American Society for Aesthetics

Roger A. Shiner
Secretary-Treasurer, ASA

Aesthetics as a field of intellectual endeavor has in modern times been pursued by scholars in different countries according to the different intellectual heritages of those countries. The term “aesthetics” was coined by Alexander Baumgarten in 1735. It became especially important in the German-speaking tradition after Kant, and in the English-speaking tradition after a number of eighteenth-century empiricist writers of the Enlightenment — Hutcheson, Shaftesbury, Hume, among the most well known. The French-speaking tradition had its own post-Cartesian tradition.

Historical facts such as these, however, are not the issue here, but rather the position of aesthetics in the modern institutionalized academy in this and other countries. In that connection, any serious degree of internationalization of scholarship is a relatively recent phenomenon. Aesthetics in the United States, like any other academic subject, was materially influenced by the influx of European intellectuals in the 1920s, 1930s and later. Contacts among scholars, however, were largely on an individual basis. The first International Congress in aesthetics was held in Berlin in 1913, and the next not until 1937 in Paris. The current regular series of quadrennial International Congresses did not begin until 1956 in Venice. But for a long while these Congresses were run by a self-perpetuating oligarchy of male persons who enjoyed government-financed trips abroad at regular intervals. Some, but by no means all, did have solid reputations as scholars, but that did not much affect the quality of the academic work at IAA meetings. Scholars from the United States did attend these meetings, especially from 1976 on, but mostly as a way of seeing the world. The general attitude was that no worthwhile work in aesthetics was being done in aesthetics outside the United States. There was some, but not enough, truth to this thought.

I am not in a position to be an impartial judge, for I was a member of the Committee which organized the meeting. But in my view international cooperation in aesthetics, at least as far as the ASA is concerned, materially changed with the holding of the XIth International Congress in Aesthetics in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in 1984. At that meeting, a formal International Association for Aesthetics came into being, with a constitution which democratized the operation of the Congresses to a considerable degree. The new Association also began to function as a more effective focal point for international contacts between aestheticians. ASA members, because of the location, attended this 1984 Congress in unprecedented numbers. The organizing committee itself made a serious effort to invite to speak persons who were currently doing important work in the field, and not persons who felt that through seniority they deserved a hearing whatever they had to say. I think that the meeting occasioned real introductions between U.S. scholars and scholars outside North America so that barriers of prejudice and stereotyping could be overcome. There has been since 1984 something far more approaching an international world of real scholarship in aesthetics than ever there was before. The IAA’s subsequent meetings have been far better attended by North Americans; there have been far fewer rumblings about the poor standards of aesthetics elsewhere; there has been serious interest in the work of U.S. scholars free of obsessions with American intellectual imperialism. The IAA itself has seen strong and genuine internationalists as President (especially Professor Göran Hermerén of Lund, Sweden), and as Secretary-General (my predecessor as ASA Secretary-Treasurer, Arnold Berleant). The general tendency is still there, for reasons over which in the end no learned society has control, for U.S. scholars to know no other language than English, and thus to fail to make real contact with international scholars. It happens far more regularly that scholars from other countries know English as well as their own tongue, and take a lively interest as a result in English-speaking work.

As a Canadian, I should also say that the 1984 IAA meeting was important for us, since it was the birth of the Canadian Society for Aesthetics/Société canadienne d’esthétique. Canadian aestheticians have been for some time and still are active in the ASA, serving as President (Francis Sparshott, University of Toronto), Trustee, and even Secretary-Treasurer. But these have been almost entirely anglophone Canadians. There was before 1984 scant cooperation between academics from Canada’s two linguistic groups. But since its foundation the CSA/Sce has been determinedly bilingual, more than most Canadian humanities societies. Unlike anglophone aesthetics, which in both the United States and Canada has been in the last two decades dominated by philosophers, the francophone tradition of aesthetics is much broader. CSA/Sce francophone members represent a wide variety of arts-connected disciplines. The richness of CSA/Sce meetings can only make one regret the insularity which monolinguality imposes on scholarship.

It is also important to single out for special mention one recently-expanding sub-field in aesthetics which has been international almost from the beginning of this recent expansion. That is the field of environmental aesthetics. It has developed as a major field of research simultaneously in North America and Finland. There are many, many contacts, both personal and institutional, between scholars in this field in the two countries. The first International Congress in Environmental Aesthetics was held this summer in Finland, and virtually all major speakers were from North America or the host country. The key contemporary literature is mostly by persons from these areas. The capacity of most Finnish scholars to work in English helps, of course, but those scholars have spent much time also translating North American work into Finnish, and their own writings into English. In part one might guess that such an interest in environmental aesthetics is an expression of the zeitgeist. But it is also clearly a function of a loose group of scholars who know each other, get on well, and cooperate closely because they are at the forefront of research in the area.

In aesthetics there is no question that scholarship has become more international in recent years. The questions that are asked are different to the extent that perspectives derived from trends in humanistic scholarship on the continent of Europe have made their way into North America in aesthetics as in other fields in the humanities and social sciences. There is much more awareness of the possible intellectual insularity in how a discipline which was mostly white, male analytic philosophers posed its questions. The greater emphasis in art-related fields on expanding the canons and the paradigms has produced theoretical work which begins from, or exploits, or uses as fulcra these new paradigms. At its most simplistic, the mechanism is simply that, for example, if aestheticians become interested in Mexican art, they are going to want to go to Mexico and talk to Mexicans; they are also going to want to understand the position of Mexican art in wider Mexican culture.

Although I cannot claim to have surveyed the matter carefully, it is my impression that in English-speaking, North American-based aesthetics journals, there is very little non-English-speaking international work published. The ASA’s Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism regularly publishes papers by scholars in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand — but then they are all “like us.” Much the same is true in reverse — the British Journal of Aesthetics, the journal of the British Society for Aesthetics, regularly publishes work from ASA members. Only occasionally does the rare person with a command of the language publish in, say, a German journal. Some do; we have distinguished German-speaking Kant scholars as members who publish in journals such as Kant Studien.

International participation in our annual national meetings is a different matter. In our 1994 national meeting in late October 1994, there were presentations by scholars from Britain (2), Canada (9), Holland, Hong Kong, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand (4), and Norway, out of about roughly 70 speakers. About half had found their way on to the program through blind-reviewed submissions; about half were invited. We paid for two of the non-North-Americans; the rest were funded in other ways. My sense is that the visitors wanted to find out in person what was happening in North America, and to make personal contacts — goals that would not have been satisfied by simply staying at home and reading our Journal. I do not know why there would be a strikingly higher acceptance rate of refereed conference papers than of refereed journal papers. It is probably a combination of a numerically less tough competition, and of a higher tolerance of rough edges for a conference presentation.

There has also been an added international dimension to the Society’s work with the introduction of ASA-L an aesthetics discussion list, and with the development of an ASA site on the World Wide Web. Although the list is not by the usual standard a very active list, many of those who do participate are our international members. They view it as an efficient and invaluable way to maintain contacts with North American scholars. In fact the list itself is currently operating from Lincoln University, New Zealand, as the moderator recently left Calgary to take up a position there! As is often pointed out, the world of the Internet is one which makes global distances and locations irrelevant. The Internet seems more than any other piece of recent technology (except possibly the fax machine) to have the capacity to internationalize (some parts of?) scholarship in a remarkable way.

When one considers the local institutional demands on the North American university and college teacher, and the inevitable tilt towards one’s own immediate scholarly and linguistic community, not much room is left in the case of the average scholar for the material effect of and change through international scholarship. All the same, aesthetics is becoming richer and less insular through the gradual expansion of international contacts which has taken place. I personally believe that our international membership, and their participation in our meetings, and our participation in theirs all do bring a unique form of intellectual nutrition to the field. We can only profit from greater expansion of the international dimension of our work.

I am pleased also to report a most recent development: the ASA Board of Trustees has agreed to make the 1996 national meeting a joint meeting with the Canadian Society for Aesthetics/Société canadienne d’esthétique in Montreal, Quebec. It may also be a joint meeting with French aestheticians too, as there are close connections between the group of aestheticians at the Université de Montréal and the Université du Québec à Montréal, and those at different campuses of the Université de Paris. Last time we had such a joint meeting, in Vancouver in 1988, the French-Canadian aestheticians were surprised at the number of U.S. ASA members whose French was good enough to participate in the francophone sessions. I hope they will be flabbergasted in 1996.