Barer, Liam;
(2024)
Fashion and Adornment in Kant, Schiller, and Merleau-Ponty: A Spectrum between Reason and Sensibility.
Masters thesis (M.Phil.Stud), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
In the 20th century, fashion, and in particular clothing, has garnered the reputation of being unworthy of philosophical investigation. Recently, contemporary analytic philosophers of art have begun to take clothing and its related aesthetic practices seriously. However, there are a few philosophers in the western philosophical canon who have either thought explicitly about clothing or have provided a conceptual apparatus to construct sophisticated theories about garments and its meaningfulness. Three such philosophers are Kant, Schiller, and Merleau-Ponty. Together, their views can be categorized according to a spectrum where we find reason on one end and sensibility on the other. This thesis is a work in the history of philosophy. My goal is not so much to argue for a view about clothing. Rather, my aim is to elucidate the interesting ways that these thinkers either seriously considered clothing, or to provide, in the case of Merleau-Ponty, a construction of what they might have thought about garments according to their overall philosophical project. By providing a close reading of what Kant, Schiller and Merleau-Ponty thought about clothing, I hope to dispel the pretension that fashion is of little concern to philosophers, nor has it received any serious treatment in the history of western philosophy. In the first chapter, I argue that Kantian disinterestedness is in tension with the role of our aesthetic judgments in deliberation about the clothes we wear. By considering fashion’s nature as embodied (in the sense that it is meant to be worn on our bodies), I think we can rescue fashion from Kantian aesthetic devaluation. In the second chapter, I consider how some of Schiller’s overlooked thoughts on clothing and dressing beautifully fit into his systematic aim to achieve political freedom. In the last chapter, I construct a phenomenological account of wearing clothes by appealing to the aesthetics and phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty – the encounter with clothing is one where its style makes certain demands on the wearer; they call out to be worn in particular ways and be paired with other items of clothing.
| Type: | Thesis (Masters) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | M.Phil.Stud |
| Title: | Fashion and Adornment in Kant, Schiller, and Merleau-Ponty: A Spectrum between Reason and Sensibility |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2024. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of Philosophy |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10195546 |
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