Summary Of Ellen Dissanayke's Homo Aesthetticus

Focusing primarily on chapter 7 of Homo Aesthetticus, we discuss the obliteration or removal of art through writing. The belief that writing erases art is not necessarily a new motif in postmodernist art and theory, but the manner in which Dissanayke discusses it is. Ellen Dissanayke ascertains that throughout history and our educations, we’ve assumed “that the authors (i.e. Plato, Aristotle) thought about art in the same ways that we do.” (194) However, Plato, Aristotle, and other traditional philosophers never really discuss “art”, instead they the word “Techné”. (194) This is sort of a blanket term, not refereeing specifically to art, the art world, or art works. Instead, it refers to the ability to correctly understand the principals involved in the creation of something.
Ellen Dissanayke relates this to the same definition of art used in the books “the art of cooking” and the “art of parenting”. This spoke more to the traditional manner of creating art, which was to correctly represent something realistic with craftsmen like skill and excellence. A notion that became antiquated with the entry of modern art and it’s ideals.
This is not to say that modernity is the solution to defining or critiquing art. In fact, Dissanayke asserts that modernity brought some good, but some evil with it. No longer dependent on the patronage of the churches and apprenticeships. Artists became reliant on the public, museums, aesthetics, and academia. This created too isolated of a society, who confuse the individuals’ personal biases and ideals as shared opinion. In order to combat this postmodernist, claim of interchangeable world views, Dissanayke proposes a replacement to this postmodern nihilism and separatism - Species-centrism. This would combat the fault of heavy reliance on reading and writing n postmodernism.
Citing the anthropological influence of reading and writing, Dissanayke expands on the literature free existence of humanity throughout nine-eights of history.
Drawing comparisons between oral and literate cultures. Doing so highlights a crucial connection between oral and literate cultures, as well as past and present. Oral is inherent, literacy is not. Oral is personal and involved. Speaker and audience must be in close proximity and the audience can ask for clarity if there is confusion. Written language is impersonal and detached. This can lead to confusion or miss iteration of information. This would indicate societies can modernize without a high level of literacy. Writing creates detachment by making it possible to view a word as a thing Modernism and postmodernism focus too heavily on reading and writing, prompting artists to focus heavily on concepts and labels to describe aesthetic experience. Dissanayke argues that you cannot describe or purposely elicit another’s aesthetic understanding to be the same as yours. Each viewer experiences a different aesthetic experience based of their perception and past. There may be commonalities, but ultimately, each’s aesthetic is
intrinsic.
A commonality throughout time, regardless of literacy, is that there has always been art in society. Art is a biologically innate part of human life and societal life. Akin to food, shelter, and warmth; it is essential to our survival. When society was previously without language and acceptance of modern art, their art was expressed intimately through play, rituals, and ceremonies that highlighted importance. This allowed them to distinguish the special from the mundane in order to share experiences and communicate. Similar to Darwin’s theories, Dissanayake, art is essential to human adaption and understanding of their cognitive world. Not the elitist, separatist practices of modernist and post-modernist views of art which are inhibited by their overreliance on the written word and do not focus enough on the human impulse that creates each viewer’s own uniquely intuitive aesthetic experience.