Laurence Buermeyer’s Role in the Reconstruction of the Genesis of Pragmatist Aesthetics

HAUBERT, LAURA ELIZIA

São Paulo

Encuentro; 22º Encontro Internacional sobre Pragmatismo; 2023

Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo

This research aims to broadly reconstruct the pragmatist aesthetic theory developed by the philosopher Laurence Buermeyer in his 1924 book “The Aesthetic Experience”. In this book, Buermeyer anticipates several key ideas that would later be identified by commentators as central and characteristic of pragmatist aesthetics, such as criticism of the esoteric conception of art, an effort to reconnect art and life, and a belief in democratizing access to aesthetic experience. Pragmatist aesthetics re-emerged strongly on the academic arena in the late 1990s, through the efforts of interpreters such as Richard Shusterman (1992). Since then, much has been written about its representative thinkers and its main characteristics. Interestingly, much of the research so far tends to focus on the aesthetics developed by John Dewey, and one can even find in some commentators a supposed equivalence between the terms “pragmatist aesthetic” and “Deweyan aesthetics”. This correspondence is understandable since of the three main exponents of classical pragmatism (Peirce, James and Dewey) only the latter developed a systematic aesthetics in his book Art as Experience (1934). More recently Shusterman himself (1999a, 1999b, and 2012) and Roberta Dreon (2021), among others, have attempted to expand the canon of classical pragmatist aesthetics by contemplating the fragmentary perspectives ofthinkers such as Ralph Emerson, Charles S. Peirce, William James, and Alain Locke. This work of reconstructing and expanding the canon, however, is far from complete. As this research aims to show, there was a whole pragmatist aesthetic production less explored by exegetes and which resides in the works of scholars who are nowadays rarely or not at all known. This is precisely the case with the book written by the thinker discussed here. The aim of this presentation is, on the one hand, to rescue Buermeyer’s figure and aesthetic theory from historical oblivion; and on the other hand, to show that the standard narrative about the history of pragmatist aesthetics is incorrect, or at least incomplete, and that there have been more thinkers who are part of this tradition than has usually been addressed so far in the secondary literature.