The Role of Art in the Construction of Personal Identity: Toward a Phenomenology of Aesthetic Self-Consciousness

179 Pages·2012·7.53 MB·English

by  Gregory V. Loewen

THE ROLE OF ART
IN THE CONSTRUCTION
OF PERSONAL IDENTITY
THE ROLE OF ART
IN THE CONSTRUCTION
OF PERSONAL IDENTITY
Toward a Phen01nenology
of Aesthetic Self-Consciousness
G. V. Loewen
With a Preface by
Farzad Bawani
The Edwin Mellen Press
Lewiston oQueenston· Lampeter
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Loewen, Gregory V.
The role of art in the construciion of personal identity: toward a
phenomenology of aesthetic self·consciousness I G.V. Loewen: with
a preface by Farzad Baviani.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN-l3: 978-0-7734-3929-0
ISBN-I0: 0-7734-3929-3
I. identity (Psychology) in art l. Title.
N71.LS962012
701 '.IS--dc23
2012017612
hors serle.
A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British
Library.
Copyright «:;) 2012 Gregory V. Loewen
All rights reserved. For information contact
The Edwin Mellen Press The Edwin Mellen Press
Box 45 Box 67
Lewiston, New York Queenston, Ontario
USA 14092-0450 CANADA LOS 1L O
The Edwin Mellen Press, Ltd.
Lampeter, Ceredigion, Wales
UNITED KINGDOM SA48 8LT
Printed in the United States of America
Dedicated to all those \'I'ho participated in the study and in
gratitude for their candor and self-reflection.

Contents
Preface by Farzad Bawani, PhD
Chapter 1. Studying Art as a Subjective Subject
1.1 Introduction: Review of the Salient Ideas in the
Literature
1.2 Current State of the Question ill the Literature 9
1.3 Response to the Problem 14
1.4 Methods 18
1.5 Argument and Summary of the Analysis 22
Chapter 2. Art as Memorialization 27
2.1 Preserving the Self as Archived Sediment 27
2.2 Art Objects as Auto-Archaeology 40
2.3 The Personal Museum 50
Chapter 3. The Project of Placing Oneself in the World of Ali 64
Chapter 4. Art's Role in Displacing Self-Consciousness 90
Chapter 5. Personal Identifications \",ith Art 116
Chapter 6. Concluding Remarks 141
References Cited 149
Index 153
Preface
From the World oCthe Intelligible to the Imaginatively
Sensible
Mundus exemplarium phantasiae est mundus
pulchritudinis
(The world of examples of fantasy is the world of
beautiful)
Fortlage (1836)
Nowhere does the human aspiration for the ideal good
reach a higher climax than in the ideas of truth, justice, and beauty,
the trinity that rests at the core of both heavenly divine and earthly
sublime. It is as though whenever one has strived to imagine, or
has struggled to establish an artistic, ethical, or political higher
good, this trinity had to be invoked to foster a claim to what may
be beyond comparison. Utopian idealists as well as pragmatists
have tried to envision or to controvert the superlative character, or
the irremediable haecceity of these terms. However, despite their
ideal spirit, these concepts are lived by us as part of our
existentiality, facticity, and forfeiture. In the world emerging from
the human experience with all its resolute or aleatory tendencies,
these ideas represent more than just distant destinations for
visionaries, and become entVli'ined or overlapping realms of
collective and individual experience.
Amongst the three, beauty (pulchrum) is perhaps the one
closest to our flesh, and therefore to the sentient world of
experience known as mundus sensibilis. It is in the perception of
beauty that one can feel the return of the sensible from vanishing in
the transcendental realm of the ultimate, or fi·om the disembodied
world of intelligible concepts, mundus intelligibilis. It is indeed
beauty immanent to the sensible world as particularly seen in
works of art that serves as the object of aesthetics, the
philosophical discipline that in the work of its originator,
Baumgarten (1750/1988), was meant to serve as "a theory of
sensible" and as "advocacy for sensibility" (Hammenneister,
2002:4), in the age of the primacy of reason and rationalism.
Baumgarten's emphasis on sentient world placed aesthetics
between epistemology and psychology (Nuzzo, 2006), albeit not so
intentionally on his part.
The monograph you are about to read begins exactly from
this point, and finally returns to the same point, as though it had
never departed from the start. Not being inert, the seeming stillness
of this text reflects its endurance against the tidal cun·ents that rise
from the world of intelligible to illuminate what in the final
analysis seems always to remain obdurately in the world of the
sentient. As every discursive tradition is a construction purpOlting
to be an explicative model of the sentient experience, mimesis and
subreption become inseparable dialectical partners. The endurance
of this text testifies to the author's enduring apprehension about
this dialectic as part of every effort to explain the lived experience
of beauty and art. The purpose of this endurance is, however, not
to draw an epistemological insight from aesthetics, but to grasp
aesthetics as a psychological process from a phenomenological
vie"wpoint deeply committed to first-person experience.
The book opens with what could have been its ending and
in a manner akin to counting in reverse, makes its way back
through subsequent chapters that examine different moments of
artistic experience. Each of the aforementioned can be a schema as
much for understanding art as for speaking about self-hood and
11
aesthetic experience. In the these chapters, the text not oniy
displays its great debt to the post-Kantian view of aesthetics, but as
well to the internalist-externalist clash of ideas, or the so called
Beardsley-Dickie (Beardsley, 1958, 1962, 1982; Dickie, 1964,
1965, 1974, 1988, 1996) debate of the jast decades of the past
century, that has continued to the present. However, one thing is
clear: the text does not rehash this longstanding dispute, as it tries
to reconstruct the aesthetic experience from the narrow confines of
its on-going contentions. In so doing, it makes no reference to
either the debate or to its prominent contenders. It maintains a
resolute focus on the key themes of aesthetic experience and self
hood and adds something interesting to the mix - nothing other
than imagination.
The text presents imagination as a faculty not for positing,
but for re-inventing the world by rendering vivid but exaggerated
images of objects. Hence, it begins from what may seem to be akin
to HusserI's notions of fantasy (phantasie) and pictorial
consciousness (Bildbe'wufitsein), wherein "the expectation of the
'not yet' [Noch-nicht] cOlmected with the "now" is fulfilled."
(Hussed, 1898-192511980) But, unexpectedly the text takes a
radical tum to encompass Bachelard's dynamic imagination.
Imagination for Bachelard (1942, 1948, 1960/65) is not merely a
vivid and exaggerating image maker that can render protean copies
from actual objects. Rather, he sees imagination as creative fantasy
(phantasie) or a world-making faculty with poetic capacity for
recreating its own objects and forging make-believe associations
that are meaningful to the subject's desire for an alternative world.
In this sense, fantasy brings the subject to the world by seeking
what is not and calmot be, but what we nonetheless envision and
iii