Then and Now, Here and There: On the Grounds of Aesthetics

What Is Aesthetics? Genealogy and Typology

About fifty years ago questions concerning the constitution, genealogy, and legitimacy of aesthetics and the philosophy of art became unavoidable in several linguistic and philosophical traditions. Claims that these are obviously well-marked “fields” or “areas” of philosophy trace their genealogy as far back as Aristotle’s Poetics; the attempt to maintain a philosophical territory for reflection on art and the aesthetic has had a great deal of institutional and traditional reinforcement. Yet periodically questions arise regarding the supposed foundations of such areas. Such questions typically meet resistances, resistances captured well by Nietzsche’s mordant observations on how scholars tend and protect the “green fields” of their specialties (their “AOS,” as the job ads say).¹ Readers will be familiar with Heidegger’s question in “The Origin of the Work of Art” whether experience might be the element in which art dies and also with Gadamer’s demonstration that the modern invention of aesthetics, roughly in the eighteenth century, was a reduction or fall from the hermeneutic to the aesthetic.² And some will have reflected that thinkers like Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze in their aesthetics of embodiment and affect can be read as restoring, through reconstructing, some aspects of eighteenth-century British theories of aesthetics that focused on sensory and sentimental experience.

Ten years before Gadamer’s revisionist account (1950), another Heidegger student, Paul Kristeller, published a magisterial article on the genealogy of aesthetics, “The Modern System of the Arts.”³ Kristeller showed, in quasi-Foucauldian fashion, that what has largely been considered to be aesthetics and the philosophy of art for 250 years or so—conceptions assumed by Kant and Hegel, for example—was a formation of the early modern period that crystallized only in the eighteenth century. We can understand this crystallization as the conjunction of two distinct but related tendencies. On the one hand, the idea emerged that there is a distinctive and universal capacity of aesthetic sensibility, a position going beyond the rationalist conception of the aesthetic as a form of confused thought and leading to canonical formulation in Kant’s four moments of aesthetic judgment. On the other, there developed the notion of a system of the arts. While traditional discourses were concerned with poetics and rhetoric, or practical treatises and manuals spoke of painting, architecture, and other pursuits, the idea that all of these, plus dance, landscape gardening, music, and other pursuits, constituted a systematic body of fine arts was something new. Kant sketched such a system, and Hegel generated one with a full historical body in his massively influential lectures on aesthetics. The story of how all this happened “then” is too long and complex to tell here, but it involved changes in institutions and practices; so art galleries and museums replaced cabinets of curiosities, while public musical performances were accessible in concert halls and the like. The picture has been deepened in recent studies such as Larry Shiner’s The Invention of Art.⁴ I can suggest only briefly here that modern aesthetics, caught between the poles of a minimalist universalism of aesthetic sensibility (e.g., the British empiricists and Kant’s four moments) and a comprehensive historical teleology (e.g., Hegel’s aesthetics), can be seen as a paradigmatic instance of the ambiguities traced by Foucault in his archaeological account of “man and his doubles.” It is finite human beings, attempting self-knowledge through their finitude, who find in aesthetics an exemplary organon of inquiry.

Foucault suggests that we may be witnessing the end of an era dominated by the figure of “man.” What might a posthumanist philosophy of art look like? Here I think it can be helpful to consider some proposals of Alain Badiou, who provocatively proposes an analogy between poetics and mathematics. He prepares the ground for this by offering a typology both of aesthetic theory and of the relations between philosophy and art. Badiou identifies three major positions with respect to the latter, associating them with forms of thought opened up by Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle.⁵ (While he limits himself to the relation...