Aesthetic as Fuck

3:21pm GMT, 3 January 2018.

Confession: relevant as I find my previous post to the kind of discourse in which I'd like to participate and overall enjoy promoting, that same post served only to delay the necessary discussion a curious truth apparent in how I came to adopt my political beliefs: one with ramifications I don’t yet fully explored, but which inheres not just in my original post on how I became an anarchist, but just the same in the post I offered to delay this discussion.

Put simply, aesthetics (the inspiration from a work of literature) established my guiding principles; and, according, to my subjective experience of what we'll briefly name "transcendent beauty," I adopted them wholeheartedly.

"Aesthetic as fuck."

Assuming that I'm not unique in finding that, upon reflection, aesthetic experiences have previously determined my beliefs, I therefore find it an important subject to explore: the analogies to religious experiences, for example, offer too much promise of insight into human consciousness for me not to explore. Though I can't say I've come to any conclusions of my own, but I'll at least do my best to bring you up to speed with my internal dialog on the subject, and perhaps together we can start to develop (for example) suggested guidelines for producing works of art that will promote a more equitable society, or any other means of employing aesthetics to promote a world without borders.

So, lets first establish a definition of "aesthetics." Wikipedia offers the following (as of 4:10pm GMT, 3 Jan 2017):

Aesthetics … explores the nature of art, beauty, and taste, with the creation and appreciation of beauty … In its more technically epistemological perspective, it is defined as the study of subjective and sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste. [In addition,] aesthetics studies how artists imagine, create and perform works of art; how people use, enjoy, and criticize art; and what happens in their minds when they look at paintings, listen to music, or read poetry, and understand what they see and hear. It also studies how they feel about art--why they like some works and not others, and how art can affect their moods, beliefs, and attitude toward life … More broadly, scholars in the field define aesthetics as 'critical reflection on art, culture and nature' [Kelly (1998) p. ix] … In modern English, the term aesthetic can also refer to a set of principles underlying the works of a particular art movement or theory: one speaks, for example, of the Cubist aesthetic.

I think we'll find it worth our time to add a few other perspectives. First, let's consider the etymology of the word (according to Wikipedia as of 4:14pm GMT, 3 Jan 2017):

The word aesthetic is derived from the Greek … aisthetikos, meaning 'esthetic, sensitive, sentient, pertaining to sense perception' … which in turn was derived from … aisthanomai, meaning 'I perceive, feel, sense' … related to … aisthēsis, 'sensation' … The term 'aesthetics' was appropriated and coined with new meaning by the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten in his dissertation Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus ('Philosophical considerations of some matters pertaining the poem') in 1735 … Baumgarten chose 'aesthetics' because he wished the emphasize the experience of art as a mean of knowing … though his later definition in the fragment Aesthetica (1750) is more often referred to as the first definition of modern aesthetics.

Finally, I discovered the following quote (from Jalsey) on Urban Dictionary which I believe describes the contemporary use of the word as I've seen it:

Aesthetic[:] 1. Something someone is obsessed with … Ex: [']Guess what my new aesthetic is!['] 2. Something beautiful or cool … Ex: [']Bruh, that is totally aesthetic!['] 3. A word that emo and [T]umblr people say … Ex: [']This post is my aesthetic.['] 4. Something someone finds fascinating … [Ex:] [']This [TV] show is my aesthetic![']

As I'm sure you can see from the broad scope of the various definitions of "aesthetics" offered above, I believe you'll see the complexity of the subject with which I've been grappling almost since I started this account. Nonetheless, I believe we can see some of the principles mentioned in those definitions at work in my own experience. Summarizing what I emphasized from the conclusion of T.H. White's The Once and Future King:

1. Among the species of Earth, humanity alone establishes political boundaries.
2. Though these boundaries have no physical reality, they serve as the focal points for war and strife between factions of humanity.
3. Those factions of humanity define their sense of unique identity within the species according to the illusory boundaries they establish.
4. Only worldwide rights for freedom of travel and trade guaranteed on the basis of one's own humanity (i.e., a world without borders) can remedy for violence between factions of humanity.
5. Eliminating borders and providing those rights to every human being need not homogenize local cultures or produce any government beyond the municipal scale.
6. Nonetheless, producing the society described above will require a cultural transformation.

Regarding my most recent emphasis, I would propose that the kind of cultural transformations that manifesting a world without borders will require occurred to myself in utero with the inspiration I gained from The Once and Future King. Comparing my own experience with the definitions I quoted above, we may say (from an epistemological perspective) that I found T.H. White's report of King Arthur's final meditations an agreeable 'judgment of sentiment.' Meanwhile, after reading the modern English sense of aesthetics as an 'underlying set of principles,' I must imagine that my agreeable response to the King's sentiment--what I called at the beginning of this post an 'experience of transcendent beauty'--suggests that experience and its accompanying sentiment provokes an agreeable judgment of the principles underlying a given artwork.

Employing the philosophical frame of Alexander Baumgarten described in the etymology from Wikipedia quoted above, we can hypothesize that the phenomenon I have just described--one in which the subjective experience of beauty, along with a favorable 'judgment of sentiment,' inspired me to adopt the (in this case easily interpreted) principles underlying a literary work--provided me a 'means of knowing' that went beyond truth values: a knowledge understood, of course, because I had at that moment completed an epic novel that masterfully simulated a narrative to persuade the reader of its conclusion's validity.

The truth of that record, of course, speaks for itself. Referring to the definition of "aesthetic" offered from Urban Dictionary, we can comfortably estimate just from my name (let alone the reasons I've given for choosing it) that I would tend toward an 'anarchist aesthetic': one that appreciates the punk sub-culture, for example, and the aesthetics of its fashion. Although I doubt my image alone would give that impression, I can say absolutely that my sympathies certainly lie there, and that I find the most authentic expressions of the punk sub-culture (and, therefore, of the aesthetics that sustain it) promote precisely the same discourse that must precede, and out of which will emerge, a society in which Homo sapiens will finally find itself free.

All that being said, I've still done nothing more than report the results from some of my more recent ruminations, and won't pretend at all to have reached anything concrete. Nonetheless, I find good reason right now to believe that aesthetics possess some determinant effect upon ideology, and can warn you already that the subject will return in later posts as my investigations continue.

Best (as always),

@riotdog