An Existential Aesthete at Harvard Divinity School

Last week I completed the final paper of my Master's degree at Harvard Divinity School. Two years ago I went back to school thinking I'd study Buddhism as a natural extension into a specialization from my undergraduate studies in Asian religious traditions.  I will graduate in a couple weeks  having eschewed the academic study of Buddhism, or anything else explicitly religious. The official title of my degree, Master of Theological Studies, is grossly misleading. From my first semester on, I exercised my freedom to take courses across all the schools at Harvard and quickly discovered that I  wanted nothing to do with theology. This is not an indictment of the quality of the courses at the Divinity school, but a testament to the way the program accommodates the study of material that does not traditionally fall within the bounds of religious studies. From courses in the English, film, and comparative literature departments, in concurrence with anthropology and literature courses taught in the Divinity school, I developed a focus on what art does with experiences that in other realms would appeal to explicitly religious, theological, or supernatural interpretations of  provenance and meaning. 

During my studies I discovered how art aesthetisizes experiences that can be deemed transcendent, unitive, and uncanny. I use aesthetics here in the way Freud did in the opening to his essay "The Uncanny," as having more to do with understanding qualities of feeling than with understanding  qualities of beauty. To the extent that transcendent, unitive, and uncanny experiences are rendered existentially through art without appeal to divine or supernatural explanation, they are made wholly human.  There is much to say here about the reflective and ritualistic power of artistic creation, which I will leave for later. Suffice it to say that when these moments are rendered existentially and aesthetically their poignancy is not restricted or abstracted by modes religious interpretation. They are shown to be independent of any single and fixed ontology, and their significance is broken open to new and individual interpretations, or allowed to glint with the poignancy of experience itself free of extraneous interpretation. Insofar as these moments are rendered aesthetically in their unhindered fullness of existential feeling, they are shown to belong to us all.

Depending on our willingness and ability to exert our powers of association and our sympathetic imaginations, we may both share in the experiences of the artists, as well as re-experience and more dynamically experience our own. 

The fine artist hones and refines the reader's faculties of perception. As Kant points out, when it comes to fine art, refining perception is not merely an experience of new degrees of pleasure or beauty, but most importantly, it generates new dimensions of cognition.

The following passage by David Malouf  in "The Valley of the Lagoons," is a brief example of what I'm on to here. Angus, the sixteen year old narrator, sits in the back of a truck heading out into the Australian bush for his first hunting expedition:

The sky above us was high and cloudless, as it is up here in winter. Stuart followed my gaze as if there was something up there that I had caught a glimpse of, a hawk maybe; but there was nothing. Just the huge expanse of blue that made the air so clean as it tumbled over us; as if all this - sky, forest, the warmth of the big dog between my knees- was part of the one thing, a consciousness- not simply my own- that belonged not only to the body I was in, back hard against the metal side of the truck, muscles flexed in my calved and thighs, belly empty, but also to something out there I had melted into as one melts into sleep, and was infinite.