Not Yet The Philosophical Significance of Aesthetics

The paper asks for the preconditions and the consequences of the emergence of aesthetics in and for philosophy. The question is: what does it mean for philosophy to engage the question of the aesthetic? My answer will be: it means nothing less than putting philosophy in question. Or, more precisely: by engaging the question of the aesthetic, philosophy puts itself in question. In order to show this, I will refer to a brief passage in the Phenomenology of the Spirit and then attempt to turn it against what I take it to be Hegel’s own inten­ tion. The paper attempts to sketch this argument in three brisk moves by (1) distinguishing a philosophy of the “poetic” from a philosophy of the “aesthetic”; (2) describing the aesthetic as “regressive” and “(self­)reflexive”; and (3) sketch­ ing the paradoxical place of aesthetics within philosophy. keywords The aesthetic, the poetic, Aristotle, Hegel, aesthetics within phil­ osophy In this paper I want to ask for the preconditions of the emergence of aesthetics in philosophy and for the consequences that this emergence of aesthetics had for philosophy. The question is: what does it mean for philos ophy to engage the question of the “aesthetic”? My answer will be: it means nothing less than putting philosophy in question. Or, more precisely: by engaging the question of the aesthetic, philosophy puts itself in question. In order to show this, I proceed in three brisk moves. (1) I will distinguish a philosophy of the aesthetic from a philosophy of the poetic, or aesthetics from poetics; (2) I will describe the aesthetic as regressive and reflexive; (3) I will sketch the paradoxical place of aesthetics within philosophy. 1 According to Aristotle’s definition, “poetics” is the name of an investigation that concerns “[p]oetry, its essence and its several species, with the characteristic function of each species and the way in which plots must be constructed if the poem is to be a success.” Aristotle understood this as the philosophical investigation of a mode of representation and experience that is itself (almost) already philosophical. The well-known distinction offered in Book 9 of the Poetics between poetry and history is this: the difference between a historian and a poet is not that one writes in prose and the other in verse [...] The real difference is this, that one tells what happened