Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction: Experience versus Non-Experience
Chapter 1. Nature versus Art and the Aesthetic
Chapter 2. Expectations and Authenticity
Chapter 3. Experience and Art
Chapter 4. The Intertwining of Aesthetics and Ethics
Chapter 5. Laughter: A Two-Way Street between Art and Morality
Conclusion: Art, Morality, Society
Bibliography

About the Author

Jadranka Skorin-Kapov is professor of operations research at Stony Brook University, with additional PhDs in philosophy and art history, and author of The Aesthetics of Desire and Surprise:
Phenomenology and Speculation.

Reviews

In this beautiful book, Jadranka Skorin-Kapov brings us to the edge of the impossible. She gives a rich and compelling philosophical account of the aesthetic encounter: how it surprises us, affects us, and takes us beyond ourselves.
*Steven Shaviro, Wayne State University*

In this brilliant tour de force through modern and contemporary aesthetic and ethical theories Skorin-Kapov aims at probing their suitability for supporting two fundamental claims: first, that the aesthetic and the ethical experience are always already weaved together on account of their common root in the experience of the sublime; second, that the aesthetic encounter is in the end primary and all-encompassing. Beginning from contemporary theories propounding to blend aesthetic and ethical feeling and thought, this wide-ranging work argues for the importance of uncovering the historical-philosophical origins of their merger.

Readers will find here breathtakingly rich resources for probing deeper into modern and contemporary notions of aesthetic feeling and judgment, from Kantian theory, through nineteenth century European idealism and romanticism, to critical theory, existentialism, phenomenology and hermeneutics. Skorin-Kapov shows how genuine aesthetic experience paradoxically implies a negation of experience, if experience is meant to involve various degrees of objectivity and contextuality, including social standards and cultural norms that may be irrelevant to, even incompatible with, the nonobjective, ecstatic dimension of the aesthetic encounter: pure desire, unadulterated expectation of an unspecifiable ‘more,’ rupture and, finally, authentic surprise in the experience of the artwork. It is from this sublime experience, the Author argues, that both the aesthetic and the moral world are born.

This book’s bold theses are sustained by learning as well as imaginative insight. These make for a rare combination of instructive and exciting reading on the fundamental re-thinking of ethics and aesthetics in contemporary continental philosophy.
*Allegra de Laurentiis, State University of New York at Stony Brook*