Arnold Berleant 
Re-thinking Aesthetics 
Re-considering Philosophy and Aesthetics 
The theme of this congress, »Aesthetics as Philosophy,« offers a rich 
opportunity for reflection on the meanings and uses of both aesthetics and 
philosophy. With the challenge of contemporary developments in the arts 
and the recognition of the diversity and uniqueness of human cultures, many 
different interpretations will surely emerge in the days to follow. Moreover, 
the timing of this congress at the end of the millennium, while hardly a cosmic 
occurrence, still offers an unusual opportunity for profound reassessment 
of both aesthetics and philosophy. I shall only begin a process here that will 
surely continue in the days that follow. 
Aesthetics is often thought of as one branch of philosophy, sometimes, 
indeed, a secondary branch of little significance for the broad reaches of 
philosophic thought. This is somewhat odd, since Rant, who is generally 
regarded as a founding figure in modern philosophy, took the aesthetic as 
his epistemological foundation and then developed a theory of the aesthetic 
as the systematic unifier of knowledge and morality. And at a gathering of 
aestheticians from all parts of the world, it requires little argument to dismiss 
the low repute of aesthetics and acknowledge its philosophical significance. 
Because of Kant's enormous historical importance, however, it maybe more 
difficult to reconsider his dominant influence on the discipline of aesthetics. 
Yet that is precisely what I should like to propose here. For what could be 
more in keeping with both the critical tradition of philosophical thought 
and the openness of aesthetic perception than to re-think the foundations 
of our discipline. 
In the spirit of »aesthetics as philosophy,« then, I propose a radical re-
examination of the foundations of modern aesthetics. This kind of explora-
tion is at the same time a profoundly philosophical act, for philosophical 
premises lie at the very foundation of modern aesthetics. Exploring these 
premises, indeed challenging them, can lead us to a new basis for aesthetics 
derived from aesthetic inquiry and not as an afterthought of a philosophical 
tradition whose origins were quite independent of the aesthetic domain. 
Conversely, re-thinking aesthetics may suggest new ways of doing philosophy. 
Filozofski vestnik, XX (2/1999 - XIVICA), pp. 25-33. 25 
Arnold Berleant 
The Radical Critique of Aesthetics 
In recent years aesthetics has had something of a revival and is slowly 
emerging from its philosophical eclipse. At the same time, it has been the 
subject of serious criticism and fundamental reconsideration. Let me mention 
two very different examples. 
In The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terr)' Eagleton develops a politico-social 
critique of aesthetics, placing it »at the heart of the middle class's struggle 
for political hegemony.«1 Despite its protestations of autonomy, Eagleton 
sees the aesthetic in its historical complexity as a window into cultural and 
political changes. From this perspective, the very autonomy claimed for the 
aesthetic serves a larger political p u r p o s e as a mode l for bourgeo i s 
individualism, that is, of its own claims to autonomy. Thus the aesthetic is 
two-edged: It represents the political aspirations to self-determination of the 
middle class and provides an uncons t ra ined locus for sensibility and 
imagination. At the same time, however, the aesthetic serves to internalize 
social power, rendering it, through its transformation into subjectivity, all 
the more effective a repressive force.2 In a larger sense, then, aesthetic 
autonomy is specious, for the aesthetic is not au tonomous at all bu t is 
harnessed to a larger, political, purpose. Perhaps this might be called, with 
apologies to Kant, purpose without purposiveness - a utili tarian goal 
masquerading under the guise of being self-contained. 
Unlike Eagleton's subsumption of aesthetics unde r historical and 
political purposes, Wolfgang Welsch centers his critique on the aesthetic, 
itself. He finds that the aesthetic not only pervades the whole of modern life 
but lies at the heart of philosophical thought. The aesthetic concerns not 
just art but human culture en tout, and it spreads out to inform the very fabric 
of meaning, truth, and reality. Thus contemporary aestheticization processes 
cover the surface of our world and reach beyond to shape social as well as 
material reality, affecting the form of individuals' existence, of social 
interaction, and the very shape of culture, itself.3 More provocative still is 
Welsch's argument for epistemological aestheticization, in which »truth, 
knowledge, and reality have increasingly assumed aesthetic contours.«4 All 
this leads him to an »aesthetics beyond aesthetics,« which takes three 
principal directions: expanding aesthetic perception to the full range of 
aisthesis, enlarging the range of art to include both the multiplicity of its inner 
1 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 3. 
2 The Ideology of the Aesthetic, pp. 23, 28. 
3 Wolfgang Welsch, Undoing Aesthetics (London: Sage, 1997), pp. 5-7. 
4 Undoing Aesthetics, p. 23. 
26 
Re-thinking Aesthetics 
aspects and the many ways in which art pervades the whole of culture, and 
finally, extending aesthetics beyond art to society and the life-world.5 
I find these critiques of aesthetics both important and convincing. They 
herald a new stage in philosophical development, one that recognizes the 
fundamental place of aesthetics in both the criticism and construction of 
contemporary culture and of our very grasp of reality. Yet for all their broad 
thrust, I believe that they do not go quite deep enough. Eagleton encloses 
aesthetics in its political and historical context, while Welsch expands the 
aesthetic into a powerful cultural force. Neither centers his critique on the 
aesthetic, itself. 
Yet the aesthetic theory they work with stands square in the center of 
the very philosophic tradition they question. And until the defects in this 
tradition are exposed and replaced, any critique of aesthetics merely snaps 
at the heels of a sluggish though still powerful beast. The domain of aesthetics 
needs to be invaded by a Trojan horse, by a critique from within the theory. 
In the pluralistic spirit of postmodernism, then, I believe that still more can 
be said, and this from the standpoint not of culture or of history but of the 
aesthetic itself. There are artistic grounds for a critique of aesthetics, and 
there are philosophical grounds, as well. Above all, there are experiential 
grounds. None of these is independent of historical and cultural forces, but 
at the same time they cannot be reduced to these forces. The critique of 
aesthetics must take place on many levels and in many forms. 
Difficulties in Traditional Aesthetics 
Western aesthetics has been formed through two major influences -
first classical Greek, and then Enlightenment thought, particularly as it was 
formulated by Kant. Of course, these are closely related. Yet new strands of 
thought emerging since the eighteenth century suggest sharply different ways 
of conceiving aesthetics. If I can characterize the dominant tradition in 
aesthetics as Kantian, what we need to explore are the possibilities of a non-
Kantian aesthetics or, better yet, a post-Kantian aesthetics, and to consider 
the characteristics such a radically different aesthetics might display. I would 
like to take the occasion of this congress, and its provocative theme, to 
examine some of these possibilities and to suggest a new and different course 
that aesthetics might follow. 
The beginnings of movement away from Kant can be traced back to 
Undoing Aesthetics, pp. 95-99. 
27 
Arnold Berleant 
the middle of the last century. With his penetrating eye and directness of 
expression, Nietzsche recognized the fundamental difficulty with traditional 
aesthetics: »Kant had thought he was doing a honor to art when, among the 
predicates of beauty, he gave prominence to those which flatter the intellect, 
i.e., impersonality and universality.... Kant, like all philosophers, instead of 
viewing the esthetic issue from the side of the artist, envisaged art and beauty 
solely from the 'spectator's' point of view, and so, without himself realizing 
it, smuggled the 'spectator' into the concept of beauty.... [W]e have got from 
these philosophers of beauty definitions which, like Kant's famous definition 
of beauty, are marred by a complete lack of esthetic sensibility. 'That is 
beaut i fu l , ' Kant proclaims, 'which gives us d i s in te res ted p l ea su re . ' 
Disinterested!«6 
But it is not only the artist for whom disinterestedness is not appropriate. 
If the appreciator abandons the objectifying, analytic stance of the scholar 
or critic, the kind of personal participation that he or she engages in is closer 
to that of the artist than to the »philosopher of beauty« of whom Nietzsche 
spoke so disparagingly. I like to call this active appreciative participation 
»aesthetic engagement,« for it best characterizes the kind of powerful 
personal involvement that we have in our most fulfilled aesthetic experience. 
There are other reasons for wanting to discard the not ion of disinte-
restedness. The attitude it enjoins leads to distancing the art object and to 
circumscribing it with clear boundaries that isolate it from the rest of the 
human world. In the eighteenth century when the fine arts were being 
identified, separated from the other arts, and given a distinctive status, an 
aesthetics that institutionalized this process and con fe r r ed a special 
prominence on those arts had its value. With widespread acceptance of the 
identity and importance of the arts, such a need no longer exists. To eternalize 
an idea whose significance is now largely historical both exaggerates its place 
and hinders aesthetic inquiry. And it misdirects and obstructs appreciative 
experience.7 
Disinterestedness is not the only one of Kant's bequests that can be 
challenged. Eighteenth century aesthetics is very much a product of the 
thinking of the times. It places in full view both its reliance on faculty 
psychology and the essentializing and universalizing philosophy of the 
Enlightenment. Furthermore, it imposes a scientific model on aesthetic 
understanding, a model that proceeds by objectification, dissection, and 
analysis. Thus the conceptual structure that we have inherited from Kant 
11 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, Thi rd Essay, 6. 
7 I have developed a constructive cri t ique of dis interestedness in »Beyond Disinte-
restedness,« British Journal of Aesthetics, 3 4 / 3 (July 1994). 
28 
Re-thinking Aesthetics 
identifies distinct and separate modalities of perception and conception, 
beginning with that famous distinction itself. To separate percept and concept 
produces a problem some aestheticians continue to grapple with: the place 
of knowledge in the pe rcep tua l exper ience of art . The re are o ther 
problematic oppositions in the eighteenth century aesthetic, such as those 
be tween sense and reason , interest and disinterest , and illusion or 
imagination and reality. In the context of Enlightenment rationalism, these 
distinctions were illuminating and liberating. Today they provide a false 
clarity and a deceptive order, and they enthrall both understanding and 
experience. Serious questions can be raised about whether we can speak 
either of reason or of sense without the one including the other, questions 
s u p p o r t e d bo th by psychological research and la ter phi losophical 
developments. Similarly, the purity of disinterestedness is difficult to defend, 
especially as both the motivation and the consumption of art have been 
absorbed into the commodification of culture.8 And the theoretical force of 
existential phenomenology, hermeneutics, deconstruction, and philosophical 
pragmatism have undermined claims to objectivity, the reduction of complex 
wholes to simple constituents, and the hegemony of scientific cognition. 
We need different theoretical tools for capturing the special character 
of aesthetic appreciation, special even though it need not be unique or 
unconnected with other domains of human culture. Furthermore, what is 
especially striking about both the intellectual and technological developments 
of our own time is the extent to which the notion of reality has been enlarged 
and multiplied. Hermeneutics and deconstruction have provided grounds 
for coexistent interpretations, and these have generated a plurality of truths. 
F rom a d i f f e r e n t d i r ec t ion , phi losophical pragmat ism and re la ted 
approaches, such as Buchler's principle of ontological parity, have laid the 
theoret ical g rounds for a metaphysics of multiple realities.9 The very 
objectivity of both history and science has been unde rmined by our 
recognition of the constitutive influence of social, cultural, and historical 
forces, and this has begun to be codified in the social sciences. Finally, 
contemporary industrial societies inhabit the virtual world of film, television, 
8 I have developed a critique of Kantian aesthetics in »The Historicity of Aesthetics I,« 
The British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Spring 1986), 101-111; »The Historicity of 
Aesthetics II,« The British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Summer 1986), 195-203. 
9 See, in part icular, William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (Lincoln and London: 
University of Nebraska Press, 1996); William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Lincoln and 
London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996); and Justus Buchler, Metaphysics of Natural 
Complexes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966). 2nd edition (State University 
of New York Press, 1990). I have carried aesthetic theory in a similar direction in Art 
and Engagement, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991). 
29 
Arnold Berleant 
and cyberspace, »media-reality,« as Welsch calls it,10 a reality we have created 
that, ironically enough, strangely resembles the African Bushmen's belief 
in creation as a dream dreaming us.11 
One of the lessons of post-modernism, a lesson post-modernism did 
not invent, is that cultural traditions and social inf luences shape our 
perceptual experience so thoroughly that there is no such thing as pure 
perception, and that to discuss it, even as a theoretical category, is greatly 
misleading. But Kantian aesthetics is built upon the conceptual structure of 
eighteenth century psychology that considers reason, sense, imagination, and 
feeling as faculties of the mind. Formed in the interest of rationalizing and 
universalizing knowledge, these vastly simplify the complex contextual 
character of human experience. To take them separately and treat them as 
distinct and independent faculties or capacities creates divisions that we then 
are faced with reconciling. Think of the vast amount of attention devoted to 
defending imagination against reason, isolating unique aesthetic qualities, 
and reconciling expression with form. 
The conclusion to which all this leads, whether or not it is comfortable 
or desirable, is inescapable. The idea of a rational universe, of an objective, 
systematic order, must be relegated to a display case in a museum of the 
history of ideas. Philosophy has constructed opposing forces that it is then 
faced with reconciling, a contrived process that is rarely successful. We need 
to re-think these ideas, not with the intent of clarifying them by sharpening 
their differences, but exactly the opposite - by showing their interpénétration, 
their continuity, and at times even their fusion, perhaps with the hope of 
achieving a kind of Spinozistic unity that sees them as aspects of a common 
substance. 
A New Direction for Aesthetics 
What is left of aesthetics if we turn away from the Kantian tradition? 
What would a new aesthetics, a post-Kantian aesthetic, look like? If we discard 
the categories of faculty psychology - sense, imagination, feeling, memory, 
reason, taste; if we forego the classical thrust of philosophy to universalize 
and dismiss the puzzles over emotion, expression, representation, and the 
like that arise from the fragmentation of the world of art into spectator, artist, 
and work of art; what then is left? If we literally re-think aesthetics, what kind 
of intellectual creation will emerge, what kind of creature will be born? 
10 Welsch, op. cit., p. 86. 
11 Lawrence van der Post, The Lost World of the Kalahari (New York: Harcour t Brace, 1977). 
30 
Re-thinking Aesthetics 
Let me take this occasion to suggest a program for the different sort of 
thinking that I believe must guide our inquiry in aesthetics in a new and 
different direction: 
1. Relinquish the substantive categories we have inherited from eighteenth 
century psychology and replace them with adjectival and adverbial forms 
of such phenomena. 'Sensation' then becomes 'sensory,' 'perception' 
becomes 'perceptual, ' 'cognition' 'cognitive,' etc. 
2. Replace universalization with a pluralistic account and explore to what 
extent there are certain common phenomena that appear in different 
artistic and aesthetic cultures. From this we can learn what degrees of 
genera l i ty can be d i sce rned and whe ther these are he lpfu l and 
i l luminat ing or, on the contrary, whether they obscure important 
differences that require recognition. 
3. Related to this, give a primary place to varying cultural traditions in 
aesthetics, and to the ongoing histories of thought and of experience that 
they reflect. Not only do the different arts have their own histories; they 
are in te r re la ted in d i f f e ren t ways in d i f fe rent cultural traditions. 
Examining these will not only encourage a degree of humility in both 
the scholar and the appreciator; at the same time it will enrich our 
capacities for aesthetic perception and enlarge its range and content. 
4. Resist the tendency of essentialist thinking to identify single forces and 
factors to illuminate the aesthetic process, such as emotion, expression, 
or mean ing , and look instead for complexities, for characteristic 
groupings of influences, for interrelationships, for appropriate and 
varying contexts. 
5. Consider aesthetics not as the special domain of a value sharply distinct 
from other kinds of values, including moral, practical, social, and political 
ones, but look for the special contribution aesthetic value can make to 
the normative complexity that pervades and is inseparable from every 
region of the human realm. Aesthetic value can be distinctive without 
being separate, uniquely valuable without being singular, important 
without being pure, and occupy a critical place in human culture without 
being isolated. 
6. Develop the grounds for an aesthetic-based criticism, not only of the arts 
b u t of cu l tu re and knowledge, for these too have their aesthetic 
dimensions. Such criticism should be directed not only at their content 
but, even more important, toward their presuppositions. 
Nowhere is criticism more needed, however, than of aesthetic theory 
itself. For philosophical influences on theory have come, not from an 
investigation of aesthetic sensibility, but largely from the ontological and 
31 
Arnold Berleant 
epistemological framework of the Western philosophical tradition that moves 
from classical sources, through its appropriation by Enlightenment thinkers, 
into the present. It is a tradition that has extolled contemplative reason and 
has been suspicious of the body and the full range of human sensibility. As 
a consequence, we are presented with an array of issues tha t have a 
philosophical rather than an aesthetic source. Among these we can cite such 
divisive oppositions as those between surface (as in aesthetic qualities) and 
substance, form and content, illusion and reality, spectator and work of art 
(that is, subject and object), and beauty and use (that is, intrinsic and 
instrumental values). These have assumed ontological status and misdirect 
aesthetic inquiry in a fragmentary and oppositional direction. All of these 
derive from the undue influence of this philosophical tradition on aesthetic 
theory, in particular from its cognitive model. 
Aesthetic Engagement, an Aesthetics of Context and Continuity 
My own view favors a pluralistic aesthetic that allows for the fullest range 
of creative making in all the human arts and in all their diverse cultural 
manifestations. We need not be so concerned with hierarchy, with invidious 
rankings, but rather with studying how these arts function in society and in 
experience - what needs they fulfill , what purposes they serve, what 
satisfactions they offer, and how they extend human capacities to perceive 
and understand. Such an aesthetic, moreover, extends beyond the arts to 
the world in which we live, to the na tura l env i ronment , to the bui l t 
environment, to community, to personal relations. These, neglected until 
recently, beg for scholarly and scientific attention so that they can add not 
only to the range of knowledge but so that they can clarify and enlarge 
regions of experience often unattended to and hidden. 
Such an aesthetic sensibility, one that recognizes its integration in the 
life of human cultures, is an aesthetics of context and continuity. Not set apart 
in grand but lonely isolation, the aesthetic domain of experience infuses the 
many and varied activities in which we engage, from daily tasks to popular 
culture. It also retains its significance for those arts that focus on and distill 
the most intense and profound moments of experience, the so-called fine 
arts. But these, too, influence and enter into the wide range of h u m a n 
experience. We must surrender the myth of purity along with the myth of 
exclusivity. 
I call this »aesthetic engagement,« for it not only recognizes and extends 
the connections of aesthetic experience but invites our total involvement as 
32 
Re-thinking Aesthetics 
active participants. Aesthetic engagement is more a descriptive theory than 
a prescriptive one: It reflects the activity of the artist, the performer, and 
the appreciator as these combine in aesthetic experience. And it is a theory 
that reflects the world we participate in, not the illusory splendor of a 
philosophical fantasy. 
* * 
I realize that these are iconoclastic proposals and that they challenge 
many of the strongest supports and firmest convictions of modern aesthetics. 
But whether or not you agree with me, I hope you will take these proposals 
as an incentive to reconsider the axioms of aesthetics, and work to shape 
theory to the facts of ar t and experience. To begin this process, no 
opportunity is better than these days in Ljubljana. Bonne chance!v2 
1 2 1 have developed aspects of this critique in many places. These include: Living in the 
Landscape: Toward an Aesthetics of Environment (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 
1997); The Aesthetic Field: A Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (Springfield, 111.: C. C. 
Thomas , 1970); in Art and Engagement, and in a number of recent papers.