The Thought of John Sallis: Phenomenology, Plato, Imagination

Part 3. Art/Sallis

Part 3 Art/Sallis It would mislead to say that John Sallis has an “aesthetics.” For such a characterization not only suggests the differentiation of philosophical “subject matters” that Sallis’s thought does not share at all (e.g., aesthetics , as distinct from ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology, etc.). Further, it installs a distancing from art that emerges as not only far from settled, but also provides one of the animating questions of his work on art. His thought on art, as will be shown, responds to art itself, to its way of showing , to its way of disclosure. As a help to this showing, as well as a way to draw the reader into the way of his thought, his books on art abound with photographs enabling constant contact—dialogue—between author and reader-become-interlocutor. Such a response also requires a reorientation of language that allows art to show itself, that is, to come forth for the reader and spectator free of the intrusion of a conceptual interpretation that would subject art to a standard not of its own making. Also, a conceptual approach would present an experience that has little or nothing to do with art’s way of disclosure. To effect this reorientation, Sallis draws upon two resources belonging to the English language. The first is its capacity for self-reflexivity, that is, for calling attention to its own limits in its very saying. The second is the simple, powerful use of imperatives: See. Let your fantasy go. Imagine. ...