Background
Dufrenne, Mikel was born in 1910.
politics ethics Phenomenologist /fits: Aesthetics
Dufrenne, Mikel was born in 1910.
Studied under Alain and Souriau.
Mobilized in 1939, Dufrenne was captured and spent the war years as a prisoner in the same camp as Ricoeur. Later taught at the Universities of Poitiers, Buffalo, Michigan and Delaware. Was one of the founding staff of l’Université de Paris X at
Nanterre.
Chief Editor of the influential journal 10/18: retired from teaching 1974.
Dufrenne was the first French phenomenologist to make aesthetics his central concern, and it was largely as a result of his work that this branch ot philosophy underwent a revival of interest in France. Through his writing and teaching, Dufrenne has had a significant impact on French philosophical aesthetics, and also, via translations, on English-speaking phenomenologists. Dufrenne’s conception of phenomenology is much closer to that of Merleau-Ponty than to that of Husserl. In his analysis of aesthetic phenomena he develops two notions of striking originality: first that the aesthetic object is best regarded as a quasi-subject, and second that the field of the a priori in philosophy has been conceived too narrowly. Following a lead from Scheler, Dufrenne contends that there are a priori affective categories which constitute the conditions under which a world can be felt. Dufrenne rejects the view that what there is can be divided into categories of en-soi and pour-soi, i.e. non-conscious objects and conscious, purposive human beingsAesthetic objects, by which Dufrenne means works of art or to a lesser degree of nature as they are experienced by us, refuse to fit into either class. Such objects have four important properties: expressiveness: Dufrenne takes a strongly objectivist line concerning expression, ascribing expressive properties to the object itself; meaningfulness: whatever is objectively expressive is meaningful or significant: selfsufficiency: aesthetic objects are ends and not means to a further end: profundity: aesthetic objects refuse to be summed up, continually manifest new significances, and this is the core of profundity. It is on the ground of their Possession of these four properties that Dufrenne assimilates aesthetic objects to persons, and so feels justified in describing them as quasi-subjects. The notion of the aesthetic object as quasisubject is an important ground for Dul'renne's second major contention concerning the extent of the a priori: he contends that an objective a priori notion of‘human being’ can be constructed, and so if the aesthetic object is a quasi-subject, the chances of being able to construct an a priori description of the latter are to that extent mcreased. Dufrcnne’s conception of the a priori differs from that of Kant in its assertion that although the a priori is anterior to experience it is also discerned in it: the a priori is not merely a condition of experience but is constitutive of it. Further, the Kantian list of categories is not exhaustive. There are a priori affective categories which are the conditions under which world can he felt. A subset of these categories are aesthetic: 'If we can feel the tragic in Racine or pathos in Beethoven or serenity in Bach it is because we have an idea, prior to all feeling sentiment, of the tragic. Pathetic and serene, i.e. of what we must henceforth call affective categories’. To repeat, these a Prioris are experienceablc. and if we fail to grasp lhem we misunderstand the works which manifest them. Here, as elsewhere, Dufrenne takes a strongly objectivist line concerning the properties °f aesthetic objects, a key presupposition for his view, reminiscent of Heidegger, that aesthetic experience is in some sense revelatory of ultimate features of being. Later in his career, Dufrenne showed an increasing concern with the threat to liberty and creativity presented by overregimented structures, he they institutions, fashions, abstractions or 'heories. This theme, stated in Pour l’homme. is developed in many of his later articles in which he analyses with approval Works of art which break down genre boundaries and shock the mind into freedom.