Another Way of Knowing: Baumgarten, Aesthetics, and the Concept of Sensuous Cognition

Søren Kjørup

Bergen National Academy of the Arts/Roskilde University

Why “sensuous knowledge”? From where does this phrase stem as the name of a multifaceted, international project with conferences, publications, and a website as its main manifestations? How come that “sensuous knowledge” can function as a common denominator of results of and reflections on artistic research?

The answer is “aesthetics”! And in this essay I shall try to explain how the concept of “sensuous knowledge” is central to the original concept of “aesthetics”, and how the concept can be seen as an invitation to go deeper into the epistemology of artistic research and development work. To be able to explain that, I shall however have to expound the discussion about art, aesthetic experience, and logic in 18th Century philosophy
– a period not unlike ours in the sense that many old, formerly stable concepts and ideas were thrown into turmoil, and it took some time before they, together with some new ones, fell down into a new, “modern”, conceptual pattern.

And as a kind of spinoff of the explanation I shall try to exemplify the importance of grasping the historicity of some of the central concepts of modern artistic understanding, and to show how what might quite generally be called “theory”, in some cases functions as obstacles to our thinking, in others open up to new vistas.