scholarly journals Aesthetic Experience as a Spiritual Support of Homo Post-Secularis

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Bychkov
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Spiritual Support ◽  
History Of ◽  
Secular Age ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Universe

The essay begins with an analysis of the cultural situation of humanity after its transition to secular mentality and a gradual disenchantment with secularism, which leads to the formation of post-secular mentality. It further suggests that aesthetic experience traditionally served as a bridge between the secular and the religious/spiritual and can serve in this capacity again in the post-secular age. It outlines the main traits of the post-secular person (homo post-saecularis). Two aspects of aesthetic experience are emphasized: its in-depth penetration into nature in an attempt to achieve unity with it, and the aesthetic observation of artworks. In pursuing both of these aspects, the post-secular person attempts, just as Romantics and Symbolists previously, to grasp something invisible beyond visible forms and escape from banal reality into higher spiritual realms of being, ultimately experiencing him- or herself as having a place in the universe. Aesthetic experience, if it is correctly understood and practiced, can give all this to the present-day post-secular person. The rest of the essay is devoted to a brief history of twentieth-century views of art, mainly in French and Russian thought, that foreshadow its post-secular role, and to the author’s authentic theoretical framework for understanding art and aesthetic experience, as well as his, equally authentic, program of how to achieve the post-secular function of art in practice for a present-day person.

scholarly journals POLISH AESTHETIC DISCOURSE OF THE 20TH CENTURY: INTERPRETATION OF INTERPRETATIONS

2018 ◽  
pp. 25-29
Author(s):  
E. I. Onishchenko
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Specific Nature ◽  
Theoretical Orientations ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
National University ◽  
Aesthetic Consciousness ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic

The article is devoted to the analysis of the Polish aesthetic discourse of the twentieth century and the prospects for its interpretation in the Ukrainian aesthetics, particularly in the works by Kateryna Shevchuk, defended at the department of ethics, aesthetics and culture studies of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. These research greatly extend the idea of the aesthetic canon of the Polish thought, classically represented by the aesthetics R. Ingarden and W. Tatarkiewicz and reveal the names of virtually unknown in Ukraine Polish scientists, including special interest is the legacy of L. Blaustein, M. Wallis, H. Elzenberg and G. Ossowski. In particular, this perspective covers traditional for the twentieth century aesthetics problems, including psychology of art, collective aesthetic experience, ratio, fantasy, and imagination. Also, new interpretive perspectives of sublime and ugly, aesthetical experience are opened. The theoretical orientations of the Polish scholars, in one way or another, were connected with the cornerstones of the aesthetic science - its subject, the conceptual-categorical apparatus, the structure of aesthetic consciousness, the phenomenon of artistic creativity, the specific nature of art, and others. In the process of conceptual concretization, in the field of Polish aesthetics a number of problems have been rather clearly distinguished, among which the special attention of practically all of its leading representatives has attracted the phenomenon of aesthetical experience. K. Shevchuk’s investigation opens up an opportunity, at least in the format of a secondary interpretation, to join the research of the Polish scholars, whose work proved to be a giant "white spot" for the Ukrainian aestheticians. Introducing actually unexplored concepts Polish scientists to the modern Ukrainian aesthetic theory not only facilitates the opening of "unknown pages" in the history of the twentieth century aesthetics, but also makes actual mark of new approaches to the analysis of classical problems, the relevance of which will never be a subject of doubt.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Dana Seitler
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Economic Equality ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Ideas

This book explores the pivotal role that various art forms played in American literary fiction in direct relation to the politics of gender and sexuality at the turn of the century. I track the transverse circulation of aesthetic ideas in fiction expressly concerned with gender and sexuality, and I argue that at stake in fin-de-siècle American writers’ aesthetic turn was not only the theorization of aesthetic experience, but also a fashioning forth of an understanding of aesthetic form in relation to political arguments and debates about available modes of sociability and cultural expression. One of the impulses of this study is to produce what we might think of as a counter-history of the aesthetic in the U.S. context at three (at least) significant and overlapping historical moments. The first is the so-called “first wave” of feminism, usually historicized as organized around the vote and the struggle for economic equality. The second is marked by the emergence of the ontologically interdependent homosexual/heterosexual matrix—expressed in Foucault’s famous revelation that, while the sodomite had been a temporary aberration, at the fin de siècle “the homosexual was now a species,” along with Eve Sedgwick’s claim that the period marks an “endemic crisis in homo-heterosexual definition.”...

Neuroaesthetics

2017 ◽  
pp. 87-102
Author(s):  
Ana Teresa Contier ◽  
Laila Torres
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Functional Neuroimaging ◽  
Imaging Techniques ◽  
Neural Architecture ◽  
History Of ◽  
System Memory ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Aesthetic

The aesthetic experience has been discussed throughout the history of mankind by philosophers and art historians, becoming a universal part of human experience, which leads us to some great interdisciplinary questions. It has been the subject of study by neuroscientists and neuro-psychologists since the 2000s. This recent evolution of neurology studies in the field of art, is due to in vivo brain imaging techniques, especially functional neuroimaging. Furthermore, recent research has provided evidence of cognitive interaction during the perception of an artwork indicating that the perceptual experience of art is not merely a passive one. This article reviews important studies in neuroaesthectics of visual art that point out that the aesthetic experience is related to the distribution in the neural architecture, suggesting the involvement of sensory-motor areas, emotional centers, reward system, memory and language.

scholarly journals The Unsolved Problem of Stellar Origins

1996 ◽  
Vol 169 ◽  
pp. 533-549
Author(s):  
Charles J. Lada
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
High Energy Physics ◽  
Gamma Ray ◽  
High Energy ◽  
Giant Molecular Clouds ◽  
Observational Astronomy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Large Telescopes ◽  
The Universe

We now stand at the threshold of the 21st century having witnessed perhaps the greatest era of astronomical discovery in the history of mankind. During the twentieth century the subject of astronomy was revolutionized and completely transformed by technology and physics. Advances in technology that produced radio astronomy, infrared astronomy, UV, X and γ ray astronomy, large telescopes on the ground, in balloons, aircraft and space coupled with advances in nuclear, atomic and high energy physics forever changed the way in which the universe is viewed. Indeed, it is altogether likely that future historians of science will consider the twentieth century as the Golden Age of observational astronomy. As a measure of how far we have come in the last 100 years, recall that at the turn of this century the nature of spiral nebulae and of the Milky Way itself as an island universe were not yet revealed. The expansion of the universe and the microwave background were not yet discovered and exotic objects such as quasars, pulsars, gamma-ray bursters and black holes were not even envisioned by the most imaginative authors of science fiction. The interstellar medium, with its giant molecular clouds, magnetic fields and obscuring dust was unknown. Not even the nature of stars, these most fundamental objects of the astronomical universe, was understood.

The General Impact of Context on Aesthetic Experience

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Pelowski ◽  
Eva Specker
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
General Consideration ◽  
Present Knowledge ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Key Aspects ◽  
Empirical Approaches

This chapter discusses the general impact of context on the aesthetic experience. It is designed to anticipate the other chapters’ discussions of context’s specific areas—the social, the physical or institutional, information and framing, museums, background or personality-related features. Here, the authors offer a more general consideration discussing key aspects such as: What even is context? How can it best be thought about? What are the key issues that might be considered? And, especially, how can it be generally integrated into present knowledge of models of aesthetic processing experience? Beginning with the interest in context throughout the history of aesthetics, the chapter builds a presentation of empirical approaches and especially theory, focusing on context’s main layers and points of influence. It then discusses how key context issues might be considered in models of aesthetic processing, with the goal of providing a framework for better approaching context aspects in this book and in one’s own future studies. This is also interspersed with what the authors consider to be some of the more intriguing studies in order to spur readers’ thinking about the potential for studying context. The chapter concludes with some major issues, some candidates for future consideration, and suggestions for further reading and education.

The fire next time. Cosmology, allegoresis, and salvation in the Derveni Papyrus

1997 ◽  
Vol 117 ◽  
pp. 117-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glenn W. Most
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Divine Intervention ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Organic Decomposition

Just in case there were any hardened sceptics who still doubted, in the second half of the twentieth century, that our world is ruled by an inept and rather junior God with immature judgment and a nasty sense of humour, He did his best to convince them by arranging for the discovery of the Derveni papyrus in 1962. The soldier who was cremated and buried in that Macedonian village towards the end of the fourth century bc had intended that the text of this papyrus be devoured by the flames of his pyre; but as it happened one of the burning logs fell onto the roll, covering and charring its top third and thereby saving that part both from immediate annihilation by the fire itself and from subsequent destruction by organic decomposition; then the Greek excavators sharp-wittedly recognized that the roll was not wood but papyrus, and the restorer of the Viennese papyrus collection managed to put together the more than 200 fragments into 26 columns of text. As A.E. Housman wrote in another connection, such a series of highly unlikely incidents can evidently not be ascribed to ‘chance and the common course of nature’, but only to divine intervention: ‘and when one considers the history of man and the spectacle of the universe I hope one may say without impiety that divine intervention might have been better employed elsewhere’.

Environmental aesthetics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen Carlson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Aesthetic Appreciation ◽  
Environmental Aesthetics ◽  
Large Measure ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Core ◽  
The World ◽  
The Aesthetic

Environmental aesthetics is one of the major new areas of aesthetics to have emerged in the last part of the twentieth century. It focuses on philosophical issues concerning appreciation of the world at large as it is constituted not simply by particular objects but also by environments themselves. In this way environmental aesthetics goes beyond the appreciation of art to the aesthetic appreciation of both natural and human environments. Its development has been influenced by eighteenth-century landscape aesthetics as well as by two recent factors: the exclusive focus of twentieth-century philosophical aesthetics on art, and the public concern for the aesthetic condition of environments that developed in the second half of that century. Both factors broadened the scope of environmental aesthetics beyond that of traditional aesthetics, and both helped to set the central philosophical issue of the field, which is due in large measure to the differences between the nature of the object of appreciation of environmental aesthetics, the world at large and the nature of art. These differences are so marked that environmental aesthetics must begin with basic questions, such as ‘what’ and ‘how’ to appreciate. These questions have generated a number of different philosophical positions, two of which are the engagement and the cognitive approaches. The first holds that appreciators must transcend traditional dichotomies, such as subject/object, and diminish the distance between themselves and objects of appreciation, aiming at multi-sensory immersion of the former within the latter. By contrast, the second contends that appreciation must be guided by the nature of objects of appreciation and that knowledge about their origins, types and properties is necessary for serious, appropriate aesthetic appreciation. Each approach has certain strengths and weaknesses. However, although different in emphasis, they are not in direct conflict. When conjoined, they advocate bringing together feeling and knowing, which is the core of serious aesthetic experience and which, when achieved in aesthetic appreciation of different environments of the world at large, shows just how rewarding such appreciation can be.

Praying by Numbers: An Essay on Medieval Aesthetics

2008 ◽  
Vol 104 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-91
Author(s):  
Niklaus Largier
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
History Of ◽  
Formal Basis ◽  
The Aesthetic

In this essay I argue that the imitation of examples of sainthood in the practice of prayer is the formal basis of a medieval aesthetics that focuses on the animation and the phenomenology of sensation and emotion. Quoting from this tradition and drawing on the mechanical character of such techniques of animation, nineteenth and twentieth-century authors and filmmakers——Flaubert, Huysmans, and Buññuel——explore the aesthetic possibilities of these religious practices. Thus, they recover and illustrate a history of the evocation of sensation and emotion through images and texts, which in the medieval context can be best described as a highly formal art of "praying by numbers."

Performatywny charakter estetyki

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (26) ◽  
pp. 32-50
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Dziamski
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Popular Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Louise Bourgeois ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Cognitive Perspectives ◽  
Making Art

Many lecturers of aesthetics feel that the subject of their lectures is not necessarily aesthetics, but history of aesthetics, the aesthetic views of Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, Hume and Burke, the British philosophers of taste and German romanticists. Does that mean that aesthetics feeds on its own past, is nurtured by reinterpretations of its classics, defends concepts and categories that inspire no one and do not open new cognitive perspectives? Does it mean that aesthetics is dead today, like Latin or Sanskrit, while its vision of art and beauty is outdated, invalid and totally useless? Aesthetics is a polysemous concept, which has never been sufficiently defined. It can determine a way of perceiving and experiencing the world that is specific for a given community, in other words, taste, yet it can also mean certain countries’ or regions’ contribution to aesthetic thought, to the aesthetic self-knowledge of man. Thus its dimension is practical, cultural and philosophical. Today aesthetics faces new challenges that it has to live up to; its major tasks include the defence of popular art, polishing the concept of aesthetic experience, aestheticization of everyday life and de-aestheticization of art, transcultural aesthetics and its approach to national cultures. In the book “Aesthetics: the Big Questions” (1998) Carolyn Korsmeyer reduces the main issues of contemporary aesthetics to six questions. The first question, old but valid, is a question about the definition of art. What is art? Nowadays everything can be art because art has shed all limitations, even the limitations of its own definition, and has gained absolute freedom. It has become absolute, as Boris Groys says. It has become absolute, because it has made anti-art a full-fledged part of art, and it has not been possible either to question or negate art since, as even the negation of art is art, legitimized by a more than 100 year long tradition, going back to the first ready-made by Marcel Duchamp in 1913. Today making art can be art and not making art can be art, as well, art is art and anti-art is art. The old question: “What is art?” loses its sense, and so does Nelson Goodman’s question: “When art?”. When does something become art? These questions are substituted by new ones: “What is art for you?”, “What do you expect from art?”. There can be a lot of answers, because defining art has a performative character. Louise Bourgeois has expressed the performative character of defining art in an even better way: “Art is whatever we believe to be art”. And for some reasons, which we do not fully realize ourselves, we want to make others share our belief.

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