The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency: Revaluating German Aesthetics from Kant to Adorno

ISBN-13: 9781472579591 / Angielski / Miękka / 2014 / 208 str.

Ayon Maharaj

Opis

This study examines how key figures in the German aesthetic tradition -- Kant, Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel, and Adorno -- attempted to think through the powers and limits of art in post-Enlightenment modernity. Ayon Maharaj argues that the aesthetic speculations of these thinkers provide the conceptual resources for a timely dialectical defense of "aesthetic agency"-- art's capacity to make available uniquely valuable modes of experience that escape the purview of Enlightenment scientific rationality.
Blending careful philosophical analysis with an intellectual historian's attention to the broader cultural resonance of philosophical arguments, Maharaj has two interrelated aims. He provides challenging new interpretations of the aesthetic philosophies of Kant, Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, and Adorno by focusing on aspects of their thought that have been neglected or misunderstood in Anglo-American and German scholarship. He demonstrates that their subtle investigations into the nature and scope of aesthetic agency have far-reaching implications for contemporary discourse on the arts. The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency is an important and original contribution to scholarship on the German aesthetic tradition and to the broader field of aesthetics.

Recenzje

How can we both be enraptured and shaken by the experience of art and yet also continuously suspicious of art's promises, seductions, and potentially dangerous uses? Is this complex attitude even coherent, let alone fruitful? By tracing and evaluating the stances on art of Kant, Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Altieri, Ayon Maharaj arrives at a compelling account of the work of art as a haunting force that eludes both reduction to any definite message and dismissal as an empty entertainment. In this way, Maharaj brings the tradition of German aesthetic theory strikingly to life in relation to current plights and possibilities of human life in culture. Richard Eldridge, Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor of Philosophy at Swarthmore College, USA 20121121

Spis treści

PrefaceAcknowledgementsAbbreviations of Primary TextsIntroduction: The Crisis of Art in Modernity1. Aporias of Aesthetic Pleasure in Kant's 'Analytic of the Beautiful'2. The "Great Gulf" of the Third Critique: Kant's Ambivalence about the Role of Aesthetic Pleasure in Moral Lif3. Kant Romanticized: Aesthetic Intuition as Redemption in Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism 4. Hegel contra Schlegel: On the Aporetic Epistemology of Romantic Irony5. Art's 'After' and the Dialectical Possibilities of Irony in Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics6. The Idealist Legacy: Adorno's Dialectical Retrieval of Aesthetic Agency in Aesthetic TheoryEpilogue: Art as Force: From Critical Suspicion to Dialectical ImmanenceNotesBibliographyIndex

O autorze

Ayon Maharaj (Swami Medhananda) is Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Vedanta Society of Southern California in Hollywood, USA.