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Department of Philosophy

Seminar

 By

Professor David Heckerl

Saint Mary's University

Halifax, Canada

 

"Democratic Aestheticism"

(in English)

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Date : 19 May 2006 (Friday)
Time : 4:30 ¡V 6:00 pm
Venue : GE321

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Abstract

My paper examines the current movement in North American political philosophy called ¡§weak ontology,¡¨ particularly the effort to (in Stephen K.White¡¦s words) ¡§open the moral-political dimension to the effects of aesthetic-affective experience.¡¨  With respect to this central aim of weak ontology, I focus attention on the influential writings of the Princeton political philosopher, George Kateb.  Kateb¡¦s theory of ¡§democratic aestheticism,¡¨ which he derives from the essays and poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, is worked through a rigorous phenomenology of aesthetic experience based in categorical distinctions between aesthetic inclinations, aesthetic cravings, and aesthetic attitudes.  Underlying these ¡§rubrics¡¨ of aesthetic experience is a deep conflict concerning the moral-political disposition that best sustains democratic culture, and which ultimately compels a fundamental choice between rationalism and irrationalism.  In Kateb¡¦s words, the defining task and problem of democratic aestheticism is to ¡§assert morality¡¦s supremacy and then educate the sense of beauty and sublimity so that it serves morality rather than harming it.¡¨  My paper elicits the various difficulties and complexities of Kateb¡¦s project.

Professor David Heckerl

David Heckerl is Assistant Professor of English at Saint Mary¡¦s University in Nova Scotia, Canada, where he teaches 19th and 20th century American literature. He maintains a lively interdisciplinary interest in philosophy and political thought, and has published articles on critical theory and the philosophy of science, naturalism and literature, and on political thinking in Edmund Burke, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Alexis de Tocqueville.  He is currently preparing a book manuscript on Lionel Trilling¡¦s conception of the ¡§liberal imagination¡¨ in context of issues raised in the political thought of Hannah Arendt. Isaiah Berlin, and Leo Strauss.

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All are welcome
For enquiries, please call 2616 7488 or e-mail to dphilo@ln.edu.hk