Dao Academy

CoursesCourse 27

The Aesthetic Gaze: seeing the world as beauty and form

Aesthetics is a way of meeting the world: not to use it, to explain it, or to define it, but to feel it, and to make something from the feeling. This course follows the idea from a word coined in 1735 and a book of 1750, through the long argument over taste, the first look and the pure onlooker, to the crossing of the senses, and ends by testing the gaze on two modern questions: why originality needs some distance, and what to make of a technology that promises a world with no center.

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Lessons

  1. 1 Another kind of knowledgeA twenty-year-old student coins a word in 1735 and a professor writes a book under it in 1750. Four ways of meeting the world, why a philosopher defended the senses, and how the tongue, the lowest sense, lent its name to the judgment of beauty. 22 minCompleted
  2. 2 The art of lookingIs beauty in the object or in the viewer? A story about a key on a leather thong, Kant’s odd claim that a personal judgment still asks for agreement, the first look that habit steals, and two attitudes toward nature: the one that questions it and the one that listens. 26 minCompleted
  3. 3 Crossing the sensesA line of poetry in which red apricot blossoms are “noisy.” What a Chinese critic meant by crossing the senses, what neuroscience calls synesthesia and how few people have it, why a round shape sounds like “bouba,” and what the link to creativity really is. 24 minCompleted
  4. 4 Original in a connected worldA 1971 lecture at UNESCO about too much communication, a ledger that no one keeps, and the lecture’s argument that a world with no center cannot last. What is history, what is mechanism, and what is only a thesis, and what it means to look at a new thing before judging it. 25 minCompleted

You’ll be able to

  • Describe what Baumgarten meant by aesthetics, why he used a Greek word for perception, and why taste, the lowest of the senses, became the name for judging beauty.
  • Explain how beauty moved from the object to the viewer, what Hume and Kant added, and what it means to say that a judgment of taste is personal and yet asks for agreement.
  • Separate neurological synesthesia, which is involuntary and consistent and found in a few percent of people, from the figures of speech that cross the senses, and say what research does and does not show about creativity.
  • Give the verifiable history of Bitcoin and the blockchain, tell it apart from the lecture’s thesis about decentralization, and say how a questioner can look at a new technology without a prediction.

About this course

This course covers 美学的凝视 (Měixué de níngshì, The Aesthetic Gaze). A “gaze” is a long, steady, directed look, and the course treats aesthetics as one such way of looking, beside the plain senses, science, and philosophy. It belongs to the humanities strand of Dao Academy, which opened with Course 23 and took up the philosophical gaze in Course 25.

The argument is an essayist’s: personal, wide-ranging, and bold. It borrows ideas from the French historian of philosophy Pierre Hadot, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and the Chinese scholar Qian Zhongshu. We keep the argument and label it (“in this reading,” “this course argues”), and we separate it from the history and science it uses, which we have checked against sources. Several familiar lines turned out to have other origins, and some claims could not be verified and are left out. Each lesson has an “Another view,” a bridge for readers in China and the United States, and hands-on activities. Earlier courses prepare some of the ground: Course 2 follows Francis Bacon and the idea that knowledge is power, and Course 10 studies how attention and perception actually work.