Richard Marc Shusterman

This much acclaimed book has emerged as neo-pragmatism's most significant contribution to contemporary aesthetics. By articulating a deeply embodied notion of aesthetic experience and the art of living, and by providing a compellingly rigorous defense of popular art—crowned by a pioneer study of hip hop—Richard Shusterman reorients aesthetics towards a fresher, more relevant, and socially progressive agenda. The second edition contains an introduction where Shusterman responds to his critics, and it concludes with an added chapter that formulates his novel notion of somaesthetics.

ABSTRACT The concept of atmosphere is now central within phenomenology, critical theory, and hermeneutics, but it has not yet played a similarly significant role in contemporary pragmatism. Part of the problem is that the term “atmosphere” is not especially salient in classical pragmatism, though the ideas encompassed by that term do play an important role there. This article explores some important ways that classical pragmatist philosophy deploys the ambiguous, polyvalent, and lexically multiple notion of atmosphere. Along with its primary scientific sense as the mixture of gases that surrounds the earth, atmosphere has the central meaning of mood, tone, or felt quality that pervades a situation or place. Having elsewhere shown the vital role of mood in pragmatism, this article extends the study of atmosphere in pragmatism by considering how that notion functions through other terms, including the term “atmosphere” itself, but also through closely associated terms like “ambience,” “climate,” “weather,” “milieu,” “aura,” “halo,” “penumbra,” “situation,” or “felt quality.” This article will focus on the pragmatism of James and Dewey, because the term “atmosphere” is strikingly absent in C. S. Peirce, notwithstanding his many years as a meteorologist for the US Coast Survey.

Experience and interpretation are two key topics of twentieth-century aesthetics that remain central today. Although aesthetic experience forms the core of John Dewey's Art as Experience, the book neglects the issue of interpretation. My essay explores this surprising lacuna in Dewey's aesthetic masterpiece. Dewey's pluralism, fallibilism, and critique of the quest for certainty should make the concept of interpretation very appealing, because fallibility and openness to plurality of perspectives are precisely what define the concept of interpretation and traditionally distinguish it from fact or truth. Dewey's neglect of interpretation in Art as Experience is even more puzzling when we recall that his early views on art and philosophy did not share this disregard but instead embraced the centrality of interpretation. My essay explores the possible reasons for this change of attitude, after demonstrating this change by comparing Dewey's dismissive view of interpretation in Art as Experience to his early essays where interpretation plays an important role.

Grateful as I am for Michael Fischer's sympathetic discussion of Philosophy and the Art of Writing, my disagreeable duty in response is to note how, where, and why his attentive, supportive, and well-intentioned reading of the book misinterprets its meaning. More positively, my mission is to clarify the book's essential purpose so that readers of this journal who have neither read the book (nor followed other symposia and discussions dedicated to it) can better understand its message.1 Because I know the reasons for Fischer's misreadings derive not from any deficiency in knowledge or interpretive skill but rather from disciplinary biases and institutional frameworks, my efforts in explaining those interpretive... Read More.

Kohelet, that ancient postmodern who already remarked that all is vanity and there is nothing new under the sun, also insisted that there is a time for everything: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to break down and a time to build up, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing. There is no mention of a time for interpretation, but surely there is one; and just as surely that time is now. Our age is even more hermeneutic than it is postmodern, and the only meaningful question to be raised at this stage is whether there is ever a time when we refrain from interpreting. To answer affirmatively by citing dreamless sleep is to dodge the real issue, which is whether we can ever refrain from interpreting without thereby refraining from intelligent activity altogether. There is a host of holist hermeneuts who answer this firmly in the negative, maintaining that simply to perceive, read, understand or behave intelligently at all is already, and must always be, to interpret. They hold that whenever we experience anything with meaning, such meaningful experience always must be a case and product of interpretation.

The term ars erotica refers to the styles and techniques of lovemaking with the honorific title of art. But in what sense are these practices artistic and how do they contribute to the aesthetics and ethics of self-cultivation in the art of living? In this book, Richard Shusterman offers a critical, comparative analysis of the erotic theories proposed by the most influential premodern cultural traditions that shaped our contemporary world. Beginning with ancient Greece, whose god of desiring love gave eroticism its name, Shusterman examines the Judaeo-Christian biblical tradition and the classical erotic theories of Chinese, Indian, Islamic, and Japanese cultures, before concluding with medieval and Renaissance Europe. His exploration of their errors and insights shows how we could improve the quality of life and love today. By using the engine of eros to cultivate qualities of sensitivity, grace, skill, and self-mastery, we can reimagine a richer, more positive vision of sex education.

This essay introduces a special issue devoted to studying the global impact and rich, ongoing legacy of John Dewey's aesthetic masterpiece _Art as Experience_, ninety years after its initial publication in 1934. After noting the role that the _Journal of Aesthetic Education_ played in assessing the book's influence, this introductory essay surveys the international reception of the book by exploring its history of translation and explaining the difficulties of its reception in certain countries. This survey demonstrates that the international reception of _Art as Experience_ was largely retrospective, coming long after the book's initial appearance and apparently benefiting from the rise of neopragmatism and the international attention given to this new pragmatist expression. The translation and reception history of Dewey's book also reveals the economic and political factors that shape the international circulation of ideas. After five essays that focus on the reception of _Art as Experience_ in cultures where it was translated, the special issue concludes with three more essays that discuss how the book's ideas can be applied to contemporary issues in aesthetics and philosophy more generally, while suggesting ways where the book's goals could also be furthered by treating its limitations.

ABSTRACT: This essay examines Foucault’s legacy in terms of its contribution to the field of som-aesthetics. It demonstrates how Foucault’s work on embodiment, care of the self, pleasure, sexuality, and aesthetics of existence were inspirational to the founding of somaesthetics and can serve as exemplars of somaesthetic philosophy. However, the essay also explores the ways that current somaesthetic research departs from Foucault’s theories by critiquing their limitations with respect to several important issues. These issues include the varieties of pleasure, the multicultural scope and diversity of ars erotica, the range of aesthetics and art, and the demand for truth and heroism in the art of living a beautiful life.

After showing how pragmatist aesthetics and Marcuse's critical theory affirm aesthetic education as key to transforming society toward greater freedom, equality, pleasure, and fulfillment, I compare the ways these two approaches differently perceive the scope and role of aesthetics in such transformation. Whereas Marcuse identifies the aesthetic dimension with the realm of high art, pragmatism understands this dimension far more broadly to include the popular arts and somaesthetic arts of living. Because Marcuse identifies art's critical function through its oppositional transcendence and autonomy from ordinary reality and practical life, he insists that aesthetics cannot directly contribute to transformative praxis in the real world but can operate only indirectly by transforming our sensibilities. Pragmatist aesthetics, particularly though somaesthetics, resolves the dilemma in Marcuse's aesthetics of liberation by bridging the alleged gap between aesthetics and praxis by reeducating our sensibilities in a more direct, practical, embodied way. The article further exemplifies the overlaps and differences between Marcuse's critical theory and pragmatist somaesthetics by focusing on erotic experience, which is essential to Marcuse's liberational program and increasingly present in somaesthetics’ concern with aesthetic reeducation of our senses and sensibilities.

Cet article éclaire par leur analyse différentes conceptions de l’expérience esthétique qui ont joué un rôle significatif dans la philosophie de l’art et de l’esthétique. Cette analyse approfondit mon étude antérieure des caractéristiques hédoniques, évaluatives, phénoménologiques, sémantiques et définitionnelles du modèle traditionnellement dominant de l’expérience esthétique et s’élargit à des critères pertinents supplémentaires pour évaluer les différentes fonctions et valeurs de l’expérience esthétique. Ce cadre analytique plus large nous permet de considérer une forme importante d’expérience – l’expérience sexuelle – que les philosophes excluent habituellement de l’expérience esthétique. En examinant d’un œil critique les raisons qui motivent une telle exclusion (le plus souvent, elles ne sont pas explicitement formulées dans les arguments), l’article suggère comment l’expérience sexuelle (ou ce que je préfère appeler l’expérience érotique) peut être utilement décrite et valorisée comme esthétique.

Underlying the stubborn hierarchical dichotomy between high and popular art, there is a far more basic contrast at work—art versus entertainment. Yet the complex network of language games deploying these concepts reveals that entertainment is not simply contrasted to art but often identified with art as an allied or subsuming category. The arts are themselves sometimes described as forms of entertainment. Because the concept of entertainment is deeply and complexly related to the concept of art, and because it is also broader and older than the concept of popular art, its analysis can be instructive not only for the question of popular art but for aesthetics as a whole. This paper, which is guided by pragmatist insights, provides a genealogical analysis of the concept of entertainment and its relation to aesthetics that offers some lessons for contemporary art and theory. In providing an aesthetic defence of entertainment's multiples values, the paper re-examines two concepts—pleasure and functionality for life—that have been used to condemn entertainment for triviality and narrowness but that are central to its value and to the value of art.

Arthur Danto was one of the three persons, along with Richard Rorty and Pierre Bourdieu, who made the author's career in pragmatism possible, and thus helped to revive pragmatist aesthetics in the 1990s. Despite his generosity toward pragmatist aesthetics, Danto opposes some of its key views. The first important difference concerns Danto's essential emphasis on a sharp division between art and life, the artworld and the real world, or as he puts it in one chapter title, between “works of art and mere real things”. Danto's long and admirable career in practical criticism, as art critic for The Nation shows his recognition that art needs more active care than mere wrapper definitions that simply reflect the status quo. Although Danto rejects the pragmatist view that aesthetic considerations are important for defining art, he ultimately converges with pragmatism's affirmation of the aesthetic as having a deeper and wider significance for shaping life and thought more generally.