Comparative Aesthetics, Syllabus for a World Aesthetics

I just finished teaching a class on the Philosophy of Art in which I tried to take a world perspective.   My typical previous way of teaching this class was to follow the history of Western aesthetics from Plato to Danto and feminist aesthetics with some side trips to Eastern traditions.   As a randomizing strategy to avoid ethnocentrism I organized the course in a roughly alphabetical way by culture.   We started with African aesthetics, then Aztec aesthetics, and so on.  In each case I tried to pair an account of traditional aesthetics within the culture with something more contemporary, as for example pairing Aztec Aesthetics with Chicano Aesthetics.  My key texts were encyclopedia articles on various traditions in The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics,  Calliope's Sisters by anthropologist Richard Anderson, Crispin Sartwell's Six Names of Beauty, and Kathleen Higgins' "Comparative Aesthetics." 

Traditionally, what I was doing is called “Comparative Aesthetics.” But what is Comparative Aesthetics?  How is it different from Aesthetics proper?  What is being compared exactly?   For countries where there is not a long written tradition, Comparative Aesthetics usually involves reading some anthropology-based or art-history-based work and comparing what we see with Western aesthetics.  For countries with long written traditions, like China, Japan and India, it is more a matter of close reading of very old texts on the arts in conjunction, of course, with analysis of actual art forms.

Before going on, I would like to distinguish what I was doing from Comparative Aesthetics.  I was doing something more like "Aesthetics from a World Perspective."  Comparative Aesthetics is part of that, but I think we need to experiment with treating Western aesthetics as just part of a much larger mix.  So I began the class with discussions of Comparative Aesthetics, and then moved on to specific Non-Western traditions, specifically African Aesthetics, and then more specifically with Yoruba Aesthetics. Yet, since comparison is inevitable, as is the issue of application of Western aesthetic theories to other cultures, I followed this up with a lecture on Clive Bell's aesthetic theory.   And to avoid an essentialist approach to the aesthetics of the West, I balanced this with material on John Dewey.   Looking back on the class I probably should have also had the students read a selection from Tolstoy or Collingwood to get something of the emotionalist or art as expression tradition in Western aesthetics.   Reading Hume's essay "On the Standard of Taste" was essential to any account of aesthetics.  I  also had them read Plato's Symposium, but that was partly in order to help them understand how Western works can sometimes be surprisingly close to Easter.  Although I assigned a selection from Kant's Critique of Judgment, there just was not enough time to do it justice.   Back to the course reading line-up, we spent a week on Chinese aesthetics, a week on Indian aesthetics, a week on Japanese aesthetics, and a day on Indigenous Aesthetics.  (See the schedule at the end.)

A lot can be learned from Comparative Aesthetics, and yet there is often something almost Euro-centric about it, despite the authors' best intentions to avoid ethnocentrism.  For what is being compared almost always seems to be something Western as against something Non-western.  Moreover, the almost inescapable reality is that aesthetic texts, especially on African and Pre-Columbian aesthetics, tend to start with or center on the evolution of Western perception of these non-Western art traditions, and of attempts by writers in formerly colonial countries to establish an independent aesthetic theory.  

A typical narrative of Comparative Aesthetics takes the following form: first, the art of X was treated as a collection of curiosities; then it was seen as art paradoxically created by people without any aesthetic sensitivity; then it was treated as art which has formal qualities strangely similar to those of Western masterpieces; then it was treated as art, but only when it is "authentic," which is to say, precolonial; then it was treated as art, but only properly so when seen in its actual historical and performance context (for example the tribal mask in the context of ritual practice); then it was treated as art best seen in terms of aesthetic concepts coming out of the culture in which it was produced.  This kind of narrative may be inescapable, but it does tend to look at things from the perspective of the West, although gradually pointing towards an evolution that will finally privilege the culture of origin itself.  For a theorist from the country in question, however, the narrative is often situated within the larger narrative of trying to achieve freedom from colonialism and neo-colonialism, which is connected with the quest for dignity and respect. 

One problem I have noticed in Comparative Aesthetics writings is that Western aesthetics is commonly seen in an essentialist way.  The idea proposed (falsely) is that the essential Western aesthetics is the formalism of Clive Bell and Roger Fry.  More broadly, the essentialist claim is often that Western aesthetics is wedded to the ideas of passive contemplation, disinterestedness, and connoisseurship.  This happened for a number of reasons that are perfectly understandable.  First, Comparative Aesthetics in the visual arts seems to go back to the moment when Picasso and friends started relating to African artifacts more as art than as curiosities.  The ur-moment was Picasso coming back to his studio with an African mask and incorporating it into his Demoiselles D'Avignon ) (1907).  Second, Formalism is associated with this moment.  Formalism seemed especially well-suited to appreciation not only of Post-Impressionist Art and the Abstract Art that followed in the Western Modern Art period, but also to understanding and appreciation of non-Western traditions.  An important moment in Formalism was Bell's famous book Art, written in 1914.  It is noteworthy that Art had as its frontispiece a non-Western work, a Chinese statue.  Bell's openness to other cultures, and also to objects often seen as craft objects, came as a radical change from the time of Hegel in which Non-western art was generally regarded as inferior. 

Yet Bell’s Formalism also was closely related to Rober Fry’s, and Fry later became notorious for his comments about how African sculptures could be masterpieces and yet come from a people who have no aesthetic sensitivity.  (How Fry could had said this and not tremble at his own self-contradiction is hard to see.) 

Looking specifically at African aesthetics we can see that the Western is not quite as monolithic as it is often made out to be.  First, even Bell’s theory had its good side:  it opened us up to the possibility of seeing African art positively while at the same time calling on us to ignore context.

I can see the temptation of identifying Bell with ethnocentrism, and colonialism as well as cultural appropriation.  One has the famous Primitivism show which seemed to show that Western curators were stuck with the formalist model.  But the problem here is in part one of a misreading of what Picasso was trying to do with Les Demoiselles.  

In his otherwise excellent Encyclopedia of Aesthetics essay “African Aesthetics” (2014) Barry Hallen raises some interesting questions when it comes to Picasso.  He usefully quotes Andre Malraux saying that Picasso did not see African sculptures as simply good sculptures but saw them as magical things, and then he quotes Rubin on Picasso.  But Rubin sees Picasso’s achievement in purely formalist terms, and therefore sees only an “elective affinity” and a form of cannibalizing.  

Halley then essentializes the Western by saying that it sees the African as “incapable of aesthetic sensitivity” which is surely not only for Fry and the typical colonialist and not even for all formalists.   Moreover, as much as Hallen has a problem with Western connoisseurs’ there is no reason, given the work of Robert Ferris Thompson, to not see connoisseurs in African contexts as well. 

Kathleen Higgins has written one of the nicest pieces on the topic "Comparative Aesthetics." In Jerrold Levinson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics. Oxford University Press (2005)  Like other writers she tends to essentialize Western aesthetics, saying that for the West, "art is understood to be designed primarily for contemplation."  Surely this would not be seen as true for Plato or Aristotle, for example, nor for Dewey, as I already mentioned. Collingwood also would not have ascribed to this theory, even though he was in fact a proponent of the view that fine art was distinct from everyday craft. Higgins stresses that many other societies make art "for purposes other than engaging contemplation; they do not distinguish between fine arts and crafts, judge artworks for their performance of practical functions, and integrate art into everyday life."  (679)

For me, a central interest of Comparative Aesthetics is the stress it places on everyday life.  Indeed, it was Higgins textbook Perspectives on Aesthetics was one of the first works to direct me towards everyday aesthetics.  Yuriko Saito's seminar work Everyday Aesthetics  draws frequently on Comparative Aesthetics, particularly on Japanese Aesthetics, for which she also wrote one of the two entries in the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics.  

At the end of the class I asked students to imagine a book on World Aesthetics.  What would be the main problems covered?  What specific cultures would be studied and how would their study be arranged?  Unlike any of the other efforts I have seen I included a section on Rasquachismo, a significant aesthetic theory for Chicano culture.  Several of my students were of Hispanic heritage and found this tradition to be particularly useful in thinking about World Aesthetics.  

One aspect of approaching aesthetics from a world perspective is that the concept of Beauty takes more prominence than it does in other Philosophy of Art classes.  Partly this is due to my choice of Six Names of Beauty by Crispin Sartwell as a key textbook. Sartwell was an early proponent both of everyday aesthetics and of Comparative Aesthetics.  Beauty becomes more prominent just as fine art becomes less so, since beauty is an attribute that fine art, nature, and everyday aesthetics share in common.  

Syllabus on World Aesthetics:  [using this approach depends on having access to The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics online through our library.]

African Aesthetics: 

1.  “African Aesthetics”  Barry Hallen Encyclopedia of Aesthetics 

2.  Appiah, K.  “Is the Post in Postmodern the Post in Postcolonial?” 

Behind the Mask  Tribal Eye  1975  David Attenborough

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPfFBA0yuoo

See  The Wikipedia article for background information on “The Tribal Eye” TV series.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tribal_Eye

African Aesthetics continued   Yoruba Aesthetics

1.      “African Aesthetics,” Rowland Abiodun The Journal of Aesthetic Education” Vol. 35, No. 4 (Winter, 2001), pp. 15-23 2.

Richard L. Anderson  Calliope’s Sisters “Yoruba Aesthetics”

Supplement ”Abiodun Understanding Yoruba Art and Aesthetics  https://www.amherst.edu/system/files/media/0222/UnderstandingYorubaArtandAesthetics.pdf  

Lecture on Clive Bell "Art" [needed to contextualize the European reception of African and other non-Western art traditions]

American Aesthetics: 

1.  John Dewey  Art as Experience.  Selection  http://thenewschoolhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Dewey-Ar tasExperience.pdf

See also my own article on Dewey in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy  

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dewey-aesthetics/

2.1-2.4

Aztec and other Pre-Columbian Aesthetics

1.  Leon-Portilla, Miguel. Aztec Thought and Culture.  [handout]

2.  Richard L. Anderson   “Aztec Aesthetics ”  Calliope’s Sisters 

3.  James Maffie  “Aztec Philosophy”  Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://www.iep.utm.edu/aztec/

 

Optional:  

James Maffie    Aztec Philosophy [eBook] University Press of Colorado 2013  Available through Clark Library.

“Pre-Columbian Aesthetics”  Esther Pasztory in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics 

British Aesthetics and “Beauty”

David Hume    “On the Standard of Taste”

http://www.econlib.org/library/LFBooks/Hume/hmMPL23.html

Roger Scruton   video on Beauty  “Why Beauty Matters”  https://vimeo.com/103665136

Crispin Sartwell    Six Names of Beauty   Forward and Chapter 1 “Beauty” xi-25. 

Early Chinese Aesthetics:  

1.  Liu Hsieh.  Wen-hsin tiao-lung   Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons.  522 A.D. 

Read Introduction and pp. 1-8.

https://archive.org/details/literarymindcarv00liux

Another easy to print version is here: 

https://archive.org/stream/literarymindcarv00liux/literarymindcarv00liux_djvu.txt

Optional:  Vincent Y. C. Shih “Classicism in in Liu Hsieh's "Wen-hsin tiao-lung"”  - E-Periodica

www.e-periodica.ch/cntmng?pid=ast-002:1953:7::220  Asiatische Studien : Zeitschrift der Schweizerischen Asiengesellschaft = Études asiatiques : revue de la Société Suisse - Asie Band (Jahr): 7 (1953)  I found this by doing this google search:

https://www.google.com/webhp?source=search_app&gws_rd=ssl#q=Wen-hsin+tiao-lung++pdf&*

Modern Chinese Aesthetics

1.  Li Zehou  The Path of Beauty  trans.  G. Lizeng, New York   Oxford U. Press, 1994.         Selection  from first chapter.

2.  Ban Wang  “Aesthetics in Contemporary China”  Encyclopedia of Aesthetics

Chicano Aesthetics

1,  Thomas Ybarra-Frausto “The Chicano Movement/The Movement of Chicano Art.”  handout

2. Maria Anderson “A lesson in “rasquachismo” art: Chicano aesthetics & the “sensibilities of the barrio” Art, History & Culture / 31 January 2017  http://insider.si.edu/2017/01/lesson-rasquachismo-chicano-asthetics-taste-underdog/

3. Amalia Mesa-Bains "Domesticana": The Sensibility of Chicana Rascuache” http://v1.zonezero.com/magazine/essays/distant/zdomes2.html

4.  http://discover.sjlibrary.org:50080/ebsco-w-a/ehost/detail/detail?sid=eae4e7f8-c5c3-4976-93b9-9c9f69e3f181%40sessionmgr4006&vid=0&hid=4209&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#db=a9h&AN=19593176

Mesa Bains and Ybarra-Fausto

Also see Roberto Bedoya, “Spatial Justice: Rasquachification, Race and the City” Creative Time Reports, September 15, 2014, http://creativetimereports.org/2014/09/15/spatial-justice-rasquachification-race-and-the-city/

German Aesthetics, 18th century: 

1.  Kant  Critique of Judgment  http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/kant-the-critique-of-judgement   Bernard translation    We will be readings selections of this.  You may also use one of the other translations if you wish:  the Meridith and Pluhar translations are both good.

Please read The Analytic of the Beautiful which goes from Paragraph 1 to 23.  Please print out these sections so that we can discuss in class.  If you do a "search on page" and go to "The judgment of taste is aesthetical,"  that is where you start.

Greek  Aesthetics 

1. Sartwell  Ch. 4  To Kalon   Greek idea, ideal

2.  Plato     Symposium  selection on Diotima’s theory of beauty. 

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/symposium.html

Search on the page for “Diotima” and read from “And now, taking my leave of you, I would rehearse a tale of love which I heard from Diotima of Mantineia,” to the point at which Socrates concludes his story of Diotima.

Hebrew Aesthetics,  

1. Sartwell Ch. 2  Yapha This material by Sartwell is partly on Hebrew Aesthetics but mainly about such things as the beauty of flowers and jewelry.

Indian Aesthetics  

1.  Sartwell, Ch. 3  Sundara  Sanscrit  Holiness

2.  David I Gitomer  “Indian Aesthetics: Overview.”  Encyclopedia of Aesthetics

Bharata Natyasastra  200-500 CE  https://archive.org/details/NatyaShastra

Read some of the first chapter.

Rasa theory of Bharata: a lecture by an Indian philosopher with good powerpoint outlines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfDCKgd23LQ

Classical Indian Music  Ravi Shankar & Anoushka Shankar Live: Raag Khamaj (1997)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xB_X9BOAOU

Anoushka Shankar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CnhcGpmH9Y

Indian Classical Dance documentary  NATYANUBHAVA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_I2eT6jrIc&list=PLqMX6p0fwy3UgMPXDvAn8MctTlzULm4G9

Bharata Natyasastra  a short video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryiCtSMFktU

Bharata Muni’s Natyashastra Navrasa by Shiva Chopra   a short video showing standardized facial expressions for drama  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_ZIQ9C8p1g

Indian Aesthetics continued

1.  “Rasa”  Alan Goldman in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics

2.  “Abinavagupta”  by V.K Chari:in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics 

Indigenous Aesthetics 

1.  “Indigenous Aesthetics”  Dylan A. T. Miner  Encyclopedia of Aesthetics.

Islamic Aesthetics

1.  "Islamic Aesthetics,"  Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. Oleg Grabar, Fadlou Shehadi, Priscilla Soucek, Esra Akcan, and Jonathan M. Bloom

Japanese Aesthetics

1. Sartwell  Ch. 5  “Wabi Sabi”

2.  Saito, Yuriko  “Japanese Aesthetics,”  The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. 

3.   Saito  Everyday Aesthetics selection  http://ww.hettingern.people.cofc.edu/Env_Aes_2012/Saito-EverydayAesthetics.pdf

Latin American Aesthetics”   Encyclopedia of Aesthetics 

Navajo Aesthetics

1. Sartwell Ch. 6   Hozho

2.  Gary Witherspoon  http://parentseyes.arizona.edu/southcorner/nav_beaut.html

3.  Kathy M’Closkey “Towards an Understanding of Navajo Aesthetics”

http://see.library.utoronto.ca/SEED/Vol4-1/M'Closkey.pdf

4.  Berlo, Janet Catherine. 2014. "Navajo Sandpainting in the Age of Cross-Cultural Replication." Art History 37, no. 4: 688-707.

Anderson’s conclusions about aesthetics and his definition of art based on his study of Comparative Aesthetics:

Anderson  Calliope’s Sisters   Chapters 12-13  http://www2.clarku.edu/~jborgatt/salemstate/calliope.pdf

Why Goodman’s exemplification theory of art is not enough, and neither is Danto’s artworld theory, why they need to be combined and also enhanced by the Confucian concept of li. And by the way, you will also find my current definition of art here.

This may seem really antique to some.  But I still teach this stuff from the 60s and the 70s.  And I do think that Danto’s and Goodman’s theories from this period can provide a jumping off point for theoretical advance.   I will promote here something like Goodman’s exemplification and Danto’s is of artistic identification, but in both cases, I believe there needs to be an enhancement.  The basic question to ask is “why should anyone care whether something has the is of artistic identification and why should anyone care that something exemplifies in an artistic way?”  Why should we seek to see something through the atmosphere of artistic theory?  What is the point of seeing a Franz Klein expressionist work in such a way that we can place it in Danto’s style matrix, for example?  And, in response to Goodman, why should we care to focus on properties of line, color, texture, size, etc. of an intransparent work of art made out of a common rock displayed in a museum?   It could be said in both cases that this is your big chance to notice these properties.  But we could notice them outside the museum and in completely non-art contexts (at least the properties Goodman is stressing, maybe not the ones Danto stresses).  Maybe what is happening is that the properties have become subjects of entertainment once the object entered the museum.  There is something strangely Plato-like in Goodman’s theory.  Sure, he rejects Platonism strictly speaking, but, like Plato, the focus is on words, or rather concepts, and so when we see an red abstract painting, on his view, we are aware of the ways in which the redness of red is exemplified, which means that there is indirect reference to all other things that are red.  But classifying things under the term “red” is not really of any interest unless you are some sort of obsessive collector of red things.

Here is my suggested solution to the problem, one that Goodman would not be happy with, but Danto might be.   The idea is inspired by Crispin Sartwell’s book Six Names of Beauty.  Sartwell, in his last chapter reminds us of the way in which the philosophy of Confucius evolved through Chu Hsi and Wang-Yang-Ming to stress the importance of li, which, when found in the Analects, is generally translated as “ritual.” (143-146) Later in Chinese philosophy it is taken to mean the essence of things, not simply their Platonic essence but the way in which they partake in the community and the cosmos.  Then, with Wang Yang-Ming, a pragmatist tendency intervenes so that “li” comes to depend on the interaction of the live creature, as Dewey would put it, with the environment.   Wang Yang Ming also introduces a love element to this theory, which both Sartwell and I like largely because we are both enamored by Plato’s theory of beauty and love in the Symposium. 

So let’s hypothesize, in a comparative philosophy way, that the reason why we care about arthood in Danto’s sense or in Goodman’s sense, or, better, in a combination of Goodman and Danto (since Goodman covers the cognitive dimension of our bodily encounter with exemplification, and Danto covers the cultural/historical aspect, each complementing the other, Goodman covering the way in which art involves certain ways the world is and Danto ways in which art and artworld interact) is that what emerges is “li” or, if we want to put it this way, the ritual-emergent essence, ritual being the way in which a complex whole is imbued with meaning that has reference to individual, community and cosmos, all together.   Art ultimately gets as essences in the way ritual does.  Art is our contemporary way of doing ritual (or maybe just one contemporary way).
 

We who love art care about art because of something that normal people with normal vision cannot see.  Something emerges because of atmosphere, but not just the atmosphere of the artworld, or simply because there are a lot of predicates missing from the style matrix (and we are somehow aware of all of these missing things, e.g. the non-imitation and non-expression of purist art) on Danto’s account. 

Something emerges, something is there which is exhibited only to those who know how to see, and what is exhibited is the li.   Now the li is socially-historically constructed:  I am not using this term to indicate anything that science can discover or describe.  Li is complex multi-layered aura of significance; an aura of possibility, but also an actual aura as-experienced.  This aura is emergent upon relations with self, community, culture, world and universe.  (Again, we are not positing the relation to the actual universe but rather to the universe as a concept, as something experienced, as something that is part of our consciousness, as even what Kant would call an a priori concept.) 

What Danto misses is that blob of paint we see as Icarus in the Bruegel painting is not just something imagined as Icarus but rather something with heightened significance based on its relations with every other aspect of the painting: and it is also perceived as a window, in a way, to the culture at large, to our own inner selves and also to our world as much as to the world of 16^th century Flanders.  It is not the atmosphere of theory or even art history so much as all of that plus all of the other appropriate atmospheres, the atmosphere of European history for example, and more.  See it through the atmosphere of what it is to be human, and of course the atmosphere of the theory of what it is to be human, as it evolves in our culture, too. 

And, speaking of Goodman, it is not that we need to simply notice all of the syntactic and semantic density of the work as symbol plus its repleteness, exemplification and complexity.  Take the print by Hokusai as his reference.  Rather there musts be something much more, something which would include not only what the Dantoian aesthete would see, but also a recognition that the curved line in the Hokusai would not have any meaning at all without its organic relations to the entire painting, and then pushing beyond that to the various organic relations that can emerge in study or contemplation between this work, self, world, etc.  It is only when the Hokusai line emerges with the aura of li that we get it, i.e. that we appreciate the painting is the best and fullest way.  Otherwise, the difference between perceiving a Hokusai and perceiving a cure in a stock market chart (when it goes up it is good for us financially) is just a matter of degree.  I think that Goodman was moving in this direction when he included a sixth symptom of the aesthetic. 

Sartwell’s thought that in loving beauty we love the entire world can be translated into the notion that the beauty of a Hokusai connects to the world not simply in terms of multiple reference (Goodman in the end is just too mechanical:  multiple reference just means more labels applied, whether metaphorically or not…and the issue is not one of application of labels). 

Something is art if it has Danto’s “is” of artistic identification, exhibits some of Goodman’s symptoms, and expresses “li.”  (This may be the first time I have ever attempted a definition of art!)

Saito's Everyday Aesthetics revisited: call for the in-between

So it has been ten years since Yuriko Saito's Everyday Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2007) came out, a seminal work in the burgeoning new field of everyday aesthetics.  She will be having a new book on the topic coming out soon.  But perhaps now is a time to revisit some of the issues raised especially in the first chapter of Everyday Aesthetics with the understanding that this is not necessarily her current position.  The chapter is titled "Neglect of Everyday Aesthetics."  It is available here.  Most of what Saito says in this chapter I agree with and it should be understood that the purpose of this post is simply to use her piece as a jumping off point for reflection, as I have in the past.  Saito makes a strong distinction between two kinds of experience in everyday aesthetics. One kind is the "stand out" experience, roughly similar to Dewey's idea of "an experience."  The second is another set of reactions we might, and often do, have to sensuous and/or design qualities of objects.  These would include the reaction of seeing an object as dirty and wishing to clean it up.

I accept Saito's expansion of the concept of the aesthetic to include these kinds of responses.  There is a dialogue going on here since Saito may have been partly inspired in this by an early article of mine on neatness and messiness as aesthetic qualities: “Everyday Surface Aesthetic Qualities:  'Neat,' 'Messy,' 'Clean,' 'Dirty',” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53:3 (1995) 259-268.  This was reprinted in The Aesthetics of Human Environments  ed Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant (Ontario:  Broadview Press, 2007).  What I currently want to push is an in-between dimension of aesthetic experience, something between the two extremes Saito posits:  a domain that I believe is fundamentally important not only for everyday aesthetics but for aesthetics in general.  In the tradition of Karl Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts and John Dewey in Art as Experience, but also of Thich Nhat Hanh on mindfulness, I want to call for expansion of this in-between domain, one that overcomes the alienation (usually based on exploitation as Marx would put it, or inadequate social arrangements as Dewey would put it) that characterizes experience at the low or "practical" end of the aesthetic spectrum.  I also see the three levels of aesthetic experience,  (1) the practical, (3) what I will call, after Buddhist thought, the mindful, and (4) the special/extraordinary, as dynamically inter-related.   So, whereas Saito favors a dichotomy between spectator-like experiences and experiences that "prompt us toward actions, such as cleaning, discarding, purchasing..."  I posit this, the middle "mindfulness," realm.  Following Nhat Hanh in his discussion of washing dishes with mindfulness and Marx in his notion of non-alienated labor, I think that there is a problem at the lowest level of the aesthetic:  a problem if the cleaning or discarding is not mindful, the purchasing is based on false consciousness in a society of consumerism (as critical theorist followers of Marx argued), and so on.  Low level activities of the sort that happen when one cleans for entirely functional purposes or purchases clothes just for comfort, usefulness, or getting ahead, become enhanced when they are mindful of aesthetic qualities. This means that I favor a notion of low-level contemplation, for example contemplative as opposed to mindless shopping. Whereas Saito associates the idea of contemplation only with the high level of fine art experience or contemplation of natural beauty, I think that mindful washing of dishes, for example, is contemplative in its own way.  

One difficulty here is that Saito associates contemplation and disinterestedness and with rejection of the proximal senses of taste, smell, and touch.  This is not my approach:  I see contemplation as applicable to multi-sensory experience.  Contemplative aesthetic experience of sexual intimacy for example is the preferred mode. Thus, on my view, one can take an aesthetic attitude towards everyday phenomena, and this can be a more valuable, actually is generally a more valuable, way to approach such phenomena, as long as it does not interfere with getting the job done.

Actually, then, I disagree with the notion that actions such as cleaning, discarding, and purchasing without any contemplative dimension are "typically the way in which aesthetics functions in everyday life."  They may in fact be typically the way in Western alienated capitalist society.  But they may not be in other societies, for example in Denmark or Bhutan.  Moreover, a better society would be one in which the contemplative or disinterested dimension of aesthetic experience of the everyday would be enhanced.  So, to put the point in another way, when Saito says that she wants to include not only aesthetic experiences of art, however broadly defined, but also "those responses that propel us toward everyday decisions and actions without any accompanying contemplative appreciation" (11) I would count this domain as, yes, aesthetic, but only at the very lowest level, and not something to be encouraged.  It is at the mid-level, where responses such as cleaning and choosing are not "almost automatic" as Saito puts it, but are mindful and at least minimally examples of contemplative appreciation because mindful of aesthetic qualities, that a happy life is constituted.  (I also think that other things that Saito says in her first chapter are actually more in accord with this position.) 

I understand the motive behind Saito's dichotomy: the need to move away from the hierarchy in which everything is seen in terms of Western fine art.  Saito eloquently demolishes that position. What I am offering is hopefully the dialectical next stage.  As with Saito, I also think my approach is more in accord with a multi-cultural, global viewpoint.  But this is because I think that in most traditional or tribal cultures, and in many other non-Western cultures, the middle, mindful, aesthetic domain, plays a more important role in life.  I agree with those people who believe that we should be more like the Navajo or the Bali people in their approaches to aesthetic experience, as much as we can given the Western-based world that surrounds us.  It is the Western mindset that promotes the dichotomy of humdrum practical vs. high art aesthetic.  I think that ultimately both Saito and I wish to undercut this dichotomy.

I also agree with Saito in attacking the tendency to see the aesthetic either as "highly specialized and isolated from our daily concerns, namely art, or else something trivial and frivolous, not essential to our lives, such as beautification and decoration" (12) and I agree that the low-level experiences that we are both interested in are important for practical purposes.  

However, although we both want to "restore aesthetics to its proper place in our everyday" lives (12), and reclaim its status in shaping the world, I wish to do so by encouraging and enhancing mindful and contemplative approaches to the everyday, whereas Saito is concerned that these approaches are too associated with an art-centered approach to aesthetics.  I agree that art-centered aesthetics can "compromise the rich diversity of out aesthetic life" but am not convinced that it always does.  Nor am I convinced that what she calls "experience-oriented aesthetics" (12) is detrimental to a sound everyday aesthetics as long as "experience" is not just understood in such a way as to privilege the distal senses or extreme forms of disinterested approaches to aesthetic objects. 

I also agree with Saito that "art is almost always regarded [in Western aesthetic theory] as the quintessential model for an aesthetic object" (13) and I believe that she is absolutely right to pursue this line.  (This makes me consistent with her quote from my 1995 article in support of her position.)  Saito presents an excellent discussion of the problems of art-centered aesthetics in the section with that name.  

My only caveat would be a response to Korsmeyer's approach to the aesthetics of food. Saito quotes Korsmeyer with approval as saying "the addition of taste and food to the domain of established aesthetic theory presents problems:  both inevitably come off as distinctly second rate, trailing the distance senses and fine art."  I just cannot agree that it is never right to understand food in terms of fine art:  my own view that something like the El Bulli dining experience is at the same level of high art as the best example of Japanese tea ceremony, and for the same reasons.  We must not turn our Western prejudices against the proximal senses into a determination of what makes fine art:  i.e. that fine art must use the distant senses. 

Nor do we have to see all food preparation as fine art in order to concede that some is.  Those who see the highest level Michelin star type dining experiences as somehow second-rate in relation to fine art painting are missing the point.  Saito further quotes Korsmeyer that "the concept of art, dominated as it is today by the idea of fine art, is a poor category to capture the nature of foods and their consumption." (17)  This just seems a category mistake since food as a category is broad like photography as a category.  Most photography is not art, and even less is fine art, and yet this does not mean that photography cannot be fine art. Similarly if we want to broadly capture the nature of foods and their consumption it would be best to focus not on El Bulli but on the vast number of practices involving food.  I would venture to say that virtually any social practice:  dance, food, music, video games, advertising, religious ritual, etc., can have a fine art manifestation (can be a product of genius, in Kant's sense).  But most dance, food, music, etc. is not fine art.  In any case, I would not want to, as Korsmeyer puts it, "divert attention from the interesting ways in which the aesthetic importance of foods diverges from parallel values in art." (18)  Of course one of the things that food as fine art does is focus our attention on such "interesting ways" just as dance as fine art focuses our attention on features of dance that differentiate it from other art forms.       

Saito further quotes Wolfgang Welsh as holding that sport, for example, "cannot substitute for Schonberg, Pollock, or Goddard" which, in my view, is just plain silly, since (1) no one is calling for substitution, and (2) the correct comparison class is master artists. It is not sports against Pollock, but Pollock compared to the El Bulli master chef, Adria. 

Saito is also excellent in his list of various things that are associated with the paradigms of classical Western art and which do not apply to everyday aesthetics.  Putting the point negatively, she says that there are various features that make certain everyday aesthetic phenomena non-art, like "absence of definite and identifiable object-hood and authorship, our literal engagement, transience and impermanence of the object, and the primacy of practical values of the object" (17) although I am somewhat concerned about the notion of "primacy of practical values" which can be interpreted in different ways.  

Saito's discussion of frames as unique to art as opposed to everyday aesthetics is of particular interest.  Ronald Hepburn had once noted that non-art objects are frame-less and that we then become the creator of the aesthetic object:  the frameless character can, as Saito puts it, "be compensated by exercising our imagination and creativity in constituting the aesthetic object as we see fit." (19)  I agree with this, but then I also think that this means that we are then virtually framing the object and thereby treating it as if it were a work of art at least in respect to being something that is now unified and has an imaginative/creative dimension, although this time introduced to some extent by ourselves as viewers.  This is why I say in my book that artists are the greatest experts in the aesthetics of everyday life.  They are constantly seeing landscapes for example as if they were works of art by framing them and exercising their imaginations in the process.  It is interesting in this regard that Saito's examples of such framing (a baseball game, the streets of New York, and drinking tea) read like a poet's appreciation of these things.  She has a fine poetic sensibility.  But poetry is an art form.  Moreover, when she says "in appreciating the smell and taste of green tea, I may incorporate the visual and tactile sensation of the tea bowl, as well as the sound of slurping" I note that this is exactly how one ought to appreciate tea in the setting of the Japanese tea ceremony, which Saito elsewhere recognizes to be an art form. (15)  

Saito admits that "In constructing the object of our aesthetic experience in these cases, we do select and specifically attend to certain ingredients in our perceptual field, just as we do when we appreciate art as art." (19)  The difference in her mind is that, in art, we determine this based on social convention and "institutional agreement" not on the basis of "our personal preference, taste, and inclination."  And she is right at least in that there is some greater degree of institutional agreement in the realm of art, but it strikes me that this is only a matter of degree and that there certainly a lot of relying on "our own imagination, judgment, and aesthetic taste as our guide" in art as much as in everyday life. Moreover, as Saito herself has described, there are some everyday practices that involve a lot of institutional agreement, for example sports and cat beauty contests.

So I agree with Saito when she says "We can appreciate the aesthetic value of a chair, an apple, a landscape, and rain as if the were a sculptural piece...[etc.] by becoming a pure spectator/listener.  However, more often than not, we experience a chair not only by inspecting its shape and color, but also by touching its fabric, sitting in it, learning against it, and moving it, to get the feel for its texture, comfort, and stability." (20) I just think that this just is what aesthetically contemplating what a chair is, what it is to be a "pure spectator" and that seeing it as if it were art must also take into account that in looking at a painting, for example, we, as Dewey observed, are subliminally aware of all of the other senses, and that the intensity of the color is that all of that other information is in some way contained in the color, and then seeing it as it functions in life, is also part of the background information subtly contained in great art.  It is just that, here, that stuff is no longer backgrounded.  One of the most poetical and best said passages in Saito's book is her description of eating an apple, except that she starts wrongly by saying that it is "our typical experience of an apple."  It is not your typical experience in alienated Western perception.   Here is what happens to Saito:  it is perceptual experience of eating an apple that is mindful:  "starts by beholding its perfect round shape and delicate colors ranging from red to green and holding it in our hand to feel its substantial weight and smooth skin.  Then we proceed to engage all of our senses and enjoy the crunching sound when we first bite into it, the contrast between the firmness of its contents and the sweet juice flowing from it, and, of course, its smell and taste."  This is the approach to an apple that a great chef would take, as well as a great poet.  It is an approach consonant with the tea ceremony approach to drinking tea.  It is a deeply contemplative approach to eating an apple very unlike the ordinary way we just consume food.

There is also the issue of conventions.  It is not as though there are no conventions in the experience of non-art.  Saito experiences three ways of appreciating raindrops.  One of them is "we may experience rain by sitting under the hanging roof of a Zen temple, looking out on its attached rock garden, attending to the way in which the surface of each rock glistens with wetness and nothing the elegant movement of raindrops..."  She stresses that, of the three way of appreciating rain, one the "singing in the rain" approach, and the third being that of John Muir in Yosemite, all are legitimate.  I agree, and yet each is a convention, and the one associated with the Zen temple is very immersed in the entire Zen aesthetic and even in a certain architectural aesthetic interestingly similar to what Heidegger speaks of when he describes a Greek temple experienced aesthetically.  So, it is wrong to say that "in all these examples, there is no institutional or conventional agreement" and that the only guide is what is more rewarding:  this sort of business is not as individualistic.  Finally, it is also just plain false that "experiencing a chair or an apple as a piece of sculpture ...is likely to be less interesting and satisfying than more normal ways of experiencing them" since all of the power of an Edward Weston photograph is based on the way in which doing so can be very interesting and satisfying, and, again, largely because he manages to capture, using only visual means, what it is to touch and eat the vegetable he photographs.  Again, although Saito is right that it does not matter when or under what light I observe a painting by Cezanne of Mt. Sainte-Victoire and it does matter when I view the actual Mt. Sainte-Victorie, I know this especially now because i have spent a lot of time looking at Cezanne.  Cezannes's painting of the mountain would not make any sense if it were not the case that he could paint it over and over again because it has different aesthetic qualities at different times.  (25)  Again, it is the dynamic relationship between the aesthetics of the everyday and the aesthetics of art that is most evident here.  

But where our area of disagreement comes up the most is exemplified when Saito says "We clean our kitchen and bathroom for hygiene, cook and eat food for sustenance, and pick our clothes for protection and comfort." (26)  Maybe the word "for" is ambiguous here, but my immediate reaction is that this is just false. I spend a lot of time doing all of these thing and I can only think of hygiene, sustenance, protection and comfort and some of the functions served by these activities...often not the most important ones.  I clean my kitchen mainly for the pleasure of getting it clean, and because I have been influenced by Nhat Hanh, secondarily for the pleasure in the rhythm of the process and the attendant aesthetic qualities, then thirdly because I want my wife to be happy with the results, and maybe fourthly for hygiene -  sure, of course, you want to eliminate the germs that might give you food poisoning....this is in the category of unimportant precisely because so obvious.  

So now to Kant.  I don't want to get deep into Kant interpretation here, and there is a lot of room for disagreement, but it strikes me that Saito's disapproval of his notion of the disinterested attitude in application to everyday aesthetics seems based largely on her understanding of what Kant means by "pure."  She thinks that Kant means that pure or "free beauty" is "more legitimate" than dependent beauty.  And yet Kant does not say so.  We Americans have associations with "pure" that Kant may not have had with the German word it translates.  Saito admits that Kant also has a concept of dependent beauty but thinks that he requires us to "surgically remove" functional value in order to appreciate the everyday.  But this is not how he treats architecture, or any of the arts, all of which he sees as examples of dependent beauty, with the possible exception of music without words.  Although I wholly agree with Saito that "in our everyday, normal interaction with a utilitarian object, the aesthetic and the practical are experienced as fully integrated" I am not convinced that Kant would have held otherwise.  (26)   Going beyond Kant, I think it would be better to say that in approaching the everyday aesthetic object we need to bracket practical considerations to see it as purposeless, to capture the "pure" aspect of the experience in free play, but that we need also to toggle between that and the other, dependent, aspect of the aesthetic object when it is an artifact and not a free beauty of nature. (How we ought to appreciate nature is not under consideration here.)  

Kant however was notoriously disregarding of the near senses, color (which he called mere "charm") and of the pleasures in practical activity.   Dewey, however, with his anti-dualist stance, would not have disregarded these things.  So this is why I join Saito against Kant when she says "the aesthetic value of a knife consists not only of its visual qualities, but also of its feeling in my hand, determined by its texture, weight and balance, but also of its feeling in my hand, determined by its surface texture, weight, and balance, but most importantly by how smoothly and effortlessly I can cut an object because of the material, shape, length, texture, and weight of the blade and handle."  (27)  Saito here stresses not the fact that the knife functions well but "the way in which all the sensuous aspects converge and work together to facilitate his use."  (27)  All of this, and the entire paragraph in which it appears, is, I think, a major contribution.