"With Aesthetic Reason, Alan Singer makes
a significant and unique contribution to the debate about the ethical
significance of art and aesthetic experience. . . . On every front,
Singer’s book offers fresh perspectives on aesthetic experience
that require attention from philosophers, historians, and critics
of literature and art."—Gregg M. Horowitz, Vanderbilt University
In recent years the category of the aesthetic has
been judged inadequate to the tasks of literary criticism. It has
been attacked for promoting class-based ideologies of distinction,
for cultivating political apathy, and for indulging irrational sensuous
decadence. Aesthetic Reason reexamines the history of aesthetic
theorizing that has led to this critical alienation from works of
art and proposes an alternative view. The book is a defense of the
relevance and usefulness of the aesthetic as a cognitive resource
of human experience. It challenges the contemporary critical tendency
to treat aesthetic value as separate from the realms of human agency
and sociopolitical change.
The argument unfolds through a review of the cognitivist
traditions in post-Enlightenment aesthetic theory and through Singer’s
own articulation of a model of ethical subjectivity that is derived
from the Greek concept of akrasia, which recognizes the intrinsic
fallibility of human action. His focus on akratic subjectivity is
aimed at revealing how the artwork has the potential to enhance
human development by cultivating habits of self-transformation.
Along these lines, he shows that the aesthetic has affinities with
the logic of reversal/recognition in Greek tragedy and with theories
of subject formation based on intersubjective recognition. The marking
of these affinities sets up a discussion of how the aesthetic can
serve protocols of rational choice-making. Within this perspective,
aesthetic practice is revealed to be a meaningful social enterprise
rather than an effete refuge from the conflicts of social existence.
The theoretical scope of the book encompasses arguments
by Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Kant, Hegel, Adorno, Lyotard, Bourdieu,
Derrida, Althusser, and Nancy. Singer’s exposition of "akratic
subjectivity" is advanced through readings of literary texts by
Sophocles, Melville, Beckett, Joyce, and Faulkner as well as visual
texts by Caravaggio, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, and Gerhard
Richter.
