The Principle of Art (in Practice)

Abstract

This paper disputes the generalised definition of ‘aesthetic practice’ which leads deconstructive postmodern ‘aestheticians’ to equate aesthetic activities (eg., gardening, hair-braiding) with art-making.  Reviving an understanding of Art’s single unifying Principle is a necessary precondition for restoring the meaning of an artistic practice.  I describe its ancient origins, its disappearance in modernity, and reconstruct its defining criteria, showing why art cannot be confused with just any ‘cultural practice’ whereby one’s experience of the ‘general aesthetic’ can by merely mimicking Nature elicit familiar empathic responses reflectively.  I argue very little real art is being made today, and AI is perfectly suited to making what has replaced it: ‘cultural artefact’.  In reconstructing this Principle, I show why artistic practice cannot be predicated merely upon theories of beauty/pleasure; but rather on what Aristotle deemed the ‘higher pleasure’ of making Reason (merging beauty with truth, and freedom with necessity).  This overcomes Kant’s reflective aesthetic paradigm that engendered the misguided ‘experientialism’ dominating modern/postmodern “art” - undergirding an ‘artworld’ of mainly anti-Art (in what Bernard Stiegler calls the ‘catastrophe’ of modern aesthetic experience driven by the rise of ‘technicism’).  A process for applying the Principle’s criteria is briefly outlined, demonstrating how to distinguish a ‘phenomenological experience’ from ‘ordinary experience’, and thus a genuinely poetic discourse from any other form of speculative discourse.  Uncovering the Principle’s origins in Aristotle’s natural science (and his discernment of ‘making’ from ‘acting’ in technê), separating normative from theoretical aesthetics, and unveiling art’s ‘objective’ meaningfulness in any artwork’s phenomenology, reaffirms why art’s relation to the Person (its ‘anthropological phenomenology’) is of primary concern to aesthetes.  I conclude with how the purpose of all inquiry into aesthetics is made more meaningful by reviving the Principle of Art, and why this essentially renders theoretical aesthetics redundant.