The Power of Illusion. Disgust and Representability in Moses Mendelssohn’s Aesthetics

<i>Herder’s Naturalist Aesthetics</i>

Standard histories of modern philosophy suggest, at least by their practice, that the philosophical landscape in Germany between Leibniz’s death in 1716 and the publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 is of little significance, either intrinsically or for our understanding of those modern philosophers that are of interest. For example, Christian Wolff, whose comprehensive series of systematic textbooks was extremely influential at the time, is typically mentioned not for his own philosophical views, but rather for popularizing Leibniz’s philosophy. Alexander Baumgarten is widely recognized for his early advocacy of aesthetics as an autonomous discipline, but not for his views in metaphysics and epistemology, since his primary contribution in theoretical philosophy was a Latin textbook whose most immediately noticeable departure from Wolff is its unusually terse mode of presentation. The pre-Critical Kant is often dismissed as well, in part owing to disparaging remarks that he later made about his early works, and in part owing to the judgement that his pre-Critical writings are an instance of precisely the kind of dogmatic metaphysics that his Critical philosophy is supposed to overcome. The same refrain is repeated with minor variations for many other figures at the time, such as Martin Knutzen, Moses Mendelssohn, and Johann Nicolas Tetens.

The implementation of video as an artistic medium is often described as motivated by radical ambitions toward art’s accessibility. Yet when these works are displayed in museums, they seldom include closed captions necessary to make their content accessible to deaf/Deaf audiences. Historic works of video art are thus often not accessible, as it remains taboo to alter an “original” work of art by adding captions. This logic privileges the work’s original aesthetic experience over its accessibility in spite of the fact that (1) many works of historic video art were first, or additionally, shown on television, where closed captions are required by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and (2) such works are almost never shown in their original format anyway. When spirits of radical access are claimed yet closed captions are not provided, a message is sent about who counts as “everyone” when art is meant for all. This article will examine the aversion to captions when displaying historic works of video arts in museums, consider the rights and responsibilities of video artists and curators, and, ultimately, ask that we rethink our aesthetic (and thereby ethical) paradigm which privileges faithfulness to an “original” over accessibility. Ultimately, I insist that captioning embodies the spirit of access that motivated so many artists to use video in the first place, and museums should preserve this spirit rather than faithfulness to an “original.”

What I want to discuss is the recent rise of the Counter-Enlightenment with its hostility to rational reflection. I want to suggest how this happened and what it may mean for the future of aesthetics. Let me begin with a consideration of the of three mainstream approaches to aesthetics: formalism, analytic aesthetics, and the institutional theory. These were predominantly Anglo-American, and their passing created a kind of theoretical vacuum into which a pragmatic postmodernism has inserted itself. This postmodernist movement is, of course, decidedly opposed to the philosophical tradition of the Enlightenment. formalist doctrine, which in literary interpretation came to be called New Criticism, has its canonical formulation in two enormously influential essays coauthored by Monroe C. Beardsley and W. K. Wimsatt, entitled, respectively, The Intentional Fallacy and The Affective Fallacy.' In these essays it is argued, first, that it is wrong to analyze a work of art on the basis of the artist's intentions because such intentions are extra-aesthetic and, second, that it is inappropriate to interpret a work of art in terms of its influence on its audience because doing so is a confusion between the work of art as a pure datum and the results it produces in its receptive environment. failure of the formalist program-and we say failure in a highly qualified sense because it remains an influential doctrine even today-can be attributed to three inherent inadequacies. First, knowledge was, in effect, reduced to measurement. Second, all aesthetic relations to the work of art were abolished. And third, the objectivity it espoused was seen as spurious by those who believed such factors as the creative process and the affective influence to be just as real and objective as the finished product. A paradigm of analytic aesthetics is probably the article by M. Weitz The Role of Theory in Aesthetics2 in which he argued that no

Is commitment to God compatible with modern citizenship? In this book, Daniel H. Weiss provides new readings of four modern Jewish philosophers – Moses Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Walter Benjamin – in light of classical rabbinic accounts of God's sovereignty, divine and human violence, and the embodied human being as the image of God. He demonstrates how classical rabbinic literature is relevant to contemporary political and philosophical debates. Weiss brings to light striking political aspects of the writings of the modern Jewish philosophers, who have often been understood as non-political. In addition, he shows how the four modern thinkers are more radical and more shaped by Jewish tradition than has previously been thought. Taken as a whole, Weiss' book argues for a fundamental rethinking of the relationship between Judaism and politics, the history of Jewish thought, and the ethical and political dynamics of the broader Western philosophical tradition.

The Aesthetics or Theory of Reception, which analyzes the meanings of literary works and the function of the reader with a reader-response perspective, is an original aesthetic theory that spread from Germany to the world and then to the other branches of art in late 1960s. In the dialogue between the received work of art and the receiver, the style and duration of reception differ fundamentally in each branch of art. As in literary works, the experience of reading and understanding the work in other realms of art depends on the language of the art form. Reception Aesthetics mainly investigates such matters as the conditions under which a work of art is to be comprehended, the styles of comprehension and their results. This study analyzes the changes in the conditions and styles of reception during a dialogue with works of Ceramic Art, and the refreshing influence of reception period on the work with an experimental approach. The reception period is analyzed in the exemplary ceramic works of J. Miro. There are two reasons why the works of Miro were selected for analysis. First, Miro is a versatile artist who has influenced not only contemporary art of painting but also the art of ceramics with his ceramic works. His contribution to ceramic art can be exemplified within his works. Second is the advantage provided by the contribution to the experimental period of analysis through publications about Miro in art literature and the advantage of the evaluating the findings of reception. It is thought that the reception period is a period of art-work analysis that responds to a wider recipient audience about the work of art. It is also considered to involve a period of synthesis revitalizing the work of art with each new receiver. A flexible and explicit approach in the evaluation of work of art will support the formation of aesthetic life and communication among a wider recipient audience.

The article analyzes several stories by A. Krymsky and O. Plyushch, which reveal the leading signs of decadent sensuality, which became an important part of the literature of the fin de siècle period. During this period, the conflict between positivist and modern consciousness arises: the man of the new century rebels against old traditions, values, and views, trying to find new aesthetic horizons for self-expression. The article aims to study the features of the manifestation and functioning of the elements of decadence in the short prose of the mentioned writers, and analyse their interaction with elements of other stylistic trends of the early 20th century, in particular, the realistic guidelines of the Narodnyks. The research is relevant because we need to deepen our study of A. Krymsky and O. Plyushch’s short prose as a bright and original phenomenon of its literary era. The study used a comprehensive methodological approach: elements of cultural-historical, biographical, comparative, and receptive-aesthetic methods. The results of the study highlight that the short prose of A. Krymsky and O. Plyushch is quite illustrative of their era. On the one hand, they did not pretend to and did not specifically write decadent texts, and on the other hand, they provided vivid examples of decadent sensuality in a work of art. Their prose combines elements of traditional populist aesthetics (while simultaneously denying and even ridiculing it) with features of decadent sensuality. Such a specific combination of diverse stylistic features presents the subjective energy and typical image of a person in the crisis era of the turn of the century, testifying to the search for new forms of aesthetic expression. These texts also testify to the desire to build a new artistic and aesthetic paradigm, in which rationality increasingly gives way to emotionality and psychological immersion in human character, indicating a new stage in the development of Ukrainian literature. The development of European art causes these new features of domestic writing, but at the same time, they have their own national roots.

The importance of the aesthetic paradigm for the modern psychology of personality is considered. The leading significance of the aesthetic paradigm for the epistemology of a transitive, changeable and uncertain society is proved. This value is connected with the fact that aesthetic experiences make it possible to introduce the psychology of personality into the framework of cultural determination. This opens new opportunities for modern epistemology, in which paradigms are transformed into gestalts, open to new data and further modifications. The role of the language of science and the language of art is revealed as complementary discourses in explaining the place of a person in modern space and time. It is proved that the aesthetic paradigm and aesthetic experiences make it possible to stabilize the changing social system and to realize the emotions associated with the variability of the social context. The stabilization of the system becomes possible due to the fact that the time-space system is transformed into a spectator-creator-work subsystem. Aesthetic experiences, crystallized in works of art, help viewers to realize their own emotions associated with the variability of identity. The connection of aesthetics with everyday life helps to maintain (or restore) the integrity of identity and continuity of individual stages of a person’s life. The constancy of works of art and emotions associated with art, nature, science, helps people see themselves in the flow of changeable and at the same time constant life and accept it as a holistic image of the world and themselves within it.

The results of theoretical and empirical research of the phenomenology and mechanisms of social cognition in the conditions of fluid modernity, social uncertainty and transitivity are summarized in this article. The starting point is the position of the scientific school of G. M. Andreeva, according to which social cognition is considered as an affective and cognitive process of constructing the image of the social world in the individual and public consciousness. A new transdisciplinary concept of social cognition, which integrates the principles of psychology of cultural activity and social constructionism, as well as theories of social representations and collective emotional experiences is presented. The new research direction that greatly expands the subject area of psychological investigation of social cognition — the social psychology of everyday life is verified. It is everyday life that acts as the optics of the analysis of subjective perception and emotional experience of social changes as a situation of uncertainty in various spheres of everyday life of society and culture (from new media to contemporary art). The proposed and implemented aesthetic paradigm in the social psychology of everyday life combines two ways of understanding, explaining and predicting social changes: scientific-conceptual and artistic-figurative (or visual). Thus, the aesthetic paradigm synthesizes the scientific and aesthetic discourses of psychology and art history. In this regard, it is a flexible methodological strategy that opens up the prospects for a multidimensional analysis of modern society and culture that cannot be conceptualized in traditional categories of social cognition (for example, mental models, categorization, causal attribution). On the basis of the aesthetic paradigm of everyday life, a new construct of precarity is introduced for domestic psychology, which means individual and collective emotion experience of total vulnerability, fragility and insecurity of a person in a situation of uncertainty. This construct makes it possible to analyze the affective states that characterize the mass consciousness of modern society. At the same time, specific instruments for studying the emotional experience of social change, including precarity, are qualitative methods for collecting, analyzing and interpreting data, which today unites in a sole methodological approach to the study of social cognition.

Moses Mendelssohn and the End of Illusion Theory : An Inquiry into Innovation in Aesthetics in the Middle of the Eighteenth-Century

The aesthetic reflection in the eighteenth century is deeply traversed by an experience perceived as capable of disrupting the disciplinary and cognitive system of early modernity: To feel the “own body,” that is, to feel its state of well-being or discomfort means to somehow modify from the inside the anthropological project of the Century of Enlightenment and to create the space and the lexicon of a modality of relationship (play, aesthetic illusion) that redefines the relationship with oneself and the context of construction of a future community. Whereas “Knowledge” and “Will” articulate the same strategy based on the relationship between the spiritual activity of a subject and the semiotic properties of an object, the orientation towards the condition of one’s own body defines in the play and in the aesthetic illusion the space of an imaginative reserve which is above all a reserve of time and mode of construction for a future sharing. Moses Mendelssohn’s thought constitutes the exemplary arrival point of an era of theoretical research that we are interested in investigating not only in terms of the solutions it has found for his time, but also in relation to the open problems, which continue to question our time.

The article examines some of Eugenio Barba’s study material now preserved in the Fonds Barba at Odin Teatret Archives (ISTA Series, b. 1). Barba’s readings preceding the first edition of the ISTA in Bonn in 1980 trace the development of interests cultivated by the director, from humanities to science (biology, neuropsychology, studies of perception, posturology). Even before developing the theory of theatre anthropology as an autonomous discipline, Barba evolved many fertile perspectives of study on energy, within which he expanded the understanding of presence as a fundamental component of theatre. Barba’s reading notes reveal an intellectual approach similar to his artistic work: the accumulation of an overabundance of material, which in the theoretical sphere, too, invert the principle of maximum results with minimum effort.

Chapter 2 looks at how travelers drew and described imperial landscapes, arguing that the picturesque was an aesthetic paradigm that concealed the monotony, hardship, and otherness of foreign lands. It analyses the complex interaction of aesthetic theory and perception, and highlights the propagandistic qualities of the picturesque that emerge in contrasts between the work of amateur and professional artists. By privileging certain sites, the picturesque ironically made much of the empire seem boring as even the most impressive views were rarely as spectacular in person as they were in paintings and engravings. Moreover, the visual familiarity of iconic sites meant fewer opportunities to explore the unexplored. Even in India, with its remarkable array of historical and religious sites, the British described much of the terrain as monotonous. In other locations, such as South Africa and Australia, where there were no ruins to enjoy, there was even less that was deemed noteworthy.

Organized around eight themes central to aesthetic theory today, this book examines the sources and development of Kant's aesthetics by mining his publications, correspondence, handwritten notes, and university lectures. Each chapter explores one of eight themes: aesthetic judgment and normativity, formal beauty, partly conceptual beauty, artistic creativity or genius, the fine arts, the sublime, ugliness and disgust, and humor. Robert R. Clewis considers how Kant's thought was shaped by authors such as Christian Wolff, Alexander Baumgarten, Georg Meier, Moses Mendelssohn, Johann Sulzer, Johann Herder, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Edmund Burke, Henry Home, Charles Batteux, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Voltaire. His resulting study uncovers and illuminates the complex development of Kant's aesthetic theory and will be useful to advanced students and scholars in fields across the humanities and studies of the arts.

This essay traces the impact of Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757/59) on the evolution of German aesthetic theory in the second half of the eighteenth century, concentrating in particular on a close reading of the series of articles on aesthetics that Moses Mendelssohn published between 1755 and 1761. The essay argues that Burke’s distinction between the sublime and the beautiful, his attempt to generate an empirical physiological aesthetic theory, and his radical severance of the links between aesthetics and ethics fundamentally challenged the rational metaphysical grounds of German aesthetic theory, provoking Mendelssohn into generating a series of creative but incompatible responses that both constituted a significant elaboration of German aesthetic theory and led into an impasse that only Kant could surmount.