Is Aesthetics Possible?

Abstract

In the present paper I shall criticize two widely accepted approaches to art and the aesthetics which imply that philosophical aesthetics is no longer possible. The sociology of art (in particular in the hands of Pierre Bourdieu) as well as various poststructuralist approaches to art, claim to have shown that traditional art history as well as traditional philosophy of art are illegitimate enterprises. Both the sociology of art and poststructuralist theory arrive – by very different routes to be sure – at a similar conclusion: aesthetics is basically an ideological discourse that has to be unmasked. I attempt to show that Bourdieu’s approach – in spite of the light it throws on some aspects of art appreciation – seriously misconstrues the nature of contemporary philosophical aesthetics. Many poststructuralist thinkers seem to me to make the same mistake as Bourdieu: they tend to think of aesthetics, traditional art history and the history of literature etc. as unredeemably “logocentric” and “essentialist”. It is as if they were saying that any aesthetics that is worth its salt must be essentialist, ahistorical and therefore ideological suspect. I argue that the concept(s) of art, as we know it, is an historical concept which crystallized into its present shape at the end of the 18th century. Art as we know it, though more enduring than life, is not eternal. This, however, does not mean that the artistic impulse, which is akin to the symbolic impulse and which can be realized in a multitude of ways under different historical and cultural circumstances, cannot legitimately be regarded as a permanent feature of human nature. Man is not only a zoon politikon, but also a zoon symbolikon. Aesthetics is, among other things, the rational reflection on our need of symbols and our capacity for symbolizing.