Toward an Aesthetic Psychology: A Review of James Hillman’s City and Soul
Dennis Patrick Slattery
Books can surprise us by how often they find a way into our literary and personal lives. Henry A. Giroux’s The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond America’s Disimagination Machine is first of all a disturbing book, but it is also a complement to James Hillman’s perspectives on politics and aesthetics. Giroux writes early on of the dissolution of democracy as an ideal in American life since the 1970s; he then offers this conclusion:
Schools, libraries, the airwaves, public parks and plazas, and other manifestations of the public sphere have been under siege, viewed as disadvantageous to a market-driven society that considers noncommercial imagination, critical thought, dialogue, and civic engagement a threat to its hierarchy of authoritarian operating systems, ideologies and structures of power, domination and control. (32)
Giroux’s commentary on those elements of society that some believe disrupts commerce is akin to Hillman’s understanding of aesthesis in City and Soul as a critical constituent in a culture to encourage its flourishing:
The word for perception or sensation in Greek was aesthesis, which means at root a breathing in or taking in of the world, the gasp, ‘aha,’ the ‘uh’ of the breath in wonder, shock, amazement, an aesthetic response to the image (eidolon) presented. In ancient Greek physiology and in biblical psychology the heart was the organ of sensation: it was also the place of imagination. (36)