Twentieth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The Western philosophical tradition has a long history of shunning the body. At best, the body was treated as a partial means for obtaining lofty philosophical goals and, at worst, a complete distraction from those very goals. While this lineage of disembodiment in Western philosophy has been addressed by such figures as Noddings in ethics and Jagger in epistemology, less attention has been given to the specific ways in which the disembodiment in Western philosophy at large has impacted the philosophy of art. This paper argues that many of the most heated clashes between art and ethics – i.e., clashes in which an ethical transgression arguably detracts from the aesthetic value of the work, might be better framed as part of the more general problem of Western philosophy’s disembodiment. After briefly reviewing some of the most prominent philosophers and philosophies of art (Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel, etc.,) to demonstrate the limited (and in some cases wholly absent) role of the body in their respective aesthetics, to argue that to prioritize the body’s role in philosophical aesthetics might help calm many of the most heated philosophical controversies about whether work of art’s aesthetic value may be legitimately increased or decreased depending on its ethics. Examples from the work of Mapplethorpe, Pasolini, Nabokov, among others, are discussed. The paper concludes by reflecting on the possibility and implications of an aesthetic approach which Sontag once described as “an erotics” of art rather than as a “hermeneutics” of art.