Aesthetics, Philosophy of Culture and 'The Aesthetic Turn'

Abstract

In sections I-II the renewed interest in aesthetics, manifested in a wealth of recent introductory texts on aesthetics, is discussed. I argue here for a historically informed philosophy of art – only too often an historical approach and a systematic-analytic approach to the problems of aesthetics have been thought to be mutually exclusive. In section III I discuss the research proposal for the renewal of the humanities of the Faculties of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Uppsala University: »Cultural Analysis and Contemporary Criticism«, of which »The Aesthetic Turn« is a subsection. It is an interesting and timely proposal, but it raises some difficult and controversial issues concerning the concepts of the aesthetic and of aesthetics, as do the writings of philosophers associated with »the aesthetic turn« in philosophy. In section IV I criticize Richard Shusterman's views on the »aestheticization of ethics and life-styles«, arguing that an aestheticization of ethics and morals implies the dissolution of ethics and morality; the aestheticization of ethics and life-styles is perhaps a reality in many postmodern societies but it poses both philosophical and moral problems that the advocates of »aestheticization« (Rorty, Welsch, Shusterman) underestimate. Similar considerations apply to Wolfgang Welsch's »aestheticization of theory and knowledge« in his book Undoing Aesthetics. In section VI argue that Welsch's proposal to widen the horizons of aesthetics is commendable but that the abandonment of an art-centred aesthetics is problematic. To my mind Welsch's »transaesthetics« in spite of some of its interesting and positive suggestions rests on a conflation of »the aesthetic« and »aesthetics«.