Aesthetics of Appearing

ONE OF the many virtues of Martin Seel's Aesthetics of Appearing is that it lays its cards on the table at the very outset. The final three chapters consist in a series of complex digressions from the main discussion: one on the aesthetic significance of ‘resonating’(p. 139), one organized around the metaphysics of pictures, and one charged with defending the implausible claim that the artistic representation of violence is uniquely capable of revealing ‘what is violent about violence’ (p. 191). Seel writes, ‘[t]his book makes the proposal of having aesthetics begin not with concepts of being-so or semblance but with a concept of appearing’ (p. xi). This might initially seem opaque, as though reducing aesthetics to a subtlety involving the meaning of the Greek word phainomai, but Seel immediately clarifies the stance that he wishes to advance. Seel's position is that aesthetics is distinguished by attention to the indeterminable particularity of sensory experience; aesthetics so considered comprises the philosophy of art as well as non-art experience; aesthetic experience is a legitimate mode of world-encounter by virtue of its immediacy or ‘presence’ (p. xi) (Gegenwart – that is, a contrary of ‘past’, rather than of ‘absence’); and because the presence of our experience reveals the presence of our lives, aesthetic experience constitutes an important form of self-knowledge. The subsequent chapters are devoted to explicating this position in extraordinary detail

Aesthetic experience · Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Everyday Aesthetics · Immediacy · Meaning (existential · Metaphysics · Politics · Representation (politics · Virtue · Art, Aesthetics, and Perception · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Philosophy