There have been a number of recent readings of Daoist creativity in terms of contextual responsiveness, playfulness, flexibility, adaptivity, novelty, and epistemic virtue. These readings emphasize how the Daoist classics, the Laozi and the Zhuangzi, offer a model of agency that avoids excessive conscious intentionality, control, rigidity, dogmatism, and perspectival myopia. This paper claims that these readings, while not incorrect, are one- sidedly in favor of the "everyday" at the expense of the more "fantastical" aspects of Daoist creativity. These readings appear to be rooted in an understanding of Daoist creation that mostly ignores the constant, self-causal, and absolutely inclusive nature of the Dao's generative power. By contrast, this paper argues that Daoist creativity is better viewed as the local expression of Daoist creation, thus rendering Daoist creation itself global creativity. This view of Daoist creativity reads the famous examples of creators in Daoist texts as cases of beings who receive inspiration from, and ultimately identify with, the Dao's or nature's global creativity. This is a thoroughly non-supernatural notion of inspiration. Daoist creativity is thus the making explicit of Daoist creation in specific aesthetic forms and objects. This is a reading that requires championing the fantastical, paradoxical, and stranger aspects of Daoist metaphysics. Through a switch of perspec-tive to the source of creation itself, Daoist creativity is no longer addressed only in terms of the reactive traits listed above, but rather seen in its full positive identity as an expression of the Dao's constant self-generation.
This article seeks to develop a phenomenological model of non-human agency through an account of music. It shows how the denial of agency to non-human entities, which lies at the core of the modern disenchantment of nature, can be both methodologically and ontologically countered through reflection on the practice - what the Greeks termed techn & eacute;-of music. Through an analysis of sound, rhythm, and melody, the article shows how musical experience discloses a world constituted by dynamic relations unfolding temporally and spatially. Melody and rhythm demonstrate how meaning arises through relational sequences rather than static entities. Furthermore, music gives us a model for understanding the relation of inner/outer being in nature through an account of rhythm and melody. On the basis of such an account, the article brings three, apparently disparate, philosophical voices into play and shows how each can help us understand this implication of agency and (re-)enchantment: the Naturphilosophie of Schelling, the Phenomenology of Nature of Merleau-Ponty and the Agential Realism of Karen Barad. The paper demonstrates how each of these accounts can be understood as re-enchanting, while avoiding both vitalism and mechanism: Schelling with respect to organism, Merleau-Ponty in terms of world and Barad in terms of quantum reality.
This essay develops a distinct aesthetic theory grounded in ancient Daoist-especially Zhuangzi's-and Stoic philosophies. For Zhuangzi, a flourishing life requires a holistic acceptance of the universe and its myriad events-an attitude that, as Pierre Hadot notes, resonates with the Stoic pursuit of fulfillment through cosmic awareness. By contrast, self-interested perception narrows understanding by privileging what seems good while obscuring what seems bad. This selective, utility-oriented mode of vision produces a fragmented image of the world. Only by transcending it can we perceive things in their totality. Such perception not only affords the distinct pleasure of perception itself but also grants access to what remains hidden in ordinary experience: the generative forces of things.
This paper is meant to contribute to the rediscovery of Maximilian Beck, a former student of Alexander Pf & auml;nder and a representative of a realist tendency in early phenomenology. I will accordingly discuss the core ideas of his magnum opus, the book Wesen und Wert, published in Berlin in 1925. Specifically, I will focus upon Beck's view of beauty and art, showing the extent to which they rest on his conception of the metaphysical structure of reality.
This paper explores the phenomena of human encounter and co-presence through a dialogue between Marina Abramovi & cacute;'s performance The Artist is Present and Martin Buber's ontology of I-You and I-It relations. Rather than using art merely to illustrate theory, the study investigates how Abramovi & cacute;'s performative exploration of silence, presence, vulnerability, and the gaze enriches and challenges the Buberian understanding of intersubjectivity. Key Buberian concepts, such as genuine presence (Gegenwart) and encounter (Begegnung), are analyzed alongside the artwork's elemental structure of face-to-face interaction. The paper argues that while Abramovi & cacute;'s work embodies Buber's ideal of unmediated relation, it also introduces complexities-such as power dynamics, asymmetry, and the Sartrean "subject-object" gaze-that transcend Buber's often harmonious framework. Furthermore, it examines the temporal dimension of the "present" in performance art, contrasting the process of "becoming" in the moment with the categorized "past" of documentation. Ultimately, the paper positions the performance as an ironic mirror reflecting contemporary mediated interactions, offering an ontological-performative study of the fundamentals of face-to-face encounter in the modern era.
The article examines Bourdieu's repurposing of Cassirer's notion of symbolic forms in the context of his sociological paradigm. After outlining the meaning of 'symbolic' in Bourdieu's work, I reconstruct his understanding of the concept of symbolic form. Bourdieu conceives of symbolic forms both as historically determined cognitive, practical, and evaluative dispositions and as cultural systems (e.g. myth, religion, ideology, art, sciences). I identify two moments in Bourdieu's appropriation of this notion. In the first moment, which I associate with the idea of a "sociology of symbolic forms" and locate in the earlier phase of his reflection, he emphasizes the relation between symbolic forms and social reproduction. In the second one, which I connect with the idea of a "differential anthropology of symbolic forms" and locate in the final phase of his production, Bourdieu explores the autonomous perspective of symbolic forms and the universal and trans-historical potential of symbolic forms such as art or science. While his later understanding and use of this notion are arguably more nuanced than his earlier one, I suggest that they still raise specifically philosophical questions that transcend the standpoint of the social and human sciences. In the conclusion, I consider three such issues: the specificity of different symbolic forms; the relation between symbolic forms as historically determined subjective dispositions, on the one hand, and basic human capacities, on the other; the adequacy of the notion of 'arbitrary' to account for symbolic forms.
Susanne K. Langer's relation to John Dewey was fraught. Even though his thinking is remarkably close to hers in many aspects, she hardly ever acknowledges this proximity; when she more than mentions him in passing, it is often to harshly (and unjustly) criticize him. This relation, in which actual disagreement, misunderstanding, and strategic distancing are difficult to tell apart, revolves around the idea of experience. Experience is at the heart of their respective philosophies of art, albeit in very different ways: whereas Langer considers works of art to be symbolizations or images of experience, Dewey calls them "intensifications" of experience; whereas Langer focuses her investigations on the structure of the works, Dewey insists on the importance of their realization in experience.The paper aims to show that these differences are not as irreconcilable as they seem, arguing that on the one hand "intensification" is a rather unfortunate term for what Dewey has in mind and that symbolization offers a more useful description, and that on the other hand Langer systematically downplays the crucial role of experience as a mode of realizing works of art, unlocking their dynamic potential.
Philosophical worries about the capacity of language to represent our reality are as old as Plato's attack on poets. Within analytic philosophy such worries have contributed either to the negative view of art's (primarily poetry and literary fiction) cognitive value, or to the need to provide a particular account of how artistic employment of language contributes to, rather than deters from, its capacity to describe our world and thus transfer knowledge about it. While some philosophers, most notably J. L. Austin, reject art forms such as poetry as serious, on the account of their employment of language, others, such as Cassirer, cherish art for its unique cognitive achievements, relating these achievements to artistic language. My aim here is, via the example of Michel Houellebecq's novel Submission, to build on Cassirer's account of art as a symbolic form and to explore how linguistic arts provide unique cognitive access into various forms of our experience, primarily but not exclusively emotional, and thus help us grasp certain segments of our reality that may not be expressible in non-artistic formulations.
To help understand what prevented Cassirer from writing a philosophy of art as an organic part of his philosophy of symbolic forms, this paper proposes to go back to the studies in which Cassirer addressed the establishment of philosophical aesthetics during the 18th century. Cassirer has been showing interest in this question since his 1902 monograph on Leibniz's system. An interest later developed in both 1916 Freiheit und Form and 1932 Philosophie der Aufkl & auml;rung. On all these occasions Cassirer takes on an attitude that is not merely reconstructive but "archaeological." For he seeks to shed light on the movements that prompted the foundation of philosophical aesthetics, meant as issues that - by thematizing, with the dimension of the sensible, a form of meaningfulness irreducible to mere cognition - critically tackle modern thought, which instead tends to resolve itself at the level of a theory of knowledge. The archaeological approach leads Cassirer to detect behind philosophical aesthetics proper a powerful matrix that goes back to Leibniz and finds amplification when joint with Shaftesbury's thought. Thus, an operative framework of the aesthetic emerges that profoundly affects Cassirer's own conception of "symbolic form," showing how this perspective is connoted by an aesthetic feature. A feature that increasingly pushes it toward its distinctive anthropological outcome.
In architecture, typology is understood as a regulative principle for design that is interwoven with history and the respective context. It arises in opposition to the literal concept of imitation, which is based on the repetition of certain timeless models. Types are the end product of fundamental systematic, analogical, rational, and combinatory processes that unfold between recognition of a historical context and subsumption under universal laws of geometry. Types fulfilled the function of representing social values, such that, based mainly on Cassirer's theory of symbolic forms, we will argue that architectural types can be understood as the imaginary processing of symbolic forms - a basic idea that opposes the reduction of type to a trivial classification of forms and functions that is common today. Therefore, a renewed conception of architectural typology proves to be an unavoidable task of architectural discourse.
In this paper, I will discuss essential aspects of Castoriadis' philosophy that can be related to Cassirer's conceptions of symbol and imagination. The aim is not to reconstruct the antecedents of Castoriadis' philosophy nor to propose a comparison between the two authors; rather, my intention is to show how Castoriadis' reflection is in tune with some of Cassirer's themes and how he develops them autonomously even to reach different conclusions. This analysis will serve to enrich the investigation on imagination in a different way from conventional frameworks. For this reason, I will choose the symbolic and art as the areas of research. Firstly, I will contextualize the figure of Castoriadis in relation to Cassirer and Neo-Kantianism in order to identify the common elements and to clarify some misunderstandings. Then, my analysis will underline Cassirer's and Castoriadis' great emphasis on the function of the symbolic in the human world and specify how the latter enriches this reflection through his original conception of the social imaginary as a collective and creative capacity for new forms. Based on these considerations, I will turn to the artistic field to observe how Castoriadis intertwines aesthetics and ontology in his conception of art as a "window into chaos".
The article examines Ernst Cassirer's late work, An Essay on Man, exploring its significance beyond merely summarizing his earlier Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, and investigates the interplay between nature and culture as conceptualized by Cassirer, emphasizing the symbolic function as a defining characteristic of human nature. Against the backdrop of contemporary debates on humanism, the article engages with Peter Gordon's reflections on Cassirer's thought, asserting that understanding humanity as animal symbolicum remains urgent today. It highlights Cassirer's critique of both rationalism and anthropocentrism, stressing the importance of symbols in shaping human experience and cognition. Focusing primarily on the chapter of An Essay on Man entitled A Clue to the Nature of Man: The Symbol, the article examines the relationship between Cassirer and Uexk & uuml;ll, illustrating the significance of the biologist's insights in questioning the notions of environment and nature for Cassirer. Through three core arguments - symbolic function, mythical consciousness, and the morphology of myth - the article argues that Cassirer's analysis provides a framework for reconceptualizing human knowledge and culture. Its aim is to affirm the possibility of a new humanism rooted in the recognition and understanding of human symbolic functions amid the challenges imposed by modernity, thereby reaffirming the essence of Cassirer's philosophical inquiries into the nature of man.
In this paper, I examine the role of literature in 20th-century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze's vitalistic philosophy, insofar as he defines it is an 'enterprise of health' that transports one to the 'outside of language'. I argue that for him, literature is a means of disrupting one's natural point of view through language, so as to experience phenomena for their own sake. I articulate my position over the course of three sections: section 1, which grapples with Deleuze's vitalism, followed by section 2 which addresses his understanding of health and finally, section 3 on his approach to language and in which I also provide a synthesis of my overall thesis. To support my claims, I draw primarily from the author's book-length study of literature, titled Essays Critical and Clinical and his broader oeuvre, along with the secondary literature. It is intended to offer a contribution to Deleuze Studies and the Philosophy of Literature.
The phenomenology of Japanese dry landscape gardens: Aesthetic and Contemplative "Ways of Seeing""Phenomenology," says Lisa Guenther, "begins with a description of lived experience and reflects on the structures that make this experience possible and meaningful." Taking our lead from this simple yet instructive description of the phenomenological approach, this paper will explore the phenomenology of Japanese dry landscape gardens through some key characteristics of Japanese aesthetics and the non-dual philosophical underpinnings of Zen Buddhist thought. In doing this, we will look at how contemplative engagement with these types of gardens generates meaning(s) in the lived experience of viewers. In other words, the aesthetic and contemplative principles that inform dry landscape garden design will provide us with a framework for the objective, given aspects of the experience while phenomenological analysis will grant us a window into the subjective, felt aspects of the experience. Our discussion will focus on what is called the "quintessential" Zen garden; the dry stone garden at Ry & omacr;an-ji Zen temple in Kyoto.After an overview of the "art of garden making" in Japan, our discussion will outline the aesthetic and contemplative sensibility that informs the Zen tradition of dry landscape garden design. In particular, the discussion will focus on the non-dual emphasis that underlies Zen thought and practice and explore how experiential reports of viewing Ry & omacr;an-ji echo this non-dual sensibility. The discussion will explore this experience as a "two-way" understanding or dialogue that constitutes an aesthetic and contemplative "literacy" resulting in the felt experience of a new or different "way of seeing".
This paper aims to contribute to understanding Edmund Husserl's early theory of imagination by examining the immanent function and the symbolic function of image consciousness in Phantasy and Image Consciousness (1904/05). To this end, I will analyse the immanent function, which explains the inner relationship of the intentions that make up image consciousness, and the symbolic function, which expresses the "transeunt" character of image consciousness by which memories are associated with their intuitive content. This examination enables us to understand that image consciousness taken as image representation is fundamentally a consciousness of otherness formed by the frictions of its different correlates from the perspective of both its immanent and symbolic functioning. The relevance of this paper for aesthetics is that it enables us to explore the concept of "representation by similarity." The analysis of representation by similarity allows Husserl to carry out detailed and in-depth examinations of aesthetic-artistic experiences, which contribute to the conceptualization of the functions of image consciousness.
Gadamer's account of aesthetic experience emerges primarily from his engagement with Kant and Heidegger. Gadamer pushes back against the subjectivism of the Neo-Kantians, where aesthetic judgement constitutes subjective experience, and adopts Heidegger's account of art where aesthetic experience is understood as the disclosure of truth. Given the topological nature of Heidegger's thinking, this paper is concerned with uncovering the topological character of Gadamer's account of aesthetic experience. By investigating key Gadamerian concepts, this paper argues that the topological is a central, albeit an implicit and often overlooked, element in Gadamer's account of aesthetic experience.
In this article, I argue that interior design is paradigmatic for our understanding of art more broadly. Key to my argument is the phenomenological structure of inhabitation, for what distinguishes interior design as an artform is the fact that its products are inhabited rather than, say, looked at or listened to. Though he rarely discusses domestic dwelling as such, Maurice Merleau-Ponty is helpful in explicating the phenomenological structure of inhabitation. In Part 1, therefore, I investigate Merleau-Ponty's repeated reliance on terminology having to do with inhabitation, showing that this terminology is used to describe phenomena as fundamentally interactive. In Part 2, I investigate interior design and domestic inhabitation themselves to reveal a similar structural interactivity: The spaces I inhabit are both shaped by and shaping of my quotidian habits and patterns of embodied activity. Finally, in Part 3, I argue that the co-shaping or mutual expression that we find in the relationship between inhabitant and inhabited space in interior design is also at work in our relationship to other artworks such as paintings. When we perceptually dwell with them, paintings, too, have the power to interactively restructure our manner of embodied engagement with the world, even as our engagements with paintings shape the continually developing sense of those very paintings. Thus, I ultimately argue that, at the deepest level of experience, we do not so much look at paintings as we inhabit them.
