Aesthetics as Secular Millennialism: Its Trail from Baumgarten and Kant to Walt Disney and Hitler by Benjamin Bennett (review)

Hannah Arendt argues that modern totalitarianism, most notably Nazism and Stalinism, arose not out of nationalism but out of “secular millennialism.” This is the belief that the absolute perfection of the human condition is achievable by human agency alone and is to be distinguished from a religious millennialism or apocalypse that posits an ultimate divine intervention. By this linkage Arendt tries to explain how people are driven by the “truth” of an ideal contrary to reason or experience. For Arendt secular millennialism emerged in the twentieth century. This is the starting point for Benjamin Bennett’s provocative new book, in which he argues that the millennial impulse can already be found fully developed in eighteenth-century aesthetics. Aesthetics in this sense is not so much about the practical questions of art but about the experience of the beautiful as an ideal and its political implications. Bennett focuses primarily on the Continental philosophical tradition, which he takes to be representative of the whole; there is little concern for the Anglo-American aesthetic and ethical trail that emerges from David Hume. Aesthetics as Secular Millennialism strikes me as an extended unacknowledged debate with the philosopher Roger Scruton.

The aesthetic trail traced by Bennett stretches from Baumgarten and Kant to Schiller, later reemerging with Cassirer and culminating with Heidegger and Adorno. It emerges, in Bennett’s view, as a response to Cartesian dualism and the problem of the self. For Schiller and Kant the focus is on how to achieve a particularized and unified self while attempting to explain the possibility of communicability between subjects. They posit an apperception that is both the foundation of individual self-consciousness and the basis of a shared universal experience prior to the particularizing of that self-consciousness. In this we can see a millennialist pursuit of the ideal that transcends the factuality of experience. Bennett finds such beliefs self-contradictory, rejecting as delusional or posturing any claims about either an autonomous aesthetic object or an aesthetic experience. For Bennett, such claims harbor ulterior motives related to a millennial desire to impose certainty on an alienating, chaotic world. Thus, we can see two versions of the millennial in Heidegger’s pursuit of authentic immediacy and the unattainable ideality in poetry and in Adorno’s desperate retreat from barbarism in his conception of critical negativity.

The role of communication closely links aesthetics with hermeneutics and the role of language in shaping our understanding of the world. Indeed, Bennett sees hermeneutics as the modern continuation of eighteenth-century aesthetics, the pursuit of truth by the hermeneutic circle as part of the same millennialist impulse. Here he focuses his analysis on Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Gadamer, and Heidegger. Bennett’s central argument often dances a delicate logical line between the fallacies of the undistributed middle and the post hoc, repeatedly admitting that those seeking the aesthetic ideal are not necessarily totalitarian, even though both share the millennial. At the same time, he contends that the aesthetic project is self-contradictory and that, insofar as it sustains the millennial mind-set, also potentially nurtures totalitarianism. Here Bennett turns to the role of the nineteenth-century realist novel as an important vehicle for conveying the aesthetic into general understanding. Central here is what he terms the paradox of the novel, which he sees as a direct continuation of eighteenth-century aesthetics. Specifically, the realist novel centers on the paradoxical relationship between individual novels and the institution of the novel. Thus, on the one hand, the individual novel is about the discovery and unmediated subjectivity of its hero, and on the other, the institution that generalizes and mediates our conception of the individual: I can realize the particular only through the general but can discover the general only through the particular.

Bennett is therefore interested in exploring art that resists claims of aesthetic response and the transparency of a communicable self. He offers extended...