Baumgarten’s *Aesthetica and the Rock Art of Northeast Brazil

Summary

This is an abstract from the "From the Plains to the Plateau: Papers in Honor of James D. Keyser" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Alexander Baumgarten’s *Aesthetica gave birth to modern aesthetics. He had in mind a specific relationship between human cognition and sensory perception. Originally, aesthetics was the “science of sensitive knowing” (*scientia cognitionis sensitivae), or the study of how we know the world through our senses (sensing it) rather than through rational cognition (thinking about it). A generation later, Immanuel Kant decentered Baumgarten’s aesthetics and reoriented it toward the Beautiful and the useless. This now overshadows Baumgarten’s original and more productive aesthetics resulting in a grand distraction: assertions that aesthetic sensibility is reliant on Western notions of beauty, that beauty is a necessary condition of art, and that usefulness eliminates any possibility of either beauty or art. In American archaeology we see this as claims that aesthetics and art are of little use in the study of non-Western or prehistoric image making and reception. This is unfortunate. When we honestly engage Baumgarten’s science of sensitive knowing in the study of northeast Brazilian rock art, we gain a deeper understanding of the diversity and sophistication of Indigenous art and aesthetic discourse.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• From the Plains to the Plateau: Papers in Honor of James D. Keyser

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33294