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nother way in which aesthetic intimacy could be approached is by paying attention to Hegel’s conception of Art as a mode of expression or manifestation of the Idea or Spirit (Geist) and to the special immediacy that artistic forms had for those who belong to the period of their production. Two aspects of Hegel’s view on art are relevant for this way of understanding aesthetic intimacy. Firstly, Hegel regarded artistic forms as expressions of the Spirit in its dialectical relationship with matter or sensible reality. Artistic forms are not thus arbitrary, their validity was given by their intimate relationships with the Idea they were a manifestation or expression of.Secondly, thanks to this expressive role, Art also contributed to self-understanding and, therefore, to the evolution and constitution of the Spirit. By providing the Spirit an image of itself, the Spirit could recognize itself and, as a result of that recognition, develop towards a different stage on the way to its own self-knowledge.
An important aspect of Hegel’s understanding of the expressive role of art is that art forms are to be regarded as manifestations of the Spirit. It is this spontaneity which guarantees the expressive and constitutive value of those forms. They are not produced out of reflection or thought; nor are they resulting from capricious choice. They convey the spiritual content in a direct, spontaneous manner. This spontaneity also explains that certain forms possess a certain vitality and immediacy at the moment in which they are produced that is no longer available once the Spirit evolves into
a further stage of development. Those forms are so to say ‘transparent’ to those who first produced them and they only become proper ‘forms of expression’ – that is, expressive options among others – for those that no longer live within them.
Thus, we can distinguish at least two forms of understanding and relating to art within Hegel’s view on Art. On the one hand, there is a more immediate but also, to some extent, unreflective way of engaging with art forms. On the other, there is a mediated form of understanding according to which we perceive certain artistic forms as expression of a culture we no longer belong to. Also it seems that, after this view, the genuine mode of understanding art coincides with the perspective of those who lived in a particular period and therefore were familiar with the artistic forms produced at that period. The art forms produced within a particular period were grasped and understood with an immediacy that is no longer available for those who contemplate them from a different historical perspective. The sort of understanding that an appreciator that belongs to a different time can aspire to can only be indirect or mediated. We can maybe understand Greek or Medieval art but we cannot feel at home within those forms: they have lost their vitality, naturalness or spontaneity. These forms were once the very representational and aesthetic constellation through which Spirit understood – or, following Hegel’s jargon, acknowledged – Itself, but they are mere objects for aesthetic contemplation once the Spirit has evolved and distanced itself from them.
This view about artistic and aesthetic understanding has survived to our days and many art historians still endorse a similar view of the symbiotic relationship between aesthetic forms and the historical and social milieu from which they arise7. As a consequence, aesthetic and artistic understanding is conceived of in a way that distinguishes between the producer or participants’ perspective and the mere observer’s perspective.
Although we approach those forms with certain tools that can make them intelligible to us, the way in which we relate to them is different.
7 See, for example, Baxandall (1985). In chapter IV he elaborates the differences in understanding that arise between the participant and the observer of a cultural period and its products.
After Hegel’s view of art in its historical role, we could characterize aesthetic intimacy as a matter of feeling at home within a certain aesthetic constellation8. Thus, the notion of aesthetic intimacy that one could derive from Hegel’s understanding of Art is a strong one for it invokes the possibility of living in or through certain aesthetic forms not as something one can freely accept or reject but as the very condition for (aesthetic) intelligibility. The notion of transparency will both serve to explain aesthetic intimacy and to emphasize the fundamental role that certain aesthetic or conceptual forms may play at a particular time. Those forms are transparent to those who live within them because, at least for some time, they cannot be substituted or translated into something different. They provide the very medium through which understanding takes place. The subjectivity they serve to express is not something distinct from the very forms through which it is embodied. They play in that sense an expressive and constitutive role.
As we have seen, one immediate consequence of this mode of understanding aesthetic intimacy is that it seems no longer possible to feel it unless one actually belongs to the corresponding period or culture.
Aesthetic intimacy can be thus crafted in terms of a particular form of aesthetic understanding that is only available to those who actually inhabit an aesthetic world. But it could not be possible to enjoy this experience when appreciating artworks that belong to a different time or to a different culture9. One could be at most an artistic tourist looking at others’ aesthetic patterns with wonder and curiosity, but without being able to enter into an intimate relationship with those forms.
In “Existential Aesthetics and Interpretation” (2003) Haapala explores the notions of artistic understanding paying attention to the kind of misunderstanding that can be grounded in our distance10 from the aesthetic
8 Albeit for Hegel that possibility was no longer available once art’s historical development had reached its end, it is possible to explore the implications of Hegel’s way of understanding artistic forms with respect to the issue of aesthetic intimacy.
9 The relative currency of this idea can be identified within a recently developed debate concerning the wrongdoing implied in cultural appropriation. The underlying idea has to do precisely with this way of regarding certain cultural manifestations or forms as intimately linked to a particular cultural o group identity. For some recent philosophical reflection on this issue see Young and Brunk, 2012, Nguyen and Strohl, forthcoming in Philosophical Studies.
10 We understand here the notion of aesthetic distance not as it is normally understood in
constellation to which the object under appreciation belongs. Even if there are limits to a possible scepticism with respect to our ability to aesthetically understand artworks that are remote to us, it seems that we cannot simply address these works as we do when appreciating the products of our own cultural environment. There may be key aspects that are crucial and basic for properly aesthetically understanding a work that may be missing in our current situation or of which we may be ignorant.11 Still, Haapala thinks that aesthetic understanding can be possible with respect to works whose original environment is now remote. However, given this picture of aesthetic understanding, it may be more difficult to defend that our experience could be possibly described as an experience of aesthetic intimacy. Even if we accept that aesthetic understanding is possible across different times and cultures, it seems that the undeniable specificity of each period will introduce a distance that could likely undermine one’s possible sense of proximity with respect to those works.
In relation to this way of conceiving aesthetic understanding, Haapala has also noticed a more fundamental role that aesthetic forms play in our lives. Following Heidegger’s characterization of “existentials”12, Haapala (2003) pays attention to what he calls the “existentials” of the artworld, or of the practice of art considered as a mode of being. As well as “existentials” play, in Heiddeger’s view, a certain transcendental role in our understanding of any form of human practice or existence, the so-called “existentials” of the artworld are to be considered as the minimal requirements or conditions without which the practice of art would not be possible as it is13.
the philosophical literature concerning the proper conditions for aesthetically appreciating an object, but as a temporal and cultural distance that may negatively affect our aesthetic understanding.
11 For example, one may not get the expressive force of a particular inflection of a Nô actor unless one is familiar enough with that practice and with the world it belongs to.
12 Haapala also uses the term ‘existentialia’. Some of these existentialia are the notions of
‘being-in’, ‘being-with-others’, ‘being-alongside’ and ‘care’.
13 Haapala identifies those ‘existentialia’ with the notions of ‘artist’, ‘artwork’, ‘interpreter’
and ‘artworld’. These notions will be differently instantiated and developed within different artistic practices but without them our most basic approach to art as an intentional practice wouldn’t even be possible.
Although Haapala does not expand much on the Heiddeggerian idea that it is in the actual and concrete practices that those existentials become normatively constituted14, we can draw, following Haapala’s own initiative, an analogy between the way human practices become normatively constituted and the artistic case. What in each artworld or practice becomes normative – setting the pattern for the continuation of a particular artistic practice – is not given a priori or from a reflective consideration of that practice, but by its very constitution within the practice itself. In this sense, deep aesthetic understanding requires being aware of the contingency and fragility of each aesthetic proposal, as well as of the importance of its role in determining future aesthetic possibilities.
An important aspect of this way of understanding aesthetic intelligibility is both its temporality and its self-constituting character. Nothing can grant that a particular, contingent, aesthetic development will speak to those who receive it. Its normative character, its persuasiveness as an aesthetic achievement, can only be confirmed within the very practice that produces it.
Aesthetic intimacy may be, in this light, understood as the experience of deeply understanding the normative appeal or proposal that a particular aesthetic attempt offers. The intimacy involved here has deeply to do with the fact that the work’s aesthetic proposal succeeds in reaching the audience although there might be no explanation or rationale that can explain its actual achievement. And yet, the appreciator feels the aesthetic form is accomplished, that it is an aesthetic achievement.
However, this way of understanding aesthetic intimacy may be undistinguishable from a characterization of aesthetic understanding simpliciter. So, as we saw with the first way of understanding aesthetic intimacy, we seem to require something more in order to be able to provide a more refined characterization of aesthetic intimacy.
I would like now to explore a third form of aesthetic intimacy that may be linked to the aforementioned experience of aesthetic understanding.
That is, with the experience that one correctly responds to a particular artistic form, or responds to it with understanding.
14 See, for example, Pippin (2005).