Kenneth Walden: Aesthetic Sources of the Self

Colloquium lecture by Kenneth Walden (Dartmouth), organized by the department of Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy
   
Schiller said that “it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom.” In this talk I will try to defend this claim, at least in spirit. To act, we need to don contingent features of agency: things that structure our practical thought and explain what we do in very general terms but are neither universal nor necessary features of agency as such. Without these things, the question of what to do for any individual would be underdetermined. The problem is that adopting such a contingent form of agency amounts to a restriction on what we can do, and so it is a prima facie threat to our autonomy. I will argue that one way of meeting this challenge lies in aesthetic experience. Granting our capacity for aesthetic pleasure the authority to determine the particularities of our agency is compatible with autonomy because doing so means identifying with one’s capacity for taking pleasure in free and creative activity.

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