Thinking Otherwise: Art as Epistemic Practice in Dieter Mersch

This paper offers a philosophical-artistic analysis of Dieter Mersch’s account of art as epistemic practice. Taking Mersch’s essay “Kunst als epistemische Praxis” as its central point of departure, the paper examines the relation between art, science, philosophy, and artistic research. It argues that Mersch does not simply collapse art and science into a shared methodology; rather, he shows that both are epistemic practices whose differences reveal the limits of one another. The first part reconstructs Mersch’s distinction between scientific and artistic forms of knowledge. Science is described through its orientation toward identity, universalization, causality, propositional discourse, and methodological validation. Against this idealized image, the paper discusses Mersch’s use of Lorraine Daston, Ian Hacking, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Helmar Schramm, and Bruno Latour, whose work complicates the view of science as a purely rational or theory-driven enterprise. The second part turns to philosophy, postmodernism, and artistic research. It examines Mersch’s claim that art stands closer to philosophy than philosophy does to the sciences, while also arguing that artistic practice cannot be reduced to philosophical reflection. Art thinks through its own media: perception, materiality, form, performance, affect, interruption, and difference. On this basis, the paper defends the view that artistic research is not a derivative imitation of scientific research, but a sui generis epistemic practice. The central claim is that art produces knowledge not by proving propositions, but by making visible, sensible, and thinkable what may remain inaccessible to scientific method or philosophical concept. Artistic research therefore expands the field of epistemology by showing that knowledge can arise not only through explanation and verification, but also through practices of showing, making, transforming, and experiencing.