The process of modernization is reflected in the extension and diversification of art as well as in its conceptuality. It became obvious in Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, and found further expression in Dadaism and Surrealism and, after the Second World War, in Op Art, Pop Art, or, with an emphasis on processuality, in Happening, Fluxus, Action Art, Concept Art, or Video Art. In the 1980s the German installation and performance artist Joseph Beuys declared, “Every Human . . . an Artist.” The postmodern “anything goes” (of material, as pastiche or combination) was accompanied and supplemented by the triumph of design; design objects have become museum objects. The German hermeneuticist Rüdiger Bubner called this critically “aestheticization of the life-world.”Posthumanism, along with trans- and metahumanism, marks a further (perhaps terminal) step in the extension of the notion of art. This is due to a paradigmatic, but nevertheless radical, realignment of epistemology, anthropology, and ethics, which negates the hitherto exceptional or unique ontological position of “man” in the world. Exclusive subjectivity vis-à-vis a material object was, after all, the very criterion on which aesthetics and, more generally, the philosophy of art was predicated. Posthuman art thereby also appears to leave behind what were still categories of postmodernism, namely novelty, difference, and surprise, that is, distinction from the old.Given the posthuman paradigm shift, it is particularly meritorious that Stefan Lorenz Sorgner makes an ambitious attempt at systematically reconceptualizing the philosophy of art. In his new book, Philosophy of Posthuman Art,1 he not only explains and elaborates on the epistemological, aesthetic, and ethical premises, but also presents a wide range of artworks that illustrate different posthuman facets. His starting point (following two short introductory chapters) is the momentous hierarchical distinction between a material and an immaterial world, matter and form, established ontologically and anthropologically by Plato and the Stoics. Interestingly enough, he associates this with the emergence and institutionalization of the Dionysian theatre, which first separated audience and actors, chorus and protagonists (Chapter Three). We thereby get an early developmental and immanent link between art and human self-understanding. The duality entailed, Sorgner argues (a little cursorily), a long line of value-based binary dualities such as truth and falsehood, male rationality and female emotionality, human and animal, whiteness and blackness, mind and body.In contradistinction to this, Sorgner has recourse to Nietzsche, Darwin, and, in a way, Heraclitan philosophy. Against a rationalistic and static notion of truth, which can never do justice to the fluid diversity of being, Nietzsche proclaimed the “wisdom” and “plurality” of the body, along with both a metaphoricity and physiology of language, from which he derived becoming, perspectivity, and interpretation. In epistemological terms, Sorgner thus rejects the correspondence theory of truth (which actually no philosopher holds any more) to advocate a (Nietzschean) perspectivism without falling into the trap of performative self-contradiction. He relativizes his statements and conceptions as tentative interpretations open to falsifications, which are, as long as plausible in themselves, not necessarily false. They are contingent. (Truth then becomes a temporary matter of propositional logic.)It is yet another positive feature of this book that Sorgner does not (as Nietzsche and other philosophers of life do, perspectivism notwithstanding) shift the momentum and formation of will to the body, simply reversing the dualist mind–body hierarchy. On the contrary, he acknowledges an “immaterial mind,” which is naturally immanent in the evolutionary process (Chapter Four). He thus retains the enlightenment concept of reason (without which humans could not decide about propositional plausibility), giving it, as it were, a “twist.” That is, old operational conceptions are taken into account and rid of their metaphysical and ontological semantics, which had, to be sure, discriminating consequences. The dualism of mind and material body is twisted into the concept of a processual psychophysiology. (Sorgner borrows the term “twist” or “twisting” [Ger. “Verwindung”] from the later Heidegger who uses it, among other places, in Identity and Difference.) Not only would an outright negation of humanism run counter to Sorgner’s perspectivism, but also, he would find it more difficult to integrate or intertwine basic and inexorable ideas such as individual (negative) freedom and personal inviolability. The ontological term “becoming” would not hold, either; there is no becoming without preconditions.Against the naturalist background of a decentered human psychophysiology, epistemological perspectivism, and an (evolutionary) becoming, which logically welcomes technological evolution, it is possible to broaden the possibilities of aesthetic experience and works of art considerably. One may include the body in its entirety, the animate and inanimate world, the audience, artist, and work, and technology and AI. Jaime de Val’s postanatomical metaformances provide a good example of a twisting of traditional sexual and physiological discriminations of the body (Chapter Three, 24–26). Bioart is exemplified by Eduardo Kac’s modified living organisms, also employing his own genes. Bio- and cryptoart are combined in Stelarc’s “Second Life” (33–37), in which he hooks up his body (or nervous system) to the Internet, creating a “phygital” loop. In Chapter Five the author distinguishes ten “Aesthetic Concepts of Posthuman Art” to classify them according to the three above-mentioned posthuman trends. They are, as one might expect, highly diverse in form, material, and technique. Yet it is comprehensible enough to class Patricia Piccinini’s “Graham” with a critical posthuman aesthetics of “monsters,” Random International’s “Rain Room” with a metahuman aesthetics of relationality, and Jeff Koons’s superheroines or the aesthetics of kawaii with transhumanism.Since virtually all historical normative classifications of the system of art (including uniqueness, originality, and intentionality) have lost their relevance, Sorgner can easily revive the classical categories of beauty, symmetry, number, or musical tonality without walking into the trap of the old metaphysics of concordant beauty (Chapter Three, 28–33; Chapter Seven, 115; Chapter Eight, 119). Rather, he points to evolution, according to which a beautiful individual (of various species) is more likely to be connected with power and selected for procreation. Statistical data, moreover, point to the golden mean as a criterion for selection in humans.Sorgner has a holistic and integral, albeit not all-inclusive or totalitarian, approach. The form, then, that encompasses most artistic manifestations is a total work of art (“Gesamtkunstwerk”) as first conceptualized by Richard Wagner. Wagner (romantically) aimed at an integration of human nature and a renewed foundation of community. Sorgner draws on the composer’s ethico-aesthetic aspirations, eschewing, nota bene, the latter’s “völkische” or reactionary semantics, which appealed so much to the Nazis. Instead, he finds in the musician, composer, and performer Sven Helbig a congenial contemporary model (Chapter Six; Chapter Seven, 93, 107). Helbig’s total works have no qualms about tonality, using wide ranges of fluid and visual techniques. Helbig thus stages a kind of open relationality and succeeds in translating becoming into his musical performance. He immerses the audience sensuously but leaves enough space for meditative contemplation, proposing an interplay between a lively experience and a distanced reflection on the world (which is, by the way, a very traditional aesthetic notion). Helbig’s lyrics have sociopolitical and ecological connotations, being far from dogmatic in their poetic openness, ambiguity, and plurality. For Sorgner, Helbig’s alternation between (in a broad sense) political commitment and calm reflection signifies a fundamental posthuman stance. It revivifies the classical otium or schole, a form of mindful leisure that, in an atmosphere of attentive equanimity, synthesizes thinking and acting, vita contemplativa and vita activa. Thus, posthuman aesthetics meets classical aristocracy via Nietzsche.It appears, perhaps, a little surprising, but not inconsistent, that the author (following his teacher, G. Vattimo) also includes monotheistic (!) religion, that is, Catholicism (Chapter Four, 56; Chapter Eight, 120). It comes down, though, to another kind of inspired contemplation, to settle on a (Pauline) Christian model of love and nonviolence. In keeping with the epistemological perspectivism, metaphysics and dogmatics must be disallowed. The question of how convincing a religion without revelation (and the prospect of redemption) may be remains open.I have three minor notes, which are not to question the achievement of a groundbreaking and comprehensibly written book.I think it is not fair to make a bogeyman out of Th. W. Adorno and his aesthetics (Chapter Two, 13; Chapter Three, 39). Adorno surely held an elitist idea of artistic complexity (Schönberg, Beckett). But rather than to arrogance, this is owing to the vulgar barbarism of the Nazis, as well as the capitalist–consumerist (“culture-industrial”) appropriation of art. More important is Adorno’s conception of (mimetic–materialist) aesthetics. In its relationality and recognition of the multiplicity of the Other, of nonidentity and “nature in the subject,” Adorno’s aesthetics may well be compatible with posthumanism.2More fundamentally, one might also consider if the hiatus and anthropological estrangement between subject and object, material and mind, sense and sensuousness has not been the very precondition for aesthetics (of beauty, the sublime, and nature) since the Renaissance and, say, Baumgarten. Music, poetry, and dance have served, after all, a culturally modulated (and ideological) realization of one’s sensuousness and physical otherness. If posthumanism closes the gap, aesthetics will be redundant, or, for better or worse, entertainment.And finally, if kawaii and religious or musical mindfulness, computer-generated paintings and techno-physical cyborg experiments can be art, and if there is neither an institutional framing (which is not addressed in the book) nor an identifiable author, if art, then, has dissolved into the lifeworld, Bubner’s apprehensions, which I do not share, will be more relevant than ever. But, one may ask, is a dissolution of art and aesthetics into a posthuman lifeworld not a logical and legitimate objective of posthumanism?