De-humanize! Reflection on Psychological and Ethical Limits of More-than-human Aesthetics
De-humanize! Reflection on Psychological and Ethical Limits of More-than-human Aesthetics

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines contemporary artistic critiques of anthropocentrism by focusing on two claims: (1) that aesthetic experience can temporarily displace human perceptual frameworks, and (2) that such displacement carries ethical value. I draw on a selection of Czech, Slovak, and international artworks that seek a nonhuman standpoint. I situate these practices within a longer debate about the limits and significance of entering into alien perspectives – ranging from David Hume’s remarks on ancient artworks that espouse moral outlooks radically different from our own to Thomas Nagel’s scepticism about the very possibility to adopt nonhuman points of view. I argue that, although aesthetic experience may prompt a departure from the human perspective, we should neither pursue nor valorise that departure. The connection between more-than-human ethics and more-than-human aesthetics, I suggest, does not proceed via empathy into a nonhuman perspective.

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