DIALOGUE AND UNIVERSALISM

No. 1112/2003






INTRODUCTION:
AESTHETICS IN THE 21ST CENTURY


This volume forms part of the Proceedings in print of the 15th International
Congress of Aesthetics (ICA), which was held in Makuhari, Tokyo region, on the
campus of Kanda University of Foreign Studies, 27th31st August 2001. This To-
kyo Congress was the first one in the history of ICA to be held in Asia, and in the
new Century. It aimed, under the general theme of Aesthetics in the 21st Century,
at discovering new orientations from the chorus of voices of aestheticians coming
from all corners of the world: the participants numbered as many as 430 from 40
countries and regions. (For a complete picture of the papers presented at this ICA,
please see my closing report: Stirrings of a New AestheticsAn Essay on a Col-
lage of Papers, http://www.soc.nacsis.ac.jp/bigaku/2001/index.html).
The basic form of the Proceedings is a CD-ROM to be titled The Great Book
of Aesthetics, which contains all the papers presented at the Congress. Besides,
several selections in print are being prepared, including this one. The Organiz-
ing Committee is editing two volumes: one is a selection of papers of all kinds
(as a single publication) and the other is a collection of papers on Japanese cul-
ture (as a special issue of Aesthetics, Journal in Western languages of the Japa-
nese Society for Aesthetics). I have besides edited Vol. 5 of the International
Yearbook of Aesthetics (journal of the International Association for Aesthetics,
IAA), under the theme of Trans-human AestheticsBeauty, Nature, Uni-
verse, with papers from W. Welsch, K. Sasaki, A. Chareyre-Mjan, Ch. Fetiosa,
Z. Kalnick, K. Lehari, Y. Higashiguchi, and K. Kitamura. This volume has just
been printed in my own department and sent to all individual members of the
IAA, free of charge. Besides, a copy is to be sold at 10 US dollars.
Among these selected volumes, this volume has this specificity of gathering
papers on subjects that conform to the policy of the Journal, i.e. discussions or
analyses of problems addressing new phenomena in the global civilization of
the 20th and 21st centuries. Having selected important contributions according
to this rough guideline, I found them belonging to or rather constituting four
groups of problems: (1) an historical perspective from romanticism to the fu-
ture, (2) globalization and particular cultures, (3) culture-oriented aesthetics,
and (4) new dimensions of aesthesic experience. In other words, these problems
were not chosen by me and imposed on authors, but were created spontaneously
by the participants in the Tokyo Congress. Therefore, we may conclude that
6 Ken-ichi Sasaki
they represent the philosophical interests shared by aestheticians of the world in
2001. Now I am going to present the papers to be included in this volume. Just a
remark in advance: readers will find that these papers, though being divided into
four groups, very often cut across these categories and reveal a plurality of
viewpoints on these issues.

1. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE:
FROM ROMANTICISM TO THE FUTURE

The five papers in Part I come from the symposium on Adorno and/with
Heidegger: Their philosophy of Art in the 20th and 21st Century. It was organ-
ized by Ale Erjavec. As most of them give descriptions of historical perspec-
tives from romanticism to the present, or even to the future, I present them at
the beginning of this volume. They might even form the cultural background for
other papers. There is also a striking fact: all five authors draw attention to com-
monalties, rather than their easily noticed divergences, between Adorno and
Heidegger. Such attention is now possible thanks to the passage of time, and the
possibility of taking a broader historical vision that reaches into the future.
Among the five, Tom Huhns paper, Heidegger, Adorno, and Mimesis, shows
a different orientation, because the author prefers to discuss theoretically rather
than historically. Taking as his reflective point of departure, the Heideggerian
thesis that truth happens in works of art, he proposes mimesis as the key con-
cept, which he considers to be the function of setting something to work or mo-
tion. Then he tries to grasp all the three phases of artcreation, work, and
judgment (Kant)under the unifying idea of mimesis. Because of this excep-
tional characteristic, I place this paper in the center, having it preceded by two
papers, those of A. J. Cascardi, and J. de Mul, which give ampler explanations
of the relationship between romanticism, especially Hegels aesthetics, and
Adorno and Heidegger. The second half of Part 1 includes two papers by
Erjavec and H. Paetzold, who contemplate the contemporary situation of cul-
ture.
The titles of Cascardis and De Muls paper, Heidegger, Adorno and the
Persistence of Romanticism and Hegel, Heidegger, Adorno and the Ends of
Art, suggest well the focus of their interest. It is the notion of the end of art
that not only ties Adorno and Heidegger to romanticism and merge them,
but also elicits from our two authors a viewpoint reflecting on contemporary
culture. Cascardi finds the premise of the notion of the end of art in Adorno
and Heidegger in the romantic worldview that underlines the tension between
the artwork. According to him, the postmodern conception of the end of art,
coming from the expansion of the field of art (anything goes), is different
from their thesis. He traces how Heidegger and Adorno reshaped the aesthetics
of Hegel and formed their respective views on the possibility of art. De Mul
analyses in detail the discussion on the end of art in three philosophers: Hegels
Introduction: Aesthetics in the 21st Century 7
view concerns the end of classical and romantic arts, and that of Heidegger
and Adornomodern art. The latter thesis derives from the two philosophers
ambivalent dispositions toward art, similar to that in Hegelgrand expectations
of art as a means of surpassing modern technological rationality and recognition
of the deceptiveness of modern art. To conclude: the author suggests a new
possibility of art after the end, different from the postmodern return to the
past: that should be found in the informational technology, such as hyper
novel.
Paetzold, in Adorno and Heidegger in-/outside Postmodern Culture, tries
to remap the postmodern culture in the light of Adorno and Heidegger. Al-
though they produced none of the postmodern concepts, their philosophy initi-
ates critical items for doing this re-mapping. According to the author, the fun-
damental problem of contemporary culture consists in the opposition between
globalization and glocality, or interculturality and multiculturalism, and finds a
solution in critical regionalism. He interprets the theory of architecture by
Adorno and Heidegger in this direction, and tries to find their respective post-
modern character, especially in relation to Vattimos aesthetics of oscillation
for Heidegger, and in the influence of Adorno on environmental aesthetics.
In his paper, Adorno and/with Heidegger: From Modernism to Postmodern-
ism, Erjavec relates the philosophy of the two philosophers to postmodernism
too, but in the reverse direction. With regards to the two philosophers, he de-
scribes a radical change in the historical image of the modern era. Paying atten-
tion to the fact, just as his colleagues do, that Adorno and Heidegger reveal their
affinities, our author takes issue with Jameson, who focuses on Heidegger,
rather than Adorno, as the representative philosopher of modernism. For Er-
javec, under the new light of postmodern culture and art, we have now a radi-
cally different vision of the modern. We can regard it as a short episode in the
long history of art, and the theory as well as the artists mentioned by Adorno is
being forgotten.

2. GLOBALIZATION AND PARTICULAR CULTURES

This category is embodied in three papers: Art, Cultural National Identity
and Globalization by B. Dziemidok, Aesthetic Experience in the Age of
Globalization by Ch. Allesch, and Are We the World? Whose Children Are
We?Globalization, Self-Orientalism and World Music in Japan by Y. Wa-
jima. At the 10th ICA at Montreal in 1984, I had the strong impression that
postmodernism dominated many conversations. This time, the idea of globaliza-
tion stood out as the main focus of participants. Besides these three papers, most
authors interested in the current state of the civilization mentioned the globaliza-
tion tendency.
Dziemidoks paper considered the issue of national identity within the inevi-
table process of globalization in economics, technology, and culture. The author
8 Ken-ichi Sasaki
notices that national identity is becoming even stronger under globalization, and
interprets this tendency as a function of the human need to belong to some per-
manent community. Culture, especially art, plays an important role in a com-
munitys conservation of its identity. In fact, however, the traditional arts eve-
rywhere have less and less influence on cultural life. Our author does not see
globalization as destructive of the national identity. Rather, he argues that glob-
alization and national cultural autonomy are compatible. He also suggests that
people over-estimate the danger of globalization, and insists on the possibility
of (an artist) being both national and international, pointing to the cases of many
artists, including Chopin, Grecki, Wajda, and Kurosawa.
Allesch starts with recognition of the same situation, especially in popular
culture, in which he finds a multinational hybrid culture. Then he links this
trend with the possibility of theorizing the aesthetic; he raises the question
whether we are facing the emergence of a new global type of experience.
Consulting the discussions by P. Burgerpolitical connotations of Western
culture leading to globalizationH. Rsing (globalization provokes a need for
cultural identity, which functions as a conservative factor, for example, the
globalizing nature of music), and W. Welsch who draws attention to the global-
ization of the aesthetic in traditional aesthetics, Allesch argues that 20th century
artists have transcended the normative postulate of traditional aesthetics, and
claims that the new centurys aesthetics should be founded not on artistic activ-
ity but on globalization and its new media. He further suggests that aesthetics
should regard itself as a social science.
Wajimas paper can be regarded as a case study of a particular culture (pop
music in Japan) as part of the globalization trajectory: World music is a cate-
gory created by the British record industry about 1989 in order to package all
music other than major twoAnglo-American pop/rock and classics. Our au-
thor analyses two critical texts from opposed viewpoints that address the possi-
bility of creating a World Music from Japan. As this category requires cul-
tural authenticity, this tentative creation of Japanese World Music necessarily
involves the question of the cultural identity of Japanese music. Through this
interpretation, Wajima throws into sharp relief the ambivalent situation that
typical Japaneseness is shaped by the image imposed from outside, while
what the Japanese feel familiar with is judged as alien. This situation reflects
Japan socio-cultural location in the split between the West and the East. In this
context, I think this is a constant feature of Japanese culture throughout its his-
tory, and wonder whether a similar situation is found in most cultures.

3. AESTHETICS IN PLURAL

In this category, we include the following three papers: The Idea of a Cul-
tural Aesthetics by A. Berleant, Comparative Aesthetics Beyond Universal-
ism and Relativism by E. Ortland, and Li Zehous Aesthetics as a Marxist
Introduction: Aesthetics in the 21st Century 9
Philosophy of Freedom by B. Bruya. This category addresses the aesthetics
involved in intercultural communication and contact. Although someone (in-
cluding our authors) might call this comparative aesthetics, I prefer to avoid this
naming, which gives me personally the impression of studies combining two
cultures in which they are not specialized in one or in other way. Anyway, this
subject is very tightly related to that of globalization, and in this sense this is
issue is very relevant to contemporary concerns.
Berleant, known as the champion of environmental aesthetics, tries here to
enlarge its horizon. He pays special attention to environmental arts such as ar-
chitecture and gardening, where, however, he wishes to find a cultural aesthet-
icsa matrix of senses, concepts and ideas. Concepts and theories of aesthetics
should now be considered, not in a supposed universal space, but in the frame-
work of the particular culture, so that aesthetics should now be regarded as a
social science. Recognizing the plurality of aesthetics, our author pursues the
possibility of a trans-cultural aesthetics that would meet the requirements of
philosophy, which is in search of universal knowledge.
Ortland proposes comparative aesthetics as a third way of aesthetics, differ-
ent from the universalist and the relativist. In the progress of globalization, we
have more chances of encountering heterogeneous cultures, so much so that we
recognize now that the traditional aesthetics that was regarded as universal was,
in fact, based on a particular aesthetics. This fact proves the difficulty of over-
coming particularity and the relevance of the choice of comparative aesthetics.
There are many proposed theories under this rubric, but we cannot endorse any
particular one. Our author then insists on the necessity of methodological dis-
cussion, and emphasizes the importance of the study of culture-oriented patterns
of perception or styles, which should enlarge our capacity for understanding
heterogeneous entities.
Li Zehou, whom B. Bruya interprets, is a Chinese philosopher, now residing
in the United States, and considered by many Chinese scholars as the most im-
portant among living Chinese aestheticians. Bruyas paper, as well as the phi-
losophy of Li, may be regarded as cases of aesthetics in the plural. According to
Bruya, Li integrated Marxism to traditional Chinese philosophy, as many others
did. Lis attention was addressed first of all to Kant, because Chinese philoso-
phy lacks the distinction between subject and object. For Li, Kant appears to
recommend a way to find the unity of the opposed subject and object in aes-
thetic freedom, which consists in the harmony of all the subjects faculties. Ar-
guing that Kant is wrong in stabilizing this duality, Li turns to Marxism to in-
troduce the moment of historicity. Now true subjectivity is considered the sedi-
ment of human practices. The realm of the unity of the human and nature is that
of freedom and beauty.

10 Ken-ichi Sasaki
4. NEW DIMENSIONS OF AESTHESIC EXPERIENCE

The fourth and the last category is aesthesic experiences. I borrow the term
aesthesic from Valry in order to avoid a misunderstanding, as if it concerns
artistic experience. We are faced with a broader horizon. We shall publish here,
first of all, the paper by K. Mandoki Aesthetic Contagion: The Kitsch and
Glamour Pathogens, and three following, all concrete and particular studies:
Kinesthetic Empathy by J. T. Parviainen, Aesthetics and Homo Mobilis by
O. Naukkarinen and The Transgression of the Mechanistic ParadigmMusic
and the New Arts by W. Jauk. As the reader might have guessed, all three au-
thors focus upon the phenomenon of movement or mobility. This coincidence
suggests that mobility is a striking element peculiar to our contemporary world.
Mandoki proposes to interpret cultural phenomena in terms of the biological
notion of contagion. Cultural contagion serves to establish and consolidate a
communitys cohesion, and therefore underlies the current globalization. The
advertisement industry and political marketing are forms of psychological engi-
neering. As the artistic policy of the Nazis proved, this can function in bad as
well as a good direction. Our author quotes two types of contagions patho-
gens: kitsch and glamour. While the former is relatively innocuous, the latter
can exercise a dreadful influence on a hyper-capitalist society, with its partner
stigmatization. Just like the AIDS virus, these pathogens penetrate the society in
disguise. Mandoki finds traces of the influence of the glamour pathogen in the
aesthetization of violence, war, drugs, and financial and athletic competition, as
well as in the cult of the body.
We have three papers on the aesthetics of mobility. In the first place, I will
present Parviainens paper because it shares with Mandokis an interest in psy-
chological identification through bodily function. The main part of this paper is
dedicated to introducing the theory of empathy by Edith Stein, and our author
underlines the definition of empathy as placing oneself in the other subjects
position especially in a dynamic phase. This implies the importance of body in
this particular form of knowledge, and the reciprocal direction of this compre-
hension (hence fusion). The author tries to apply this theory of kinesthetic
empathy to the experience of doing and appreciating dance. Unfortunately this
part is not so much developed as to answer to my curiosity.
Naukkarinen finds mobility as one of key concepts of our time. Because of
the enormous progress in transportation and communication technology, the
world is becoming smaller and smaller, and we are on the move. In order to
elucidate this aspect of the human experience, she chooses the method of inter-
preting artistic photographs dealing with movementtwo photographs by
Tapio Heikkila. Reading these images, the author mentions insights such as:
that the experience of movement is not simply visual but also kinetic, olfactory,
etc, that we are part of the environment, and that the aesthetic aspect of move-
ment informs our worldview. Besides, sharing the idea of applied aesthetics, she
Introduction: Aesthetics in the 21st Century 11
intends to relate these observations to a purpose of shaping and forming the
environment.
Strictly speaking, the central theme of Jauks paper is velocity rather than
mobility. In other words, he is not interested in bodily movement or the trans-
portation event, but in the quickness of informational transmission. Finding the
all-at-onceness we are experiencing in cyber-space analogous to the perception
mode of sound, Jauk claims that music offers the paradigm of art and the model
for our contact with this new world. He emphasizes the difference between the
auditory and the visual: passive analyzing and hedonistic structuring character-
ize the former, and instead of causality it is feasibility that reigns. The author
does not forget to mention the stylistic change of contemporary music, and the
basic role of the body in this hedonistic world of consumption.

*

Through this survey of the papers to be included in this volume, the reader
must have already perceived a certain convergence within their diversity. Let
me repeat that this is not the result of my choice of papers on such subjects, but
rather it represents a tendency within the papers chosen according to the sole
standard of quality among those works on contemporary culture. Such involun-
tarily realized unity means, for a Japanese as I am, the truth that emerges from a
deep layer of reality. I am inclined to believe that we have here an authentic
map of topics in which we are interested at the beginning of the 21st century.
Finally, I wish, however, to add that this volume should be complemented by
the above-mentioned Yearbook for an integrated mapping.

Ken-ichi Sasaki





We have the pleasure to publish the special issue of Dialogue and Universalism
prepared by Professor Ken-ichi Sasaki. For us it is an important contribution to
contemporary intellectual and philosophical debates. We are convinced that papers by
leading specialists will arise vivid reaction and we are ready to open our pages for next
publications and free discussion. Details on our general aim can be found at
http://www.dialogue.uw.edu.pl. Please send you contributions to Professor Ken-ichi
Sasaki or to our editorial office.

Dialogue and Universalism