Relation to the world· Aesthetics
Aestheticism
Axis: Beauty in life — Is beauty at the heart of a flourishing life, or a secondary luxury next to ethics and usefulness?
Beauty is what justifies and fulfills existence: making one's life a work of art, seeking the intensity of beautiful sensations and beautiful forms. Existence is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon.
Movements 1
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Romanticisminferable
Romanticism makes art and beauty the highest place of existence, at times above the morality and utility the Enlightenment prized. To live poetically, to make one's life a work, to touch the absolute through beauty: the aesthetic becomes a way of being, even a path of salvation, and not a mere ornament.
Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man · Novalis, Hymns to the Night
Philosophers 3
Nietzscheexplicit
It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified: the thesis of subordinates the meaning of life to the aesthetic rather than the moral register. Art, not morality, is the truly metaphysical activity of man.
The Birth of Tragedy, §5 and §24 · The Birth of Tragedy, "Attempt at a Self-Criticism", §5
Show inferred positions (2)
Camusinferable
For Camus, to create is one of the highest ways of living : the work of art, faithful to the sensible world without claiming to explain it, is a form of and beauty that justifies existence. This value granted to creation leans toward aestheticism, without erasing the ethical demand of a revolt in solidarity.
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), "Absurd Creation" · The Rebel (1951), "Rebellion and Art"
Zhuangziextrapolated
Zhuangzi's ideal is not moral duty but a light, played existence whose grace is akin to the artist's: the butcher whose blade dances "to the rhythm of the Mulberry Forest," the painter who strips naked to paint at his ease. The successful life is less a matter of rightness than of ease and beauty of gesture, which makes it an aestheticization of existence, even though the word art is anachronistic here and the aim remains a liberation rather than a cult of the beautiful.
Zhuangzi, ch. 3 (Cook Ding) · Zhuangzi, ch. 21 (the naked painter)
Romanticizing the everydayStanceInspired by Novalis
To give the common a lofty meaning, the known the dignity of the unknown, the finite the glow of the infinite: this is to romanticize.
called « romanticizing » the power to look at the ordinary world so as to give it back its depth and mystery. It is a disposition to cultivate: before a street, a face, a banal gesture, to suspend the habit that makes them grey and to find again the strange, the beautiful, the infinite hidden in them. Reality does not change; it is the gaze that re-enchants it.
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- PrescriptiveAesthetic Thought experimentLife as a work of art
Making one's life a work of art, seeking the intensity of beautiful sensations: is such a life self-sufficient, or does it end up hollow, indifferent to good and evil and stalked by boredom?
a whole life - PrescriptiveAestheticThe beautiful and the good
Are the beautiful and the good one, or are they rivals: does beauty raise the soul toward the good, or seduce it by flattering appearances against duty?
a beautiful act - PrescriptiveExistentialDoes beauty save?
Is beauty a mere ornament, or what redeems an otherwise absurd or suffering existence and makes it bearable?
existence as a whole - PrescriptiveAestheticEnjoying beauty or creating it
Is the aesthetic life about gathering beautiful experiences as a connoisseur, or about fashioning oneself as a work by giving one's existence style?
a life - DescriptiveWhere the value of beauty comes from
Is beauty a real perfection of things, or merely a pleasure of taste? If it is all a matter of taste, its claim to count in a flourishing life weakens.
a beautiful thing - PrescriptiveAestheticBeauty of the senses or of the mind
Does the aesthetic life rest first on the pleasures of the senses, falling then under the same suspicion as they do, or on a form that transcends them?
aesthetic pleasures