И отново: към какво няма интерес естетическата незаинтересованост? (Шопенхауер след Хобс)

Abstract

The article retraces a broader context for the emergence of the notions driving the disputed idea of aesthetic disinterestedness, first, by looking at how Shaftesbury aimed to counter Hobbes’s concept of desire as an individual-centred, unsatisfiable drive to possess. In a second step, the article maps those tensions onto tensions within Schopenhauer’s aesthetics and metaphysics (usually classed in a quite different tradition of thinking), where we meet a notoriously extreme version of disinterestedness. The article argues that to make sense of it, it is worthwhile to interpret Schopenhauer’s contrast between a desire-driven, growth-seeking everyday life and the calm repose of aesthetic contemplation as a radical version of an opposition to the emerging capitalist lifeworld that put its mark onto aesthetics as it shaped itself as a self-standing discipline through the 18th–19th centuries.