The ontology of sensory experience: The art and perspective of shared access to reality

Abstract

The appeal to sensory experience today makes it possible to consider the possibilities of access to reality beyond the first- and third-person perspectives outlined in European rationality since the modern era. Special attention should be paid to the sphere of the aesthetics, in which the conditions for collective affective experience are created. The legacy of archaic pre-discursive practices, which lie at the origins of the formation of a rational attitude to the world, makes it possible to assume the continuity of the appeal to sensory experience today in terms of the desire to reach the pre-individual experience of reality. As outlined by V. Benjamin, the technical reproducibility and politicization of art that had taken place by the beginning of the 20^th century created conditions for blurring the boundaries between the everyday life and the aesthetics. Experiments in the theatricalization of life and the convergence of art and production in the early Soviet period marked the masses as a new subject of consumption and contemplation. The phenomenological elaboration of the problems of sensory experience and the lifeworld, with which man interacts in a pre-reflective way, provides the basis for a revision of aesthetic experience. M. Merleau-Ponty, analyzing Cézanne’s painting, offers a revision of the role of the artist, suggesting viewing the artist not as a creator but rather an intermediary contributing to the experience of naïve access to reality. The thesis about the ‘power of art’ by the representative of the ‘new realism’ M. Gabriel draws attention to the autonomy of the work of art and the involvement of the viewer in its performance, and the metrics and algorithms accompanying virtual reality strengthen the nature of involvement of many people in the common sensory experience. All of the above illustrates the desire of European thought to search for new ways of the non-thetic relation of mind to the world.