Overcoming aesthetics: Creative expression and human agency

A meta-aesthetic examination of approaches to the study of art reveals that a methodological emphasis on the ontology of art objects and the conditions for their perception has created a gulf between art and human life that renders it unimportant to central philosophical concerns. This impoverished "spectator model" of aesthetics runs counter to a common intuition that art is more intimately connected to us---and more important to our lives---than the pleasures of an isolated encounter in a museum can explain. A corrective to the spectator model requires an exploration of the grounds for this intuition.;I begin by shifting focus from an idealized encounter between spectator and art object to expressive and creative human activities that may not yield "art" as their products. By plumbing resources from the German Romantic tradition, I uncover an approach that places art at the centre of philosophical theorizing and establishes an integral link between art and human existence. I use the notion of "aesthetic subjectivity" to capture Romantic ideas of aesthetic acts as cognitive, of human existence as creative and expressive, of art as essential to human flourishing, and I develop this notion within a contemporary philosophical context.;My main contention is that aesthetic subjectivity underpins the formation of personal identity and human agency and that acknowledgment of this will ensure a methodological role for aesthetics in philosophical theories concerned with the nature of human existence and human well-being. An elaboration of aesthetic subjectivity comes by way of a critical study of Charles Taylor's interpretationalist theory of personal identity and of narrative accounts of self-formation, and I argue that the self can be construed as an aesthetic product.;Having demonstrated a methodological role for aesthetics in philosophy, I close with a return to art objects and explore the immediate way that art itself contributes to human well-being. This provides suggestions for an approach to the arts that will avoid the alienation of the spectator model and will re-invigorate the discipline of aesthetics.