experience, or else they are some form of innate formal representation. Thinking, within the context of knowledge production, then reduces to intellectual manipulations of concepts and propositions. Thought (or cognition) is thus viewed as operating via language-like propositional structures, and reason is our capacity to trace out relations among various propositions (according to logical principles). The only role for the body is to supply the perceptual content of some of our concepts and to serve as the medium of action in the world.

5. Thinking and feeling are fundamentally different. Thinking is a cognitive, conceptual, propositional process, whose structure is given by the innate characteristics of human understanding and reason. Feeling is a noncognitive, bodily sensation process. Consequently, thinking is not a feeling process, although it might occasionally give rise to feelings.

6. Feelings are subjective and noncognitive. Feeling states are bodily perturbations that have no cognitive or conceptual dimension (beyond the fact that we have concepts to name some of our feelings). As such, they play no role in our acquisition of conceptual knowledge. Feelings are always relativized to the embodied creature who is experiencing that feeling, as a subjective state.

7. Concepts are literal and classically defined. The concepts with which we reason and gain knowledge of our world have to be literal; that is, defined by necessary and sufficient conditions that are capable of mapping onto mind-independent objects, events, properties, and relations. Otherwise, we could never achieve objective knowledge of our world.

8. Reason is disembodied. The faculty of reason is our power to discern abstract relations between concepts and the propositions they make up. Reason is a universal human capacity for formal and logical operations, and in that sense it is considered transcendent of our bodily makeup.

9. Aesthetics is subjective and relative. Aesthetics, regarded as pertaining to felt sensations and to feeling-based appraisals of artistic and natural beauty, cannot be a matter of cognitive judgment or knowledge. Aesthetic judgment is thus a matter of taste, not the result of cognitive or conceptual structures. Consequently, aesthetic judgments yield no knowledge.

This cluster of related views treats thought as relatively disembodied, in the sense that the structures of understanding and reasoning are formal operations supposedly untethered by body-based feelings and emotions. This folk theory of disembodied mind and thought received its most elaborate and rigorous articulation in Enlightenment philosophy, but it has remained dominant down to the present day, especially in ever-popular computational models of mind, which treat mental operations as algorithmic formal manipulations of meaningless symbols that allegedly constitute a language of thought (see Lakoff and Johnson 1999 for an account and critique of this view).

The Marginalization of Aesthetics

The folk theory of disembodied mind and thought tends to go hand in hand with a correlative folk theory according to which aesthetic dimensions of experience are taken to be wholly subjective and therefore completely separate from our knowledge producing faculty. This relegation of aesthetics to the philosophical hinterlands has been especially prominent since the emergence in the Enlightenment of a conception of philosophy-as-theory-of-knowledge. If, following Immanuel Kant ([1781] 1968, [1785] 1993, [1790] 1987), you conceive the job of philosophy to be explaining how various types of judgments are possible—especially those that are cognitive and generate knowledge—you will be tempted to downplay anything that is not believed to contribute to a theory of knowledge. You will tend to assume that our primary acts, as rational creatures, are the making and justifying of knowledge claims.

Kant is one of the most famous proponents of such a view, which privileges cognitive over aesthetic forms of judgment. Kant defined the task of what he called his critical philosophy to be providing an explanation of the nature, conditions of possibility, and limits of various types of judgments. Kant and many other Enlightenment philosophers were obsessed with questions about how knowledge is possible and capable of verification in experience. Richard Rorty (1979) correctly accused Kant of having epistemologized philosophy through his exclusive focus on the cognitive conditions for the possibility of certain types of knowledge-producing judgments. Whatever was not cognitive was regarded as more or less irrelevant to the mind’s primary job of thinking, reasoning, and acquiring knowledge. The result was the relegation of aesthetic experience and judgment to noncognitive, subjective status, as set forth in

The Folk Theory of Aesthetics as Subjective

1. Feelings are bodily; concepts are mental. Emotions and feelings are states of perturbation of our body. Thought, as conceptual, is based on understanding and reason, which are shared universal capacities of mind.

2. Feelings are subjective. Since feelings and emotions are bodily states, they are relative to the person who experiences them. Only I can experience my feelings and you yours. Feelings are thus subjective states; they cannot be the basis for shared (objective) understanding and knowledge.

3. Cognitive judgments are conceptual; aesthetic judgments are based on feelings. Cognitive judgments are operations on concepts (and propositions), which are mental structures. Aesthetic judgments are based on feelings (as body states). The former give rise to knowledge and thought, while the latter give rise to feeling responses of pleasure or displeasure.

4. Aesthetic dimensions are merely subjective. Aesthetic experience and judgment, as feeling based, are subjective and therefore fundamentally different in kind from acts of knowing and reasoning. Consequently, aesthetic aspects of experience are irrelevant when it comes to matters of knowledge production. Even if, as Kant ([1790] 1987) insisted, aesthetic reflective judgments of taste lay claim to universal validity, they do not constitute acts of knowing, because they are not based on determinate concepts.

If you assume the relatively disembodied view of mind sketched earlier—especially as it has developed since its heyday in the Enlightenment—you will deny any role for feelings in understanding and reasoning. If you mistakenly assume that aesthetics focuses exclusively on noncognitive bodily feeling states, and if you think that all knowledge is conceptual and propositional, then you will not find any place for feelings and emotions in our cognitive judgments. You will regard aesthetics as being about what happens when understanding and reasoning go on holiday and leave the mind to the fanciful hijinks of imagination and feeling, unfettered by rational constraints.

I want to probe a bit more deeply into the justification for banishing aesthetics to the nether reaches of human experience and cognition, as unfit for the lofty tasks of understanding and knowing. If, as I will be arguing, aesthetics is fundamentally about how we are able to have meaningful experience, then one might wonder why this has not seemed evident to philosophers throughout most of Western history. Why is it that people tend to think of aesthetics as exclusively concerned with art and so-called aesthetic experience, both of which they consider to be subjective matters of taste?

I am suggesting that the answer to this question can be found in the view of mind, meaning, and thought that solidified in Europe during the eighteenth century, when the philosophical field of aesthetics first emerged. To recapitulate: (1) Human mind was thought to consist of a set of independent faculties or powers (e.g., sensation, feeling, emotion, imagination, understanding, reason, will) that, in various combinations, give rise to the specific kinds of judgments we make. (2) Aesthetic judgments are based primarily on the faculties of perception, feeling, and imagination, whereas knowledge judgments are based on conceptual capacities and reason. (3) Feelings are private, noncognitive bodily states. (4) As noncognitive, feelings were not seen as contributing either to meaning, to understanding, or to reasoning. (5) Because philosophy had come to be narrowly defined as primarily an epistemological project concerned with the nature, possibility, and limits of human knowledge, there was no serious place within philosophy for any aesthetics, other than as an analysis of types of human feeling states and judgments.

The view I have just summarized found eloquent and exquisitely detailed articulation in eighteenth-century philosophy of art. Our modern use of the term aesthetics is typically traced to Alexander Baumgarten’s Aesthetica (1750–58), where he defines aesthetics as an inquiry into the nature of taste—our sense of beauty—which he regarded as a matter of bodily feeling, rather than an activity of the intellect or reason. Immanuel Kant ([1790] 1987, 203) appropriated a similar notion of aesthetics, in his Critique of Judgment, where he defined an aesthetic judgment as feeling based, and therefore subjective. Since no conception of aesthetics has been more influential in shaping our contemporary views, it is helpful to sketch the outline of Kant’s approach in order to see how it led to a marginalization and subjectivizing of aesthetics. With the faculty psychology described above in hand, Kant defined the problem of aesthetic judgments (especially judgments of beauty and sublimity in nature and art) as how judgments based on feelings can, nevertheless, claim universal validity.

Kant developed his treatment of aesthetic judgment within a broader project of explaining how certain types of mental judgments are possible. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant focuses chiefly on the conditions of possibility of theoretical judgments in the natural sciences (especially in the form of universal causal laws of nature). He argues that theoretical judgments of a causally deterministic nature can be objective and universally shareable (i.e., communicable), precisely because they are based on universal concepts (such as the notion of causation).

Having supposedly established the basis for the universality and objectivity of scientific judgments, Kant next turns to the status of moral judgments, which presuppose the notion of freedom underlying ethical choice. In his Critique of Practical Reason (1787) he tries to explain the universal validity and unconditional bindingness of moral principles, as also resting on concepts, but this time on concepts derived from pure practical (rather than theoretical) reason alone.

In the first part of his Critique of Judgment (1790), he asks how a third type of judgment—a judgment of taste concerning the beautiful in nature and art—is possible. The problem is that judgments of taste appear to be grounded on feelings, whereas Kant typically requires that the universal validity of a judgment be grounded on a shared concept. So, it would seem that such noncognitive, feeling-based aesthetic judgments of this sort could never lay claim to universal validity. And yet, he strenuously affirms, they do make just such a claim! He insists that when we say that something is beautiful, we demand the agreement of others with our judgment, even though we lack any universal concept to ground such an agreement. So, how is it possible for a judgment to be at once aesthetic (feeling based and nonconceptual) and universally valid?

When Kant began his Third Critique with the claim that "a judgment of taste is not a cognitive judgment and so is not a logical judgment but an aesthetic one, by which we mean a judgment whose determining basis cannot be other than subjective" ([1790] 1987, 203; italics in the original), the fateful die was cast. Aesthetics came to be narrowly defined as an inquiry into the nature, possibility, and limits of judgments of taste (i.e., judgments of beauty in nature and art) and also of judgments of sublimity, both of which were held to be based on subjective feelings, even though they somehow supposedly lay claim to universal validity. Because Kant took feelings—as subjective—to be relative to the individual bodies experiencing those feelings, he could not use feelings to ground the alleged universal validity of the judgment of taste. Kant infamously tried to resolve this deep tension by arguing that aesthetic judgments of taste were not in fact grounded on, or caused by, feelings, but instead were based on a harmonious interplay of imagination and understanding that constitutes an unforced orderliness in our experience of certain objects and events (Kant [1790] 1987, sec. 9). The feelings involved in aesthetic experience and judgment are thus taken to be secondary effects; that is, they are not the ground or cause of the judgment of taste, but merely our felt consciousness (as effect) of the harmony of the interplay of the cognitive faculties (i.e., imagination and understanding) that is the basis for the judgment.¹

Another highly influential aspect of Kant’s philosophy of art is his formalism. What is it in our perception of an object that grounds our feeling of its beauty? The answer, he claims, must be its formal properties, since the matter or content of the object is merely empirical and therefore incapable of supporting a truly universal judgment (M. Johnson 1979). The underlying assumption is that whereas the material content of a perceptual judgment cannot guarantee universal validity, we all can nevertheless experience the formal features of an object in the same way, since space and time are the pure forms of sensuous intuition shared by all humans. The point to emphasize here is that the pure judgment of taste focuses only on the formal characteristics of an object and ignores any direct relation to the empirical and practical affairs of daily life. As we will see below, we find here the basis for a disengagement of art from our lived mundane experiences in the world that will prove fateful, in a problematic way, for subsequent aesthetic theory.

There is no need here to dwell on the intricacies and mental gymnastics of Kant’s ingenious account. Kant never relinquished his conviction that only shared concepts could ground the universal validity of a judgment, and that is why he ends up performing a philosophical sleight of hand by conjuring up what he calls an indeterminate concept to ground the judgment of taste. However, this attempt to intellectualize judgments of taste cannot save them from subjectivity.² Kant’s rigid faculty psychology and his unbridgeable dichotomies between feeling and thought, concept and percept, emotion and reason, imagination and knowledge made it impossible for him to salvage any significant role for aesthetics in the cultivation of a meaningful and moral human life, even though he devoted significant parts of the Critique of Judgment to arguing precisely this claim.³

My point here is not to enter into debate about the proper interpretation of Kant’s aesthetic theory. Rather, I simply want to observe that Kant’s legacy in the philosophy of art and aesthetic judgment is what Hans-Georg Gadamer calls the subjectivisation of aesthetics in the Kantian critique (1975, 39); for, after Kant, the problem of aesthetic judgment comes to be framed as how a judgment that is merely subjective—as based on feelings—can lay claim to universal validity.

Another fateful effect of Kant’s account of aesthetic judgments of taste is the view that in order to experience the merely formal features on which the universality of the aesthetic judgment is based, one must abstract from any practical interest in the objects being experienced. Kant’s phrase is a disinterested satisfaction in the object, by which he means that we care only for its form (and the harmony that generates in our minds) and not for any desire for, or practical interest in, the object. Although Kant is not entirely to blame for this, one unfortunate legacy of his insistence on disinterestedness has been the mistaken idea that a full and pure appreciation of natural or artistic beauty requires us to suspend any practical life engagement we might normally have with the object, so that we can focus exclusively on the interplay of the formal features that make possible a universally valid judgment of taste.⁴ Kant, of course, does not say that we cannot also have a practical interest in the object of our aesthetic appreciation, but only that we must never allow any relation of the object to our interests, life emotions, or vital ends to be the basis of a pure judgment of taste. And he insists that only a pure, disinterested judgment can support the claim of universal validity.

Unfortunately, many subsequent philosophers of art have latched on to the doctrine of disinterested judgment and what they call the aesthetic attitude as the key to a proper experience of an artwork. The basic idea is that only if we disengage from our practical involvement in the affairs of daily living are we then able to experience the beauty of nature or of an art object in its purity, universality, and transcendence. This is a historically consequential move, insofar as it puts aesthetic experience supposedly above and beyond the practical concerns of everyday life. From here it is but a short step to Oscar Wilde’s quip that the value of art lies precisely in its having nothing to do with ordinary, day-to-day life.⁵

Kant’s idea of disinterested satisfaction was taken to an absurd extreme in the art theory of Clive Bell, who ridiculously pontificates: For, to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions. Art transports us from the world of man’s activities to a world of aesthetic exaltation. For a moment we are shut off from human interests; we are lifted above the stream of life (Bell [1914] 1958, 27). Here we have art completely severed from any connection to the practical affairs of living, existing eternally in a realm that utterly transcends our contingent historical situatedness in the world. The wealthy and privileged patron, transported to the transcendent realm of significant form, need take no notice of the messiness and uncertainty of daily life. I cannot help but observe the irony that Bell was penning this vision of transcendent perfection and release from the affairs of human existence—as if art were an otherworldly reality that could take us beyond the cares of our lives—on the very eve of Britain’s catastrophic plunge into the hell of the Great War. It is hard not to think of Bell as whistling in the dark. The juxtaposition of Bell’s supernatural realm of timeless beauty (or significant form) with the ugly tragedy of modern warfare that was about to be unleashed on the world could not be more stark. Nor could such an otherworldly and transcendent conception of art be more disengaged from the meaning of our daily lives. I daresay that the value of art for World War I poets like Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, who experienced the unimaginable slaughter and terrors of trench warfare, lay not in escaping to some otherworldly realm, but consisted in the beauty of the love, sacrifice, courage, and caring they saw realized in the midst of the horrors that engulfed them.

Neither can we excuse Edward Bullough, who, just two years earlier (1912), advised us of the necessity of disengaging from life, if we hope to achieve an objective regard for an aesthetic object. Bullough’s aesthetic outlook requires putting the phenomenon, so to speak, out of gear with our practical, actual self; by allowing it to stand outside the context of our personal needs and ends—in short, by looking at it ‘objectively,’ as it has often been called (Ridley and Neill 1995, 298–99). Here again we have the belief in a pure, shiny, exalted aesthetic object that could supposedly only be accessed by putting aside and rising above our daily existence.

I confess that I cannot but wonder: Who is experiencing the aesthetic object and grasping its meaning, once we have put the phenomenon out of gear with our practical, actual self? I, for one, would like my actual self to grasp the significance and meaning of the phenomenon, not my nonactual self! How could an artwork have any meaning if it is disconnected from our selfhood and our visceral embeddedness in the world? George Dickie (1974) long ago made mincemeat of aesthetic-attitude theories of art, so maybe there is no point in beating this dead horse any further. But we have not yet freed ourselves from the oppressive yoke of a view that makes art irrelevant to daily life, by extracting it from the visceral meaning of our mundane affairs of living and then projecting it into some allegedly eternal realm of timeless aesthetic ecstasy. As Tolstoy ([1896] 1960) argued so vehemently, art and aesthetics have too often become parlor games for those wealthy enough to afford museums, concerts, and performances, who then tout the eternal excellence of their preferred artistic achievements while recognizing no concrete connections to daily existence and the lives of ordinary folks.

Although there are no doubt exceptions to this denigration of the aesthetic, it mostly held sway from Kant’s day up through the glory days of early and midtwentieth-century analytic philosophy. In describing the stranglehold that aesthetic attitude thinking has exercised over art theory, I am not overlooking the nineteenth-century romantic valorization of art as the key to the recovery of our lost or alienated souls. The romantic poets, novelists, composers, and painters had a deep sense of art as connecting us back up, in a quasi-religious way, with a healing nature from which industrialized modern society had alienated us. For them, art matters for our daily lives in the most profound way. Indeed, this romantic conviction that art reveals the meaning of our existence anticipates the view I am developing here.

However, this romantic movement too often assumed the cluster of defining dichotomies (e.g., mind/body, cognition/emotion, thinking/feeling, knowledge/imagination) that was the source of the problem and simply elevated the second (or bottom) half of each dichotomy above the first (or top) half, without substantially overcoming this fundamental metaphysical dualism. In other words, there was a tendency to celebrate passion and feeling over against reason, without recognizing that reason is itself intimately connected with desire. Despite this tendency to overemphasize feeling and desire, the romantics rightly saw the arts as fundamental necessities of a life that was meaningful and well lived.

Unfortunately, these romantic tendencies did not survive the onslaught of modernism at the dawn of the twentieth century. Much of what was good in romanticism came to be replaced with modernist sympathies closer to the Enlightenment perspective so well articulated by Kant. One need only thumb through anthologies of twentieth-century aesthetics to see the return to Kantian-influenced perspectives, with topics like aesthetic experience, the aesthetic attitude, aesthetic judgment, the definition of art, and the cognitive status of various arts, with passing mention of the institutional social context of art thrown in for good measure.

As evidence for this derogation of aesthetics, one need only peruse the writings of the most illustrious analytic philosophers of the last century to see how consistently they have ignored or disparaged aesthetics. You will search in vain for a serious treatment of aesthetics in the works of Gottlob Frege, Rudolf Carnap, Bertrand Russell, Carl Hempel, J. L. Austin, Willard Van Orman Quine, Donald Davidson, John Searle, Ernest Nagel, Hilary Putnam, and a host of less prominent figures in the Anglo American philosophical tradition. Even Wittgenstein’s scattered remarks on art and aesthetics have not brought aesthetics to center stage. Among well-known analytic philosophers, only Nelson Goodman took aesthetics seriously, and then only within a nominalist theory of signs and language. I daresay that one can read through Goodman’s Languages of Art or his Ways of Worldmaking with nary a serious encounter with the body, embodied meaning, or meaningful feeling. In so-called analytic philosophical circles, it has never been considered a shortcoming for a philosopher to have nothing significant to say about either art or aesthetics. Moreover, those analytically trained philosophers who did make forays into aesthetics tended to approach the subject strictly within the confines set out by Hume, Kant, and Hegel, and occasionally Aristotle. It is not surprising, then, that when the subject known as aesthetics and the philosophy of art was consolidated as a distinct philosophical field in the 1960s in the United States and England, it was dominated mostly by analytically trained philosophers interested in questions about the nature of the concept art: whether art was even definable, whether or not judgments of taste could claim universality, and whether art had anything to do with morality. A quick glance through the section headings in any anthology of aesthetics reveals the relative absence, until quite recently, of any recognition of aesthetics as relevant to what it means to be human, how we make and experience meaning, and how we ought to live.

In the face of this cultural marginalization of aesthetics, John Dewey wrote Art as Experience (1934) in part to counteract what he perceived to be the disengagement of art from life, especially the removal of art into museums, where artworks supposedly become eternal objects of pure aesthetic appreciation. According to the view he was challenging, the art museum becomes a temple where we are urged to put aside our worldly cares and engage some transcendent beauty, significance, or truth. Dewey was rightly reacting to the tendency to overlook the pervasiveness of art in all aspects of everyday life—a tendency reinforced by the view that artworks transport us above the affairs of day-to-day existence.

Following Dewey, I am arguing for an aesthetics of our bodily, worldly existence. Such a view places art squarely within everyday life and treats the aesthetic as pertaining to all the experiential components of human meaning, not merely to art and so-called aesthetic objects. I shall, therefore, henceforth assume that an artwork, or any object or event, is