The Aesthetic Thinking. Reconnecting the Subject with the Reality, the Society and the Cosmos

In this paper, we will argue that the basic form of thought is the aesthetical form because it permits us to give meaning to our basic experience of reality. The basic human experience evolves aesthetically into a further ‘mentalized’ experience because a complex web of presymbolic operations (resonances, rhythms, transmodal interactions) and feedback is activated between the subject and the reality. This allows the experience of more sophisticated plots, as far as to reach the abstraction of thought. Indeed «knowledge is a product of art», as Dewey observes (1925, 273). The cognitive dimension of art, however, must not outshine its faculty to be in contact with the primordial meaning of being alive. Thanks to art we understand that «beauty is a grand fact in the universe» (Whitehead, 1938, 173). Starting from the «elementary contents of human life», from which it must never detach from, on pain of insignificance, art makes humans «aware of what it means to be alive. There is no other final end for this life» (Arnheim, 1954, 417). The current sociocultural context, however, does not allow us to see art as a foundational experience of the human-world-society relationship and reduces it to a type of self-expression. In the post-modern era we don’t believe that life can create ‘organic forms’ with their own spiritual content and internal purpose, on which the romantic idea of art as a ‘living form’ (Schiller, 1906, 76) was based. This paper is intended to reconsider valid this perspective applying the epistemology of complexity and showing its educational implications.