Professor Philip Buckley is an expert on 19th and 20th century continental philosophy from McGill University, Montreal, Canada, specializing on phenomenology, Husserl, and Heidegger.  In this lecture, Professor Buckley will utilize certain concepts of phenomenology and the development of philosophy of art from the continental perspective, which is crucial for understanding contemporary trends in art and design. More specifically, he suggests that an “artistic life” is one that can be elucidated within a consideration of what he terms an “aesthetic” of desire. 

First, Prof. Buckley will trace through some ‘standard’ views in the philosophy of art about aesthetic experience. Put generally, these views suggest that the experience of a work of art is best understood from either one of two poles. On the one hand, there is the “objective” side; here, an artwork might be seen as a special sort of “thing” that possess certain properties (e.g. “beauty”) or is the “objective” representation of the artist’s creative project. On the subjective side, it is claimed that every work of art is “experienced” differently, depending on a variety of contextual factors ranging from individual taste to cultural contexts. At the extremes, both views seem to be untenable. The solution often appears to be a stress on the entanglement of objective and subjective features. But what if we take another approach? What if we assume that aesthetic experience points to a type of “meaning” that is neither “objective” nor “subjective” in the traditional sense? In the second part of the presentation, this deeper (or “transcendental”) sense of aesthetic experience is developed through an analysis of “desire.” In the concluding third part, Professor Buckley suggests that desire can be “cultivated,” and in doing so, opens the space for some new senses of the role of community and education in the development of an “aesthetic of desire” and more broadly, an “artistic” culture.