ABSTRACT
This chapter sketches out the case for a social aesthetics. Aesthetic perception, ordinarily thought of as peculiar to the arts, has always been at the heart of our appreciation of nature, from small objects of special beauty, such as a blossom or a stone, to monumental ones in the form of a waterfall, a chasm, or an entire landscape. Traditional aesthetics has been constrained by intellectualist premises from accepting the full scope of sensory experience. In perceptual experience the senses fuse inseparably, a phenomenon called synaesthesia that is especially pronounced in aesthetic appreciation. From the central place accorded perceptual awareness, aesthetic experience is, at least in principle, unconstrained by preconceptions about what can be taken aesthetically. Reciprocity lies at the heart of the democratic process, for it takes the essential interplay and fusion that develop in aesthetic experience as a model for social and political order.
