LETTER TO A YOUNG PHILOSOPHER
Dear James,
After reading your proposal for a book on black aesthetics,
I raise four common sense questions:
WHAT IS NECESSARY?
WHAT IS GOOD?
WHAT IS TRUE?
WHAT IS BEAUTIFUL?
If you paste these questions on your wall as you investigate
"black aesthetics," you might write a mind-opening book. That is the only worthwhile kind of book any
of us ought to try to write. Good
thinkers use the gravity of simple questions to ground themselves.
Standard American English invites us to be careless as we
pretend to be rigorous. Take a clue from
the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, who merits applause for publishing The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st
Century ( New York: Viking, 2014). No sentence in his book refers to Black
American English. That is a damned fine
thing. By ignoring an ethnic use of
English that flavors styles of contemporary American thought, Pinker alerts us
to exclusion as an option. In academic
commerce, we opt to exclude or ignore as we shape reality in an image that we
deem pleasing and proper. For example,
he tells us "the graybeard sensibilities of the style mavens come not just
from an underappreciation of the fact of language change but from a lack of
reflection on their own psychology"(4).
Should you opt to ignore the ethnic history of the word
"aesthetic," and what that history reveals about use and abuse in
doing things with words, you will make common cause with Pinker in mavenship.
Be at once more cautious and more radical than he, and reflect on your own
psychology.
The English language can be treacherous. To write about aesthetics in a meaningful and
necessary way, you have to weed the garden of Western thought. As far as I know, aesthetics was not a worshipful category prior to the 18th
century. And since you up the ante by
using the slippery adjective black to modify aesthetics, remember
that African peoples did not think of themselves as "black" prior to
their sundry contacts with color-deficient peoples. They thought of themselves as people who used
their minds and bodies as instruments to sense what was external. In this regard, they were no different than
people unlike themselves in expressing how body and mind could deal with
material objects and environments and flashings of the spirit. Western thought is predisposed to fix what is
not broken and to let weeds choke roots.
As a philosopher, you may have studied how etymology is related to epistemology and use of words.
From the Oxford English Dictionary, a
source of some authority, we learn that aesthetic
comes from Greek. It originally meant "of or pertaining
to...things perceptible by the senses, things material (as opposed to...things
thinkable or immaterial." In 1735,
the German thinker Alexander Gottlieb
Baumgarten, being pro-Aristotle and anti-Plato in sensibility, used episteme aistetike to mean a science of
what is sensed and imagined, a nice violation of the original meaning.
According to some reports, Immanuel Kant was not pleased with such
philosophical violation. He was a
purist. But when the word " aesthetic" gained currency in English usage after 1830, thinkers maximized the sense of taste (minimizing other
senses) and designated it to mean "philosophical inquiry, the object of
which is philosophical theory of the beautiful." The word's
journey from the Greek to the German to the English is ethnic and also
coloured by the paint of race. The word is now used most exclusively in discussions of art.
It pleases me that you are taking up an unfinished project
of the Black Arts Movement (BAM), namely exploration of diverse changes in
how African American make aesthetic
choices as they respond to life and to art.
It became fashionable in the 1980s to demonize the "political"
features of BAM, to dismiss the
phenomenon as a cultural temper tantrum or a suspect reification of African and
African American mythologies.
BAM did have flaws
and contradictions, of course, but they were not so irrational that discussions
of the Black Aesthetic and aesthetics in the anthology The Black Aesthetic (Garden
City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), edited by Addison Gayle, Jr., had to be murdered in a rush toward a reconstruction of
instruction and the salvation of theory. Many anti-BAM critics, energized by the vernacular
signifying of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., deemed it a virtue to be
"theoretical" in the way
Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Jacques
Derrida were always already postmodern and deconstructionist in the theatre of
philosophy. Their opposition was a sign of how rational they were. A smaller number
of them embraced the blues-informed ideology of Houston A. Baker, Jr.'s
history-bound brand of theorizing. Few of them, I suspect, read Derrida's
characterization of metaphysics in The Margins of Philosophy (London:
Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982) as "the white mythology which reassembles and
reflects the culture of the West: the white man takes his own mythology,
Indo-European mythology, his own logos,
that is, the mythos of his idiom, for
the universal form of that he must still wish to call Reason" (231). Had
they engaged Reason from this angle, they might have been more sympathetic to
BAM's efforts to say that perceptions have a racialized historicity. They might
have been less anxious to foreclose the unfinished metaphysical project BAM initiated regarding
aesthetics.
On the other hand, it
might have mattered very little if they had read Derrida, for they were
determined to give credibility to an
assertion John Dewey made in Art as
Experience (1934; New York: Paragon, 1979): "Usually there is a
hostile reaction to a conception of art that connects it with the activities of
a live creature in its environment. The hostility to association of fine art
with normal processes of living is a pathetic, even a tragic commentary on life
as it is ordinarily lived" (27). Dewey understood that aesthetic
experiences were first of all about living (sensing of materiality) and only
secondarily about "correct" contemplation of objects in the visual
and plastic arts and motion in ballet; eargasms
and rapture in the presence of
"classical music" or opera; or in the case of literature, formal and
deceptive ahistorical inspection of verbal icons. James, I urge you to read Dewey as well as
Cornel West's enlightened commentary on Dewey in The American Evasion of Philosophy (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1989). Dewey knew how
to weed a garden. You may also want to
read Barnor Hesse, "Racialized Modernity: An Analytics of White
Mythologies." Ethnic and Racial
Studies 30.4 (2007): 643-663. Hesse
pulls up weeds nicely as he discusses the racial metaphysics of presence.
Above all, I strongly recommend that you read Carolyn
Fowler's brilliant introduction to Black
Arts and Black Aesthetics. 2nd
Edition (Atlanta: First World Foundation, 1981). Better than any other thinker associated with
the Black Arts Movement, Fowler understood that the term "black aesthetics"
is historical and non-exclusive. Like
the terms "Chinese aesthetics" or "Persian aesthetics," it
belongs to a history of philosophical discourses. The idea of aesthetics is fluid not fixed.
And our talk about aesthetics should not lead to the belief that we can have a
total accounting of how people perceive and think about things material. We are limited to approximate accounting for
the human sensorium in time and space.
Emphasize in your book that you are making an inquiry about history
(narratives regarding the endless process of change and continuity) and that
philosophical propositions are not omniscient.
It is necessary and good to make acknowledgements with grace. I believe you are trying to articulate
"a truth" rather than "the Truth." Ultimately, I am suggesting that you use
common sense to write in uncommon ways about the flowing ontology of black
aesthetics, the river where consciousness connects with the beautiful.
With very best wishes,
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
October 8, 2015
