Communicating through aisthesis

pp. 155-174

in: Herman Parret, The aesthetics of communication, Berlin, Springer, 1993

Abstract

Aesthetics has never really served as First Philosophy (Protè Philosophia) as have metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Nevertheless, since Baumgarten founded aesthetics in 1750 as a philosophical discipline having its own, delimitable object, and especially since Kant, who in 1790 put forward (in a brilliantly critical way) a conception of aesthetic judgment, one can observe certain attempts being made towards aestheticize of the philosophical problematic. Schiller, moved by the enthusiasm of Romantic speculation, certainly wished to aestheticize the Kantian monument as a whole. This aestheticization has lead in certain case to a quasi-nihilistic aestheticism. One sees today in postmodernism a new wave of aestheticization. It is, naturally, ethics in the first place that becomes the "daughter of aesthetics"¹. Taste is thus transformed into an aesthetico-ethcial category, rapidly filling the void left behind by naturalism, historicism, and positivism in ethical matters.