Abstract

Krukowski sets out to examine the contemporary aesthetic scene by considering its roots. He begins by considering the shift in the last two centuries from the view that art has an epistemological mission to the quintessentially modernist view that art is autonomous. Krukowski seeks the origins of this shift in the aesthetic theories of Kant, Schopenhauer, and Hegel. Each proposed a grand ambition for philosophy and a prominent philosophical role for art. Kant saw the aesthetic stance of the cultivated taste as a means of achieving the reconciliation of the orderly empirical realm with the autonomous freedom of the moral sphere. Schopenhauer considered the expressions of the artist of genius to communicate the essential structures of reality. Hegel saw the aesthetic dimension as a manifestation of the teleological progress of history, in which spirit comes increasingly to embody matter, thereby resolving the duality of thought and world.