Aesthetics

This book offers the first full treatment of design in the field of philosophical aesthetics. Aesthetic theory has traditionally occupied itself with fine art in all its forms, sometimes with craft, and often with notions of beauty and sublimity in art and nature. In so doing, it has largely ignored the quotidian and familiar objects and experiences that make up our daily lives. Yet how we interact with design involves aesthetic choices and judgements as well as practical, cognitive and moral considerations. This work challenges the discipline to broaden its scope to include design, and illustrates how aesthetics helps define our human concerns. Subjecting design to as rigorous a treatment as any other aesthetic object exposes it to three main challenges that form the core of this book. First, design must be distinguished from art and craft as a unique kind of object meriting separate philosophical attention, and is here defined in part by its functional qualities. Second, the experience of design must be defended as having a particularly aesthetic nature. Here Forsey adapts the Kantian notion of dependent beauty to provide a model for our appreciation of design as different from our judgments of art, craft and natural beauty. Finally, design is important for aesthetics and philosophy as a whole in that it is implicated in broader human concerns. Forsey situates her theory of design as a constructive contribution to the recent movement of Everyday Aesthetics, which seeks to re-enfranchise philosophical aesthetics as an important part of philosophy at large.

Art changes the totality of human experience as Dewey emphasized. Goodman and Heidegger propose that art reveals a special contribution to the world-making experience of the artist and the receivers of the artwork. Art is often representational. It may, as Bell and Fry affirmed, contain significant form giving rise to a special emotion, it may be expressive of human feelings, as Croce and Collingwood averred. It may deconstruct previous artworks, removing them from their frames to assemble something new, as Derrida suggests. Some art does each, and I seek to explain how. But not all art does these things, and not only art does them. So what is the special contribution that art makes to experience that changes human life? Art uses sensory consciousness as the focus of attention to create new form and content out of exemplars of experience. The exemplars mark a new distinction in conceptual space. I call this exemplarization. We value art because of the new content it offers us in our lives. We are provoked by art to ask ourselves whether to transfer the content of the artwork to our world and ourselves beyond the artwork. Our answer reveals to us what we are like as we exercise our freedom and autonomy in how we represent our world. Art is that part of experience that uses experience to change the content of experience. Exemplar representation, exemplarization, unifies the aesthetic, creating a new understanding of our selves and our world.

The first part of this book critically assesses some of the bold claims that have been made about films' contributions to philosophy and defends a balanced perspective on the topic. It argues that in many cases, it is the philosophical commentator and not ‘the film itself’ that is the actual source of the philosophizing attributed to a movie. In some cases, however, it is the film-maker who, by working with a background of specific philosophical sources, creates a work that expresses philosophical ideas. With this possibility in mind, the second part of the book outlines a ‘partial intentionalist’ approach. In response to a series of objections, the book defends underlying assumptions about interpretation, expression, and authorship. The book's partial intentionalist approach is exemplified in the third part of the book, which focuses on the work of Ingmar Bergman. The book argues that Bergman was profoundly influenced by a Finnish philosopher, Eino Kaila. Bergman proclaimed that reading Kaila's book on philosophical psychology a tremendous philosophical experience for him and that he ‘built on this ground’. With reference to unpublished materials in the newly created Ingmar Bergman archive in Stockholm, the book shows how, in works such as Wild Strawberries, Persona, and In the Life of the Marionettes, the Swedish director took up and responded to Kaila's views on motivated irrationality, inauthenticity, ethics, and the problem of self-knowledge.

Disgust has a strong claim to be a distinctively human emotion. But what is it to be disgusting? What unifies the class of disgusting things? This book sets out to analyze the content of disgust, arguing that life and death are implicit in its meaning. Disgust is a kind of philosophical emotion, reflecting the human attitude to the biological world. Yet it is an emotion we strive to repress. It may have initially arisen as a method of curbing voracious human desire, which itself results from our powerful imagination. Because we feel disgust towards ourselves as a species, we are placed in a fraught emotional predicament: we admire ourselves for our achievements, but we also experience revulsion at our necessary organic nature. We are subject to an affective split. Death involves the disgusting, in the shape of the rotting corpse, and our complex attitudes towards death feed into our feelings of disgust. We are beings with a “disgust consciousness,” unlike animals and gods—and we cannot shake our self-ambivalence. Existentialism and psychoanalysis sought a general theory of human emotion; this book seeks to replace them with a theory in which our primary mode of feeling centers around disgust.