Digital Commons@RISD Home > Division of Liberal Arts > Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive) > Vol. 3 (2005)
Abstract
We are anchored to the world because we are bodies. For us, the world means human society based upon nature. Nature is an essential constituent. For human being is bodily existence: social relationships are basically formed through the contact between these bodily existences, one with another, and the cultural space, that is, the city, is based on matter and surrounded by nature. Hence the possibility and the necessity of anchorage. An inanimate object is simply thrown into the sea of matter. Human bodies, on the contrary, do not only belong to this material texture in a passive way but can also live in it in an active way and constitute it as world. Modern civilization has severed our anchorage to the world. It is expected and very often believed that the aesthetic moderates and even mediates this opposition. I am convinced that all our creative activities in our actual situation of civilization after modernity should originate in and be based on our Being-on-the-Earth.