Denken und Betrachten

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-109
Author(s):  
Johannes Hees

Der Schulphilosoph Leibniz und der physikotheologische Dichter Brockes bilden eine historische Konstellation in der Frühaufklärung. Leibniz markiert eine Lücke in der rationalistischen Epistemologie: Er stößt in der Logik auf eine ästhetische Dimension der Erkenntnis, ohne dass er dabei die Ästhetik von der Logik trennt. Im Irdischen Vergnügen in Gott (1721-1748), dessen Zentrum die Wahrnehmung, Beobachtung und Beschreibung von Naturphänomenen bildet, inszeniert Brockes diese ästhetische Dimension der Erkenntnis. Die Gedichtsammlung entwickelt dabei eine Proto-Ästhetik in poetischer Form, deren Grundzüge in diesem Beitrag entwickelt werden sollen. Leibniz, the rationalist philosopher, and Brockes, the poet inspired by physicotheology, form a historical constellation within the early German enlightenment. Leibniz points to a gap within rationalist epistemology: Within logic he encounters an aesthetic mode of cognition without separating logic from aesthetics. In his ›Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott‹ (1721-1748), the main theme of which is the observation and description of natural phenomena, Brockes performs the aesthetic mode of cognition in poetic form. Consequently, Brockes’ monumental anthology develops a prototype of aesthetic theory in poetic form which shall be outlined in this article

ARTic ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 121-134
Author(s):  
Apsari Dj Hasan

This study aims to examine the decorative types of Gorontalo karawo fabrics in aesthetic and symbolic elements. Researchers want to know as made in the research design, aspects that are present in the decoration of fabrics in aesthetic and symbolic elements. This study uses a number of related theories to get results, and as a determinant, the authors use aesthetic theory, as well as historical approaches. With this theoretical basis, the author seeks to describe the aesthetic aspects and symbolic meanings that exist in Gorontalo karawo fabric. Through the data collection of the chosen motif and provide a classification of motives, the part is used as a reference for research material. The results showed that Gorontalo filigree had an aesthetic value consisting of unity formed from the overall decorative motifs displayed, complexity formed by complexity in the manufacturing process, and intensity of seriousness in the manufacturing process or the impression displayed on the filigree motif. The aesthetic form also reflects the diversity of meanings for communication, such as the symbol of a leader with his noble instincts, a symbol of cultural cooperation, which is worth maintaining, and ideas about nature conservation. This research proves that the decoration in Gorontalo filigree cloth (karawo) does not only act as a visual value, but also as a communication of cultural meanings and social status. Of all these distinctive motifs show a relationship between humans and humans and humans with nature. The influence of culture from the Philippines is also known to have a strong influence on the emergence of the Gorontalo filigree namely manila filigree.


2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 23-41
Author(s):  
Max Pensky

Abstract Theodor W. Adorno’s claim in Aesthetic Theory that artworks have a truth content, and that this truth content in turn depends on philosophical interpretation, is among the work’s most challenging and obscure claims. This article argues that “The Idea of Natural History,” Adorno’s lecture dating to 1932, offers important resources for interpreting the claim of art’s truth content. Reading the lecture’s core idea of transience, the article proposes that the form of philosophical interpretation Adorno develops there illuminates one way to clarify what Adorno means, in Aesthetic Theory, by the interpretation of art’s truth content. While far from definitive, this conclusion does support interpretations of art’s truth content that foreground art’s function as a critique of ideology, that is, of having a field of application that moves beyond the sphere of the aesthetic and toward the disclosure of conditions of social domination.


2018 ◽  
pp. 124-160
Author(s):  
David Lloyd

“The Aesthetic Taboo” concerns the place of primitive anthropology in the aesthetic theory of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. It traces the influence of Freud’s Totem and Taboo through their work, in the concepts myth, magic, and aura. Neither thinker ever manages to escape the historical narrative of aesthetics: the transition from a state of necessity that defines the Savage as pathological subject, through a state of domination to an ideal state of freedom. Adorno and Benjamin continue to think within the traditions of Kant and Schiller. Yet in Aesthetic Theory magic images the sensuous remnant in the artwork that withstands rationalization. This “pathological” moment restores to the aesthetic its foundations in pleasure and pain and demands the destruction of the racial regime of representation. Its analogy with the Subaltern suggests another conception of life in common, predicated on the pains and pleasures of the pathological subject.


PMLA ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 134 (5) ◽  
pp. 1056-1075
Author(s):  
Benjamin Kohlmann

This article identifies a body of work—films, literary texts, and theories of the aesthetic—that can help us reopen the question of what it means for an artwork to project a vision of classlessness. The article begins by focusing on early-twentieth-century proletarian modernism, in particular in the cinematic work of Sergey Eisenstein and in British literary works that repurposed Woolfian and Joycean styles during the later interwar years. Proletarian modernism, I argue, highlights an alternative route taken by modernist literature and art: unlike the late modernists feted in much recent scholarship, proletarian modernists aimed to retool modernism, opening up new and global political futures for it rather than anticipating its end. The article concludes by showing that the cultural genealogy of proletarian modernism mapped out here doubles as a prehistory of contemporary aesthetic theory: it enables us to recognize the significant political and theoretical erasures that structure recent accounts of art's democratic potential.


Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josephine Donovan

In nature the transformation of dead matter (objects) into living matter endowed with green energy or subjectivity is called emergence. Art itself, I argue, is an emergence phenomenon, enacting and replicating in theme and form emergence in nature. Literature thus conceived is about the emergence of spirit. It depicts forces that suppress spirit and enables the spiritual in nature to find expression. It gives voice to spirit rising. Mimesis is thus reconceived as a replication of the natural phenomenon of emergence, which brings to life what has hitherto been seen as object, dead matter. This article outlines the concept of emergence in current philosophical and scientific theories; examines the aesthetic precursors of emergence theory in certain Frankfurt School theorists, notably Theodor Adorno; and applies emergence aesthetic theory to a contemporary novel, Richard Powers’ The Overstory (2018).


2012 ◽  
Vol 598 ◽  
pp. 8-11
Author(s):  
Shen Qi Gan ◽  
Hong Zhang

This paper introduces the basic concepts of ecological aesthetic, pointing out that the ecological aesthetic comes from population, resources, environment and other factors, understanding the natural beauty from the harmonious compatibility between man and nature, the environment, perception, greatly improving the aesthetic value of taste. This paper introduces the core categories、aesthetic standards and the three characteristics of ecological architectural aesthetics in detail, interpret the ecological architecture and its aesthetic theory.


2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 478-498 ◽  
Author(s):  
Varvara Kobyshcha

In studying visual and plastic arts, social researchers tend to assume that an aesthetic object is pre-given to a viewer who does not participate in the process of the object’s becoming. They problematise the aesthetic status of an artwork, but not its objectness. This article shows that audience perception, considered as interaction and situated practice, does not merely define the meanings and emotions attached to a certain object, but plays a constitutive role in the object’s physical state and its very existence as an object, i.e. as an integrated unity extracted from its surroundings and affording a direct, intensive encounter. Synthesising the conceptual resources of Hennion’s pragmatics of taste, Simmel’s aesthetic theory, gestalt theory, and social phenomenology, I explain various ways an object in the situation of perception happens and achieves a certain mode of existence or fails to happen and disappears. The article is based on three empirical examples derived from the ethnographic study of the open-air land art/architectural festival ‘Archstoyanie’. The first case illustrates how an object is extracted from the environment and the festival’s infrastructure; the second, how the visitors destroy the incomplete boundaries of an object so that it dissolves into the surroundings; and the third, how an object maintains its integrity despite its inner complexity and multiple centres that attract the visitor’s attention.


Author(s):  
JiHae Koo

Abstract The photographer Peter Henry Emerson (1856–1936) is known today for the splash he made on the Victorian photographic scene in the 1880s with his bold refusal to follow his fellow art photographers (collectively known as the Pictorialists) in latching the new medium on to the aesthetic conventions of painting. His conventional position within art history is thus as a precursor to the Modernist conception of photography’s medium-specificity. Yet even if Emerson’s work was ahead of its time in its proto-Modernist refusal of painterly conventions, it also has qualities that place it more squarely within late-Victorian discourses. In particular, I argue, Emerson’s ongoing efforts to secure his photographs via copyright law need to be understood as reflective of a distinctly nineteenth-century cultural imaginary. This essay addresses the relationship between Emerson’s aesthetic theory and copyright law by dividing Emerson’s career into two stages, before and after 1891, this being the year in which Emerson abruptly disavowed photography as an artistic medium in his short pamphlet ‘The Death of Naturalistic Photography’. Examining two photography books – Pictures of East Anglian Life (1888) and On English Lagoons (1893) – alongside late-Victorian debates about photographic copyright, I show that Emerson’s earlier belief in photographic copyright’s ability to retain the integrity of an artist’s vision breaks down after 1891. He loses faith in the ‘copyrightability’ of photography in 1891 when he recognizes the mechanical nature – or automaticity – of the camera. That is, Emerson realizes that the photograph is never purely the product of the artist. In sum, this case study shows that by the 1890s, photographic copyright was becoming detached from the notion of creativity and thus could no longer be the guarantee of a photographer’s claim to artistic individuality.


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