L’expérience esthétique en tant que praxis anthropologique

This essay advances a pragmatist reorientation of aesthetics by conceiving it as an anthropological praxis. Drawing on John Dewey’s legacy and its development in Richard Shusterman’s work, it argues that aesthetic experience cannot be reduced either to an ontological definition of art or to a mere descriptive account of established practices. Pragmatism subordinates substance to function and understands aesthetic concepts as historically situated, operational structures open to revision and improvement. Against the dualisms inherited from logical atomism — fact and value, description and evaluation, nature and convention — the pragmatist perspective emphasizes the continuity between art and life and foregrounds the organic unity of experience. Particular attention is devoted to the central role of the body and perception. Engaging with the notion of habitus (Bourdieu) and with anthropological insights from Arnold Gehlen, the essay proposes an understanding of aesthetics as a field of embodied practices in which the soma functions as the site of interaction between subjectivity and objectivity. Aesthetic experience thus emerges as a dynamic process of integration, involving action and reception, formation and self-transformation. Beyond foundationalist and purely institutional conceptions of art, pragmatist aesthetics is presented as a critical and meliorative project capable of reconfiguring artistic and cultural practices. In this light, aesthetics appears not as a theory of artistic objects, but as a situated and transformative way of inhabiting the world.