Beauty
Posted: October 30th, 2004, 12:22 am
The single most important feature of modern aesthetics has been the severing of the classic connection between art and beauty. The function of art, in was thought by many, was to transmit or convey the idea and sensation of the beautiful to the perceiver via the handiwork of the artist. With modern art (and indeed preceding it) comes the realization that art can convey things other than the beautiful, indeed that it can convey the horrible, such as war (e.g. Picasso's Guernica) without any pretense that there is beauty in suffering.
A century earlier, modern philosophy was grappling with the issue of conceptualizing the aesthetic realm of experience and the post-Kantian idealist Schopenhauer conceived of the aesthetic in a way which totally dispense with beauty (or so it seems). Kant had distinguished between the beautiful and the sublime but his conception of the latter (like most else) was obscure and riddled with aporia. Schopenhauer, took up much of Kant's problems but pushed tem in a new direction. For Schopenhauer, the sublime is an aesthetic experience characterized by a state of terror, the sprt of terror before the awesome power of nature that a person might experience when faced with a violent dark storm approaching. Thus, the aesthetic is primally witnesses in nature as well as human cultural creations of art. For Schopenhauer, the aesthetic is not some sort of detached academic contemplation but a state of existential mysticism. The sort of art that most closely attains this paradigm would seem to be music of a powerful dark, symphonic sort, for example, as Nietzsche would later identify in connection with the Dionysean principle of art (think Wagner and Beethoven, for instance) or, on the other hand, disaster films like where floods and earthquakes shallow civilizations (when not done in typically stupid Hollywood fashion).
A century earlier, modern philosophy was grappling with the issue of conceptualizing the aesthetic realm of experience and the post-Kantian idealist Schopenhauer conceived of the aesthetic in a way which totally dispense with beauty (or so it seems). Kant had distinguished between the beautiful and the sublime but his conception of the latter (like most else) was obscure and riddled with aporia. Schopenhauer, took up much of Kant's problems but pushed tem in a new direction. For Schopenhauer, the sublime is an aesthetic experience characterized by a state of terror, the sprt of terror before the awesome power of nature that a person might experience when faced with a violent dark storm approaching. Thus, the aesthetic is primally witnesses in nature as well as human cultural creations of art. For Schopenhauer, the aesthetic is not some sort of detached academic contemplation but a state of existential mysticism. The sort of art that most closely attains this paradigm would seem to be music of a powerful dark, symphonic sort, for example, as Nietzsche would later identify in connection with the Dionysean principle of art (think Wagner and Beethoven, for instance) or, on the other hand, disaster films like where floods and earthquakes shallow civilizations (when not done in typically stupid Hollywood fashion).