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Aesthetic Comprehension of Abstract and Emotion Concepts: Kant’s Aesthetics Renewed
Get PDFIn § 49 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment Kant puts forward a view that the feeling of pleasure in the experience of the beautiful can be stimulated not merely by perceptual properties, but by ideas and thoughts as well. The aim of this paper is to argue that aesthetic ideas fill in the emptiness that abstract and emotion concepts on their own would have without empirical intuitions. That is, aesthetic ideas make these concepts more accessible to us, by creating image schemas that allow us to think about these abstract concepts in a way linked to sensory experience, thereby imbuing them with a more substantive meaning and understanding
“This Obscure and Enigmatic Concept”. Philosophy of Cruelty in Nietzsche, Freud, and Beyond
Get PDFThis essay traces Derrida’s interrogation of Nietzsche and Freud’s concept of cruelty and his attempt to think the beyond that this concept necessarily presupposes. On the one hand, it highlights the key traits of the Nietzschean and Freudian concept of cruelty, namely, its irreducibility to determination and its essential entanglement with life. On the other hand, it explains that the beyond cruelty, which Derrida thinks by dissociating life from cruelty, offers us the point of departure for another thinking of life as well as for the foundation of the right to life
En chantier
Get PDFThis essay aims at reading Walter Benjamin’s Einbahnstrasse taking into account five interrelated aspects: the “crisis of narrativity” and the kinship of Einbahnstrasse with the surrealist texts and the practice of montage; the importance – not only romantic but also intellectual and political – of Asja Lacis, to whom the work is dedicated; the writing of Einbahnstrasse as an attempt to answer, literarily and politically, to another “Strasse”, the one of the despair and of the inflation in Weimar Republic; the form of the Denkbild; the figure of the child that plays with the debris, like in the case of the poet in Baudelaire or the proletarian children’s theater founded by Asja Lacis – the connection between Spiel and Stoff
Repetita iuvant? A Note on the Concept of “repeated Exposure” in Aesthetics
Get PDFWhy do we make the aesthetic judgements and have the aesthetic preferences that we do? How and to what extent does repeated exposure to a certain aesthetic object influence our appreciation and taste for it? The present paper aims at reflecting on the role played by repetition in enhancing people\u27s appreciation and attitudes towards an aesthetic stimulus (either a work of art or a natural object or event). Almost forty years ago the Polish-born psychologist Robert Zajonc famously championed the so-called "mere-exposure effect" hypothesis (Zajonc 1968), according to which repeated exposure of an individual to a stimulus is a sufficient condition for the enhancement of his/her attitude toward it. When applied to the aesthetic case, however, Zajonc\u27s theory produces inconsistent evidence. Is repetition useful or, more precisely, is it true that "the more we repeat, the more we like"? Repetita iuvant
Repetition, experimentation: games of chance and the urban room for play
Get PDFWalter Benjamin’s texts on Baudelaire put forward a threefold analogy, surprising at first glance, between the experience of the crowd, typical of modern metropolises, mechanized work and games of chance. While exploring gambling and the gambler in Benjamin’s analysis, this article explores the inner ambiguity of the concept of repetition: firstly conceived as belonging to the «time of hell» of the ever-new, it can also be understood as a gateway for understanding the processes of experimentation, which are crucial to modern and contemporary aesthetic experiences. In this sense, urban space can also be conceived as a room for play, vulnerable to and enriched by chance and playful mechanisms encompassing aesthetic and political dimensions
Theodicy as a social function and the age of secularization
Get PDFThis paper analyses both the possibility of interpreting theodicy as provided with a social function and that of a secularized version of the theodicy itself, characterised by a remarkable continuity between its religious version and the secularized one. To this purpose we focus on the functional analysis of theodicy, i. e. on the concrete effects that it has on society, and on its argumentative structure, reading it as a special kind of social justification; in particular, we underline the role of theodicy in the construction of meaning and its relations with ethics, the conception of justice and the presence of evil in the world. This interpretation is then tested by applying the theoretical conclusions thus obtained to a specific case: Weber’s analysis on Protestant ethic, since it exemplifies a theodicy with a clear social function. Lastly we apply this analysis to the historical case of Social Darwinism, interpreting it as a concrete instance of secularized theodicy; we especially focus on the thought and influence of Herbert Spencer and on its effects on his fervent, as well as probably most famous follower, Andrew Carnegie
The Emotion of Pain for a Critical Theory of Society
Get PDFPain, as a physical and emotional experience, is an involuntary and unpleasant response to a situation, namely an external manifestation of an unintentional aversion to reality. This paper discusses the social aspects of pain that are relevant to political philosophy, insofar as the concept of pain can be considered as an effective parameter to define a society. It will be argued that if pain in our society is experienced as private, the experience of solidarity can only be shared with people and situations with whom we can identify. In order to understand the emotional distance of many injustices in the world, the need for an awareness of human beings’ involvement in other people’s suffering is critical
Havarie by Philip Scheffner: an Experiment in Erratic Empathy
Get PDFIn recent decades, many studies have been published on the topic of empathy across a range of disciplines. Being empathic is today almost a social duty, amplified by the possibilities enabled by new media in terms of getting directly in contact with stories and experiences of distant people simultaneously. The general trend is arguably that of focusing on the fusional relation between subject and object, without taking into account the distance and conflict implicit in sensing the other. The latest film of the Berliner visual artist Philip Scheffner, Havarie (2016), offers some compelling and fresh cinematic devices to challenge other kinds of empathic relation with the spectator, focusing on an erratic temporality that avoids striking actions and takes position against the idea of one, unique, right image to represent reality
The veil of the body. Emotions and expressive mimesis in Johann Jakob Engel’s aesthetic thought
Get PDFIn the present article, I intend to examine the importance of Engel’s mimicry for the corporeal visualization of affects, showing the links with its roots in the early German Enlightenment. If the body serves as a picture of the soul, the aim of this essay is to understand how Engel’s mimicry turns this correspondence to its own purpose, enhancing its role as a privileged observatory of the human mind as well as a building site of a historical form of humanity
“At a Spit’s Distance”: Disgust and Fear in Aurel Kolnai and Jean-Paul Sartre
Get PDFDisgust and fear are very similar. Both seem to be a reaction of defense. The very sense of fear is nonetheless clear enough, that of disgust is not. Fear defends a person from something dangerous; disgust defends a person too, but the danger (if there is) that elicits it is absolutely obscure. In this paper, I will try to clarify in what consists the function of disgust and provide a criterion to identify its object. Basing my analysis on those carried out by Aurel Kolnai and Jean-Paul Sartre, I will claim that fear concerns the very existence of a person, while disgust its very value.Â