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Undisciplined Aesthetics: a Proposal for Repairing Perception
Nicola Perullo
First of all, I would like to thank the journal for facilitating this symposium. My book, Aesthetics without Objects and Subjects, published about a year ago, was conceived and developed in part thanks to discussions with Yuriko Saito and Arnold Berleant, who encouraged me to write this volume.
Secondly, I would like to thank the three scholars who accepted my invitation to write their critical notes and observations: Kathleen Higgins, Kenneth Liberman, and Giovanni Matteucci. Each of them has picked up on aspects and nuances that help to continue the debate: programmatically, Aesthetics without Objects and Subjects is an open essay, full of gaps, unsystematic and performative.
The book does not intend to propose an aesthetic “theory” or advance truths, but it was written in the spirit of exposition and fragility characteristic of correspondences—a term that is of particular importance and should not be understood exclusively as coincidences, harmonies, or agreements. Correspondences can be of various kinds, and at the basis of my argument there is also the idea that a correspondence acts even when it unfolds within disagreements, misunderstandings, and distances.
In the case in question, I am faced with three different correspondences: two—those of Higgins and Liberman—seem more convergent and generally aligned with the approach I propose, while the third, that of Matteucci, presents elements of greater disagreement and misunderstanding, or at least greater elements of friction and distance.
All this is extremely positive, from my point of view, because it will allow me, in a very concise and succinct manner, to better clarify what Aesthetics without Objects and Subjects means to say and what the reading experience it intends to be seeks to evoke.
Higgins has accurately captured the approach and the hue of my essay with perfect sensitivity and affinity. I feel close to her when she points out that my attempt consists in continuously writing what is theorized, while at the same time removing the foundation, or ground, from the theory that concepts necessarily tend to produce. This is precisely the heart of my approach, which she generously defines as a radical attempt to practice a new aesthetics. And this is why this essay, which is intended to be a transformative reading experience, and is therefore very demanding for the reader, requires a very slow digestion: it rejects any immediacy of conceptual understanding, even though its effect of truth may well be grasped all at once in an instant.
This approach is close to the spirit of Daoism. Higgins (as well as Liberman) understands this well, generously comparing my proposal to Zhuangzi, but also to Nietzsche, read in a positive rather than nihilistic key: nondualistic and unfounded feeling/thinking leaves us with “nothing,” that instead of being an empty space coincides with everything. Relational perception celebrates the abundance of the world and stimulates our attention to adhere to it, resisting as much as possible the temptation to systematize it. This is a proposal to reorient and repair perception in this key, and from my point of view only a radically relational and processual aesthetics can contribute to this. To perceive is to respond, and aesthetics is the art of responding consciously, attentively, and with presence to the situations that arise, first and foremost, in everyday life, even before expressions that intentionally evoke an aesthetic engagement and an active participation such as is the case with artworks. For me, aesthetics is a way of doing philosophy as “a way of life, and one that is available to human beings across social roles. Thus, Perullo dissociates philosophy conducted in the aesthetic mode from professionalism and expertise. Indeed, he encourages an approach characterized by undisciplined dabbling, dilettantism, and amateurism” (Higgins, Sec. 4).
Higgins reconsiders the role of two concepts I use: agencing and call of consciousness, and correctly interprets them as a way of describing that “middle way” between doing and undergoing, which in my opinion is where aesthetic perception happens. With respect to agencing: I think it is a useful tool since Aesthetics—in its institutional history—does not often address this middle ground. Neither action nor acceptance, perception is a correspondence in the sense that I have elaborated from Ingold: a postal exchange, a response that can be both a dissonance and a resonance, a call. A call is not necessarily harmony, relaxation, perfect accord. It can also be disharmony, tension, discord. It is therefore unsurprising that Higgins initially “found the term [agencing] unwieldy” (Sec. 3), for this very instability is precisely what I have attempted to preserve and foster within the book’s argumentative texture, making the connection to her concept of “aesthetic patience” (Sec. 3) not only comprehensible but genuinely generative.
However, she may be right in arguing that my thesis that aesthetics is the “call of consciousness” is not sufficiently clarified. In my book, consciousness is not something that one has individually but, to use a phenomenological terminology, the precondition for something to be; and this depends on a plane that is necessarily shared. One is always in consciousness. This is why I argue that what we call ‘aesthetic experience’ is the call of consciousness: perceiving aesthetically is to be conscious of —that is, to experience—the connection, the original togetherness, the with-. This is why I also state that communication goes before information. Obviously, every aesthetic manifestation occurs in the course of a singular and specific experience. But this singularity is inextricably entangled to a shared and communal plane, that I name consciousness: “Aesthetic relation occurs whenever perceiving consciously recalls its nature as a singular manifestation of consciousness” (Perullo 2025, 17). It is here that the possibility of an aesthetics without objects and subjects grows. Of course, I am well aware that using the term “call of conscience” to describe the distinctive feature of aesthetic experience may appear ambiguous. But it is an ambiguity that I find interesting and useful to explore.
Like Higgins, Kenneth Liberman emphasizes the fact that the relational and ungrounded aesthetics—an aesthetics “away from ontology”—that I propose leaves no room for nihilism, but on the contrary is a celebration of life. I totally agree with this acknowledgment. Opposition to objectified ontologies and dualism—not duality: the difference between duality and dualism, understood as the objectification of duality, is fundamental to my argument—does not lead to an impasse but opens the field to a different kind of perceiving as agencing. He also points out that my engagement for a nondualistic aesthetics is above all a tool for critical reorientation of the times we are living in: “healing the alienating techno-fascism” (Liberman, Sec. 1) that dominates today. In fact, I believe he is right to frame my work within a broader reflection that goes beyond the disciplinary boundaries—which are, moreover, always highly debated, uncertain or fragile—of modern aesthetics. As I pointed out in the first part of the book, I do not consider myself entirely a scholar of aesthetics, but rather a thinker who uses an aesthetic approach, in the sense I described above, to debate and address more general, metaphysical, ontological, and ethical-political issues. Liberman captures the theoretical aspects of my work with great precision and, like Higgins, honors me by comparing it to that of the sixth-century Buddhist philosopher Candrakīrti, one of the leading exponents of the Mahāyāna school, especially in terms of the point that compassion transcends cognition and all theory.
What I am trying to propose is an aesthetics—therefore a Western theory—in which compassion (as con-, as feeling together, as communication and consciousness) plays a fundamental role. This also has to do with my provocative statement, impeccably echoed by Liberman, that eco-logic exceeds formal logic and therefore cannot be explained or understood through it. To illustrate this surplus, Liberman uses the case of objectivity in coffee tasting. For many years, Ken and I have shared an interest in the epistemological and aesthetic aspects of taste, and we have met several times to discuss this topic. My research has focused on the taste of wine; his, on coffee, publishing a fundamental and essential book on the subject.
Coffee is a perfect example, because given its global popularity—it’s the most widely consumed beverage in the world after water—it is heavily influenced by commodification both in production and processing in order to achieve a recognizable and replicable taste, based on general quality standards and very strict evaluation criteria. Taking his cue from my criticism of objectivity and my proposal to abandon the idea of critical distance in favor of a relational approach based on compassion, collusion, consciousness, and so on, Liberman stresses that objectivity is a concept that is anything but simple. Through a phenomenology of professional coffee-tasters, his proposal seeks to demonstrate the reasons in favor of a balance between, on the one hand, the reasons of lived taste experience, a field that is irreducible to any classification or objectification and, on the other hand, the reasons, primarily practical and communicative, for cataloging and creating objective standards. He proposes the notion of emerging objectivity, that is, situated, continuously reasoned and adapted, never absolute.
According to Liberman, objectivity and standardized criteria are therefore necessary, even if they produce alienation; following his mentor Simmel, he too believes that alienation is a necessary evil. We need to understand its underlying causes and address it obliquely, without attempting to overcome it. In his opinion, my position on this matter is ambiguous, and it seems that my attempt at times is to try to grasp a deeper truth, a nonalienated reality beyond the conventional truth of (necessary) objectification. In his words: “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” (Sec. 3).
The point raised is essential. On the one hand, I completely agree with him on the need for objectification—which I understand as the “crystallization of processes” and the temporary stabilization of relationships. I also would be inclined not to call this need ‘alienation,’ since being alienated presupposes that there can be a purely personal plane, which I do not believe in. On the other hand, it is a question of not considering concepts and formal logic to be the last word. It is a question of experimenting. In this sense, the approach of my book is very Wittgensteinian: I try, through the use of words that do not claim any absolute validity or incontrovertible precision, to stimulate an intuition to escape—not necessarily in conceptual ways—from the cage of languages and concepts. Leaving the space that centuries upon centuries have curved over us is the most beautiful act one can perform. I am not aiming for liberation, but at the same time I like to explore paths that do not necessarily coincide with those typical of Greek philosophy and Western aesthetics. I have often emphasized the relational-processual and nondualistic nature of this aesthetics; however, I realize that I should have emphasized its ungrounded nature with equal emphasis. As a matter of fact, this feature is even more decisive for the perceptual experiment I am trying to carry out.
It is more difficult for me to respond to Giovanni Matteucci’s comments and criticisms: not only because they are very precise and detailed, but above all because they betray a fundamental difference in how we view aesthetics. This is clear from his first criticism—that of engaging in a discourse that always risks becoming ideological; what for him is ideology is for me just an ethical stance, which I claim to the extent that I agree with the many thinkers and philosophers who see aesthetics and ethics as closely linked—indeed, in Wittgensteinian terms, as one and the same thing. Matteucci instead seems to shy away from the ideological risk by resorting to phenomenology as a tool for recognizing the structures already at work in experience “as they are,” forgetting, in my view, that even phenomenological attention to what happens phenomenologically constitutes a non-neutral salience.
Perhaps the fundamental difference between our approaches lies in the fact that, in my opinion, the nature of aesthetics is multifaceted and diverse: there is no such thing as a “proper” aesthetic. It is precisely in this sense I find it difficult to understand his claim that I would be proposing a new paradigm of exceptionality. The exceptionality that I attribute to the aesthetic is no greater than that which Matteucci himself recognizes in his reference to the “distinctive character of the aesthetic phenomenon” (Matteucci, Sec. 2). In the book, I emphasize countless times how aesthetics can be found everywhere and that in principle every experience can be an aesthetic one. Of course, this does not mean that aesthetic perception happens by itself, without us noticing it. (I find it difficult to think so: who would judge it as such?) Therefore, it is a matter of the modality in which we perceive. I tried to suggest a path that consists of two simultaneous movements: on the one hand, showing that perception is always a type of relationship, even when the perceiver is unaware of it. On the other hand, I show that being aware of this relationality allows us to live more aesthetically: this is what I call the ‘haptic approach.’
To corroborate the first point—what I call an ‘ecology of perception’—I use contemporary physics, anthropology, and other sources. I do believe that there is no aesthetics without epistemology. In fact, his understanding that I want to create an aesthetics in tune with science is correct, but I consider it a point of merit that has very illustrious precedents, examples of which I draw upon. In my own small way, I have tried to propose an aesthetics consistent with contemporary physics, as notably with relativity and quantum mechanics, as well as with symbiotic biology. Science, of course, does not seek to corroborate my proposal metaphysically; rather, like other resources, it is a simple way of suggesting another plane of reality, or as Matteucci might perhaps prefer to say, a different “phenomenological grain” (Sec. 2). At the same time, there is also no aesthetics without ontology, that is, a clear stance on what we think really exists. He accuses me of para-ontology. In reality, however, my choice, clearly stated from the very first pages, is ontogenetic, which refers to a specific tradition (Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze, Descola, Ingold, and so on). Anyway, to think, as Matteucci seems to argue, that aesthetics must have to do with phenomenology and therefore with the “manifestation of phenomena as such” is precisely an ontological option. Believing that phenomena exist “as such” is not the path pursued by my relational aesthetics, according to which every phenomenon is a perspective. Relational and processual philosophy start precisely from the idea that things do not, in any sense, have “their own” characteristics, as Matteucci seems to suggest. For these reasons I find it difficult to understand the meaning of his criticism, according to which my aesthetics follows the “path of what” while his follows the “path of how” (Sec. 5). Matteucci is right: there are ways of perceiving “of” and other ways of perceiving “with,” but I believe that this depends not on the field in which perception is exercised (science would be “of” and aesthetics “with”) but on the manner. Aesthetics is present whenever there is a resonance, a correspondence, which makes us conscious of this “with.” My goal is precisely to create an aesthetics that is totally devoted to how and in which way the relationship occurs.
And this brings me to the second point. The haptic is a modality of perceiving, not a content; and for this reason I find not a divergence but a convergence with the term ‘resonance’ proposed by Matteucci. I like it very much, and the tactile metaphor is no different from the auditory metaphor in expressing this perceptual mode. In fact, the word ‘resonance’ is used fourteen times in the book, always with this positive meaning and sometimes as a synonym for ‘haptic.’ However, Matteucci argues that the metaphor of the haptic, which, as I say in the first line of the book, does not in any way concern the physical sense of touch but rather the widespread collusiveness of feeling would propose a fundamental dualism, while that of resonance would not. (I learned to use ‘collusiveness’ thanks to Giovanni Matteucci, whose most recent book, Estetica e natura umana, is cited among my sources.) The reason, Matteucci argues, is that “in the paradigm of resonance, there is no need to distinguish between agency and agencing because resonance is constitutively impersonal: it happens in the field, not to a subject” (Sec. 3). But this is exactly what I mean by ‘agencing’: a medium, an in-between action and passion. So, I am not quite sure where the real point of distinction would be.
A similar point can be made with regard to what in the book I call consciousness. It does not surprise me that this notion is problematic for Matteucci, since he understands it as the moment of (conscious) “thematization and objectification” (Sec. 2), whereas in the book I tried to clarify several times, following James and others, that consciousness is “the immanent plane of con-, of communication” (Perullo 2025, 37), that precedes and enables any thematization. Therefore, it does not concern the difference between a conscious and an unconscious state, since its affirmation coincides precisely with the collapse of any distinction. The term ‘correspondence’ meets a similar fate, insofar as Matteucci identifies it with precisely what I distinguish from it—namely, interaction.
With regard to language and wisdom, Matteucci argues that my “artisanal” conception of philosophy remains tied to a residual dualism, insofar as I claim that writing this book required a significant effort precisely because it is my most artisanal work. For Matteucci, by contrast, wisdom appears as something that cannot be cultivated, something already present and operative. The point, however, is that this very perspective—which, according to Matteucci, should correct any residual dualism in my proposal—strikes me as paradigmatically dualistic. Wisdom, for me, consists precisely in the overcoming of this aut, of this allegedly irreducible gap between operativity and thematization. It is a “middle way” that matures within—and through—the polarization between a passive abstention and the triumph of an imposing activity, without any teleological pull toward either pole.
To conclude, I can agree with Matteucci that the aesthetic has an “high energetic cost” (Sec. 3), although I consider the term ‘high’ to be excessive: the activity involved is no greater than that required by the active–passive correspondence with the environment. As far as I am concerned, this energetic cost is necessary to overcome the sedimented dualisms that have taken on convincing traits in what Liberman defines as “techno-fascism” (Sec. 1). To do this, however, we need an approach, an awareness, an education, a way of being—unless one conceives the aesthetic to be always guaranteed, regardless of the conditions under which it manifests. This energetic cost—for me, once again, closely linked to the ethical root of aesthetics—does not make the aesthetic something exceptional. I do not believe that the urgency and crisis I perceive in the present—always necessarily perspective-bound—lead us to conceive of aesthetics in extraordinary terms; on the contrary, it is a matter, as they say, of rediscovering aesthetic qualities in ordinary, everyday experience. Finally, and perhaps this is the most important point, it certainly does not justify a separation between a supposedly prescriptive nature and a merely descriptive (and thus neutral) phenomenological one; besides being itself highly prescriptive, this move seems to me philosophically problematic.
I will conclude by quoting a few lines from my book in which I express as best as I can my position in relation to the acute observations that have been made to me in this discussion:
“Let’s experiment then with a perceiving that is disanchored from any ultimate ground, neither material nor ideal. This experiment does not lead to any nihilism or relativism, quite the opposite: reality is enhanced. Once solidity and visible permanence dissolve, an opening appears in the fence, a crack through which the light gets in […]
“The spherical fullness of the real, which underlies all essentialist ontology, leaves room to a fluid granularity of varying densities. This shift does not involve the replacement of one ontology with another; there is no logic of substitution. Rather, groundless relational and process thinking is about repairing, and repair implies continuity, commonality, and collaboration. Opening up to different densities allows for non-monotonous, nonlinear, and non-univocal perceiving. I repeat: there is an urgency to gather the scattered threads of a perceiving that experiments with the different planes of the same reality of one world; such perceiving can also be probably understood as a kind of enactivist and meditative epoché […]
“The granular density of impermanence and fluidity recalls the concept of emptiness in Buddhist thought or the notion of vacuity in quantum physics. As the Daodejing makes clear, emptiness is neither nothingness nor a ground. Rather, it is the very process that is experienced and lived rather than theorized: perceptual flotation. I like to join this idea with Wittgenstein’s insight: ‘An enclosure with a hole in it is as good as none.—But is that really true?” (35-36).
Nicola Perullo
n.perullo@unisg.it
Nicola Perullo is full Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Gastronomic Sciences of Pollenzo (Italy), where he is currently serving as the rector. He is director of the series, “Emergenze dell’Estetica” (Aesthetica Edizioni), director of the series “SAPIO. Cibo – conoscenza – filosofia” (Edizioni ETS), member of the Scientific Committee of Studi di Estetica, Rivista di Estetica, Estetica. Studi e ricerche, Aesthetica Preprint, and Aisthesis.
He has published many books and academic papers and essays; some of them have been translated into English and other languages. He has worked on various topics in modern and contemporary philosophy and aesthetics. He is one of the leading scholars in the field of the philosophy of food and the aesthetics of taste. His latest work is Aesthetics without Objects and Subjects (Bloomsbury 2025).
Published on March 12, 2026.
Cite this article: Nicola Perullo, “Undisciplined Aesthetics: a Proposal for Repairing Perception,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Volume 24 (2026), accessed date.