From the witnessing subject to the substituting object. Reception of the aesthetic ideas of José Ortega y Gasset in Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology

Abstract

The article addresses the problematization of aesthetic experience in Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology. The status of sense experience in non-classical philosophy and cultural practices of our time has changed, which makes the research topic relevant. Today, gaining autonomy, freeing itself from the need to become part of a common range of ‘higher’ forms of cognition and comprehension of reality, aesthetic experience is quite reasonably claiming the status of a self-sufficient philosophical practice. As an emphasis, the research analyses the substitution strategy proposed by Harman as an explanation of aesthetic experience. José Ortega y Gasset’s approach to the interpretation of the metaphor makes it possible to trace a shift from the 20th century focus on the subject to the 21st century focus on the human as an object and to identify the issues arising in this respect. The article emphasizes the difference in approaches to the topic of the aesthetic: the philosophy of the early 20th century with its focus on the subject that is having an aesthetic experience undergoes qualitative changes resulting in the modern 21st century thought with the establishment of non-subjective forms of appeal to the experience. Due to the deanthropologization of the aesthetic sphere in the object-oriented ontology, Harman’s speculative thought needs an argument for the special status of his aesthetics. The article concludes that in the context of modernity, a new metaphysics as a “theory of everything” acts as one of the many possible strategies of the modern thought that should primarily be considered as a symptomatic phenomenon of postmodernity with its need to specify new strategies for experiencing and comprehending subjectivity and its anthropological orientation.