What Could Be More Important Than Kant?

Years ago, at one of the events of the Sanat Tanımı Topluluğu, a conceptual art group I was once part of, a friend didn’t show up. We were reading Kant at the time. When Şükrü Aysan, one of the collective’s founding artists, asked where the person was, he was told that something had come up at work. Şükrü Hoca’s reply was, “What work could be more important than Kant?” and we laughed. I’ve never forgotten that line, and we’ve used it among friends, half in jest, whenever we run late for a meeting.

The more I read, the more I notice that philosophy keeps coming back to wrestling with the problems Kant opened up. In the previous piece, I realized that several of the concepts I touched on hadn’t fully settled in my mind and kept bleeding into one another. In this piece I’ll try to clarify those ambiguities (and fail!).

This series is grounded in research, one I’ve learned from by writing, that often slips into philosophical questions in order to interrogate the assumptions of how contemporary art operates and what kinds of relations it builds. For that reason the flow I promised in the previous piece can get interrupted; I have to go back and take up the same matter again from another angle. So thank you for your patience.

Why Do We Separate Phenomena from the Things Themselves?

“Thus, the underlying problem of the concept of ‘phenomenon’ is: why should what we see not be what it is? At the basis of this, there is the idea that appearances deceive us because perception is contingent. However, Kant does not oppose onta and phainomena, like Plato, nor does he consider phenomenology as a doctrine of appearance as something between truth and falsehood, like Lambert. Rather, he gives phenomena full legality; so one does indeed wonder: why call them ‘phenomena’, setting them against the things themselves?”1

The philosophical tradition that followed Kant has largely accepted his basic distinction between phenomena (things as they appear to us) and noumena (things as they exist in themselves). This distinction produced what many later philosophers saw as an unbridgeable gulf: if we can only access appearances and never the things in themselves, how can we claim to know reality?

Some contemporary philosophies reject this split. On this view, there is no inaccessible “thing in itself” hiding behind appearances. Appearances themselves are real. When we encounter a tree, we do not encounter a mere “representation” or appearance of a tree that conceals some unknowable “essence-tree.” We encounter a real tree with all its properties and its resistance (and therefore with its unknowable aspects too).

Phenomenology also carries within it an effort to overcome this split. Phenomenologists such as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty treat experience not as a mere bundle of representations but as a direct relation to and orientation toward the world. For Merleau-Ponty, perception is not a mental reflection of an external reality but a participatory relation of the body with the world. The body doesn’t simply receive sensory data; it is positioned as a being that, in interacting with its environment, produces meaning.

This concrete outlook marks an important break from earlier philosophical approaches. Phenomenology sees consciousness not as an “observer” of reality but as a being that participates in and interacts with the world. Living beings are participants in the world, not spectators. When I breathe the dirty air of the city, watch the red tones of a Turner painting, or feel the resistance of the concrete beneath my feet, I don’t immediately set about constructing mental representations or analyzing. I live through the immediate experiences that surround my body.

“to be immersed is not reducible to finding oneself in something that surrounds and penetrates us. […] for there to be immersion, subject and environment have to actively penetrate each other.”2

The Critique by New Realism and the Phenomenon of Experience in Contemporary Art

Phenomenology, despite the conceptual innovations it introduced, has been criticized, on the basis of its early forms, by the realism that remains in force today. Ferraris criticizes Husserl’s phenomenology for identifying reality with phenomena, thereby producing an ontological deficit, and for failing to account for the distance between appearance and reality:

“[O]ntology is not identified with phenomenology, because to speak of phenomena means to refer to that which by definition is a transitional moment, destined to find its truth elsewhere.”3

One of the main targets for many realists is the rejection of subjectivism. Phenomenology, by contrast, typically begins with the structures of consciousness and how these constitute experience. Consciousness, then, still plays a strong role in shaping reality.

For realism, reality has a structure independent of human perception or conceptualization. Objects possess an ontological reality independent of our perception. The goal is to affirm the existence of a reality independent of us, not to examine how reality appears to us. For this reason, realists focus on the reality of what is experienced rather than on how experience is possible, that is, on its conditions.

Suhail Malik, whom I quoted at length in the earlier pieces, built his critique of contemporary art on correlationism.4 What he objected to was that art always sets about constructing reality through the experience or interpretation of a subject. For this reason, contemporary art typically deploys deliberate ambiguity in order to remain open to multiple interpretations, and designs experiential fields fit for interpretation. This also confines it to a universe of interpretation and experience that cannot confront real problems, either philosophically or politically.

I think Malik’s critique is directed at a phenomenological conception of experience, because phenomenology, by focusing on how things appear to consciousness, brackets the question of independent existences (without denying it). This approach remains problematic for realism, since it places subjective experience and what is “for us” at the center.

Phenomenology, though, is also not a movement that can be reduced to an idealist subjectivism, because it investigates the relation between consciousness and the world, not the idea that the mind creates the world. One should keep in mind that the subject/object divide is seriously eroded in works such as Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible5 and in many of Heidegger’s writings.6 Whether realism and phenomenology stand in strict opposition is therefore debatable.7 Phenomenology is in fact indifferent to the realism/anti-realism problem.

Aisthesis

I think the problem stems from the concept of phenomenon, because it rests on the Kantian divide. To explain experience within a realist framework, Ferraris turns to a different concept. Aisthesis, too, comes into play here as the basic level of experience.

Ferraris uses aisthesis, the concept I mentioned in the previous piece, which precedes conceptualization or interpretation, in a sense close to its original meaning (sensation or perception).8 This is not the same thing as “aesthetic experience” in the everyday sense (appreciating a work of art, for example), but even that kind of experience rests, at the most basic level, on aisthesis.

Unlike traditional empiricism, which treats sensory data as atomic units requiring a mental synthesis, aisthesis accepts that perception exists as already structured. This Gestalt-like structure is not something the mind imposes on sensory data but something inherent in perception. Markus Gabriel puts it this way:

“As if it were not already structured in one way or other even if we present it as a mere ‘flux’. A flux is as structured as any other cloud. That we can read faces into clouds does not make them less structured in themselves.”9

We can put it this way: there is a world that exists prior to us and resists our attempts to alter it through thought. We can bump into a table, for example, without knowing it is a table. As children, we felt the heat of fire without possessing the concepts of heat and fire. It is also possible to see colors without any aesthetic judgment or interpretation. In short, a world is already there before we start thinking about it.

Aisthesis is not a subjective “filter” that distorts reality. It is our direct contact with reality; it is how the world introduces itself to us. This contact is not perfect or complete, but it is real.

Aisthesis is ecological and concrete by its very nature. It concerns the interaction between an organism and its environment. It concerns the interaction of a living being with specific sensory capacities with a concrete, physical world.

What Makes Art Different?

Is art, then, a special form of these interactions?

Treating art as merely a representation or a transfer of mental images turns it into a system of signs in which meaning alone rules. Yet artworks open up fields of interaction not only at a conceptual level but also as material entities. By materiality I do not mean only a three-dimensional sculpture. A painting, a sound, an image cloud circulating in millions of copies on the internet, an electrically powered work, performances: all of these are material. When we experience an artwork, we first meet not its concepts but its physical presence, its place on the interface. Even a conceptual artwork, at the first moment, appears as the presence of an object rather than the presence of an explanation. In this respect, in the field of art as with other objects in the world, aisthesis produces a physical and perceptual encounter that comes before any mental interpretation.

Aisthesis is present in everything, yet art gives sensations a specific orientation; it frames, intensifies, or interrupts them. A carpenter also struggles with materials, a scientist also discovers resistances in nature, yet what differentiates the artist is a practice that directly interrogates and organizes the structure of encounters. For this reason art is a process that discloses and reorganizes the relations built with the world, rather than a reflection or construction of it.

The art object is also a social and historical object. It can also produce different kinds of knowledge. It gains meaning in these contexts. Art, therefore, cannot be explained solely through aisthesis. Even though art produces distinct and particular aesthetic encounters, we always have the chance of finding such encounters in other things as well. The very thing that pulled me toward the aesthetics of everyday life, toward the aesthetics of animals and machines, toward biosemiotics, that is, away from the world of art, was always this problem. Perhaps art is not so singular after all.

Any realist theory of art must overcome two basic difficulties when explaining what sets art apart from other kinds of objects and activities. The first is idealism/constructivism: making art entirely dependent on mind or social conventions. The second is materialist reductionism: reducing art to its purely physical or formal properties. This, in turn, leads to a broader question: if realism is reduced to a dogmatic physicalism, then the existence and efficacy of human-made objects (states, money, law, for example) become impossible to explain. Since art, too, is a social system, it has to be explained along this axis, because the physical existence of individual works is not enough to account for art.

Footnotes

  1. Maurizio Ferraris, Hysteresis: The External World (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024), 34. ↩

  2. Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, trans. Dylan J. Montanari (Cambridge: Polity, 2019). ↩

  3. Ferraris, Hysteresis, 135. ↩

  4. Suhail Malik, “Reason to Destroy Contemporary Art,” in Realism Materialism Art, ed. Christoph Cox, Jenny Jaskey, and Suhail Malik (London: Sternberg Press, 2015), 185–190. ↩

  5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968). ↩

  6. Graham Harman, Heidegger Explained: From Phenomenon to Thing (Chicago: Open Court, 2007). ↩

  7. Matthew Coate has a good article on this: “‘Yes, the Whole Approach Is Questionable, Yes, False’: Phenomenology and the New Realism,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 32, no. 3 (2018): 450–461. ↩

  8. Ferraris, Hysteresis, 84. ↩

  9. Markus Gabriel, Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). ↩