The aesthetics of appearing

The aesthetics of appearing
Martin Seel

If for a moment we were to imagine aesthetics as an expansive building that has been worked upon continuously for centuries, that has undergone many redecorations and acquired numerous extensions - let’s say, as a museum that has become somewhat labyrinthine in the course of time - then we could consider which of its many entrances is the best for us to commence a tour of the building. It would probably be easiest to meet up at the entrance most conveniently located for reaching the important exhibition halls, the cafe, the cloakroom, the screening room, and the bookstore. If we were lucky, this would be the main entrance, to which someone giving us directions would in any case send us. But we are not that lucky. As a result of the many renovations and additions to the building, the idea of a main entrance has been forgotten. Instead, there are countless portals from which the various exhibits can be reached more or less easily. Therefore we must first set about finding an appropriate entrance that will lead us without diversion to the heart of the complex.

In what follows I would like to give an account of what I found during my search. I shall distinguish an entrance to aesthetics that can lead us without any detours in medias res. My concern here is exclusively with such an opening, not with the many further steps that follow upon this access.1 I shall take this step into aesthetics exemplarily - two examples are to show where a suitable access point is located. As in our imaginary building, there are of course many other entry points, some of which are hardly any less suitable; but the entrance presented here is the one I would recommend - should anyone ask.

A topographical sketch
Since its Platonic beginnings, philosophical aesthetics has been impelled by an alternative that is as enlightening as it is misleading. Aesthetic perception has been attributed the capacity either to gain a genuine access to being or to disclose a genuine sphere of illusion [Schein]. In the first figure of thought, aesthetic perception is seen as an encounter with how things truly are, as a penetration of illusionary conditions of everyday life. In the second figure of thought, however, aesthetic perception appears inversely as a turning away from the stability of the reliable world and thus as a penetration of the power of the real.

To my mind, this is one of the incorrect contrasts from which aesthetics ought to escape. The way of doing so becomes evident once it is clear that the alternative paths are just variations of a third path that is already well trodden, where intuition and reflection are on a pilgrimage to being or appearance.

The classical aesthetics of being [aesthetik des Seins] understands the aesthetic process as the revelation of an otherwise concealed higher sense or being. In current discussions, though, a non-classical variation, one frequently formulated in media theory, plays a big part; in the objects of art, this variation sees at work a discovery of the constructiveness of all relations of the real. Both variations of an aesthetics of being do, however, assume that general structures of reality can be recognized in or by means of aesthetic perception; the basic constitution of the reality becomes visible in the constitution of aesthetic perception.

An aesthetics of illusion [aesthetik des Scheins], by contrast, rejects this close liaison between reality and aesthetic reality, and, correspondingly, between the aesthetic, epistemological and ethical theory of the one reality. For the aesthetics of illusion the field - or, more radically, the time span - of the aesthetic is a separate zone from which nothing can be inferred about the constitution of reality. It describes the process of aesthetic experience as entering the sphere of illusion, an illusion that is otherwise ignored, one that is located outside the continuity of being.

Each of these positions has been defended in very different variations and with enormously varying willingness to form alliances. One need only recall Hegel’s hugely influential discussion of the absolute’s sensuous illusion [sinnlicher Schein], Nietzsche’s ideas about artistically exposing the illusionary character [Scheincharakter] of the cultural world, or Bloch’s aesthetics of anticipating [Vorschein] a better society in the future. Nonetheless, the preoccupation with being or appearance, which goes back to Plato, presents an especially unfortunate alternative. According to this fixation, aesthetic consciousness paves the way either to a higher reality or out of the lower reaches of reality (or it goes both ways simultaneously). Either way, aesthetic perception is conceived of as flight from the phenomenal presence of human life. In effect, aesthetic consciousness is understood in both perspectives as an inattentiveness to the concrete here and now of its acts of perception.

We should not accept this disastrous consequence. For there is a lot of evidence that aesthetic consciousness ought to be comprehended as an excellent form of intuiting presence. Even if it is past or future presences that are perceived in their fathomlessness, for this we nevertheless require a situation that is perceived in its own particular momentariness. This turn to the presence of something present, I would like to say, is a basic propelling force of all aesthetic perception. Aesthetic consciousness perceives reality in the particularity of its own sensuous self-presentation, and this means in the simultaneity and momentariness in which it presents itself to sensuous discernment. In this perspective, aesthetic perception is understood as the opening of a zone of appearing [Erscheinen] in which reality is revealed from a different, otherwise inaccessible, side. Neither determinable being nor irreal appearance, but the momentary and simultaneous repleteness of the process of appearing, constitutes the first touchstone of aesthetic conduct.