Prologue

Why Aesthetics?

An anywhere close to complete comprehension of the existential human reality of art is no simple matter, much less easy is devising an appropriate anthropological theory about aesthetics. Such a difficult task is not lessened by the fact that aesthetic anthropology remains to a large extent a somewhat underdeveloped, peripheral and neglected area of participant observation in ethnographic literature, while artists themselves frequently tend to be a comparatively silent bunch, often times non-objective and unempirical in orientation. The area of aesthetics itself also tends to be a somewhat indefinable and cloudy one, if not a notion abstractly obscured by our own reason and rationality.

It is not my intention to simply string together cliché cultural bromides or to proffer shopworn and trite conceptions concerning aesthetics, nor do I want to merely repeat in third hand fashion information or ethnographic data upon the perspective of comparative aesthetics. On the other hand I am not claiming to construct scientifically veridical or falsifiable theory or to necessarily utilize empirically substantiated evidence in support of my broad sweeping generalizations and untenable claims. I paint this picture somewhat intuitively with a big, broad brush, and the details and clarity of focus must necessarily suffer.

Whatever else art is or is not, from the start it is important to state that what this work is concerned with is the prevailing existential human reality of art as a process in and of itself, and of the aesthetic experience associated with the aesthetic process in the assessment and rational explanation of the aesthetic phenomenon. I am not concerned with what art is supposed to be. It is at least an honest and unpresuming effort. It is neither intended necessarily to be pro-art of any particular kind nor against any art. It feigns a guarded and noncommittal neutrality in regard to the generalizable aesthetic experience of humankind.

On the other hand, I am not so much concerned with the day to day reality of art itself, art as praxis per se, but more with the rational, hopefully theoretical, understanding of that reality and its possible relevancies to the general human condition. It is an attempt to provide a system of rational organization for the theoretical comprehension of aesthetic anthropology. There is a philosophy of art, or aesthetic philosophy. There is an "art for art's sake" world of the working artist. There is a science of art technique, and there are many practicing and competing ideologies and religions of art, but this work is principally concerned with the aesthetic anthropological perspective, which falls under my category of ideology, and only secondly is it concerned with aesthetic philosophy or with the aesthetic paradigm. The aesthetic paradigm, though paradoxically capable of standing alone and of providing a complete self contained view of that reality, is nonetheless alone inadequate for a complete comprehension of metaphysical reality. It is important to speak of the philosophy of art or of the technical applications of the science of art or of the ideology of art, but this is not to say that aesthetics is itself a philosophy, or a science or a religion. The conceptuality of art is a distinct and separable human epiphenomenom, not unrelated to other conceptual realities, but interrelated.

I feel a need to justify to the critical reader the rationale and strategy of this work, and I cannot honestly distinguish from such a feeling a selfish necessity of self rationalization as a way of convincing myself of the merit of its writing. I feel the area of aesthetics in general, as a field of human experience and endeavor, and not only as a sub-field of philosophy or of art history or of the practice of art itself, is one neglected and poorly understood and yet one which is fully capable of standing on its own merits, independent of other disciplines and yet at the same time comprising in part the valuable insights from other areas of aesthetic involvement. Justice has not been done nor enough attention paid to the subject of aesthetics as a separable and distinctive phenomenon of human reality.

By art I am referring to every possible form or mode of expression of art, as it is manifest by any and every culture or human being, as well as the art of any other accomplishment or activity, be it in the art of war, of science, of living, of gardening, cooking, sex or of stealing. By aesthetics I am referring both to a comprehensive understanding of art in both formal conceptual theory as well as the personally meaningful, nonobjective influence of art upon the soul of the individual and the spirit of humanity in general. I regret a total ignorance about the field of ethnomusicology, which by the way comprises a major proportion of the ethnographic literature in aesthetic anthropology, and I fear this omission must inevitably preclude the comprehensive completeness of this work. I hope my failure to incorporate music will not detract too much from the applicability or relevancy of the conclusions I draw. I presume, perhaps erroneously, that the thoughts contained in this work are generally applicable to most if not to all forms of aesthetic experience. My own personally intense interest and involvement with the visual arts will perhaps bias my "aesthetic world view" too much in favor of eyes to the shortcoming of the ears. What few examples I give will be drawn from the realm of visual arts.

This work is a rational exploration, a continuation along the same general lines as the development of my ideas in an earlier study entitled "Philosophy, Irrationality and Ideology: An Anthropological Synthesis". This previous work provides a definitive platform of rationalization upon which many of the seemingly straight forward and unjustifiable presumptions of this work are based. In short this work represents a personal attempt on my own behalf to try to arrive at some consummate comprehension about the transcendent phenomenological human reality of the aesthetic experience and of the "anthropology of art" in keeping with lines of reasoning I pursued earlier.

In the first chapter I seek to fit the understanding of aesthetics into a philosophical framework which I devised previously in the work aforementioned, in order to provide a systematic way of conceptualizing about aesthetics. In the second part I will attempt to elucidate and elaborate upon the many meanings of such a general word as aesthetics, in an effort to divine some sort of structural unity for such meaningful understanding. In the third chapter, after starting from presumption that aesthetics is a near human universal, I seek to access the limitations of frequently occurring labels and conventional stereotypes concerning aesthetics, to show their inadequacies and then to proffer an alternative way of generalizing about aesthetics in lieu of such dispossessed labels. In the final section I will try to bring together the results of the previous three chapters in a formulation of a general anthropological theory concerning the relevancy of aesthetics t humanity.

I wish to reach some general, transcendent, possibly original and hopefully new perspective upon the area of aesthetic anthropology. Even though my aim is a high one, I will nevertheless be satisfied with intermediate results. I am not claiming empirical validity or rational truth concerning the human world of aesthetics; rather I am only offering opinionated possibilities and suggesting alternative generalizations in the hope of stimulating new directions of thought, argument, questions and maybe, wishfully, to expand a little bit the aesthetic horizons of the writer if not also the reader. Finally I hope to answer at least partially the question of "Why study aesthetics?"