Sense and Senses in Aesthetics

Many questions regarding sense and the senses in art and aesthetics are addressed in this anthology. Meditating on philosophy, fine arts, and literature, as well as on the more simple 'joys of life' such as cinema, dirty language, and food, the authors draw upon a wide range of phenomena, none of wh [...]
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Many questions regarding sense and the senses in art and aesthetics are addressed in this anthology. Meditating on philosophy, fine arts, and literature, as well as on the more simple 'joys of life' such as cinema, dirty language, and food, the authors draw upon a wide range of phenomena, none of which is more privileged than the others. Art's relationship to humankind exists through the senses, it seems. The fact that different kinds of art exists might be associated with the circumstance that we have disparate senses, thus the divergent ways in which the aesthetic experience is transmitted. Art, therefore, can necessarily be understood as a fundamental plurality, since there is no single way to experience it. Accordingly, we tend to distinguish, for example, between those art forms that lend themselves to the senses of distance (sight and hearing) and the proximate senses of smell, touch and taste. In art, it has been maintained that the so-called 'fine arts' -- music and the visual arts -- were based on the distant senses, while the 'lower arts' -- such as perfumery and gastronomy -- were associated with the proximate senses.But, how could we conceptualize differences among art and the senses at all if we lacked a common concept -- a sensus communis -- of art and sense? With subjects ranging quite literally from philosophy to faeces, the reader of this anthology will find new views on film directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Lars von Trier, and Krzysztof Kieslowski; authors such as Sylvia Plath, Vilhelm Ekelund, Elias Canetti, and Rainer-Maria Rilke; and philosophers such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Friedrich Nietzsche, Peter Sloterdijk, and Michel Serres.