Aesthetics for me is a matter of rupturing the relation between an object and its qualities, and since such rupture for me is the engine of the world, then aesthetics does become first philosophy. Aesthetics should not be a marginal discipline that tells us about why people enjoy pretty paintings and songs; instead, these topics should be seen as a limited region of a far wider problem, which I have shown to relate also to such issues as time, space, essence, eidos, causation, theory, and perception.
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| — | Graham Harman, responding to Paul Ennis’ commentary on Harman’s “Vicarious Causation” essay. I am very much in sympathy with Harman’s suggestion of “aesthetics as first philosophy”; though I want to say that “rupturing the relation between an object and its qualities” is only one of a number of various modes of aesthetics (as I tried to suggest, in a first approximation, here). |
