The Idea of a Cultural Aesthetic

In its search for universal knowledge, philosophy has become mired in its own presuppositions. However, if we use as our touchstone what is common and what is diverse in human experience, recognizing all the while that experience itself is never pure but historically and culturally conditioned, we shall find that the nature of inquiry changes. How can we characterize such experience? Examining the meaning of culture and its influence on perception and on art, we find ourselves led toward landscape and, more generally, environment as embodying the history of culture. The idea of a cultural aesthetic can be developed on three levels: the distinctive sensibility of a particular culture, the theoretical elaboration of that sensibility, and a metaesthetic analysis of such theories. This essay mainly concerns the second, arguing for the recognition of an irreducible plurality of theories, yet suggesting that some basis for generality lies hidden amid the diversity of cultural aesthetics in the form of a cluster of factors that are typically present.