Aesthetic Experience, Mimesis and Testimony

Authors

  • Roger W. H. Savage University of California at Los Angeles, USA

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5195/errs.2012.114

Keywords:

Aesthetic experience, Mimesis, Judgment, Testimony

Abstract

In this article, I relate the demand that Paul Ricoeur suggests mimesis places on the way we think about truth to the idea that the work of art is a model for thinking about testimony. By attributing a work’s epoché of reality to the work of imagination, I resolve the impasse that arises from attributing music, literature, and art’s distance from the real to their social emancipation. Examining the conjunction, in aesthetic experience, of the communicability and the exemplarity of a work reveals how Ricoeur’s definition of mimesis as refiguration relates to the “rule” that the work summons. This “rule” constitutes the solution to a problem or question for which the work is the answer. In conclusion, as a model for thinking about testimony, the claims that works make have a counterpart in the injunctions that issue from exemplary moral and political acts.

 

Author Biography

Roger W. H. Savage, University of California at Los Angeles, USA

Roger Savage is Professor of Systeamtic Musicology in the Department of Ethnomusicology at UCLA. His interdisciplinary research interests focus on the connections between hermeneutics, critical theory, music criticism, aesthetics and politics. His book Hermeneutics and Music Criticism (Routledge, 2010) provides an extended critique of the use of hermeneutics as a way of deconstructing traditional disciplinary constructs. His book Structure and Sorcery: The Aesthetics of Post-War Serial Composition and Indeterminacy (Garland, 1989) examines the practices of high modernist composers. Professor Savage has published articles in Philosophy and Literature, the Journal of French Philosophy, world of music, Telos, The European Legacy, the British Journal of Aesthetics, ex tempore, Symposium and Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology. He is a contributing author to Ricoeur across the Disciplines (Continuum, 2010) and Paul Ricoeur and the Task of Political Philosophy (forthcoming Lexington Books). He co-edited Perspectives in Systematic Musicology: Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology volume 12 (2005).

Professor Savage was a 2010 Fulbright Scholar at the Centre for Irish Studies at the National University of Ireland, Galway, where he taught and conducted research on cultural politics and Irish traditional music. He is currently Vice-President of the Society for Ricoeur Studies.

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Published

2012-06-25

Issue

Vol. 3 No. 1 (2012)

Section

Varia

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