Adam Blair

This paper argues that carefully curated aesthetic experience can bring us into proximity with perceptual modes we cannot live ourselves. When speaking of differently abled bodies and sensory worlds, empathy often falls short or worse, becomes a kind of violence. The desire to understand another can flatten, appropriate, or misrepresent. But if we give up the idea of total comprehension, we might find something more durable: proximity, contact, and a shared vulnerability. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment, I argue that carefully curated aesthetic experience addresses the body directly, posing perceptual questions to what Merleau-Ponty calls the tacit cogito rather than to reflective thought. Because perceptual structure cannot be changed through conceptual argument—only through embodied encounter—curated aesthetic experience offers a privileged site for approaching another’s mode of perceiving. I demonstrate this thesis through an experimental engagement with works by Julia Wolfe and Jackson Pollock, guiding readers toward something that approximates my own non-normative vision: a figureless ground.

The Collegium Phaenomenologicum has met in Umbria, Italy every summer since 1976; only COVID made it pause, and hopefully only temporarily. It has been a forum for deep and broad discussion of the phenomenological tradition; it has also been a place where that tradition has itself been broadened and deepened by generations of thinkers who came to study the classical texts and to do phenomenology. In 2019, over the course of three weeks in July, in three lecture courses, several talks by visiting faculty, twelve text seminars sessions, art workshops, and very many informal talks over dinner, on the terrace, and on long walks through the town of Città di Castello and beyond, the Collegium worked on the question of critical phenomenology.