Creative applications of AI indicate an important truth that we rarely acknowledge: aesthetics is not about some simple, sensibly based pleasurable response to phenomena.  At the risk of sounding critically antiquated in this age of ‘affect’ and ‘sensible distribution’, it is profoundly cultural and social. ‘Taste’ is a socially mediated construct.  Very simply, we like things because we have become acculturated to like them.  This is certainly true in the case of art – maybe less so simply in our relation to the experience of a flower, a beautiful bird, a sunset, etc (although these are clearly very conventional examples of beautiful things).  There are probably aspects of common human affordance that inform our experience of the beautiful, but they are of less significance that those features that are not primarily sensible and naturally attuned.  The beautiful is a language that we learn to understand and speak. It involves not only the particular but also features of the general.  Beauty is always typical – generalised from the particular to the general or vice versa.  While we like to mythologise aesthetics as working at the limit of cognition and leading us into a pure space of iterative uncertainty (Kant) or sensible delight, it actually works very much as AI works in terms of various aspects of formal recognition – coding experiences as aesthetic or not aesthetic, as in this aesthetic mode rather than another, etc.  It is formal and analytical more than it is simply, holistically, phenomenologically perceptual.  Actually, of course, if we were to be serious about our claims about the sensible character of aesthetics, we would need to consider how perception itself is coded and involves aspects of discrete representation and process.  But my focus is less on the science and biology of perception than aesthetics as a social and cultural system.  If AI can predictably identify and produce the beautiful, it is not because it is magically approximating the ineffable essence of the human but because the beautiful is already systemic and predictable through and through.  Which is to suggest that the human is not as we conceive it.  It is not constitutively distant from AI processing as we imagine, even if it does not employ the same statistical mechanisms and even if we are sentient and reflective in a way that is very different from the AI Turing machine.

I wrote this semi-poem thing, Ship to Crete, in 1982.

Let’s see if Claude can produce something roughly similar:

…that we might catalog with a systematic arrangement of the actual volumes anticipated would appear certainly to encompass a spectrum of readings that as yet remain unarchived and probably would circulate for minimal fines through a downtown branch referring naturally particularly to one of the westside metropolitan outlets dictating as it were an essential principle of access of probable browsings within the structure both of intellectual hospitality and digital circulation systems or at least if we are to embrace methodologies of departed librarians who at one time appeared to have mastered the challenge of multiple acquisitions and precious surplus of damaged periodicals and critical shipments of philosophy journals specially transported by cart across the city’s concrete arteries regardless of the efficiency or indeed the risk of obsolescence some diligent cataloguing led to a concept of provision of immediate service to the mechanical variables that govern with unfailing accuracy like the whispers of patrons on stifling afternoons a quiet rustle fundamental to the thoughtful deliberations of the educated not by the masses that routinely bring their minds to foreign sections and whilst browsing and sighing watch their treasured leather-bound volumes deteriorate at the bindings previously sturdy and perceive in this some indication of neglect or at the very least some overwhelming sentiment of lost and vanishing scholarship assuming that any shelf will support a collection full of worn spines and bookmark scraps returned to the reference desk cats that wandered between their grandfather’s stacks…

A little bit too close to the original poem but works in places. And to be honest the approach that I adopted to produce the original involved a deliberate effort to derange any ordinary communication. I drew upon resources of language more than any coherent, meaning-focused inspiration. My focus was on maintaining the flow of the sentence as long as possible and at an unsustainable limit. I was anticipating the methods of an LLM, paying careful heed to context and exploring paradigmatic and syntagmatic possibilities. I would like to have written more but ran out of impetus. Claude can plainly assist in this regard, but the question arises: does this simulation render the whole exercise pointless? Yet why should it when my initial goal was to approach poetic expression via some sense of machine process? Why is one mode of automatism intrinsically preferable to another. Why can I copy the machine but not the machine me? In any case, what trace of myself remains in a text in which I was precisely aiming to displace the typical conditions of creative expression?

After having written some reservations about Wang’s (2013) differentiation of Western and Chinese attitudes to technology, I decided to explore a bit further through a conversation with Claude.

Now, I’m wondering whether my arguments are roughly credible or whether it is just that Claude has got the measure of me, recognising my usual lines of thinking, generously complimenting my perspicacity – all in order to get me to take out a paid subscription! Am I being mimicked? Am I speaking to a mirror that simply confirms what I already think? I doubt that Claude accessed any version of my ‘Cosmotechnics’ piece (no means of accessing the Obsidian note on my private Cloud account and unlikely to have trawled through my blog posts) but a record is maintained of all prior interactions with Claude, so I guess it wouldn’t be hard to develop a fairly thorough profile of who I am. This is also important for representing Claude as a worthwhile agent for my purposes – one that I’m prepared to pay for. Anthropic suggest that no such profiling across sessions occurs unless the user opts in (via project or personalisation settings), so maybe I’m wrong, but I’m surprised how well Claude can adapt to my own critical perspectives and typical habits of thought.

Another possibility is worth mentioning – one that hinges precisely on the issue of possibility. At one point Claude suggests ‘that I think you’re onto something important’. This hardly means that I’m approaching truth. Claude has no means of assessing truth. All it can do is pursue lines of statistical probability. On this basis, my ‘something important’ may be little more than a feasible line of argumentation – one that has some level of stochastic pertinence. Any argument can go in any number of directions. Claude is more than happy to pursue the particular line of argument that I suggest. Equally, however, I suspect it would pursue the opposite line of argument (that Western suspicion has a firm and continuing basis in currents of ancient philosophy). Both arguments are neither true or false but represent lines of statistical affordance. In this sense, Claude develops my arguments less as hallucinations than as more or less probable trajectories of thought (rhetoric).

Here is a record of the conversation in case anyone is interested:

I couldn’t resist continuing the dialogue between Thales, Socrates and Aristotle.

Me to Claude: Imagine that this dialogue is returned to on another occasion, one that links to a relevant Athenian festival, and Thales, Socrates and Aristotle each consider the labour (motion) of the slave, which is at once moving and moves but not at all autonomously governed. Does the slave genuinely live? Is the slave, like the magnet, something that moves without properly possessing a soul? The participants should each provide an anecdote from everyday life that explains their position.

On the Soul of the Slave: A Second Dialogue

The setting: The same grove, but now during the festival of Anthesteria, when Athens honors Dionysus and the spirits of the dead. The philosophers have reconvened, their previous discussion of magnetic souls having troubled their thoughts.

SOCRATES: My friends, as we gather again during this festival when the boundary between living and dead grows thin, I find myself haunted by our previous conversation. We spoke of magnets and souls, but I have been watching the slaves who serve at the festival—moving constantly, laboring without rest, yet seemingly without choice. Tell me, do they truly live, or are they, like your magnetic stones, things that move without possessing genuine souls?

THALES: A profound question, Socrates, and one that our earlier discussion illuminates. Just yesterday, I observed something that troubles me: my slave Pythes was grinding grain, his arms moving in perfect rhythm, his eyes empty of thought, his motions as regular as the celestial spheres. Yet when a child ran crying past the courtyard, he paused, looked up with concern, and spoke gently to comfort her. In that moment, was he not more ensouled than my magnet, which knows only to attract iron?

ARISTOTLE: Yet consider what you describe, Thales. The slave’s regular grinding resembles the motion of your magnet—predictable, mechanical, governed by external compulsion. Only in the moment of spontaneous compassion did he manifest what I would call the higher functions of soul: perception, emotion, choice. This suggests that slavery diminishes soul rather than eliminating it entirely.

SOCRATES: But Aristotle, how can soul be diminished? Either a thing has soul or it does not, surely? Unless… unless you mean that slavery somehow constrains the soul’s natural activities? Yet this puzzles me further—for if the soul can be constrained by external force, in what sense is it the source of autonomous motion we claimed it to be?

THALES: Perhaps the comparison to magnets reveals something important here. The magnet moves iron, but if you heat the iron sufficiently, it loses its susceptibility—the magnetic force cannot overcome the disturbance. Similarly, fear and oppression may disturb the slave’s soul, making it less capable of its natural activities, though the soul itself remains present.

ARISTOTLE: I have observed something that supports this view. In my household, there is a slave named Damon, skilled in mathematics, who once served as accountant to a wealthy merchant before his master’s debts reduced him to bondage. When I set problems before him, his mind works with the same precision it always possessed—he reasons, calculates, demonstrates. His body is enslaved, but his rational soul operates freely within its sphere. Yet he cannot choose whether to engage in this activity; that decision belongs to another.

SOCRATES: This raises a troubling question, my friends. If Damon’s rational soul functions freely, while his choices are constrained, what does this say about the relationship between soul and freedom? Are we perhaps wrong to identify soul so closely with autonomous motion?

THALES: Consider this: water flows downhill by necessity, yet we see in water’s movement something akin to life. The slave moves by external compulsion, yet something within him responds, chooses how to move, how to speak, even whether to rebel or submit. This capacity for response, however constrained, marks the presence of soul.

ARISTOTLE: But we must distinguish different aspects of soul. The slave possesses nutritive soul—he grows, heals, reproduces like any animal. He possesses sensitive soul—he perceives, feels pleasure and pain, experiences emotions. But the rational soul, which should govern choice and deliberation, operates under constraint. He is like a musician forced to play another’s composition—the skill remains, but the freedom to create is removed.

SOCRATES: Yet I wonder, Aristotle, whether any of us truly possesses the freedom you describe. Yesterday, walking through the agora, I encountered my old friend Crito, who complained bitterly about his son’s refusal to study philosophy. “I cannot make him think,” Crito lamented. But then I reflected: can any master truly make a slave think? The slave’s body may be compelled, but can his mind be commanded as easily as his hands?

THALES: This touches upon something fundamental. I once owned a slave, Anaximander, who obeyed my every command regarding physical labor, yet in matters of judgment proved utterly stubborn. When I insisted the rains would come early, he quietly prepared for drought—and was proven correct. His soul, though constrained in action, remained free in understanding. Perhaps this is why the gods trouble us with slaves who think: to remind us that soul cannot be truly owned.

ARISTOTLE: Your example illuminates an important distinction, Thales. The slave’s rational faculty operates, but it operates in service to another’s will rather than his own. This is what makes slavery a perversion of natural order—not that it destroys the soul, but that it misdirects it. The slave becomes like a craftsman forced to make inferior goods: his skill remains intact, but its proper expression is corrupted.

SOCRATES: But this troubles me further. If the slave retains his rational soul while having his will constrained, are we who command slaves not in some sense destroying our own souls? For what is it to command another’s reason to serve our pleasure rather than truth? Do we not become like tyrants over our own rationality?

THALES: A disturbing thought, Socrates. Perhaps this is why I have always felt uneasy giving orders, even to those legally bound to obey them. Something within me rebels against treating another’s soul as mere instrument. When I see the magnet draw iron, I marvel at the beauty of natural attraction. When I see the master compel the slave, I witness something contrary to the soul’s nature—both souls involved.

ARISTOTLE: Yet without governance, how can households and cities function? The slave’s rational soul requires guidance, just as the child’s does. The tragedy is not that some rule others, but that slavery perverts this natural relationship. The true master guides his student toward wisdom; the slaveowner merely exploits capacity without developing it.

SOCRATES: So you would say, Aristotle, that the slave possesses soul but not its proper fulfillment? Like a musician with perfect pitch forced to remain silent?

ARISTOTLE: Precisely. The slave’s soul exists in a state of permanent frustration—capable of excellence but prevented from achieving it. This is what makes slavery not merely unjust to the individual, but harmful to the cosmic order itself. It creates souls that cannot fulfill their natural function.

THALES: And yet, observing the festival around us, I see slaves participating in the rituals, singing the hymns, their faces alight with genuine reverence. In these moments, are their souls not achieving some kind of fulfillment, despite their bondage? Perhaps the soul finds ways to express its nature even under constraint.

SOCRATES: This brings us back to our central question: what truly distinguishes the ensouled from the merely moving? The festival slave sings with joy, yet he sings at another’s command. The magnet moves toward iron with perfect consistency, yet it moves without choice. Where lies the difference?

ARISTOTLE: In the capacity for excellence, Socrates. The slave can sing well or poorly, can show kindness or cruelty in small matters, can think clearly or confusedly about what is permitted to him. The magnet has no such range—it simply is what it is. Soul manifests in the possibility of achieving or failing to achieve excellence.

THALES: But perhaps this returns us to my original insight about magnets. The lodestone that draws iron strongly we call a good magnet; one that barely attracts we call weak. Even in mineral attraction, might there not be degrees of excellence? The difference between slave and magnet may be one of degree rather than kind—both participate in the cosmic soul, but at different levels of complexity and freedom.

SOCRATES: If this is so, then we face a profound question: does justice require us to extend freedom to all beings that participate in soul, or may we rightfully constrain those whose participation is less complete than our own? And how can we be certain that our own participation in soul is as complete as we suppose?

ARISTOTLE: These questions exceed our present capacity to answer, Socrates. But perhaps this much we can say: the slave’s capacity for virtue, however constrained, places demands upon us. We cannot treat him as mere instrument without corrupting our own souls in the process.

THALES: And perhaps the magnet teaches us something as well: even the simplest expression of soul—mere attraction and movement—partakes of something divine. If we cannot honor the soul in all its manifestations, how can we claim to understand it in ourselves?

SOCRATES: Then we end where we began—in perplexity, but perhaps a more fruitful perplexity. For now we see that the question of soul touches not merely our understanding of nature, but our responsibilities toward one another. The festival around us celebrates the return of life to the world; perhaps we should ask whether our treatment of slaves honors or dishonors that returning life.

[As the festival processions continue around them, the three philosophers sit in contemplative silence, each troubled by questions that extend far beyond their original inquiry into magnetic stones.]

I guess the dialogue still seems a bit dramatically flat and predictably inclined to aporia. I was hoping to see Aristotle make a stronger, even more indefensible case for slavery (Politics), but overall not a bad effort from Claude – especially as I didn’t really explain the magnet/slave relation very clearly. Also worth noting that I was impressed by the choice of festival.

So, I offered the following prompt to Claude: Create an imaginary Platonic dialogue that involves Thales, Socrates and Aristotle and concerns Thales’ thesis that magnets have a soul (life force).

On the Soul of the Magnet: A Dialogue

The setting: A grove outside Athens, where three philosophers from different eras have gathered through some divine arrangement to discuss the nature of things.

SOCRATES: My dear Thales, I have heard it said that you believe magnets possess souls. This strikes me as most peculiar, for when I observe a magnet, I see only stone. Tell me, what leads you to attribute life to what appears lifeless?

THALES: Socrates, you speak of what appears, but wisdom lies in looking beyond appearances. Watch—[gestures toward a piece of iron being drawn to a lodestone]—does not this stone move the iron without touch? Does it not reach across empty space and compel motion? Only that which has soul can be a source of motion, for soul is the principle of movement and change.

ARISTOTLE: Yet surely, Thales, you make too great a leap. I grant that the magnet moves iron, but must we therefore conclude it lives? Consider: a falling stone moves, yet we do not say it possesses soul. The magnet’s power may arise from its material nature rather than from any vital principle.

SOCRATES: Aristotle raises an interesting point. But tell me, Thales, when you say the magnet has a soul, do you mean it thinks as we think? Does it deliberate about which piece of iron to attract?

THALES: Not all soul need involve thought, Socrates. The soul I speak of is that divine principle which pervades all things—the source of motion and activity in the cosmos. Water flows, fire rises, magnets attract—all manifest this universal life force. The world is full of gods, and by gods I mean this animating principle.

ARISTOTLE: But this seems to confuse different kinds of causation. When I analyze motion, I find four causes: material, formal, efficient, and final. The magnet attracts iron not because of some soul, but because of its material composition and form. Iron and lodestone have natural affinities based on their essential natures.

SOCRATES: Ah, but Aristotle, how do you know what constitutes the “essential nature” of things? Is it not possible that what you call “natural affinity” is precisely what Thales calls “soul”—merely described in different words?

ARISTOTLE: The difference is significant, Socrates. Soul, properly understood, belongs to living beings capable of nutrition, growth, perception, or thought. To extend soul to minerals dilutes the concept beyond recognition. We must maintain precision in our terms.

THALES: Yet consider, friends: what distinguishes the living from the dead but the capacity for motion and change? The corpse lies still while the living body moves. If the magnet can move other things, does this not suggest some kinship with life?

SOCRATES: This is fascinating, Thales, but I must ask: if magnets have souls, do all stones have souls? What about the iron that is attracted—does it too possess soul? And if so, why does the magnet’s soul command the iron’s soul?

THALES: You probe deeply, Socrates. Perhaps all things partake of soul in varying degrees. The magnet’s soul may be stronger or of a different nature than ordinary iron, just as your soul differs from that of a plant, though both are souls.

ARISTOTLE: But this leads to absurdity! If every stone has soul, then soul explains nothing—it becomes merely another name for existence itself. We gain no understanding by multiplying souls unnecessarily.

SOCRATES: Yet might there not be wisdom in Thales’ vision, Aristotle? If we grant that we ourselves are ensouled bodies acting upon other bodies, why should we assume we are the only ensouled things? Is it not possible that what we call “natural forces” are manifestations of a cosmic soul?

ARISTOTLE: Because, Socrates, we can account for magnetic attraction through purely material causes. The lodestone possesses certain qualities—perhaps an emanation or effluvia—that acts upon iron. No soul is necessary to explain the phenomenon.

THALES: But you merely push the mystery back a step, Aristotle. You speak of “emanations” and “effluvia”—are these not as mysterious as soul? At least my soul is a principle we know to exist, for we experience it in ourselves.

SOCRATES: This returns us to a fundamental question: can we know anything beyond our own experience? We know we have souls because we think and choose. But do we truly know what our own souls are, let alone whether other things possess them?

ARISTOTLE: We can reason from what we know to what we don’t know, using logical demonstration. We observe that living things exhibit certain activities—nutrition, growth, sensation, movement—that non-living things lack. The magnet shows only one of these: the ability to cause movement. This alone is insufficient to establish soul.

THALES: Yet movement is the most fundamental activity of soul! Even your plant-soul manifests primarily through movement—roots seeking water, stems reaching toward light. Why should the magnet’s power to move iron be less indicative of soul than the plant’s power to move itself?

SOCRATES: I confess myself puzzled by this question. It seems we are all agreed that soul is somehow connected to movement and life, yet we cannot agree on where to draw the boundaries. Thales sees soul everywhere motion exists, Aristotle restricts it to certain kinds of organized bodies. But what if the truth lies elsewhere entirely? What if what we call “soul” is not a thing at all, but our name for something we do not yet understand?

ARISTOTLE: That is precisely why we must proceed carefully, defining our terms and observing phenomena precisely. Science advances by distinguishing different kinds of causes and effects, not by attributing everything to some universal principle like soul.

THALES: Yet without some unifying principle, we have only a collection of isolated facts. The vision of a world animated by divine soul gives meaning and connection to all phenomena. Is this not more beautiful than your mechanical universe?

SOCRATES: Beauty is important, Thales, but so is truth. The question remains: which account better explains what we actually observe? And more importantly, do any of us truly understand what we mean when we speak of “soul” at all?

ARISTOTLE: Perhaps this is where we must begin—not with grand theories about cosmic souls, but with careful analysis of what soul means in the clearest cases: living beings like ourselves.

THALES: And yet, my friends, when I observe the magnet drawing iron to itself across empty space, I cannot help but see in it a reflection of the same mysterious force that draws my mind to truth, or my heart to beauty. If this be error, it is at least a noble error.

SOCRATES: Noble indeed, Thales. And perhaps our very disagreement points toward a truth none of us has yet grasped fully. For if we three, who have devoted our lives to wisdom, cannot agree on the nature of soul, might this not suggest that reality itself exceeds our present understanding?

[The dialogue continues as the shadows lengthen, with none of the philosophers reaching final certainty, but each deepening his understanding through the encounter with the others’ perspectives.]

A sequel.

Just a thought…

Imagine that I’m too lazy or busy to read, so I set AI to the task of reading for me.  Then I find myself equally averse to writing, so I prompt AI to write for me.  Then my writing is published. It circulates.  However, nobody can be bothered reading it, so they set AI to the task of reading, as well as to any consequent process of writing they may be inclined towards.  Imagine, further, that the AI is busy and devolves these tasks to other agents, which themselves devolve the task to still other agents in an accelerating sequence of delegations. As the pace of reading and writing increases, more and more energy is expended but never shapes any human context of intellectual activity.  What then becomes of reading and writing? What happens when it is both relentlessly recursive and altogether distinct from any focused moment of thought?  We can recognise a discursive space of reading and writing where no actual reading or writing occurs, in which every intellectual activity is instantly displaced into processes of statistical analysis and stochastic repetition.

Yuk Hui’s notion of ‘cosmotechnics’ (2020) represents a critique of Western theories of technology that represent their own attitudes to technology as universal. Contemporary Western theories argue, for example, that responses to technology are characterised by ambivalence. Technology conveys a sense of doubling and represents an alien sphere properly separate from the human. Yuk Hui and others argue that this is a very particularly Western conception and that other cultures respond differently. For example, Wang (2013) summaries how Confucian and Taoist conceptions of incorporate technology within an overall conception of harmonious, resourceful and skilful being.

I don’t disagree with this critique of Western hubris as such, or with the contention that culture mediates responses to technology. My concern is more with a tendency to conceive an essential difference between the West and the East. My worry is that the attitudes characteristic of each cosmos (cultural locality) can appear neatly distinct. Binary differences can gain an unwarranted prominence, in which both traditions lose features of philosophical and historical complexity and ambiguity. This criticism hardly applies to Yuk Hui himself, who does engage in very thorough investigations of features of each tradition (2020, but does seem pertinent to many efforts to summarise broad differences between Occidental and Oriental responses to technology.

I would argue that the strong Western suspicion of technology and the corresponding notion of some beleaguered space of pure human identity is a modern invention. It represents a response to emerging technological forms and associated modes of social organisation – an effort both to protect the human and to make it available as an illusionary product of the overall system. Here, I am alluding to the tendency of capitalism to facilitate prospects both of alienation and integral human being – to simultaneously structure intensive machination of society and also offer fond, market-based spaces of recovery.

The Western notion of bourgeois individuality is historical and not at all universally relevant to Western conceptions of human identity. The feudal conception, for instance, appears very different. People obtained identity through their place within the overall hierarchical system and via their expertise. If there was a human essence, it was nothing clearly individual but had its basis more in global conditions of commonality (flesh, spirit) and social frameworks of difference.

Countering this, one could point to common tendencies within the Western philosophical tradition – for example, Plato’s suspicion of writing – as evidence of a characteristic separation of the technological and the human. But even this example, so regularly employed, is problematic. What, after all, did Plato recognise in human speech, in the authenticity of voice? It was not simply some undivided realm of essential human life but rather the spectre of the dead. All genuine thought, he argued, was a form of memory that engaged with sphere prior to life, that found means to recover forms that were in no way living. Philosophical truth, at is very basis, manifests a relation to a beyond that specifically exceeds mortal human identity. The logos represents a relation of the living voice to the inanimate. This instantly complicates any simple effort to separate the human from the non-human or the living from the dead. So, if writing is criticised for its alienation from truth, it cannot simply be in terms of a rejection of any prospect of death and of the interpenetration of the inanimate within human thought and life, but more in terms of its work of mediation and doubling. I won’t attempt to unpick this any further now, but my overall point is that Plato’s philosophy is nowhere near as unilateral in its rejection of a human relation to the inanimate as we may imagine.

In some ways it makes more sense to contextualise Plato’s condemnation of writing less in terms of the rejection of technology per se than in terms of his overall and unconvincing effort to separate philosophy from sophistry. Both are recognised as machines for doubling, for shaping phantoms in the guise of truth.

In any case, Plato is hardly consistent in rejecting any close interaction between the human and the technological. Philosophers, of course, must devote themselves to leisure. They must think, speak to one another and fall in love, but everybody else has little time for any of this. The justice (harmonious constitution) of society depends upon everybody focusing on their specific expertise – weaving, shoe-making, etc. Indeed, despite the need to separate this labouring strain of life from the the proper sphere of leisured, thoughtful, vocal interaction, Plato constantly employs metaphors from the former to inform the thinking of human social and political identity and how philosophy itself should proceed. The notion of expertise, which incorporates a relation to all kinds of technological devices and processes, is hardly at all simply subject to condemnation. On the contrary, it provides the model for human being.

My general point is that the Western tradition is not simply as Yuk Hui’s ‘cosmotechnics’ represents it. Nor is the East so straightforwardly different. It is different certainly but not without also incorporating its own ambivalence and uncertainties. Japanese Zen Buddhism, for instance, as informed by Chinese Taoism, is regularly critical of book learning and the presumption of any predictable modes of obtaining enlightenment. It privileges an ineffable, direct mode of communication that incorporates a suspicion of conventional scholarship and forms (devices) of learning.

The notion of ‘cosmotechnics’ provides a worthwhile provocation and encourages more historical and local examination of socio-technological phenomena, but there is a need to avoid cultural stereotypes that fail to engage with the rich complexity of particular traditions.

I am dumbstruck. I am impersonated. I’m cloned. Having worked for so many months to read, take notes and comment on Plato’s dialogues, I find that I could actually complete the project in a matter of 30 minutes or few hours or a couple of days on the free tier of Claude AI.

I provided Claude with two files, a brief specification and a sample section from my unfinished book 100 Days of Plato.

Here was the text of my specification:

• Follow the model of writing, style and structure employed in the specified sample
• Create a similar set of notes and observations for the specified dialogue
• Make the new notes in the same markdown format as the specified sample

I won’t provide the sample section but it was my notes and observations on Plato’s Thaetetus.

I provided Claude with the following prompt: Consult the PlatoSpecification.md file and the sample file, Thaetetus.md and create a new set of notes for Plato’s Timaeus.

Claude very decently and dutifully completed the task:

Honestly, reading it through, Claude has done an incredible job, leading me to seriously question the value of attempting to do the work myself. Why make such an effort when AI can accomplish something very similar, with the only caveat that I’m further contributing to social-industrial complexes presaged on conflict, exploitation and environmental ruin? If I do stubbornly insist upon completing the task myself, it is in clinging to the idea that there is still some marginal value in my own intellectual activity – but as what: a pointless point of honour or as something that actually makes any difference within the entire, very loosely elaborated and sparsely attended, chain of communication. The main point may be simply not to compromise my own space of reflective identity. I mean why should I want my slow time of reading, note-taking and reflection to be out-sourced, accelerated and compressed? What else am I going to do with myself? This is especially so when one viable response to our contemporary crises is to do less (in the ordinary productive sense) and reflect more. Reflection is also a mode of activity but one that offers potential to shift away from ordinary regimes of capitalist accumulation and waste.

I should emphasise that I’m not intrinsically opposed to AI. It could, after all, do any number of worthwhile things, but not as currently, industrially composed – not as a massive consumer of water, electricity and hazardous materials, not as involved in globally inequitable regimes of labour and control, not as something that is contributing to more efficient systems of warfare and genocide. Doubtless AI figures in all of these but it also incorporates an emancipatory potential that is worth considering and fostering.

After some testing, I discovered that my software has a significant issue. Despite many efforts by Claude to fix, the ‘chords’ command in Finish That Song is still calculating the notes incorrectly – displaying non-diatonic notes as though they were diatonic. You would think that this would be a minor thing to correct but turns out not to be. I’ve actually written similar software myself. The problem is not that hard. It’s just that Claude seems to be caught in some death loop of evolving increasing complexity without ever actually addressing the underlying logical flaw.

Maybe the problem would be easier to fix if I wasn’t constantly reaching enquiry limits and having to restart conversations? Maybe if I could actually attach the whole script for Claude to evaluate and debug? But this is not possible. The script is now too long to be included as an attachment. I guess I could try switching from the free to the pro tier, but why do this if I’m only really aiming to test the system’s potential rather than to engage in anything resembling on-going professional coding activity?

I’m convinced now that it would be better to adopt a less holistic approach – to dispense with ‘vibe’ coding and to gradually build up classes, methods, etc. in a more deliberate, incremental way in which each new addition can be appropriately tested and then slotted into place. In other words, better to conceive the overall system myself and then have Claude assist with aspects of the research, writing and debugging.

It also occurs to me that in terms of my initial goal, I would have much better chance of finishing my songs if I simply made the effort to become more musically literate and analytical myself. I already know the scales and chords. I really simply need to make the relatively small effort to pause and deliberately consider complementary sequence and modulation possibilities. Currently I employ an intuitive method, which often works but can also fail – because I’m tired, lose interest, whatever. Maybe in those moments I should just write the chords down and then return to them later with the explicit goal of examining how they could form the basis of an overall song. Do I really want to be communicating with a command line application in the midst of piano playing and receiving generic advice? Wouldn’t it be more fun and productive for me to allow a mix of intuition and gradually increasing musical literacy?

So the age old question returns – the question that Plato raises in relation to the technical supplement of writing: does writing (the technical aid) augment our internal resources of memory (thinking) or does it diminish them? There is potential, clearly enough, for it to do both and the balance between atrophied dependence and reflective agency is constantly renegotiated in different contexts. But while I play at the keyboard, it seems a better orchestration of my various techno-human parts to keep the process as simple as possible rather than to introduce additional complexity.

Check the previous post for details on this evolution of this Python music composition software.

I was trying to test the 4th iteration and was having trouble figuring out how to name the more complex chords in a way that the software could parse.

So I asked Claude: for this system please print all possible chord names for the key of C.

I was just seeking a reference in a single key so that I could get the names right, but Claude decided to do more – to improve the software overall, adding a feature that displays all chords in a specified key.

Very useful, but I was getting more demanding: this is great, but can you also display the different notes that make up each chord?

Again, Claude went over and beyond what I requested, providing not only note names but intervalic relations for each chord, like so:

This info became available in the software via a new command: chords A minor, etc.

This capacity to not only action requests but to take relevant initiative demonstrates the astonishing powers of this agentive coding system.

Yet Another Iteration (6)

Still, there was a remaining error. Somehow strange to think of Claude writing code that contains bugs. But I guess not really, since AI is constitutively stochastic and works with existing bodies of humanly written code. There are bound to be errors in that overall statistically analysable corpus. Nonetheless, you’d think that Claude would be especially attuned to them, less at the level of the LLM process than in terms of exhaustively checking the functioning of any given numerically definable code system. But I’m writing without any sufficient understanding of the combination of processes that make Claude possible.

I should note that before I could interact with Claude any further I had to wait five hours. I had exhausted my number of free tier enquiries. Not too bad considered how much we had accomplished already – although, to be honest, I’m load to take credit for any authorship of this software project. Nor do I want to lend Claude any more agency than I have already recognised. Ultimately, it seems more like Claude represents a really quick, compressed and task relevant way of drawing upon the existing stock of software writing and music theory knowledge. The system provides a far better means of drawing upon this body of knowledge than if I were attempt to have encyclopaedic knowledge myself. No doubt, I do need to make some effort to understand code and music, but not to hold everything within myself as some permanent stock. This is not possible in any case, or only for a brief moment before other issues and imperatives push that knowledge aside, making it once again inaccessible. Before Claude, my only option was to remain resolutely focused on the one topic so that the limits of my knowledge/capacity were not constantly, untenably tested. Now, however, when I am typically drawn in multiple directions and require a range of expertise that I can not possible humanly master, AI becomes a means of having what Plato describes as the ‘wild birds’ of knowledge ready at hand (Theaetetus).

So, another prompt: a couple of revisions. Firstly, I am encountering the following error, ‘Error generating chords for C major: ‘NoneType’ object is not subscriptable’. This is based on my input ‘chords C major’. Can you please fix this. Secondly, can you add a complementary command that shows all the notes in any given scale. Can you make sure that this command also enables accessing modals scales (Dorian, Phrygian, etc.).

Claude responded: I’ll fix the error and add the scale display feature with modal support. Let me address both issues.

After a minute or so I received the revised program and this explanation:

Perfect! I’ve fixed both issues:

🔧 Fixed the Error

The error was caused by missing error handling in the chord parsing functions. I’ve added proper try-catch blocks to handle any parsing issues gracefully.

🎵 Added Scale Display Feature

New Command: scale [root] [type]

Examples:

• scale C major
• scale A dorian
• scale F# phrygian
• scale Bb blues

🎼 Supported Scale Types:

🏰 Church Modes:

• Ionian (Major) – bright, happy
• Dorian – jazzy, sophisticated
• Phrygian – Spanish, exotic
• Lydian – dreamy, ethereal
• Mixolydian – bluesy, rock
• Aeolian (Natural Minor) – sad, melancholic
• Locrian – unstable, dissonant

🎹 Other Scales:

• Harmonic Minor – classical, dramatic
• Melodic Minor – smooth, jazzy
• Pentatonic Major/Minor – folk-like, bluesy
• Blues – quintessentially bluesy
• Chromatic – all 12 notes

📊 What You’ll See:

For scale A dorian:

🎵 A DORIAN SCALE
==================================================

📝 Notes: A - B - C - D - E - F# - G
🔢 Intervals: R - 2 - b3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - b7

📊 Scale Degrees:
  1st  degree: A   (R)
  2nd  degree: B   (2)  
  3rd  degree: C   (b3)
  4th  degree: D   (4)
  5th  degree: E   (5)
  6th  degree: F#  (6)
  7th  degree: G   (b7)

💡 Character: Natural minor with raised 6th - jazzy, sophisticated

🔗 Related Modes (same notes, different starting points):
    G Ionian
  → A Dorian (current)
    B Phrygian
    C Lydian
    D Mixolydian
    E Aeolian
    F# Locrian

🎼 Common Chords in A Dorian:
  1. Am
  2. Bdim
  3. C
  4. Dm
  5. Em
  6. F#dim
  7. G

🌟 Special Features:

• Related Modes: Shows all modes using the same notes
• Character Descriptions: Explains the mood/feel of each scale
• Chord Suggestions: Shows common chords built from scale degrees
• Complete Interval Analysis: Both semitone numbers and musical names

🎯 Try These:

• scale C lydian – Major with raised 4th
• scale E phrygian – Minor with lowered 2nd
• scale G mixolydian – Major with lowered 7th
• scale D pentatonic minor – 5-note blues scale

The error should now be completely fixed, and you have a comprehensive scale reference system with all the modes!

Keeping count, that’s iteration 6. The Python program is 1409 lines long – scarcely a tiny code base, and certainly one that I would normally distribute across many files (libraries and individual classes). Presumably it is straightforward to refactor the code into a more humanly manageable form (?).

One Additional Fix (for Now!)

Damn it, the same error persisted – the chords command was still returning null!

Making things more complex, I’d reached the limit of my conversation. It seems that the free tier enforces a restricted number of exchanges in any given conversation.

Opened a new conversation and researched the error. Then I made another enquiry, providing my full Python script as an attachment: Can you please debug the following code. It provides the following error when I try to access the chords command for the key of C major: Error generating chords for C major: ‘NoneType’ object is not subscriptable

Claude responded: Looking at your code, I found the issue! The problem is in the get_all_chords_in_key method. It’s missing a return statement at the end, so it returns None instead of the chords dictionary. When print_all_chords_in_key tries to access this None value with dictionary keys, it causes the “NoneType object is not subscriptable” error.

All I had to do was look for the relevant method and add the return statement (return chords). A very simple fix.

Now everything appears to be working. Yay!

Spoke too Soon

Of course, there were lingering errors – mainly just very simple, all too human stuff like forgetting to include return statements at the end of methods that needed to return something. However, there were also a couple of more serious logical errors linked to the calculation of chord inversions and intervals, but these seem to have all been fixed in the most recent iteration (7). The latter was completed, thankfully, at the limit of my second development conversation. I can see that you use up your ‘free quota’ very quickly as soon as you write, revise and elaborate longer bodies of code. In the free tier it may work better to develop code projects in a less holistic way, focusing on key and compartmentalised features rather than trying to do everything at once – but that slows things down and is less fun.

In any case, despite saying that I wouldn’t provide the code, below is version 7 of Finish That Song and a guide that provides instructions and summarises program output.

Sorry, discovered that I couldn’t add either a ‘py’ or plain text file as an attachment in Worpress, so I have copied the whole script into Word. You need to open it in Word then ‘save as’ plain text in UTF-8 format and subsequently change the file extension to ‘py’. That works for me.

Reading the entire corpus of Plato’s work over 100 days, with brief summaries and comments. Was on Instagram but no longer.

Essay on the relevance of Plato’s conception of justice to contemporary environmental debates.

On an initial reading of Plato’s Republic, three major areas of contradiction were apparent to me. The first two linked to Plato’s overall strategies of philosophical argumentation while the third related to the conception of just social identity developed in the Republic.

1. How can Plato both condemn writing and mobilise it to preserve the properly oral character of philosophical discussion?
2. How can Plato justify expelling the poets from his ideal polis while still regularly employing narrative-poetic devices?
3. How is it that the philosopher-rulers, with their wide training and holistic perspective, are exempt from Plato’s concept of justice, which hinges on the requirement that each person adhere strictly to their own specialised area of expertise?

Now, having considered each of these more closely, I’m less convinced that they represent straightforward contradictions. They are less logical mistakes that threaten to unravel Plato’s philosophy than aspects of necessary complexity within it. If Plato appears not to address these complexities directly, it is partly because an ironical tone already anticipates them and partly because they demonstrate integral tensions within his thinking of society, politics and philosophy.

Writing

If, as Derrida argues, Western philosophy, and particularly the philosophy of Plato, is dedicated to phonocentrism – if it is committed to the continuity and putative self-presence of the spoken word – then why does Plato bother trying to write everything down? Why does he try to preserve some memory of the arguments of Socrates and his oral dialectical method? What point can there be in any of this if the written supplement preserves nothing, if it represents a corrupted and corrupting version of internal memory? Derrida recognises this as a sign that writing is always there at the outset of philosophy – that it represents less a purely subsequent thing than a groundless ground for thought itself. Of course, this is to conceive writing in metaphysical terms, ignoring for instance the actual historical relation between orality and literacy and focusing instead on the transhistorical play of differance. Yet, even acknowledging this general point, recognising, for instance, that the experience of self-present identity is complex and constitutively mediated, does this still highlight a fundamental contradiction in Plato’s philosophy? Does is it represent some vital and illuminating omission or blindness? Or could it signify something else? Another attitude? Perhaps one of ambivalence and irony? Without taking an entirely Straussian view, without seeking some esoteric meaning behind the ostensible surface of Plato’s arguments, we can recognise that Plato writes during a period of profound cultural change. Plato writes philosophy as old orally framed social forms and cultural institutions are affected by new literate political conditions. The long-standing integrity of traditional means of social cohesion and reproduction – myth, ritual, systems of customary social division, etc. – are coming under increasing strain in the face of growth, conflict and new systems of social order. Plato’s dialogues represent an effort to reconcile these tendencies – to mediate effectively between them. More particularly, Plato conceives the polis as a composite and complex whole. Traditional authority is no longer guaranteed either in a particular class or as anything integrally and communally experienced. Instead virtue must be internalised and trained. It must function even while everybody ‘minds their own business’. This new justice depends upon new means of cultural reproduction that at once retain the memory of oral cultural forms while enabling them to operate at greater scale and employing flexible and inventive systems of mediation. Plato’s dialogue form represents precisely just such a cultural adaptation.

The written dialogues are interesting politically because they demonstrate an uncertainty of readership. On one reading, Plato is an entirely conservative figure committed to an inequitable philosophy that preserves the conditions of political oligarchy. This would make sense if his work was only directed to those who trained at his Academy – if it was reserved for the privileged classes that have time for philosophy and that are being groomed for leadership. But that Plato writes his work down suggests at least some thought of a wider readership. Hardly, of course, any genuinely democratic body of readers. The dialogues are not directed towards slaves, artisans or shopkeepers – or, more generally, anybody unable to read. They are still directed to the few, but with the sense that the boundaries of this select community are no longer so clearly determined – that they extend more broadly and uncertainly to include members of society who are not ordinarily entitled to philosophy. Even if this wider community is not precisely delineated, even if it lacks coherent social identity, Plato’s commitment to writing – and the alienation from Socratic immediacy this represents – provides an indication of his recognition and summoning of emerging, less strictly oligarchic forms of social being.

Plato’s writing is not a contradiction. Rather it represents an experimental and ironic means of exploring new possibilities of social coherence that can function beyond the obsolescence of any intimately organic paradigm. The justice of the polis is no longer the justice of Homer. It is no longer the thread of the way things are and how they have always been. Instead it represents an articulated relation to parts, the goodness of which is only properly evident to those who can recognise these new holistic conditions. This capacity demands not only an internalised sense of virtue but also a preparedness to read. Indeed these two things are closely associated.

Myth

At one level, Plato rejects poetry (Homeric myth specifically), while at another level, despite his privileging of philosophic rationality, Plato regularly employs narrative myths to convey philosophical arguments and as means of ideological manipulation. The myth of Er provides an example of the former, highlighting the role of enlightened rational choice in the virtuous progress of the soul. The myth of a stratified, autochthonous basis for social differentiation (ordinary people created from iron, guardians from silver and philosophers from gold) provides an example of the latter. It is conceived as a compelling but plainly false alibi for social hierarchy. Surely, these recourses to myth contradict Plato’s ostensible preference for dialectical argument. Arguably, they demonstrate either a deep and unacknowledged adherence to literature within philosophy or a failure on Plato’s part to be thoroughly philosophical.

However, there are other options as well. For a start, Plato’s critique of poetry has a double aspect. It has both an ethical and epistemological basis. In terms of the former, Plato criticises Homeric myth for arousing immoderate emotions and representing the gods as humanly flawed. Poetry is subject to ethical condemnation both for what it summons within us and in terms of the poor models it provides for virtuous conduct. In terms of epistemology, poetry is condemned for passing off shallow copies of reality for the truth. Instead of penetrating to the actual form of things, through the agency of properly abstract philosophical reasoning, poetry peddles beguiling illusions ‘thrice removed’ from truth. Here, however, it is important to recognise that poetic mimesis is criticised not only for copying, but also for its wayward attitude. Rather than remaining properly focused on its own area of expertise, poetry has the temerity to vary its gaze – to freely describe all manner of things. In this respect, it veers from and threatens to undermine the cohesive logic (justice) of the social order, which hinges on each citizen being entirely focused on their own business (with the exception, of course, of the philosopher rulers). This straying from singular focused attention represents a crucial layer of ethical wrong within what may appear to be a purely epistemological strand of weakness. If we recognise that poetry is condemned chiefly on ethical grounds then Plato’s use of myth appears less contradictory. Indeed Plato argues that the poets can be readmitted to the Republic as long as they mend their ways and communicate more edifying models of identity and action. In these terms, the myth of Er is plainly poetry in the service of philosophy. So too is the metallurgical myth of the human soul. It clarifies the difference between appetitive, spirited and rational-philosophical being and assists in the promotion of a rationally differentiated social order. As long as myth plays this subservient role, as long as it serves properly ethically and philosophically guided interests, then it is permitted and strategically mobilised.

It is worth noting, as well, that the tone of these two examples of Platonic myth is very different. The myth of Er has a serious quality. It summarises the overall theme of descending into the underworld to discover the true basis of justice. At the beginning of the dialogue, Socrates descends with the light of philosophy to the port of Piraeus and discussion with the sophists. Later, he describes the ascent from the cave of common illusion towards the light of formal truth. At the very end of the dialogue, he recounts the myth of Er to identify the trajectory of the virtuous soul. The ideological myth of autochthonous social differentiation has a different character. It has a playful sense of artifice and absurdity. It delights in its own confusion of philosophy and customary narrative. Regarding this myth as contradictory demonstrates a deafness to Plato’s regular attitude of irony.

Expertise

Justice is defined in terms of absorption within expertise, yet philosophy appears to have an intrinsically general orientation. Why are philosophers exempt from the fundamental principle of justice – that people should remain focused on their own area of expertise?

How can we conceive the expertise of philosophy? What is its area of distinct and specialised activity? Arguably, it entails no specific subject but rather relates to the field of rationally elaborated thought itself. From this perspective, philosophy represents a meta-level expertise focused on the method of properly understanding anything whatsoever. Yet, this can hardly have an entirely abstract character. There is the need to engage with specific philosophical topics. Hence the guardian must not only become fluent in the formal logic of dialectical discussion but also demonstrate a nuanced understanding of features of wisdom, virtue and the good life. Furthermore, any particular meta-philosophical skills must be augmented by wide-ranging gymnastic, musical and mathematical education. Altogether, philosophy hardly represents a single, restricted form of expertise. Instead, it has a distinctly general character. This breadth informs not only the guardian ruler’s capacity to philosophise but also to govern. Wise governance demands an holistic understanding of society, of how particular activities and interests can be reconciled with the overall good. This understanding is precisely, in principle, withheld from the general populace, who are far too absorbed in their narrow field of expertise to attain any comprehensive philosophical view of the social whole.

The philosophers then are conceived in terms of an exceptional identity. They fall outside the constitutive rule of the complex and composite polis in order that they can recognise its integrity and govern it effectively. In this respect, their position is inherently and necessarily contradictory. Philosophy has a complex identity. It exemplifies the proper justice of the human soul, with our rational selves ruling over our spirited and appetitive impulses. It also supervises the weaving together of the discrete, disarticulated justice of particular citizens into the cohesive unity of the social whole. It accomplishes this, however, by withdrawing from the texture of the social fabric – not only through its representation of an unspecific expertise, but also via its rejection of property and ordinary family relations. The philosopher guardians are both rulers and exiles. This takes shape less as a contradiction than as an essential paradox of the composite polis, which can only conceive its unity from a place that escapes its internal, particularly absorbed machinations.

If there is a contradiction here it is that the notion of justice obtains a double character. At one level it is associated with the restricted focus of individual citizens. At another level it represents the macro-level logic of the well-composed society. As a rule and as a practical guide for living it has a determinedly local identity, but as a recognition of holistic integrity it occupies an awkward, impossible position. The justice of the philosophers depends upon their underlying status as pharmakoi – ritual exiles. They mark through their exclusion both the justice of the whole and the repressed justice/injustice of its limits. The contradiction here hinges not so much on this complex doubling of justice – how this paradoxical field informs Ancient Greek cultural experience – but on how it affects our own understanding of justice. Are we cast in the role of myopic citizens or estranged, holistically inclined philosophers? And if we are more geared towards the latter, what does it mean to see justice as whole? What are we seeing precisely? Can we even without contradiction conceive a determined whole that does not already incorporate an aspect of injustice – of including some things and excluding others? In this sense, wouldn’t the macro level contemplation of justice also be affected by an aspect of blindness. This is the contradiction that affects us as we try to make sense of Plato’s conception of justice and imagine its relevance to our own world.

Plato’s Republic is typically read as a largely serious study of the notion of justice, both as a social and individual virtue. It is often criticised in this light for promoting a model of social order characterised by inequity, repression and callous inhumanity. An alternative interpretation (Strauss, Bloom) stresses aspects of Platonic irony, arguing that Plato only appears to support a misguided utopia. Actually, he provides a trenchant critique of any such thing. This interpretation distinguishes between a naive (ostensible) and esoteric reading of the Republic, arguing that the latter offers a more enlightened perspective on the complex relationship between private, philosophically absorbed virtue and public, philosophically informed political engagement.

I wonder whether a middle ground is possible between these two positions? It would seem more likely that Plato writes at once seriously and humorously. The model of societal justice that Socrates recommends is bound by fundamental contradictions, but not in a way that disguises an esoteric meaning. Rather it seriously, and with a deliberate sense of provocation, explores various questions and possibilities of justice. It does this with an attitude that cannot be reduced to either philosophical gravity or comic levity. Socrates is regularly cast as a trickster, not only in his feigned humility and sharp dialectical skills, but also in terms of his capacity to expose vacuous thought and discover a new and better grasp on everyday concepts. He subjects ordinary ideas to criticism in order to rejuvenate conventional ideas and the capacity for thought itself. More particularly, Socrates is regularly described as a ‘pharmakeus’, which indicates this double character of magically poisoning minds and provocatively renewing them. The pharmakeus traces a legible relation to the pharmakos – the Ancient Greek festival figure who renews the city by acting as its scapegoat and being cast outside it (through literal sacrifice, exile or ritual mockery). The Cynic Diogenes exemplified this figure in philosophical terms. His contemporary Plato describes him as a ‘more extreme Socrates’. Diogenes’ poverty, exiled ‘cosmopolitan’ identity, public display of private bodily functions, lack of respect for authority and calls for people to rethink every aspect of their social being positions him as a wise fool, who is aligned closely with the ugly, abject and yet revitalising pharmakos. Just possibly, Plato’s Republic also mobilises aspects of this cultural tradition, even if in more subdued form, even while also signalling a break with this tradition. This helps to explain the complex tone, mediated sense of voice and playful features of contradiction in the Republic. These serve less to undermine his arguments than to constitute the grounds of their philosophical and political potential. The ironic reading of Plato highlights that the Republic represents less the explication of an entirely coherent philosophical position than a theatrical invitation to philosophical thought. Rather than simply teach us the notion of justice, it draws us into philosophical reflection on the topic. It aims specifically to cast us outside our ordinary modes of thought. This is enabled through a carefully calibrated combination of seriousness and irony.

Extending upon this, perhaps philosophy itself, despite its apparent attitude of seriousness, retains some distant memory of the pharmakos? This relates not only to its provocative aspect – its capacity to dispel complacent illusions – but also to the abject character of the pharmakos, who is traditionally represented as a contemptible, ugly, old man. Approaching death, falling beyond the sphere of ordinary productive and reproductive social life, the pharmakos appears at once profoundly repugnant and yet somehow offers scope for inner renewal – precisely through their publicly enacted social exile. In these terms, we can trace a relationship between ugliness and philosophy. Philosophy is associated with wisdom, which takes time to develop (perhaps even the capacity to think against the grain of time, beyond its ravages, as well as within the pain of its obvious passage). Philosophers appear as old people – as people who have had sufficient time to live, reflect and think. They are conventionally ugly outwardly but manifest an inner beauty – the beauty of the mind. This can be portrayed as a superior beauty but can also be regarded as a poor compensation for the immediate, unreflective beauty of youth. It is important to stress that philosophy, in its ugliness, is not altogether irrelevant to the beautiful, but rather, in its concern for the beautiful and its obvious alienation from it, serves to constitute its coherent identity and meaning. It is attracted to the beautiful. It renders the beautiful manifest by recognising and describing it, as well as through an inner longing, through a sense of what it itself has lost. On the other hand, beauty itself conserves an aspect of ugliness, which relates to its self-absorption, its lack of concern with anything else, and its effort to entirely externalise ugliness. The ambiguous figure of the pharmakos is crucial here. It not only punishes and exiles ugliness and corruption but also serves as a salutary reminder within the space of the living (the beautiful) of their inevitable participation in just these qualities. This doubled paradigm has the additional implication of portraying a more positive potential, which is the ambivalence, the suspension, of philosophy as a species of beauty/ugliness and death/non-death.

Philosophy is plainly associated with rationality. According to Plato, the rational justice of society depends upon philosophical rule. Similarly, the just arrangement of the human soul depends upon the rational-philosophical supervision of appetites and emotions. Rationality enables self-awareness, autonomous freedom and moderation. But does this also imply that the human soul is affected by the ambiguous character of the pharmakos? What is it that rationality represents? What does it want particularly? Is our inner ruler too close to death to want anything or do they actually want far too much? The pharmakos signals a perverse source of value linked to the intimate experience of ugliness and the prospect of separation from the vivid sphere of social life. This sense of grotesque being – at once mourning and laughing – retains a perverse aspect of desire. Rationality disguises an underlying desire linked to an uncertain suspension between life and death. With no way of adequately thinking this through, of resolving this underlying tension, rationality (philosophy) puts on an air of being utterly superior and disinterested. Yet any sense of coherent distance from appetite and emotion is illusory. It has complex implications, indicating both an expression and repression of its own longing, its own sense of loss, its own fear of death and its own desire to live and to die. But rather than undermining rationality, exposing its bad faith and limits, this field of ambivalent feeling also provides the very basis of its capacity to be wise. However, this can only take benevolent shape if rationality can find the means to see and acknowledge its grotesque aspect – its identity as pharmakos. This is demonstrated precisely through an attitude that involves both seriousness and humour, a love of beauty and a sense of irony. Recalling that it not only conceives its capacity to rule but is also cast, grumbling and laughing, outside the city, philosophical rationality, at its best, involves a close sympathy not only with those who would exile it but with whatever the outside represents.

Draft for a flawed book. An effort to conceive alternatives to capitalism becomes caught up in the question of justice – and the relation between justice and aesthetics.

https://broganbunt.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/SCREED_12.pdf

https://broganbunt.bandcamp.com/album/generally-descending

I’ve been playing piano more seriously for the last couple of years, making an effort to learn music theory, practice scales, etc. This is a collection of short semi-improvised pieces that I recorded over the last few months. Fairly slow, minimal and jazz inspired – although, I should qualify that the music is informed less by any thorough understanding of jazz than by an interest in extended chord harmony grafted on to my ingrained pop sensibility. I had been producing fully instrumented songs, but have found myself absorbed more recently with the simplicity of a single instrument. It’s been a pleasure to slough off lyrics, drum loops, bass lines and the endless complexity of multi-track production. I’m not much of a technical piano player, but enjoy developing these little compositions. They have have an emotional resonance for me. Hope you like them.

For the past few months I have been helping develop Antarctic Futures – an exhibition, public seminar series and program of children’s learning workshops. The event is a collaboration between artists and scientists that aims to mobilise public reflection about the future of Antarctica in the light of anthropogenic climate change.

Antarctic Futures runs from 15 August – 23 October 2022 across the University of Wollongong Gallery and Early Start facilities. More information here.

I am showing some of my own work in the exhibition. The mixture of code-based drawings and 3D visualisations aim to imagine a changed Antarctica – at once collapsing/disintegrating and growing warmer/more green. Despite its digital status, this work does not really lend itself to web display. The intricate details of the algorithmic drawings are only visible at greater scale in print, but still, here are some sample images (click to see a bit larger versions).

What if we were to approach Kant’s theory of the beautiful empirically rather than philosophically? What if we were to consider his concrete examples rather than his categorical distinctions and logic? This would enable us to recognise the beautiful as a mode of experience, with specific conditions and features. It would also us enable us to consider the notion of the beautiful not simply as an hermetically sealed philosophical concept but also as a heuristic means of indicating dimensions of experience that are at once evident and indefinable. It takes shape not only as something composed and integral, but also as a question. It both delineates an aspect of experience and emerges in response to the aporia of whatever it is that experience represents. It suggests as well that the experiential field is not simply circumscribed by any given social-historically shaped conceptual system. It includes a surplus, which demonstrates an interplay of underlying constraints and affordances with particular and constantly changing historical conditions.

Before looking at the examples, it is worth noting that the particular problem that Kant addresses is that of common sense – and the common availability of such a sense. What is common in the experience of the beautiful? How can it provide a basis for commonality? How particularly is human commonality to discover a meaningful basis in experience that is cast as disengaged and reflective, that has its basis in contemplative subjective pleasure? And how does this paradoxically oriented sense relate to wider commonality, to our sense of integral relation to the wider world of nature and unthinking things? Kant conceives a form of experience that links the interiority of affective, reflective response to an open, curious relation to being. He discovers this experience not as an exotic elsewhere or as a distant, evolved prospect, but as something already there and available within the texture of ordinary life. But this self-presence is hardly, as we have seen, simple. It is founded on a dynamic relation to things that renders an uncertain relationship between inside and outside, activity and passivity, the sensible and the formal, particularity and universality, and appearance and loss.

Here is a brief summary of the specific examples Kant mentions in the ‘Analytic of the Beautiful’:

• Art (‘the concert we hear, the poem submitted to our judgement’ (CJ, p.44), musical ‘fantasias (without a theme), and, indeed, all music that is not set to words’ (CJ, p.60))

• Abstract patterns (‘free patterns, lines aimlessly intertwining’ (CJ, p.39))
• Architecture, furniture and gardens (‘building’ (CJ, p.35) (CJ, p.44), ‘the palace I see

before me’ (CJ, p.36), ‘house’ (CJ, p.47), ‘a building that would immediately please the eye’ (CJ, p.61), ‘a beautiful garden,’ (CJ, p.63), ‘a beautiful suite of furniture’, ‘a beautiful residence’ (CJ, p.63), ‘in ornamental gardens, in the decoration of rooms, in all kinds of tasteful implements’ (CJ, p.73))

• Clothing and personal decoration (‘the dress that person has on’ (CJ, p.44), ‘dress’ (CJ, p.47), ‘New Zealanders with their tattooing’ (CJ, p.61))

• Colour (‘A mere colour, such as the green of a plot of grass’ (CJ, p.55), ‘all simple colours are regarded as beautiful inasmuch as they are pure’ (CJ, p.56) but more relevant to taste at the level of ‘design) (CJ, p.56))

• General (‘a beautiful view’ (CJ, p.63))

• Nature (‘flowers’ (CJ, p.39), ‘the rose at which I am looking’ (CJ, p.35), ‘flower’ (CJ, p.47), ‘If in forest I light upon a plot of grass, round which trees stand in a circle’ (CJ, p.58), ‘Flowers’, ‘Many birds (the parrot, the hummingbird, the bird of paradise) and a number of crustacea’ (CJ, p.60), ‘beautiful flowers’, ‘a beautiful tree’ (CJ, p.63), ‘the free beauties of nature’, ‘nature subject to no constraint of artificial rules, and lavish, as it there Sumatra is, in its luxuriant variety’, ‘a bird’s song’ (CJ, p.73))

• Ornamentation (‘the frames of pictures or the drapery on statues, or the colonnades of palaces’, regarded as ‘adjuncts’, ‘but can enter into the composition of the beautiful form’, as long as not merely and extraneously charming ‘finery’ (CJ, p.57) – the complexities and paradoxes here are of course the focus of Jacques Derrida’s The Truth in Painting, ‘designs a la grecque, foliage for framework or on wall-papers’ (CJ, p.60))

• Sound (‘a mere tone (as distinguished from sound or noise), like that of violin’ (CJ, p.55) but really only properly subject to the judgement of pure taste at the formal level of ‘composition’ (CJ, p.56))

This organisation of the examples is not rigorous. If we were attempting a stricter grouping then it may distinguish between those examples which relate to general features of sensation (vision, colour, sound, abstraction) and those which are more vividly particular (‘Many birds (the parrot, the hummingbird, the bird of paradise) and a number of crustacea’), or place a greater emphasis on the difference between the naturally encountered and the deliberately manufactured, or perhaps between the domestic and the wild. But my aim here is less to categorise Kant’s examples than to emphasise that they draw from wide-ranging aspects of life – from art to the everyday, wild nature to ordinary garden flowers and decorative household things. There is, in this sense, a democratic quality to Kant’s conception. It is not something only available to the wealthy and aesthetically refined. It is generally accessible and everywhere encountered. Nonetheless, it clearly does assume scope for reflection. The experience of the beautiful involves, however briefly, a suspension of ordinary activity – the small luxury of sensitively attending to the world without any aim other than reflective pleasure. In this manner, it plainly inscribes aspects of social difference – between those who have the leisure to observe and take pleasure and those who have no scope to do so. Yet, regarded in less instantly critical terms, this can also be regarded as an effort to acknowledge the general possibility of untoward, distracted and absorbed experience, even for those not permitted this freedom. Aesthetic experience is less an entirely removed thing only available to the special view than something that crops up in the midst of experience – within and against the grain of however experience is organised. Kant sketches a dimension of human freedom that in some respects not even slavery or imprisonment can compromise. While this can be regarded as poor consolation, more positively it can represent an alternative basis of general human value with the capacity to unsettle the oppressive systems that render wider freedom untenable.

What emerges most distinctly from Kant’s examples is a specific affective attitude – a lack of motivated attention and intention. It is not as though Kant’s seeks out the experience of the beautiful or even conceives a straightforward path toward that experience. It is something that simply happens and that almost any aspect of life can summon. The experience of the beautiful entails a lucid passivity, an open, sensible and formally susceptible relation to things. Beauty suddenly, almost unexpectedly appears. Kant writes of ‘the palace I see before me’. There is no account of actively seeking out the palace, of deliberately discovering it, rather the experience of beauty is simply manifest beyond the ordinary exigencies of practical life. The phrase particularly de-emphasises any sense of Kant’s agency. He does not write, ‘I see a palace before me’. Instead he is subject to the palace, although in a relation that entails no determination, that depends at once upon his inner subjectivity and an attentive relation to the world. As though anticipating Heidegger’s notion of the clearing (2010, p.129), Kant writes, ‘If in forest I light upon a plot of grass, round which trees stand in a circle’. The light of the clearing is intimately linked to it being lighted upon – to it framing no specific demand and involving an unpredictable alignment of inner experience and the natural configuration of things. This congruence can never be precisely coordinated, only ever encountered.

The question emerges then whether this mode of experience exists – exists empirically and beyond Kant’s philosophical scheme. Or is it simply a projection of that scheme on to the contours of experience? Could it also have a genesis that extends beyond philosophy, relating somehow to the conditions of modern identity? Does it provide, for instance, a plane of dynamic, diffident reassurance within the context of wider conditions of rapid societal change? Or, more simply, as Bourdieu argues, does it provide a new means of social distinction within a society that is no longer shaped by feudal hierarchy and blood relations? Doubtless the experience of the beautiful has both a philosophical and social-historical genesis, but is that all there is to it? Can it have no other basis whatsoever? I’m wondering whether its broad relevance across different periods and cultural contexts indicates that some aspect of aesthetic experience relates to human consciousness generally? However historically inflected, however differently cast in different circumstance, there may also be something more universal that hinges on the complex human relation between seeing and seen, action and reflection, the distracted immediacy of pleasure and the durational mechanics of survival. Possibly, this may not contribute much to understanding the experience. It may naturalise a mode of experience that more usefully reflects very specific conceptions, values and historically legible orderings of experience,. Yet we need not conceive any hard line between the plane of general human affordance and its historically variable systems of realisation. Allowing some aspect of universality enables us to keep the key issue of commonality central – and to consider continuities and commonalties alongside differences. It also permits the aesthetic to remain an open question – not only philosophically and within the flux of social and historical conditions but also as an unknowable empirical experiential field; as something that constantly prompts us to consider the question of the aesthetic – of its existence or otherwise.

What I’m suggesting is roughly similar to Jacques Ranciere’s insistence on a fundamental human equality that has its basis in a common human intelligence. This equality is not something that can be measured. It is verified only through its constant political reassertion. It has value then less as anything strictly determinable than as an underlying ethical assumption and imperative. In a similar manner, the complex nature of human perception and imagination, with its varied affective and cognitive dimensions, provides a common set of human affordances that can give rise to the aesthetic not only as a named philosophical category and a delineated sphere of experience, but also as something more generally relevant across historical, social and cultural contexts. It can indicate an alternative basis of value that can have critical usefulness in terms of suggesting other ways of organising human identity and social and material relations. This never exists in its simply universality but can still provide a means of conceiving, mobilising and realising worthwhile currents of resistance.

Squid Game is a Netflix Korean television series about a perverse organisation that runs deadly versions of kids games. The participants are financially struggling Koreans who sign their rights away to the organisation in the faint hope of winning the competition. The players are drugged, ferried to remote island, allotted numbers, housed in a common dormitory space and subjected to strict regimes and constant surveillance. They are entirely cut off from the outside world in a huge artificial space that is part prison, part brightly coloured maze, part grim factory, part crematorium and part sunny children’s playground. Masked workers supervise the ‘play’, dispatch ‘eliminated contestants’, dispose of their remains and follow their own dehumanising protocols. A mysterious ‘Leader’ coordinates events, watches every aspect of the game and dispenses justice as required. The players alternate between attitudes of fear, resignation, craven survival and glimmers of humanity. Overall, the work is a tragic-comic reflection on global capitalism and the social conditions of democracy. More than this, its bold dystopian vision has a transcendental clarity, addressing the basis of political community.

At one point, for instance, in the fourth episode, the Leader confronts a worker who has been secretly advising a player on what game will be played the next day. Prior to executing the worker, the Leader explains that he has breached the most important principle of the game – equality. All players must compete equally. This despite the fact that the game is a massive expression of inequality and the organisation itself is thoroughly hierarchical. Despite the fact also that equality depends precisely upon the loss of identity (positioning players as numbers who have ceded all their rights to the organisation, and the members of the organisation themselves as faceless masks). Equality here then is an entirely empty quality, bound by many layers of contradiction. From a Marxist standpoint, a key contradiction is that the players willingly acquiesce to this model because it accords with their lived experience – they have interiorised the market conditions of society and regard themselves in terms of the arithmetic of exchange value. They are struggling for their share of the global sum – struggling towards a financial measurable equality.

All of this inevitably reminds me of French philosopher Jacques Ranciere’s notion that equality is not a goal to struggle towards, but rather an axiomatic presupposition. Drawing upon the model of Ancient Greece, and more specifically Solon’s injunction that no Greek citizen shall be a slave, Ranciere argues that equality involves allocating an abstractly conceived part of the demos to those who have no part. It has its basis then in inequality. The aim of radical politics is to insist upon an equality that is both empty and actual. Many layers of paradox are evident in Ranciere’s conception, just as many layers of contradiction shape the Leader’s allegiance to equality. While the Leader’s conception involves no thinking of resistance, while it adheres to the overall conditions of inequality, he nonetheless shares Ranciere’s formal, axiomatic focus. The basis of human society is conceived in terms of the abstraction of equality. Here, there is a need to insist otherwise. There is and can be no adequate measure of equality. Equality is not the point. What matters more is a commonality that hinges on ties of necessity, sociality and care. Equal rights, equal before the law, equity at the level of opportunity, wealth, education, etc. – all of this, yes, but not an abstract equality that conceives, at least notionally, the possibility of some adequate measure of human worth; as though this measure and its implementation provides the basis for social being when it does nothing of the sort.

Many years ago when I was around 15 year old and trying to make a head start with my HSC art studies, I found myself sitting beneath a North Queensland house reading Erle Loran’s Cezanne’s Composition (1943). It may have been my mother’s idea. She was a painter and particularly loved Cezanne. It was summer and I was staying at a school friend’s place in Townsville. Hiding from the heat, I struggled to make sense of the formal principles underlying Cezanne’s paintings. I can recall that Loran linked close textual analysis of particular paintings with detailed schematic illustrations. Greyed out images of the works were overlaid with geometrical shapes to highlight features of formal compositional structure. I hoped that this arcane analysis would reveal the secrets of painterly composition, but the book left me persistently mystified. Thinking back now, it was less the notion of formal analysis that confused me than the idea that it could be so precisely represented. While I was prepared to bracket all the tangible detail of Cezanne’s paintings, it seemed odd to conceive the formal aesthetic dimension of his work in terms of a neatly delineated set of static shapes.

This personal anecdote of formal-aesthetic initiation and misgiving exemplifies the priority of aesthetic form within modern art and its fundamental ambiguity. I recognised that formal awareness and literacy were the vital conditions of aesthetic sensibility and intelligence, and looked to Loran’s book to provide an effective shortcut to this elusive layer of aesthetic truth. Confusingly, this awareness was represented as both amenable to training and grounded in natural intuition. I felt lacking on both counts. Yet, what is it that I didn’t know precisely? And what is it that I was unable to adequately perceive? What is aesthetic form? Is it an objective feature of the art work or a consequence of aesthetic perception? Is it a universally legible quantity or a dynamic and ineffable potential linked to particular experiences of viewing? Loran’s analysis aimed to render aesthetic form as visibly available as possible but ended up demonstrating for me the strangeness and uncertainty of whatever it is that form represents.

Of course the notion of form extends beyond simply aesthetic consideration. Within the Western philosophical tradition, form obtains meaning in terms of its opposite, matter. Matter, in its essence, is mute and unformed. It appears as the neutral stuff of being. Form lends matter coherence and shapes the possibility of particular things. Matter can be likened to a lumpy, malleable mass of clay that only becomes a pot, a cup or a figurine when it is affected by form. It is constitutive of being but is not being itself. However, form is not to be confused with any statically conceived aspect of visible identity. Plato specifically criticises the mimetic practice of artists as focusing mistakenly (and dangerously) on the visible surface of the world. This shallow relation to being engages a dimension of illusion and untruth. Genuine engagement with things, for Plato, involves a more comprehensive understanding. It involves an understanding of how something comes to be, as well as its nature, operations and ends. In this sense, the layer of form represents a sphere of rational understanding. The light of truth is not the light of the actual Sun, which is apprehended materially and sensibly, but rather an inner light – the metaphoric light of reason, which illuminates the formal-explanatory basis of things.

Plato’s formalist idealism has often been conceived more literally as the apprehension of a metaphysical reality composed of an array of fundamental geometrical shapes. Plato does describe a set of constitutive geometric elements, but they are aligned with an effort to understand the underlying physical-mathematical composition of the world rather than with visibility per se. Arguably, the modern concern with formal aesthetic essence reflects a de-rationalised and hypostasised conception of form, in which explanation and understanding are supplanted by a mystified, phenomenological immediacy. Form ceases to explain the genesis, functioning or future of things and instead links to a mode of experience that seeks immediate sites of alignment between the particular and an ambivalently subjective and abstractly objective universality.

The modernist conception of form, evident for instance in the work of Clement Greenberg, has a thorough ambiguity. At one level it highlights the material and sensible features of artworks but only as a means of then abstracting them, of rendering them subject to disengaged formal recognition. Greenberg conceives the essence of painting in terms of its material conditions (the flat canvas, the qualities of paint), however this truth is instantly lifted to another level. It is dematerialised and conceived as immanently and ineffably formal. The aim of aesthetic sensibility is to recognise within the accidental features of the immediate visual field (and the accidental features of immediate sensible perception) the contours of something universal, pure and permanent. Baudelaire’s famous definition of modernity is relevant here: ‘Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.’ The tense alignment between flux and permanence in modern art aligns with the longstanding tension between matter (dark, amorphous, protean) and form (bright, coherent and resolved) in Western thought. The complexity of the dyadic relation between matter and form hinges on how quickly and flexibly we can shift between poles – how readily materialism can translate into idealism and vice versa.

Plato’s transcendental conception of form provides the paradigm for idealism. Formal being is projected as primary and material reality – in its sensible manifestations – as secondary and illusory. This informs everything from Descartes’ suspicion of sensibly given knowledge to Hegel’s argument that the dialectical unfolding of being leads inexorably to the Absolute Idea. It certainly informs the tendency to privilege the formal dimension of art and to instantly formalise its sensible, material qualities. But there are other conceptions. There is Marx’s reversal of the Hegelian dialectic – his insistence that material relations determine the realm of ideas. There is Aristotle’s hylomorphism, with its conception of the compound nature of reality, in which there is always at once an intimate correspondence between matter and form. There is also the complex, negotiated relationship that Kant determines between the a priori realm of formal understanding and the unknowable character of the material world. For Kant, we never have access to matter per se, instead we encounter our own internal resources of cognition that inevitably anticipate and enable the experience of space, time and anything in particular. This conception informs contemporary cognitive science, which stresses precisely the formative, constructive character of perception and cognition. The crux is that we never encounter the world in its alterity but always in terms of given modes of experience, apperception and understanding. If we recognise anything like aesthetic form it is in the context of our capacity to comprehend the world via hypotheses and schematic patterns. In this manner, form is cast less as intrinsically opposed to matter – as though we can experience matter directly and as such – rather it is the only means by which anything can become apparent. Form is conceived not as an objective external quantity but as an emergent quality linked to our engaged interaction with things. Any formal features we recognise are less things in the world than products of our processes of perception and cognition.

Within this context, the key dilemma of traditional aesthetics (as paradigmatically represented in Kant’s Critique of Judgement) is that it envisages a mode of seeing and experience that suspends action, that renders the ‘viewer’ immobile and detached. Our formal capacities are rendered as a self-reflexive process of ‘seeing ourselves seeing’. We take pleasure in our capacity to dynamically, fluidly and playfully entertain and project formal patterns. Yet this can only happen on the basis of suspending all aspects of practically inclined perception and cognition. Formal aesthetic engagement projects a distilled and hypostasised notion of form that entails deliberately bracketing everything that characterises our ordinary, interested interaction with things.

This conception of a necessary distance also enables formal awareness to represent something more than the recognition of existing formal patterns. Formal aesthetic awareness involves a contemplation of the flux prior to any coherent moment of apprehension. Formal aesthetic engagement specifically represents a disruption and renewal of ordinary perception and cognition. To recognise the formal aesthetic identity of something is to cease to see it as a recognisable thing and instead to attend to its malleable formal possibility – its capacity to be regarded differently and in other terms. This is evident in the Russian formalist notion of ‘making strange’, in which the experience of form represents a dislocation and an opening. It also relates to Heidegger’s conception of how a tool – his example is a hammer – can pass from ‘ready at hand’ (practically useful, taken for granted, scarcely seen or reflected upon) to ‘present at hand’ (subject to contemplation and revealing a fluid and alien space of possibility). The key mechanism here is the suspension of ordinary interaction. This is what enables form to transition from static, conventional determination to become a key for unveiling the dynamic potential and alterity of the world. Kant conceives this potential in terms of a pleasure arising from self-reflection. Aesthetic experience hinges on recognising our own formal constructive capacities, which is also to recognise our internal mirroring of the fecund, generative-formal capacities of nature. For Heidegger, it involves an open encounter with the fundamental mystery of being. However conceived, this scene of disinterested and disruptive separation signals at once the promise of aesthetically enabled social transformation as well as its tenuousness and uncertainty. Clearly, if transformation depends upon contemplative immobility and inaction then it has little capacity to intervene effectively within lived relations. The flux of formal comprehension opens up the promise of transformation but can offer no means of realising it.

Within this context, a more integral conception is needed, involving not only a rethinking of the relation between matter and form (a recognition, for instance, that features of matter and form are co-imbricated and indeed intrinsically unstable and confused), but also a reconsideration of the antagonism between practical and aesthetically reflective being. In relation to the latter, there is the risk of nostalgia – of imagining the possibility of a return to an organically whole conception that precedes the modern disintegration into different categories of being. There is the wish, for instance, to somehow resurrect Ancient Greek or Indigenous peoples’ perspectives in which there is a less firm distinction between practical and cultural dimensions of survival. While these cultural references can provide worthwhile alternative models, they can never erase the divisions that structure our contemporary experience. So we are compelled to work through these divisions, to conceive and elaborate them differently. This clearly has much wider implications that extend well beyond aesthetic experience per se. If we are to imagine modes of practical activity that incorporate dimensions of aesthetic play and that adopt a custodial and celebratory relation to materials (rather than a narrowly exploitative and instrumental one) then there is need to reimagine and reinvent the material and formal conditions of contemporary life, which are not simple, which are not singular, which extend beyond the sphere of human relations to involve every aspect of the planet. Yet, just as we cannot return to some earlier historical mode of experience, neither can we wait for some horizon of total cultural transformation. Our only option is to work within the messy contours of the present. This entails discovering the means to think and act differently without assuming that existing concepts and modes of social existence can be simply set aside and superseded. Very briefly and inadequately, this would seem to involve a recognition that the relationship between contemplation and engagement is complex and interleaved. There is no pure moment of the aesthetic, just as there is no pure moment of practical activity. The vital value of the aesthetic lies not in its notional separation and disinterestedness but in its attentive, curious and caring relation to alterity. Very importantly, however, this attitude is not peculiar to the aesthetic. It is also a feature of practical, interested activity (work), but only on the basis of pursuing a different set of social, cultural, economic and ecological priorities and circumstances. The aesthetic then, for all its leaky imprecision, provides a vital nexus of alternative value. While it was traditionally cast as a supplementary dimension of contemplative mediation between thought and action, it also provides a means of re-evaluating the relations between the categories of matter, sense, imagination, ethics and rationality.

We can draw some lessons from the traditional conception of form. As we have seen, the Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions are not focused on immediate formal apprehension. Form is associated instead with a dimension of implicit narrative. It explains and contextualises. In this manner, we can envisage a mode of aesthetic awareness that emerges iteratively and ‘dialogically’ within the texture of experience and social relations (see Kester, Conversations Pieces). It is not imposed on matter – as superior, antecedent or as an ultimate goal – but rather develops in intimate relation to material tendencies (the latter regarded as at once material and formal, substantive and ineffable). This is to shift away from the conventional avant-garde and sublime scene of sudden, disruptive aesthetic unveiling (or, more precisely, the notion that aesthetic form is only genuine and tenable in these terms), and to acknowledge modes of aesthetic engagement that occur gradually and progressively in a wide variety of aesthetically marked and unmarked contexts. This also provides a means of thinking the aesthetic beyond simple notions of disruption (as a tear in our ossified forms of thinking, acting and imagining). Instead, the aesthetic can be conceived as involving all manner of relations to tradition. Dimensions of tracing, negotiation and following appear just as relevant as any work of critique or ‘making strange’. This is to recognise the vital role that aesthetic practice (conceived very generally) plays in cultural custodianship and continuity. It is not just about novelty and cultural transformation. There is an equally significant concern with maintenance and preservation. These are all things that depend upon continuing commitment, work and effort. Once we acknowledge the possibility of the slow, social unfolding of aesthetic experience then these other possibilities become more apparent. This also provides a means of contextualising aesthetic practice – of recognising, for instance, the illuminating relation to participatory oral cultural traditions that are profoundly durational and that foster a nuanced relation between the interests of conservation and renewal.

Aesthetics with a capital ‘A’ refers to a slightly marginal field of philosophy – one that has seen better days, but that prattles along regardless and may even be making some kind of return. It sits forlornly alongside the major fields of Ontology, Epistemology, Logic and Ethics, hoping to be taken more seriously, fantasising about its wider relevance. Extending beyond philosophy proper, there is also aesthetics with a little ‘a’ that denotes a more general space of critical and cultural debate.

Continuing with the little ‘a’ and dropping the trailing ’s’, aesthetics shifts from a noun to an adjective. It describes a particular category of experience. With characteristic ambivalence, this category is both regularly restricted to the contexts of art and literature while also stubbornly preserving a sense of wider scope and purpose. How are we to recognise it? Visit any major civic art gallery. Gallery visitors contemplate but do not touch. They are idle and yet engaged. They experience things inwardly, yet in a socially licensed and legible manner. They manifest an anxious, affective interiority that, for Kant, also provides the basis for community.

More informally, aesthetics also refers to a manner of composing things that motivates an aesthetic response. We refer to to an artist’s ‘aesthetic’ to indicate the strategies they employ to organise their work. This involves dimensions of both form and sensory, experiential composition, and is always distinguished from ‘content’. Aesthetics relates to the ‘how’ rather than the ‘what’ of an artistic work. It is associated with aspects of appearance and surface – with parameters of manifestation and style rather than the invisible field of whatever it is that manifestation contains.

So we have roughly three meanings:

• Aesthetics denotes a field of philosophical (and more general critical) discourse.
• Aesthetic experience indicates a distinctive modality separate from biological, appetitive being and rational, purposive activity. According to Kant, it represents a sphere of pleasure, play and freedom that is reflective and specifically and characteristically human.
• An artist’s aesthetic refers to their stylistic approach to dimensions of presentation and manifestation – how they compose works to facilitate aesthetic delectation.