Aesthetics

Twentieth-century philosophical aesthetics has no single center. It bifurcates into at least two major traditions — continental and analytic — each with its own problematics, yet converging by different paths on a common question: what is art? And, inseparably: what happens to art when technical reproduction dissolves the singularity of the work, when the market turns culture into commodity, when a signed urinal is exhibited in a museum? This article traces the fundamental lines of twentieth-century aesthetics, from the founding texts of Benjamin and Adorno to the analytic theories of Danto and Goodman. ...

What is beauty? The question runs through the entire history of Western philosophy — from Plato, who identified it with an eternal Form, to Kant, who located it in the subject’s judgment, to Nietzsche, who returned it to the body and the intoxication of life. Philosophical aesthetics is not a peripheral discipline: it touches the heart of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, because to ask about beauty is to ask what moves us, what has value, and ultimately what is real. ...

In 1818, a thirty-year-old philosopher published in Dresden a work the world received with near-total indifference: The World as Will and Representation (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung). Arthur Schopenhauer was convinced he had deciphered the riddle of the world — and he was not mistaken about the importance of what he had written, only about the patience he would need. Decades of obscurity would pass before Europe recognised in him one of the most original thinkers of the nineteenth century: the philosopher who dared to assert that the essence of reality is not reason, progress, or spirit — but a blind, irrational, and insatiable drive called Will. ...

There is an experience nearly all of us have had and very few can explain: listening to a piece of music — a Beethoven symphony, a Mozart adagio, an unexpected chord in some ordinary song — and feeling something that cannot be put into words. It is not joy, not sadness, not any nameable emotion. It is as if the music touched a layer of our existence that lies beneath language, beneath thought, beneath everything we call “self.” Why does this happen? Why does music move us in a way that painting, poetry, and sculpture — however beautiful — can never quite replicate? ...

Arthur Schopenhauer Born in Danzig in 1788, into a wealthy merchant family, Arthur Schopenhauer was able to devote himself to philosophy with financial independence. He earned his doctorate with On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (1813) and at thirty published his major work, The World as Will and Representation (1818) — which, however, was almost entirely ignored for decades. Hostile to the then-dominant Hegel, he even scheduled his lectures at the same hour as his rival’s in Berlin, to no audience. Recognition came only at the end of his life, in the 1850s. He was also the first major Western philosopher to engage seriously with Indian thought (the Upanishads and Buddhism). ...

Immanuel Kant Born in Königsberg, in East Prussia, in 1724, and never having strayed from his native city, Immanuel Kant led the methodical life of a university professor — so regular, tradition holds, that his neighbors set their clocks by his daily walk. It was, in his own words, the reading of Hume that “awakened him from his dogmatic slumber” and led him into a long decade of silence, at the end of which, already 57 years old, he published the monumental Critique of Pure Reason (1781). His work both closes and refounds Modernity, mediating the dispute between the rationalism of Descartes and the empiricism of Hume. ...

Léopold Sédar Senghor Léopold Sédar Senghor (9 October 1906, Joal, Senegal — 20 December 2001, Verson, France) was a poet, philosopher of culture, and statesman. The first president of independent Senegal (1960–1980) and the first African elected to the Académie française (1983), he was also, alongside Aimé Césaire and Léon-Gontran Damas, one of the founders of Négritude in 1930s Paris. While Césaire gave the movement its poetic force, Senghor set out to give it a systematic philosophical and aesthetic elaboration, making of it a general theory of the African contribution to human civilization. His work is today the object of both recognition and lively controversy. ...

Mikhail Bakhtin Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (16 November 1895, Oryol — 7 March 1975, Moscow) was a philosopher of language and a theorist of literature and culture. Marginalized and almost unknown during his lifetime in the Soviet Union — arrested and sent into exile in 1929, he taught for decades at provincial universities — he was rediscovered from the 1960s onward and became one of the most influential Russian thinkers in the world across the humanities. He was the center of the so-called Bakhtin Circle, which also included Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev (the authorship of some works signed by them is a matter of scholarly debate). ...

Theodor W. Adorno Born in Frankfurt in 1903, Theodor W. Adorno was, alongside Horkheimer, the most rigorous figure of the first generation of the Frankfurt School. Also trained in music — he studied composition in Vienna — he united philosophy, sociology, and aesthetics in a radical critique of modern society. A Jew and a Marxist, he went into exile in the United States during Nazism, where he observed mass culture at close range; he returned to Frankfurt after the war and died there in 1969. ...

Walter Benjamin Born in Berlin in 1892, Walter Benjamin was one of the most original and unclassifiable figures of twentieth-century thought — philosopher, literary critic, translator, and essayist, peripherally linked to the Frankfurt School and a friend of Adorno. His academic career failed (his habilitation thesis was rejected), and he lived by his writing, always in difficulty. In 1940, fleeing the Nazis, he found himself blocked at the Franco-Spanish border, in Portbou, and took his own life — one of the most tragic fates of the European intelligentsia. ...