The free access to this article was made possible by support from readers like you. Please consider donating any amount to help defray the cost of our operation
Aesthetics as a Path to an Inclusive Solution
Kenneth Liberman
Abstract
This essay summarizes the prescriptions of Nicola Perullo presented in his unconventional, commodious inquiry into nondual experience, Aesthetics without Objects or Subjects (Bloomsbury, 2025), which lays out many practical epistemological strategies that are applicable not only to personal experience but to the political-economic crisis of our time. Strategies proposed by Perullo are outlined and assessed including nondual perception, co-participatory engagement, ontogenesis, and the removal of the anthropocentric and cognitively fragmented ontological foundations that shroud our immanent experience of reality. Here, details of these strategies are clarified using illustrations taken from tasting coffee and some philosophical anthropological resources.
Key Words
de-reification; haptic perception; nondualism; objectivity; phenomenology
1. Reality is participation in the flux
Perullo proposes what he calls a “process-oriented ontogenesis” not merely as a solution to some abstract epistemological problem but as a highly effective path for combatting and overcoming the political and economic tyranny of what he calls our “current emergency”: “For me aesthetics is not only summoned by a personal urgency—this would be worth little—but by a collective emergency …. This urgency primarily arises from a crisis of reality, which in turn is a crisis of perceiving.”[1]
This crisis of reality obviously is also ecological, and part of the radicality of Perullo’s proposal is exhibited by his recognition that the present-day ecological emergency is deeply rooted in perception. This obvious truth nevertheless is overlooked by capitalist culture and much of the objective science that services its interests. More than a century ago, Georg Simmel observed that being in the presence of a landscape is always already a spiritual configuration, and that its reality can get lost during analytic work that depends upon decomposing its elements, a step necessary for scientists who need to count and measure things. Simmel writes, “By ‘nature’ we understand the connection without end of things, the fluid unity that develops and expresses itself in the continuity of spatial and temporal existence.”[2] The reality of nature is available to a nondualist aesthetics, and it is this attunement to fluidity that motivates many of Perullo’s suggestions. At its core, the problem is with our dualistic ontology, which undergirds not only what we think but what we experience. The aesthetics without objects or subjects that Perullo is proposing can be an effective route for healing the alienating technofacism that seems poised to be the next stage of modern civilization. Accordingly, Perullo’s serious reflections on aesthetics need to be taken to heart.
What is the big deal about process-oriented ontogenesis? Ontogenesis is a way to realize a middle path between a naive positivism and a cognitivist idealism. It remains oriented to actual being and affords being the space to continue its evolving. The term ‘ontogenesis’ conserves the dynamic nature of reality, a nature that is obscured by most ontology that becomes “entrapped within cognitive boundaries” (136), self-indoctrinations of our own manufacturing (or those of our received language, culture or political economies). Importantly, in Perullo’s vigorous opposition to the distortions of reified ontologies, there is not a shred of nihilism at work. On the contrary, there is a celebration of life. Perullo presents us with one of the most optimistic pessimisms of all time.
The goal of Perullo’s aesthetics is not control but co-participation, based upon the acknowledgement that reality is always unfolding, always in a process of emerging. In reality, nothing is ever fixed, nor can real things be fully represented as fixed concepts. We frequently settle on fixations because we enjoy certainty, but these fixed entities are fictions, even dreams (or nightmares) produced by the human intellect and confirmed by our associates who, like us, have not learned how to live fearlessly: “Cognition turns the aesthetic relation into a theme, and the living process into a series of fragmented qualities” (58) and units. This modern project of subdivisive analysis first was systematized by that pioneer of modernity René Descartes, who in his second rule of methods instructed, “To divide each of the difficulties I would examine it into as many parts as possible and as was required in order to better resolve them.”[3] Reality is subdivided into categories in order to apply mathematical measures to each category, a tradition of objective science and capitalism that persists to the present day; to wit, the American businessman Michael Bloomberg recently advised, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”[4] And management and control is a principal aim of technofacism.
Such people consider themselves realists, but “realist” is an odd moniker for those who lack even a passing engagement with reality, that is, “the connection without end of things” that surrounds them,[5] for “the real is relational” (27), not static. Nothing real is ever static. Reality consists of always emerging, co-participatory nets of relations. This includes all of the “co”-s that Perullo offers us: cooperation, communality, corresponding, communication, compassion, and the others, the antidotes with which any dualist ontology can be suppressed.
Especially compassion. Perullo (160) tells us, “Compassion is a collusive alignment,” the epitome of the nondualist posture he is recommending, for it is necessarily participation in a flow, the flow of the Other: “Compassion adheres to and participates in the flow” (93). The Other, and our responsibility for the Other—evoked by what Levinas has called “the face of the Other”[6] —transcends all of our theorizing and our cognitive reductions, for the Other is real only when the Other remains immanent. Hegel has described how our efforts to confine the Other within the identity to which we have reduced her are doomed to failure, for the Other will always exceed our identifications.[7] This critical part of reality played by compassion also is brought into prominence by the great Middle Way Buddhist philosopher Candrakīrti, who in his most important philosophical tome—one that contains hundreds of pages of Buddhist logic—includes as the epigraph to his seventh-century masterpiece a praise to compassion: “As compassion alone is accepted to be the seed of the perfect harvest of Buddhahood, the water that nourishes it, and the fruit that is long a source of enjoyment, I will praise compassion at the start of all.”[8]
What is compassion doing as the epigraph to what is basically a text on Buddhist logic? Buddhist logic seeks to exceed logic, in addition to exposing its imperfections. Compassion naturally exceeds theorizing; it pushes us out of the comfort zone of our fixed concepts and back into the actual world that always and necessarily exceeds our conceptual controls. Candrakīrti and the Tibetan commentators who followed him did not reduce compassion or generosity to their reifications: when we give to another, the Other is not frozen in some destitution of the needy. As Perullo (9) teaches us, the concept of caring must be freed “from the subjectivist and paternalistic halo.” Nor can we ourselves rest inside any static self-image of being “a benefactor;” rather, the gift, the giver, and the recipient are mutually dependent and highly transitory. If there is any value to giving, it rests in attending to the co-participation, without ideologizing, beneficial or detrimental. That is to say, genuine compassion forces us to keep it real. This is the point of the Tibetan Khedrup’s recommendation that we adhere to a “non-objectified compassion,”[9] for reification will always be the enemy of reality.
Co-participation demands that we surrender control, that we abandon our agency and keep ourselves open to what is developing, to what we do not yet “know.” The reversibility and “intertwining chiasm,” of which Merleau-Ponty speaks,[10] involves being shaped by the world as much as shaping it, a posture that is an anathema to “manifest destiny” and every colonizing spirit. Here, aesthetics is called upon to preserve the co-participation. In this “attentive engagement with the materials” (82), the material shapes the craftsperson as the craftsperson shapes the material. The aesthetic redemption of the world occurs not by dominating things but by responding and participating in the folds, creases, and “cracks” (21) that our surroundings make available to us. Let anyone’s skepticism about this be tempered by appreciating that Perullo’s aesthetics is a reliable cure for the overwhelming fragmentation of our mundane lives.
2. A perspicuous illustration: the case of coffee
Perullo (45) commends to us “feeling/thinking-with” the whole instead of the applying the Cartesian strategy of constructing “separate domains” (80). The entire litany disparaged by Perullo (73) of “classifying the world into separate objects” and issuing certifications is at work in the professional industry of purveying coffees around the world, and entrepreneurial purveyors are eager and able to extract dollars at every one of these stages. Generality, standardizations, large scales, and what Perullo (150) calls the “financial power of a dualistic mindset,” which includes “industrial standards of repeatability” (162), have played important roles in the commodification of coffee, the diminution of flavor, and the maximization of profits. It may be said that more than anything else it was the Fordism of the early twentieth century that caused the tastelessness of industrial coffee; and there can be no doubt that the flavor of nineteenth-century coffees, when the roasting was always near at hand and fresh, was superior to most commodified coffees of the twentieth century.
Competing ideas of objectivity are at work in the worldwide coffee industry. Everyone is in favor of objectivity, but few are able to explain what it is. Two of the principal notions of objectivity used are (1) numerically driven assessment and (2) making direct contact with the object. Regarding the former, Perullo (108) tells us, “It has long been assumed that the light of reason coincides with reducing knowledge to analytical and calculative measurements of the world, creating an increasing sense of distance.” It is the strategy of the latter form of objectivity to reduce this distance, in order to foster the “co”-s of co-participation, correspondence, and the rest. Perullo commends to us a “haptic” approach, which diminishes distance and requires a “drawing close” that allows us to make contact with the object.[11] In contrast to this latter notion of objectivity, it is the ideological orientation of contemporary sensory science to propose that the best way to obtain objectivity is to remove subjectivity. Perullo (11) criticizes such a notion, “There is now a significant philosophical movement that believes you can remove the subject without also dropping the object.” Removing the subject alone is an impossible proposal and should be the embarrassment of any scientist who proposes it, for where there is no subject, there will be no object either: objectivity is constructed by subjectivity. The static reality produced by such an effort could never be real. In an aesthetics without object or subject, such static realities are enlivened, made fluid the way reality always is, for every substance must involve dynamically evolving interconnected relations, and the less we think we know, and the fewer pigeonholes we have for containing that knowledge, the more we may discover.
In scientific coffee tasting, a coffee is subdivided into traits or categories like “aroma,” “body,” “flavor,” “balance,” “aftertaste,” and other pertinent categories. Each category is given a numerical score, and after all of the numerations are completed, a total is added, which is meant to define for us the “whole” coffee. But this “whole” is nothing that is actually perceived by any coffee drinker, for it excludes all the synergies of co-participation. When it comes to drinking coffee, one plus one does not always equal two. The notion of most sensory analysts is that all one needs to do is add up the scores of the subdivisions, and the total that results will define the character of the coffee being sampled. But such a “whole” is an artifact of the scientific method and not any actual coffee available for tasting.
Every tasting form I have seen used by the coffee industry worldwide adjusts its numerations by means of an arbitrary design process, so that it will produce a clean “100” possible total; however, this total is another artifact of the form since none of the standard cupping forms offer numerations that actually reach a total of 100. The Cup of Excellence form uses eight categories that receive 8 points each, for a total of 64 points, to which 36 points are added arbitrarily to make that even 100 (the final score can be reduced by penalties for defects). The Espresso Cupping Form, used by the Specialty Coffee Association in Europe for certifying espressos as “specialty” coffees, evaluates eleven categories which can earn 7 points each, for a total of 77 points, to which 23 points are added to make the 100 points. The Specialty Coffee Association form offers a selection of between 6 and 10 for each of seven categories (presumably coffees unable to earn a score of 6 would never make it as far as SCA’s cupping tables) plus an additional 15 points are possible for sweetness, clean cup, and uniformity for a potential total of 85, which then also requires the arbitrary addition of points to reach the desired total of 100. Accordingly, each form affords the coffees under assessment a different starting “premium” (up to 36 points); significantly, this discrepancy is rarely mentioned since the “100” basis points serve well as a universal public token, offering the appearance of objective precision. Moreover, the coffees that excel in each of these tasting schedules are frequently compared with each other without much acknowledgment that each coffee of excellence may have had a different starting premium (derived by the points that need to be added to reach that tidy 100).
What is most vital to know about the taste of coffee is that one can never drink the same cup twice. Never forget this. The flavor of any coffee, good or bad, is always changing since it is subject to the manifold transformations that occur during the long journey from seed to cup, transformations that can be the result of fermentations, staling, spoiling during transport, and ambient aromas that are on the docks, the ship, and in one’s refrigerator. Roasting, blending, grinding, packaging, brewing, and a dozen other factors influence the flavor of a coffee, and that flavor is transforming even as the coffee sits on one’s shelf. My interest in the taste of coffee began several decades ago when at last I prepared at home what I considered to be the perfect cup of coffee. I was never able to find that coffee again, even though I went back to the roaster where I purchased it, ordered the same coffee at the same roast level (“Full City Roast,” which I learned much later is largely mythological). Even this morning I cannot even make the same taste as yesterday’s coffee with the identical batch of Ethiopian gesha that I am now drinking.
Coffee is dynamic, and the flavors are changing even as the coffee cools. And yet the aims of “objective” coffee purveying insist that this wildness be tamed, trapped within the categories and numerations of sensory science. Perullo (70) asks, “How can we then justify the claims of science, summoned to prove the absolute objectivity of traces and their independence from human life?” The coffee produced by much objective coffee purveying is “reduced to a cold and lifeless state” (106), whereas the coffee I seek is full of surprises. The situation reminds me of the wisdom of William Blake’s short poem, “Eternity”:
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy.
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.
To fix the reality of coffee’s taste is to entirely ignore the fluid flavor that serendipitously arrives on my palate and to replace what is alive with some type of taxidermy, whereas coffee is better appreciated as that bird on the wing. Here, the highest purpose of aesthetics is realized by engaging in a co-participation with ever-changing flavors. Aesthetics has the capacity to rescue us from the industrial world of Nescafe and Starbucks and deliver us over to what we have ceased to dominate with our expectations. Although Perullo’s insights about haptic perception were gained during his inquiries into wine tasting,[12] what he discovered is equally valid for coffee. We have departed “the thought of the discrete [that] manifests as scientific reasoning founded on classification and taxonomy, rooted in the division between mind and world. This foundation gives rise to unequivocal definitions of identity, substance, matter, theory, and so forth” (137), and instead we can enter an unpredictable future wherein the world remains alive.
There are now cafés that serve clients who come hoping to discover what is not expected, and somehow these cafés manage to make a profit. These drinkers are making their experience “fluid” (34) and open to “letting the field’s changing configuration dilate to fill experience” (114). Each trace of a taste presents “a gap that is never closed but remains open to the flow” (166). Instead of the unequivocal taxonomical flavor identities provided by World Coffee Research’s Sensory Lexicon,[13] wherein every taste has arrived predefined, we can step into “the broader flow of the currents of experience.” Since an aesthetics without objects or subjects is without foundations, the current of our immanent experience with a coffee will remain available to us. The abandonment of distality in favor of collusions can enrich us. As Perullo (147) insists, “This is not about fantasy daydreaming, as some realists [may] claim,” but the route to a better coffee drinking experience.
3. Our fundamental anthropological task
Perullo (121) conceives of his project as a humanifying process—“the continuous flourishing of humanity as a humanifying process within the larger context of the current of more-than-human life.” As any biology student knows, Homo sapiens is still in the process of evolving. Whether or not humans have become as wise as Linnaeus’s 1758 denomination “sapiens” suggests, it remains a noble goal that has a central role in any “humanifying process.” More recently, anthropologists have doubled down on this self-praise by designating a subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens in order to distinguish modern humans (approximately the last one hundred thousand years of our branch of human being) from our more ancient Homo sapiens ancestors. The emphasis upon sapiens suggests that what is most important to our being is our capacity for thinking; however, we have not progressed as far along in this capacity as our doubled-down denomination might suggest. We are still prone to becoming trapped inside the prisons that we continuously erect with our own habits of thinking. We constantly enslave ourselves, both with our individual conceptual forms and with our social forms. Thinking not only requires building formal structures of concepts and logics, it depends upon some ability to escape those structures into order to keep gaining a clearer perspective. That is, in addition to a positive gaze outward, a reflexive gaze is required that can keep reexamining our basic assumptions and, when necessary, undermine the very conceptual and institutional structures we have devised.
A Homo sapiens that is unable to get past believing its own propaganda is not fully worthy of the designation sapiens, and the last two millennia or so of dialectical thinking, developed in both Asia and Europe,[14] holds much promise for progress in human thinking and for improving our capabilities. Learning how to think without becoming trapped by the reified structures we ourselves devise for making our way through the world is one of the essential anthropological tasks humanity is facing, and Perullo’s prescriptions may be appreciated as contributions to this evolutionary aim.
Of course we must think, and thinking will inevitably involve erecting some limitations to our perspectives. Jean-Paul Sartre has observed that we are condemned to be free.[15] That is, the evolutionary momentum we are living can never come to an end with any contingent structures that confine us at any moment. When we become addicted to the security afforded by the certainties of some local order, a habit sometimes known as authoritarianism, our unavoidable freedom can be frightening for us. When Maurice Merleau-Ponty tells us that we are condemned to meaning,[16] he tacks in the opposing direction: our freedom is never unencumbered by conceptual forms that guide us along our way. Dialectical philosophy can disassemble some limitations and provide reorientations, but ultimately the presence of limiting factors is without remedy, although improvement is always achievable. There are times when Perullo seems to suggest that we might be able to avoid altogether the condemnation to which Merleau-Ponty refers. This is his optimism. I am more skeptical.
Jean Hyppolite’s declaration, “Philosophy must alienate itself – but it comprehends its own alienation,”[17] is very much to this point: alienation is an inevitable part of human being. Although alienation is unavoidable, it can be understood and on occasion transcended. Georg Simmel contributed some of the first comprehensive analyses of alienation in modern society with his investigations of social forms, principally in his texts, Philosophy of Money and Sociology. According to Simmel, the same social forms that contribute to the successful ordering of social relations, like money, can be alienating. Simmel usually sticks to an agnostic position, and perfection does not seem to have been his aim. In frankly addressing the alienating consequences of social institutions, he admits their necessity and does little advocating against them. As Simmel writes in his The View of Life: “Necessarily and in order to reveal itself at all, life produces form.”[18] These social forms produce the objectivations[19] that make it possible for people to use in concerting and coordinating their actions, and all of the other “co”-s that Perullo values. Simmel is well aware of the fluid interconnected reciprocal relations that enable social interaction, a phenomenon that he collects under the notion Wechselwirkung, but what they enable—even the emotional sociality they help to foster—comes at the price of some alienation. Without those objective forms, albeit their being prone to reification and even tyranny, people would never be able to get on the same page or be able to work cooperatively. Simmel summarizes:
As its immediate manifestation at the level of consciousness, Geist produces objective creations in which it expresses itself and which for their part, as life’s containers and forms, tend to receive its further flows—yet at the same time their ideal and historical determinacy, boundedness and rigidity sooner or later come into opposition and antagonism with ever-variable, boundary-dissolving, continuous life. Life is continually producing something on which it breaks, by which it is violated, something that is necessarily its proper form but yet, by the very fact of being form, in the deepest sense conflicts with the dynamic life, with life’s incapability of any actual pause.[20]
In an astonishingly original insight, Simmel focuses this analysis also upon logic: “One could compare the bureaucratic pattern with the logical one.”[21] Logic offers a means for organizing knowledge and for sharing philosophical ideas and rendering them communicable, providing philosophy some orderliness so that it can expand. And yet, like any other social form, it quickly seeks its own autonomy in addition to a firmness that can shut down the very openness that is thinking reason’s greatest gift. In the end, “Logic … constructs a world for itself that tends to stand in considerable opposition to the real world.”[22]
It is this formal logic that Perullo is battling against, and I am a conscript in his battle, but in my heart I have no confidence that we can avoid alienation, since alienation is endemic to Homo sapiens’ sapience. Reducing this alienation is our fundamental anthropological problem, already recognized by Simmel at the end of the nineteenth century. At times Perullo (129) acknowledges this: “Although classifications and distinctions have practical utility and are necessary to communicate, one must avoid considering them as real entities endowed with autonomous existence.” However, Perullo has yet to integrate this admission into his larger framework.
Perullo is suspicious of classifications and categorizations, informing us that everything resists categorization. He views names, glosses, and categories as “knots” (19) that can service our explorations, so long as we do not cling to them. They can offer us access to a world, yet they also obscure that world. Here, too, coffee provides a fine illustration: when a colleague tells us that the coffee we are drinking tastes like “the husk of a peanut” or like “caramel,” we can use the taste descriptor and place it on our tongue as it dives into the cup, using this theme for organizing its search for flavor. With such a “knot” in hand, we can make taste discoveries we might not otherwise have noticed, but they are discoveries that come at the expense of closing off our inquiry to other possibilities (such as lemon or butterscotch). The solution here is to use knots without being limited by them, and to somehow keep ourselves open for what we have not yet discovered. Perullo’s text addresses these “somehows.” That is, thinking—whether it is philosophical, scientific, or everyday—should be both formal analytical and sustain that openness that will lead us to what we do not yet know. Citing David Bohm, Perullo (129) explains that openness requires acknowledging the “unending development of new forms of insight.” Our “knots” should be nothing more than temporary guides.
Perullo (101) derides the limits of clinging “to fleeting solidifications,” even as these solidifications are necessary as temporary crutches. This resembles the two truths theory of Buddhist Middle Way thinking. For Mahayana Buddhists, there exists a conventional truth (kun rdzob bden pa, which literally means “the truth-that-covers-over”) and an ultimate truth. The former truth is a mundane truth that employs conventions that enable people to communicate and cooperate in practical projects. Ultimate truth is a deeper reality that recognizes that there are no things that exist by virtue of their own inherent essence because each thing is interconnectedly dependent with what surrounds it, dependent upon everything else, and perpetually in flux. Nothing finds stasis, except in the perspective of some mundane conventions that we invent and impose and which possess only temporary efficacy. The Middle Way finds a balance between these two truths, a balance that avoids both essentialism and nihilism.
As one illustration, consider the reasoning of Nāgārjuna in Chapter 5 of his Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way,[23] where he deconstructs the notion that characteristics or any definition can inherently subsist in what is being defined:
Neither in the uncharacterized nor in the characterized does a characteristic arise… From this it follows that there is no [inherent] characterized and no [inherently] existing characteristic. Nor is there any entity other than the characterized and the characteristic… Fools and reificationists who perceive the [inherent] existence of objects do not see the pacification of objectifications.
The argument here is that the notion that there is an independent entity that can “have” characteristics implies that it must already have some pre-existence of its own, independent of any defining characteristics. If that is so, it must be able to exist without those defining characteristics and so doesn’t need them. Consequently, those definitions cannot subsist in the entity in an inherent way. They are conventions. The essential thing about nondual experience is that a phenomenon and its characteristics, as well as a subject and an object, never exist independently, detached from each other
Further, if entities are not independent of their defining characteristics, then they must possess them already, so what possible role could defining characteristics play in offering anything foundational in defining them, in the way that sensory science proceeds? There is no space for dualism: the mistake here is to separate the two—the definition and the definiendum—and then to reify that separation as if one was dealing with real things that exist independently when they are only interconnectedly dependent. The point here is that definitions cannot be given foundational status since without something that already exists prior to definitions; definitions cannot be posited. There can be a momentary identification, a “fleeting” knot, but to solidify that identity and make of it something independent, in possession of an inherent essence, is to believe one’s own propaganda. Evading these objectifications while also using them when needed is what the “middle way” is about.
The parallels between Mahayana Buddhism and Perullo’s aesthetics run further and include Perullo’s fabulous reflection on “the non-anthropocentric and more-than-human reality of Homo.” Perullo recognizes that humanity takes itself too seriously for its own good. Another dualism inhabits the notion that we are in life, a separation that does not reflect the reality of the eternal chain of being. Instead of us being in life, life is in us. We are what we seek, and Homo sapiens is no more static or fixed than anything else is. Consider the fact that for the greater part of the time that humans including Homo sapiens have been dwelling on the planet there existed multiple species of Homo who coexisted alongside each other! Moreover, they kept swapping genes as they evolved. In fact, it is only very recently that Homo sapiens have become the only species of human still wandering about. Life is an unfinished story, and we are that story. According to the Buddhists, this story is without a beginning and without an ending. Life exists, and it is eternal. This gives new meaning to Perullo’s statement (121) regarding “the continuous flourishing of humanity as a humanifying process within the larger context of the current of more-than-human life.” What counts here is “the current,” within which it is delusory to distinguish in an absolute way the human from the nonhuman. Perullo contends that this includes even stones.
We are miniscule, which is why Perullo (120) advises “an estrangement from the supposed stability of self and identity” and advocates “minimizing the prominence of authorship in favor of collaboration.” As Achaan Buddhadasa, a Theravāda monk from Thailand, once explained to his students, “The forest is the teacher here.” The humility embodied in this observation is an instrument for growth. It is our anonymity, and not our ego, that is the guarantor of our learning what we do not yet know, and for participating in, and as, the current of being. Perullo (149) writes, “The author’s personal brilliance is secondary to the whole process, where the act of doing submits to undergoing. The individual is shifting sands. According to this line of thought, anonymity is neither flatness nor standardization of the mind; rather, it thins the ego and enhances the awareness of entangled correspondence.” Personal brilliance is not what has value; indeed, it can become an obstruction as easily as any other ignorance can.
The Aboriginal people that I lived with for two years in central Australia aspire only to their anonymity,[24] and thereby they become available for being possessed by the earth. This can be part of what haptic perception can accomplish, for “Haptic perceiving is not ego-driven” (152) and is wise because it is impersonal and anonymous. That is, “The haptic disposition seeks impersonality, lack of authorship, and anonymity” (149). “Perceiving haptically entails loosening one’s perceptual grip, relinquishing [objectifications]” (114), which involves surrendering control.
Perullo (116) considers “the current crisis of reality” to be a crisis of perception (107); hence, the emergency is an aesthetic crisis. In this way, aesthetics is not some remote museum far removed from the political; rather, it can perform a critical role at the very center of the world’s current “eco-political crisis” (31). But this aesthetics must be an aesthetics without objects and subjects (AWOS). This is what will allow the sapience of Homo sapiens to evolve.
Evading objectifications while still using them is the message embodied in the maxim of Perullo’s home village of Livorno, “Credici, ma non ti ci fissa” (25), with which he concludes his volume: “Believe it, but don’t fixate on it” (164). Surely this is the coda that can guide us into the next stage of our humanifying process. That presumably this maxim has been at work for some centuries in Livorno and seems to have made little difference may not bode well for the ultimate success of humanity in its evolution in sapience, and everywhere it is dawning upon people that our time may be running out; however, the maxim remains a vital principle that can guide us on our way, and it is a viable path for us to follow.
Kenneth Liberman
liberman@uoregon.edu
Kenneth Liberman is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Oregon, where he taught for thirty years. He trained as a phenomenologist (under Frederick Olafson, Herbert Marcuse, and Fredric Jameson) and as an ethnomethodologist (under Harold Garfinkel) and has undertaken sociological research among Americans, Italians, and Latin Americans, and anthropological research among Australian Aboriginal people and Tibetan Buddhists in India. Two of his books, More Studies in Ethnomethodology and Tasting Coffee: An Inquiry into Objectivity, have won Best Book awards from the American Sociological Association, and in 2025 he received a Distinguished Career Award from the ASA.
Published on March 12, 2026.
Cite this article, Kenneth Liberman, “Aesthetics as a Path to an Inclusive Solution,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Volume 24 (2026), accessed date.
Endnotes
[1] Nicola Perullo, Aesthetics without Objects and Subjects (Bloomsbury, 2025), 10.
Henceforth, references to the book under review are embedded in the main text.
[2] Georg Simmel, Filosofía del Paisaje (Casimiro Libros, 2013), 8.
[3] René Descartes, Discourse on Method (Hackett, 2013).
[4] Michael Bloomberg, Interview, The Economist (November 9, 2013, Podcast).
[5] See Endnote 2.
[6] Emmanuel Lévinas, Ethics and Infinity (Duquesne University Press), 1985.
[7] G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Clarendon Press,1977), 111-18.
[8] Candrakīrti, dbu ma la ’jug pa [Introduction to the Middle Way] (Gelugpa Students’ Welfare Committee, Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, India).
[9] Khedrup Gelek Pelzang, rgyud thams cad kyi rgyal po dpal gsang ba ’dus pa’i rim pa la slob tsul bsgrub pa’i thabs rnam par bshad pa dngos grub kyi rgya mtsho [Generation Stage Commentary to Guhyasamaja Tantra], (The Corporate Body of the Buddha Education Foundation, Buddhist Digital Resource Center, Taiwan, 2004), 1.
[10] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Northwestern University Press, 1968).
[11] For a comprehensive exposition of this theory of objectivity, see Günter Figal, Objectivity (State University of New York Press, 2010).
[12] Nicola Perullo, Epistenology: Wine as Experience (Columbia University Press, 2020).
[13] Sensory Lexicon (World Coffee Research, 2017), https://worldcoffeeresearch.org/resources/sensory-lexicon.
[14] See Thomas McEvilley for an account of the reciprocal influences of Asian and European dialecticians, in The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies (Allworth Press, 2002).
[15] Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions (Philosophical Library, 1967).
[16] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (Routledge, 1962).
[17] Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence (State University of New York Press, 1997), 70.
[18] Georg Simmel, The View of Life (University of Chicago Press, 2010), 105.
[19] Kenneth Liberman “Objectivation Practices,” Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality (2018) Vol. 1, No. 2, www.social-interaction.net.
DOI: https://tidsskrift.dk/socialinteraction/article/view/110037/159343.
[20] Georg Simmel, Sociology: Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms (Brill, 2009), 503.
[21] Ibid., 504.
[22] Ibid., 505.
[23] Nāgārjuna, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (Oxford University Press, 1995), 14-15. [See also dBus ma rtsa ba shes rab, nd, Dehradun, India: Prajna Publications].
[24] Kenneth Liberman, “Decentering the Self: Two Perspectives from Philosophical Anthropology,” in The Question of the Other (1989 Issue of the Series, Selected Studies in Phenomenology, State University of New York Press, 1989), 127-142.