SPLectrum's Kind of Aesthetics

In Flying the Flag of Belonging, Privacy and Creativity I made a start situating SPLectrum, exploring the type of inquiry that flows from the three core values. Epistemology — or how we come to knowledge — is all around the subject experience. Ontology is about the concepts we use in language. And then came the third: what about the way concepts relate and express meaning, what about the ‘dynamic’ part of language?

It sort of struck me: ‘isn’t this like aesthetics, how it is put together?’. The expression of language as a form of art — the chosen concepts and how they relate. An aesthetics concerned with meaning in general rather than just the sensory. It may not be a mainstream view of aesthetics, but so what? So I set about positioning it, looking around the philosophical neighbourhood.

And then came the headache … Philosophy has a very fragmented view of what is essentially expression of meaning. On the periphery there is aesthetics concerned with the sensory, poetics about the made work, rhetoric concerned with persuasive expression. Within the core of philosophy, hermeneutics has made interpretation its own, semiotics took the sign, and structuralism read meaning off a system of differences. Philosophy of language about sense and reference, meaning pinned down to the last bolt. Seven serious fields — not even all of them — each tending its own patch and each dealing with expression of meaning within their specific context.

I see SPLectrum not as being out on a limb, going down avenues blindly. Pluralism is ingrained in its core — together we know more than alone. A different approach has to make sense in the wider scheme of things. So, is my gut feeling the right way to go? Yes, go! Expression of meaning is a core activity, it evolves and diversifies — it’s a process, not static. Can we rewind a bit, how did we get here?

There was a time when there were no humans yet, there was a time there were no creatures with brains. Our current state of thinking came about after a long evolution. As cells diversified into neurons, and neurons evolved into brains, one of the main concerns was processing the sensory input. And this has always had a language associated with it — primitive at first, like an off/on switch — but a language nevertheless. Evolution has layered complexity on top of this; concepts and language evolve. Our brain reflects this through different layers: the reptilian brain, the limbic brain, the neocortex. Our pure abstract thinking is not detached from the language of our senses — it is layered on top — abstraction was always already there. It makes sense to keep all expressions of meaning under one umbrella as a field of philosophical inquiry — and let’s call it aesthetics.

Pulling expression of meaning back to where it started creates a natural flow that goes both ways: the abstract runs down into the sensory it grew from, and the sensory bubbles up into the abstract — there’s no clean break to be found anywhere along the line. Seen like that, expression of meaning stops being a human speciality, too — it runs wherever meaning is made. Which is what dissolves the headache: those scattered fields were never rivals, just this one concern at work in different places.

SPLectrum’s aesthetics as the single umbrella finds itself in resonance with many philosophical branches that touch on some aspect of expression of meaning, and that puts my mind at rest. It’s a difference that makes sense in the pluralistic landscape.

Photo: Kevin Laminto / Unsplash