From: creitz-AT-toto.net
Date: Fri, 10 Oct 1997 17:09:41 -0500 (CDT)
To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
Subject: Re: BHA: deconstruction
Cc: creitz-AT-toto.net


I (Charley Reitz) want to thank Marshall Feldman, Louis Irwin and Michael
Salter for taking the time and energy to respond to my critical comments on
the aesthetic imagination and postmodernism's aesthetic ontology. I see
myself as defending the critical realist approach. 

I agree that Marcuse thinks he has a realist theory of art because he (like
Heidegger) theorizes the imagination as the faculty that arrives at
ontological knowledge, and that empirical data alone misrepresent the real.
But philosophical idealists have long held that their methods disclose real
universals which provide a critical purchase in evaluating the given
circumstances of social life. Critical realism differs with idealists on
this. I believe Marcuse's theory of art (and society) needs to be
re-materialized.

It makes sense to ask just how real aesthetic images are. The examples
Marshall gives are of unicorns and socialism. There is a reason why Marshall
(and others of us) believes socialism is a more real possibility than
unicorns. Doesn't critical realism hinge on its ability to explain
Marshall's view here. And to explain it we must test the image against
something else: value for life? Adequation to the dynamics (or relative
statics) of social forces? In other words, a realist social and aesthetic
theory must be externally referential and not simply a projection of the
subject. Imagination in Marcuse's sense is self-contained: emergent from our
conflicted self, the depth dialectic of Eros and Thanatos, which his
philosophical anthropology postulates as our human nature. I agree with
Louis Irwin that critical realism is not to be derided as a faulty
(de-humanized, reified) form of projection. We are attempting to make sense
of science and imagination, beyond the fallacies of subjectivism, and
without a shirking of intellectual/political responsibilities.

I don't want to separate aesthetics and science unscientifically. To me it
is a question of holding to an aesthetic ontology (which privileges learning
through art) or developing a social history of art and and social history of
learning, consistent with a critical realism.

Charles Reitz, Kansas City Kansas Community College 



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