Aesthetics in the raw

What happens when we strip aesthetics back? We take off its shields and its layers that were built intentionally as a way to recognise the subjectivity, the autonomy of the individual during our Enlightened Western History when the church and the monarchs dictated conditions for the individual?

The realm of aesthetics that was established during this period, notably by Kant and the appreciation of Modern Aesthetics coined by Baumgarten are understandings that we have remain committed to from these forefathers, I say fathers. They supported and empowered the individual to assert themself within the confines of the state, to find a sense of agency that was not only subsumed by the church, to establish their own sovereignty as individuals. This was a necessary step and a highly influential step that happened within our Western trajectory. We can appreciate its usefulness today, as we continue to look to ways and means to assert our own individuality, our own independence, to remind us, possibly for no other reason than to sustain the ego that we have a voice. Aesthetics facilitates this voice via its traditions as established via Enlightenment traditions, that recognise the realm of aesthetics as a culmination of both perception and criticism.

However, if we step away periodically from the enlightenment understanding of aesthetics stripping aesthetics back to its raw state, what is it that resonates as an aesthetic experience? It’s a sunrise, a sunset, the feeling of climbing a mountain and looking out over the vista. It’s the feeling, that pure feeling of joy, of blowing out your birthday candles, of feeling that twang of attraction, or that deep, full-body experience. That we understand as love.

For these understandings that are innate to our being, that fundamentally drive us within all we do, are not aspects that can be critiqued as the enlightenment period advises. They are aspects that we, in body and in grace, recognise as aesthetic experiences. And they are deeply influential and inform what we do, how we do it and why, but not actually in a critical sense. The stubborness of the aesthetic and our desire to lean into the awe and wonder of the sublime is something that, despite every effort, written, spoken, characterised, can never be genuinely understood unless it is subjectively felt.

This is what Bergson calls that intuitive knowing that can only be captured through lived and phenomenological, qualitative, direct empirical experience. Dewey understood this also, and so does the more recent work of Deleuze and Guattari. So this idea of aesthetics in the raw has a different function to aesthetics from its Kantian lineage and enlightened lineage. Both serve a purpose.

However, I argue that this aesthetic rawness that can be felt is currently not available within our education structures. And it is for this reason that it is this understanding of aesthetics that is of most interest to me. Within our current institutional systems, these kernels of aesthetics do not have enough fertile soil to plant and will, in its current design, never grow. Yet these kernels, I argue, are the very essences of what it is to be a feeling human. They are the very essences that, despite the rise of technology and its ongoing ability to copy, imitate and fabricate the sense of a human and their aesthetic knowing. It is the one thing that defines us as humans. It may seem simple, but it’s this raw aesthetic that traditional education has never genuinely let in and it is imperative we find ways to do so. For it are these seeds of the raw aesthetic that allow us to in turn become reflectively, critically, analytically aesthetic. But it’s these genuine beginnings that we first need to orientate ourselves to. Because it’s here that we remember who we are and what matters to us as a human being.

By embracing aesthetics in the raw, we choose to rewrite the story of education away from industrial, institutionalised models towards more human-centred, embodied, intimate connection. When I talk about raw aesthetics I am talking K-12 and tertiary, any learning along the lifelong learning continuum. When I talk about raw aesthetics I am talking about taking art out of the art room and flooding our learning experiences with things we can see, smell and touch, using quality and finite materials which in turn reminds us of our own finiteness within a finite world.

We use aesthetic experience to activate intellectual and rational ways of knowing that transcend the intellect that inspire, delight and entertain away from screens that prompt awe and wonder by stimulating our senses rather than simulating them. Rather than additional extras these activities are intentional, planned, front and centre. This is not discussions for the kindergarten, this is discussions for all learners. And it is from here seeds of the aesthetic can be planted and can begin to grow, but we must first be prepared to strip back to the raw to achieve a rebuilding, a re-interpretation and eventually a re-writing of what we do, why we do it and how we do it within education.

Until next time,

Dr. Mon x