The Gift as Art: An Interview with Stephen David Ross - Pt. 2

  James Coignard, Blatt 3 aus "Nous sommes de terre" Farbcarborundumradierung mit Collage und Fadenverknüpfung 1979, 57 x 45 cm  Boisseree  "The multiplicity of operations entailed by engraving turns the question of the working surface into an issue in itself.  A finished engraving is presented on a sheet of paper which is a supple material, whereas it was created on a rigid one (copper, zinc, aluminum, sheet-iron, etc.)  There is this additional aspect which seems highly significant to me: engraving done with carborundum allows one to clean the block each time so that it can be reused indefinitely for the creation of new engravings (Pleynet, p.20)."

Rick Visser:  Throughout your thought and writing, art and aesthetics have been of particular interest and importance to you.  Among other things, you have edited an anthology of aesthetic theory and authored a book delineating your own theory of art.  Clearly, this is not an arbitrary interest.  The interests we pursue speak to something we feel or question deeply and personally, perhaps beyond mere professional concern.  Why is art important to you now and has this changed over time?

Stephen David Ross:  This may require a long autobiographical excursion, long at least in years if not in words. I studied piano as a child, later the cello, attended Music & Art high school in NYC, read voluminously throughout my childhood and adolescence, spent hours in museums and at films and plays, found myself studying singing, primarily French and German lieder, eventually with Aksel Schiotz, one of the great lied singers of the mid twentieth century. All this is to say that one of my personal journeys has been entirely immersed in the arts.

Another personal journey was from mathematics, which I studied at the graduate level through course requirements for the PhD, to philosophy, which seemed to me to raise fascinating questions about almost everything I lived and experienced. I was particularly interested in the ways in which philosophy was able to reinvent itself, to find new and deep questions that had never been asked before.

Yet when I took courses and read philosophical works in aesthetics and philosophy of art they seemed to me to have nothing to do with my own artistic experiences, which seemed to me as far reaching as philosophy, yet far more intense. That was both a loss and a silencing. For several years I avoided aesthetics. I did not avoid art. I found something similar in art and philosophy, intense and profound encounters with the world and with possibilities of expression. Yet they did not speak to me effectively of each other.

I began my work in philosophy with the American pragmatists, especially Dewey, for whom traditional philosophy was too bound up with ideas and reflection and irrelevant to experience, life, and practice. Art and aesthetic experiences represented the highest possibilities and achievements of human life. I later found my way into Continental philosophy through Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida, for whom questions of art, aesthetics, and literature were both deeply important for philosophy itself and of fundamental importance for new forms of life and practice. At this point aesthetics and ethics joined in my thinking as part of the project Nietzsche described as the revaluation of all values.

This was not so much to advocate art as fulfilling the promise of life and being but more to pursue questions of art and aesthetics as the most provocative, disturbing, and profound questions available to thinking in our time. Art itself, and questions concerning it, seem to me to touch the very possibilities of humanity and any future for it. Art seems to me an intense engagement with the world and its expressiveness. In this way, aesthetics is inseparable from ethics and from politics, as well as from every rethinking of knowledge and truth. These all take place at the limits of human reason and social life. What would it mean to think of philosophy and truth from the standpoint of ethics and aesthetics more than from the standpoint of knowledge and science? What would it mean to think of these all as writing, expression, without defending disciplinary boundaries?

One might say that these last questions represent the driving force behind most of my work. What are the ways in which we can undertake questions and projects that push to the very edges of intelligibility, and even beyond? How can we be as critical as possible, even of our own criticisms?

I have written on many different subjects: education, literature, science, ethics, metaphysics, representation, law, language, justice. In the past few years I have pursued a rethinking of human life and natural processes in terms of giving and gifts, resisting the possessiveness of knowledge and being. Giving is the abundance of nature, the expressiveness of things. This has environmental and ethical implications, but is recognizable most immediately as the expressiveness of art and the uncontainability of aesthetics. All of my other interests reemerge as questions of art, aesthetics, and beauty. All of my current writing is an effort to inhabit philosophy aesthetically.

Art and aesthetics are for me a secular expression of infinity, whatever meaning that can have, but where what is infinite is profoundly expressive. How are we to understand and participate in an expressiveness of things that exceeds any image of its exposition? How except through art? How except as beauty? How express the sublime and beautiful except through aesthetics? How engage in art and aesthetics except as they proliferate throughout life and being.

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