“If I Could but See a Day of it”: On the Aesthetic Potential for Belonging and Action

Adam J. Goldsmith

doi:10.18778/2083-2931.14.19

Authors

Adam J. Goldsmith Northwestern University, USA https://orcid.org/0009-0004-5364-0674

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.14.19

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Keywords:

aesthetics, potential freedom, imagination, utopia, political possibility

Abstract

This essay argues that the potential freedom revealed within aesthetic experiences of beauty can encourage a utopian form of belonging that could help materially realize this potential. Drawing upon Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller, while aesthetics offers the occasion to imagine freedom, aesthetics alone cannot make us free. To try to instantiate aesthetic freedom, as Herbert Marcuse notes, is utopian: imagining freedom in an unjust world produces dissatisfaction with reality. Thereby, aesthetic occasions can heighten a longing for the material manifestation of the potential freedom it glimpses. Under the right conditions, such longing encourages be-longing, (and be-longing encourages longing), a deep feeling that can excite wills to act in concert to refashion the world inspired by its image. To demonstrate this, I first read Schiller to display the possibility for aesthetic experiences to offer us back our freedom in potentia. Then, following Marcuse, I explain the utopian character of this aesthetic freedom, as it longs for broader materialization that is not-yet existent. Finally, I sketch how this longing can encourage be-longing through a reading of Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel The Ministry for the Future.

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Author Biography

Adam J. Goldsmith, Northwestern University, USA

Adam J. Goldsmith is a PhD candidate in the Rhetoric and Public Culture program at Northwestern University. He is also an alum of Barrett, the Honors College, at the West campus and the Communication studies MA program at the University of Maine. Goldsmith has also served as a fellow at Northwestern’s Center for Civic Engagement. He has presented conference papers in the United States and Europe and is currently working on his dissertation on exemplary rhetoric from Cicero, Jane Austen, and Kim Stanley Robinson to orient (and hopefully augment) public judgment for political action, reflection, and imagination.

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