Perception: Episteme, Aesthetics, Politics

Hearing, seeing, touching, smelling, tasting – both human and non-human animals encounter the world through perception. Meaningful self-comportment, capable of responding to the challenges of one’s environment, would be impossible without appropriately specialized perceptual capacities. Whether and to what extent life extends beyond environment-bounded perception and behavior depends on the type of organism and its sensory, affective, and cognitive capabilities. Human beings have a rich spectrum of capabilities at their disposal. Their survival, like that of other living beings, is ensured through environment-attuned perception. Moreover, the latter serves as the experiential basis for interpreting a wide range of human activities, forms of expression, interactions, affectivities, and vulnerabilities.

Social conflict is commonly sparked by differing opinions and judgments. Sharing a perceptual situation and jointly reflecting on the experiences it affords can help resolve conflict. The same is true of aesthetic, moral, and ideological disagreements: all involved parties must first agree on a shared sensory foundation, in order to be able to determine whether something is beautiful or ugly, repugnant or grotesque, magnanimous or boastful; whether someone is ambitious and competitive or rather devoid of empathy and envious; whether someone champions their cause with conviction and dedication or is rather an inconsiderate zealot. As these examples indicate, perception is an essential foundation for experience. It is also evident that perception is intertwined with other, non-sensory (or not exclusively sensory) capacities and proficiencies such as recollecting, feeling, phantasizing, and judging, as well as the apprehending of ideas and values. If we wish to understand how social, aesthetic, moral, and other forms of disagreement and conflict arise and how they can be overcome, we must first scrutinize the cognitive accomplishments of human perception, but also its deceptions, errors, and blind spots.

Against this background, the interdisciplinary faculty core topic Perception: Episteme, Aesthetics, Politics adopts an appropriately expanded understanding of perception and explores its diverse accomplishments and (dis)functions. The broad range of associated research interests is covered by philosophical, (art-)historical, musicological, literary, and linguistic approaches. Issues of social change are further analyzed from the perspectives of aging and care studies and the field of digital humanities. These fields of research address the transformation and the hybridization of human perception in increasingly technologized environments.

In what ways can humanistic theorizing, reconstruction, description, and analysis contribute to our understanding of perception? How is the significance of perception reflected in different scientific contexts, in the shaping and critique of our society, as well as in human beings’ everyday experience across different historical epochs and cultures?