In the last ten years, the Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA) has undertaken the monumental task of “Shifting the Geography of Reason.” Essentially, it has raised and considered the sorts of philosophical issues that arise if conceptions of reason, gender, religion, conditions of rationality, and articulations of the self are located in a Caribbean center of discourse. Engaged in a similar project since the 1980s, African art historians and culture studies specialists have argued that any meaningful conceptual shift must substantively reshape the character and language of theoretical production. This means recognizing that, owing to obvious ontological and cultural differences, traditional African art and aesthetics would not necessarily conform to what art and aesthetics are in the West. Because aesthetic categories and assumptions emerge from the artistic and cultural practices of societies, conceptualizations and discussions of African aesthetic categories must reflect this conceptual dynamic. Extending this insight to the African diaspora of the Caribbean, and connecting it to the CPA project of “shifting the geography of reason,” it is necessary to focus on a category of creative expression that is influenced by African religions in the Caribbean such as Vodun, Obeah, Lucumi, and Candomblé. In this lecture, I will focus on one artist whose work reflects voduisant aesthetics, and whose creations should properly be referred to as “voduisant art.” To begin the examination, I will conceptually restructure the Atlantic to situate the African belief system at the center of discourse. I will then draw on Haitian and African metaphysics and metanarratives to examine the assumptions and presuppositions of voduisant art and aesthetics of transformation. The goal is to illumine the aesthetic categories of this genre of African Caribbean art and to see how it speaks to a particular notion of space and self.
 

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In this essay, I examine Caribbean axiology, with a view to eliciting the fundamental influences of Euro-American and Asiatic-Arabic imperial cultural ideas on Jamaican cultural consciousness about sexuality. I attempt this being very mindful of the problematic of distilling a uniform Jamaican consciousness, given the myriad of cultural beliefs and adherences of peoples of different ethnicities which make up the country and the larger Caribbean; yet there is no difficulty in my mind that most people Jamaicans of African descent would embrace filial orientations that are more in accord with the natural understanding of sexuality as an amorous interface between opposing genders. We note that with the internationalization of spontaneous information dissemination on a globalized format, instantaneously from direct source and unmediated by any apparent control mechanisms, there is a sense in which events and incidents in any part of the world become consumption information items everywhere in the world immediately. This has brought with it unequal cultural/ethical interfaces in the realms of human interactions, thereby making unpredictable the various tropes for reacting to these exchanges and coping mechanisms for mediating the divergences to prevent perpetual discord. 
 

The area of human sexuality has been one in which, because of the awkwardness and intimateness of the issues involved, there have been reprobate, degenerate, subliminal and patronizing reactions on various cultural fronts to different cultural practices contesting for universal validity and acceptance. This is even more remarkable in the Africana-Caribbean setting, where the indigenous traditions and practices have become tools for idolization and/or demonization, at the same time, of practices which speak to human sexuality within these indigenous or traditional cultural spaces. Thus, spaces of human personal and cultural beauty, genital treatment, procreation and pleasure have become centers of unnecessarily stressful contestations, impositions of views external to domestic cultural ideas and ideals, while at the same time reifying to absolutist truisms ideas from external sources which are backed by socio-epistemic metaphysics alien to the indigenous peoples being imposed on. In light of the foregoing, it has become very difficult not to find divergences of beliefs and conceptions of ideals being the victims of intolerant affront by those who have the technological, financial and political power to impose (and have imposed) their own culturally evolved positions on the rest of humanity.

In view of the above, we argue, in this essay, even if contrary to received orthodoxies, that human culture largely dictates differences in how human beings from different parts of the world relate to similar or identical experiences, often imposing standards of acceptability and prohibitions, backed by reward mechanisms and sanctions. In the light of this, one may wonder why there is no uniformity in the ideas and dictates of cultures regarding human behaviour at large. What this implicates is that where there are clashes of cultures, those who have had the capacity to enforce their own views have been the ones setting the standards of right and wrong. Human sexuality is not any different, except that imposing some positions on the rest of humanity raises the questions why not other positions which we currently disagree with?
 

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Architecture defines and consumes people.  It exposes them to a multitude of varieties of different aesthetic engagements. Architecture becomes a lived experience. However, this lived experience is always caught in the inner workings of the social and more specifically within cultural ideology. In modern capitalism, culture pervades every aspect of our lives. It shows its presence everywhere from our own homes to the public streets.  Culture is everywhere, and architecture is a tool used for both the benefit and detriment of the 'culture industry.’

by Roxanne Burton
 

Though it has been discounted in much of traditional western philosophy, the body, it can be argued, plays as important a role as cognition in the shaping of personal identity and a sense of self. The phenomenological turn in the discipline has led to more serious consideration being given (as it had been done in other philosophical traditions) to the role of the body in the process of meaning giving and meaning acquisition. By wholeheartedly taking the role of the body into account, there is a greater scope for understanding the interplay between one’s social, cultural and geographical location and identity. This interplay can be clearly seen is the way in which the body serves as a basis for demarcation of persons into distinct categories, which in turn affect how the individual sees oneself. It is also present in the varying interpretations that can be given to ways in which the body is adorned, decorated or beautified based on cultural and other underlying assumptions about beauty and the body. The aim of this presentation is to examine some of the assumptions that are made about the different ways in which the human body is used for artistic representation, and about cultural, racial and gender differences (and superiority in some cases) about bodies and body presentations. It will also interrogate the ways in which the body as an artistic canvass can be used as a location through which the development of a strong positive sense of self can be facilitated, and how it can hamper the same.
 

One of the more ambitious and yet fruitful attempts in recent years to untangle general questions about the nature of aesthetic phenomena and their socially constituted nature rests in Lambert Zuidervaart’s critical hermeneutic theory of artistic truth. Zuidervaart follows Adorno in accepting that aesthetic critique should include critique of non-aesthetic institutions, e.g. economic and cultural institutions. (Zuidervaart 2005, 56) In this paper, I explore one part of Zuidervaart’s project, namely his conception of “aesthetic validity as a horizon of imaginative cogency” (ibid, 9). I seek to develop Zuidervaart’s conception by bringing his thesis into dialogue with phenomenological analyses of “horizon” and the collective intentional approach to institutional and social objects, both projects that I have been at work on elsewhere.
 
The phenomenological analysis of horizon should serve to add content to the idea of horizon. Zuidervaart relies primarily on Gadamer’s view of horizon, but does not offer very much by way of clarification as to exactly what a horizon is. Gadamer’s view of horizon is developed in response to that of Husserl. It is my contention that the Husserlian notion is both more informative and has more utility for Zuidervaart’s project. Of course, he might contend that the phenomenological project is too focused on individual experiences and lacks sufficient resources for understanding social phenomena. (ibid.) This view of phenomenology and its resources, I have argued, relies on an insufficient understanding of the scope and nature of phenomenological analysis. (Chelstrom 2012) Hermeneutics isn’t new to phenomenology with Heidegger and Gadamer, just accentuated.
 
The collective intentional approach to institutions offers a framework for interpreting social phenomena that is both congenial to phenomenological analysis and which offers a way to preserve subjectivity while addressing intersubjective phenomena. Such an approach was already embedded in a close reading of Husserl’s controversial Fifth Cartesian Meditation (Husserl 1999), though critics have long charged him with solipsism. However, those critics fail to appreciate the nature of Husserl’s concern. In brief, after recognizing the intersubjectively rich nature of everyday life, Husserl asks what’s left over if one brackets those layers of meaning constitution relative to a given phenomenon. It is one issue to argue that there would be nothing left over, though that is a far harder challenge than critics often acknowledge, it is a separate issue to argue that Husserl is thereby solipsistic – a claim that is clearly misguided if the issue is bracketing socially constituted elements of one’s experience.
 
The promise for aesthetics on this approach is that it acknowledges both the individual’s and their culture(s)’s  influences on their experiences and evaluations while also being able to account for Frankfurt School type concerns about the effects of institutions on our judgments. At the same time, this approach will allow one to clarify why naïve relativisms in aesthetics are mistaken.

by Joshua Hall
j.maloy.hall@ospamgmail.com

This presentation takes its practical orientation from my experiences in a philosophy reading group on death row in Nashville, Tennessee, and its theoretical orientation from W. E. B. Du Bois’ understanding of the battle for aesthetics as essential in the war against racial oppression and social injustice.  In outline, after a careful reading of Du Bois' essay "Criteria of Death Row Art," I will explore several of Michel Foucault's writings on imprisonment, subjectivity and self-creation, foregrounding the important interconnections among these three phenomena in order to illuminate the conditions of prison artists in a way that offers a productive challenge to contemporary aesthetics. 

 

As we enter a period of increased awareness of Architecture and our environment in Barbados, stimulated by the recent UN World Heritage Inscription, it becomes evident that there will be a need for increased understanding of aesthetics as it applies in particular to the design, renovation and restoration of buildings.

 

Philosophical aesthetics in the (broadly) analytic tradition has focused on two questions (in addition to others): The Art Question: What is (and isn’t) art? (Is art necessarily representational? Is art necessarily conceptual? Can an art object have a strictly utilitarian purpose? Etc.) The Value Question: What is aesthetic value? (Does aesthetic appreciation of an object confer or discover aesthetic value? If the latter, what is the source of aesthetic value? Etc.) This paper is about the way that attention to these questions can affect the treatment of unfamiliar cultures within analytic aesthetics.

First, I argue that a focus on the Art Question has the tendency to marginalize cultures unfamiliar to most analytic philosophers, while a focus on the Value Question has the potential to produce a genuinely inclusive philosophical aesthetics. My argument, in a nutshell, is that (1) the two most philosophically seductive analyses of art—the institutionalist theory and the representationalist theory—tend to exclude the unfamiliar, whereas (2) the two most philosophically seductive analyses of aesthetic value—aesthetic constructivism and aesthetic realism—are intrinsically disposed to include the unfamiliar.

Second, I distinguish between activist philosophy (which aims to do good in the world) and theoretical philosophy (which proceeds without regard for its effects). I argue that good philosophy is theoretical philosophy, and therefore that philosophers should not explicitly set out to produce a more inclusive philosophical aesthetics.

Third, I argue that even from the perspective of purely theoretical philosophy, the Value Question is simply more interesting than the Art Question. I argue that whatever the nature of art turns out to be, it is fixed by arbitrary linguistic conventions—whereas this is not the case with respect to the nature of aesthetic value. Thus, I argue on purely theoretical grounds that philosophers ought to focus on the Value Question and ought to mainly disregard the Art Question. This suggestion has the beneficial side-effect of producing a more inclusive philosophical aesthetics.
 

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  Violence covers a series of phenomena: feelings, sentiments, body or physical, killing, crimes, aggressions and war, arts and culture, etc by which one expresses one’s reaction to as situation or imposes one’s will to others. The aim of this paper is to show how violence is expressed and represented in the Francophone writings of Africa and the Caribbean. It can take the shape of the grotesque or even self-mutilation; it can also involve a fantastic universe in which only the sacrifice of blood softens the anger of gods. In African and Caribbean Francophone literature, one notices that the appropriation of self in the process of liberation is very important. Every writer uses his basic temperament to express or acquire it. The four writers – Aimé Césaire, Mongo Beti, Sony Labou Tansi and Patrick Chamoiseau – I have chosen at random confirm obviously an initial perception of how self-conquest is represented in literary works. In Césaire’s work verbal violence is about letting the voice of the oppressed heard throughout the world, it’s a real conquest of space. Mongo Beti continues in the same vain by radicalizing it even after the occurrence of independence. Sony Labou Tansi puts it to the level of the unsolved, the foolishness by exploring all the senses possible or exploiting the topic of resitance to the powerful leadership. Tansi goes beyond Césaire and Beti’s attempts and breaches all linguistics rules. The same kind of dementia or verbal delira is also illustrated by Chamoiseau in his attempt to put the foundation of a Creole discourse. I hope to come out with a sound synthesis on the subject. In the end the discussions of resistance/violence/identity will bring us to address the relationships between art and morality. What is it telling us when apparently the only route for someone to become themselves is through violence or delirium?  
 

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The paper endorses the view articulated by, amongst others, Iris Murdoch and Martha Nusssbaum, that some novels are ‘irreplaceably works of moral philosophy’.  While narrative literature provides countless opportunities for the acquisition of phenomenal knowledge (or knowledge by acquaintance) the paper shows how other art forms – including music, film, dance, architecture and painting – have the capacity to contribute to moral insight and understanding by means other than merely descriptive.   Works of art are shown to provide knowledge other than propositional (with its concern for truth) in ways that are radically different from that provided by the study of ethics, science, history or psychology, for example.  The paper is critical of those who, wedded to an adherence of propositional knowledge as paradigmatic, would deny that art is a source of knowledge and understanding in general, and moral knowledge and understanding in particular. Art, through the opportunities it affords for imaginative insights, can show us how to feel and respond, as well as what it is, or might be like, to be subject to experiences in a world very different from that which is familiar and parochial. It is argued that art also has the potential to enhance our understanding of what is/is not appropriate to feel and do in response to a given situation.

But the question here is: what is the real significance of this sense of rhythm in the life of the African? The rhythm that is prevalent in the existence of the African is one of participation in life. As a rule, submission to this rhythm ought to instill in man a discipline of the body and mind that determines self-mastery and, the African would thus gain a degree of freedom.

I argue thus that the rhythmic existence of the African does not bring to him a more self-mastery.The presence of art in the form of rhythm and dance in the daily life of the African has not hitherto contributed to making out of the African a more free being.
 

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Looking at the overlapping ideas between early twentieth century American pragmatism and German phenomenology, this paper extrapolates a notion of experience from Dewey, James, and Heidegger that is orthogonal to traditional modern metaphysics (which, in using the word ‘experience’, refers to the perceptual content of a subjects mind) and explicates ‘experience’ as a lived composition of phenomenal events that is determined between the temporal points of beginning and end. With this particular notion of experience in place, the structural conditions of such an experience are drawn out to the purpose of then arguing that these structural conditions are analogously similar to the phenomenal structure of music and are therefore embodied by music, that is, built into music insofar as music is, unlike some other visual arts, a temporalized material product created by a human being (Dasein), emerging as the objectification of a particular kind of experience—the aesthetic experience of musical performance. The real time production of music, say as one is playing the guitar, is doubled sided in the sense that the person plucking strings to create a sound (producer) can also be a person hearing those sounds as they are made (contemplator). In other words, as a “musical performer”, one gets to simultaneously experience both producing the music and contemplating the music. If music embodies the structure of the experience that produces it, then the insight we are left with is:  the aesthetic experience of musical performance has the potential to be self-reflexive. That is, the explicit phenomenal structure of music as a worldly entity can act as a mirror which reflects onto the experiencer the implicit ontological structure of their Self as an existing entity. Understood as such, an examination of aesthetic experience as that which gives rise to the possibility of the semi-religious experience of loss of self in intense performance or meditation chanting is suggested as a topic for further research.
 

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Art: The Pleasure's in the Thinking

by Dena Shottenkirke
dshottenkirk@nospambrooklyn.cuny.edu
Read complete paper (PDF)

 

Social aesthetics consists of aesthetic care to groups of people who cannot assist classes of aesthetics for different reasons such as social, economic, psychological ones. Social aesthetics as a sector tries to ensure an improvement of the psychological state of persons rather than their appearance. What happens is that volunteers offer services of aesthetics to mentally ill people or to nursing homes full of old people –they usually use cosmetics donated by large multinational firms in favour of old people, by massaging them over the face and body, which has tremendously good results in their sanity and well-being. Using this method, not only these people manage to feel beautiful but also to accept messages of life, of capacity for a normal social life etc.

Conclusion: The present paper would try to play a constructive role on behalf of man and aesthetics by presenting benefits for the first such as development of social consciousness, commonweal, expression of a common language uniting people, since aesthetics  provides models and values of ethics, solidarity, dignity, parity.
 

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