Knower, Knowing, Known: The Ontoepistemological Unity of Aesthetic Experience

Abstract

Abstract:Contemporary culture privileges frictionless access over the labor of mediated experience, what Anna Kornbluh calls a "culture of immediacy." Yet the philosophical tradition names an immediacy of another order, one in which, as Aristotle writes, "what understands and what is understood are the same." The author argues that this second immediacy is available in aesthetic experience, which discloses the ontoepistemological unity of knower, knowing, and known: The work of art invites the participatory, embodied engagement that ordinary cognition can elide. Aristotle's noesis, Hegel's dialectical self-positing, Dewey's rhythm of "doing and undergoing," and Merleau-Ponty's chiasmic flesh each articulate that unity in a different register, each deepening the last. If knower, knowing, and known name the poles of this unity, a Greek triad names its movement: askesis, the disciplined labor of attention; metanoia, the reorientation it effects; and noesis, the disclosure in which the known becomes actual in the intellect. Because this movement reconstitutes rather than merely informs the knower, and because the self it forms is inherently intersubjective, art should be recognized as a culturally formative domain of knowledge.