Developing a concept briefly introduced in Counterrevolution and Revolt, Marcuse here addresses the shortcomings of a Marxist aesthetic theory and explores a dialectical aesthetic in which art functions as the conscience of society. Marcuse argues that art is the only form of expression that can take up where religion and philosophy fail and contends that aesthetic offers the last refuge for two-dimensional criticism in a one-dimensional society.

The Aesthetic Dimensions of Educational Administration and Leadership provides an aesthetic critique of educational administration and leadership. It demonstrates the importance of aesthetics on all aspects of the administrative and leadership world: the ways ideas and ideals are created, how their expression is conveyed, the impact they have on interpersonal relationships and the organizational environment that carries and reinforces them, and the moral boundaries or limits that can be established or exceeded. The book is divided into three sections. (...) · Section I examines various philosophical traditions in aesthetics as they inform administrative life, focussing on major modern traditions arising from Kant, romanticism and Nietzsche, Collingwood, the pragmatic school, and critical theory. · Section II explores four aesthetic sources for administrative critique - architecture, literature, film, and movement - as they serve both to understand the social construction of administration and leadership and provide a critique of values, roles, power and authority. · Section III examines more topical and applied problems of charisma, heroism, and authority in practice, concluding with a discussion of the aesthetic analysis of politics and power within the context of contemporary educational administration and leadership theory. While presenting a significant departure from conventional studies in the field, the international contributors reflect a continuity of thought on the creation, use and abuse of administrative and leadership authority from the writings of Plato through to contemporary theory. This book should appeal to school administrators and leaders and those aspiring to these roles. (shrink)

This article reframes the approach to Rousseau in political philosophy and histories of political thought by emphasizing some neglected aesthetic dimensions of amour-propre and the general will. I argue that Rousseau's account of the origins of amour-propre in aesthetic judgment alerts us to his view that the potentially dangerous effects of amour-propre can be mitigated if its 'extension' to others is grounded in an aesthetic appreciation of beauty. This pushes back against the predominant 'revisionist' interpretation of amour-propre (...) in terms of Hegelian 'recognition' or Rawlsian 'social bases of self-respect'. It also clears the ground for my recovery of Rousseau's neglected analogy between the general will and what he called the general taste. I argue that reconstructing the general taste and reconsidering the general will in its light yields a significant argument by analogy: like the general taste, the general will is democratically determined by majority vote, not constrained by transcendent standards. (shrink)

This is a series of reflections on the aesthetic dimensions of law (how it is presented and conveyed to its subjects) and justice (the ways in which justice can be aesthetically satisfying or dissatisfying).

This paper is stimulated by and indebted to a study by Charles Altieri of the ways in which affect is present and articulated in art and literature, which, he argues, hold significance for the philosophy of emotion. I focus on Altieri's thesis that affective states may have aesthetic qualities and value. I pursue this notion first with reference to Nietzsche's attempt to recruit affect as a means of countering Schopenhauer's pessimism. I then attempt to show the coherence of the (...) notion that passion may exhibit an aesthetic dimension, drawing on Richard Wollheim's account of certain ideas in psychoanalytic theory, for which I suggest precedents in the history of philosophy. (shrink)

How can aesthetic enquiry contribute to the study of visual culture? There seems to be little doubt that aesthetic theory ought to be of interest to the study of visual culture. For one thing, aesthetic vocabulary has far from vanished from contemporary debates on the nature of our visual experiences and its various shapes, a fact especially pertinent where dissatisfaction with vulgar value relativism prevails. Besides, the very question ubiquitous in the debates on visual culture of what (...) is natural and what is acquired in our visual experiences has been a topic in aesthetics at least since the Enlightenment. And last but not least, despite attempts to study visual culture without employing the concept of art, there is no prospect of this central subject of aesthetic theory ebbing away from visual studies. The essays compiled in this volume show a variety of points of intersection and involvement between aesthetics and visual studies; some consider the future of visual art, some the conditions and characteristics of contemporary visual aesthetic experience, while others take on the difficult question of the relation between visual representation and reality. What unites them is their authors' willingness to think about contemporary visual culture in the conceptual frame of aesthetics. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of philosophical aesthetics, art history, and cultural studies. (shrink)

Schiller a été fasciné par la résistance que la beauté oppose à la conceptualisation dans l’esthétique de Kant et l’a associée à une forme de temporalité particulière : l’« arrêt » sur le beau. La thèse que je soutiens est la suivante : le fait que nous nous arrêtions à contempler le beau ouvre pour Schiller une dimension critique au sein de l’esthétique, où l’expérience de la beauté résiste à la violence qui caractérise la modernité et en même temps (...) cet arrêt favorise l’apparition d’une perspective esthétique au sein de la critique en inaugurant une temporalité d’un autre type, en dehors de l’ordre causal des événements, dans laquelle il devient possible de « jouer » librement, et donc de manière critique, avec les déterminations historiques du présent. (shrink)

In this essay I argue the extent to which meaning and judgment in aesthetics figures in Wittgenstein’s later conception of language, particularly in his conception of how philosophy might go about explaining the ordinary functioning of language. Following a review of some biographical and textual matters concerning Wittgenstein’s life with music, I outline the connection among (1) Wittgenstein’s discussions of philosophical clarity or perspicuity, (2) our attempts to give clarity to our aesthetic experiences by wording them, and (3) the (...) clarifying experience of the dawning of an aspect, which Wittgenstein pictures as the perception of an internal relation. By examining Wittgenstein’s use of “internal relation” from the Tractatus to his later writings, I come to challenge the still prevalent understanding of Wittgenstein’s appeals to grammar as an appeal to something given (e.g., to a set of grammatical rules). Instead, as I argue, Wittgensteinian appeals to grammatical criteria should be understood as modeled by the form of justification found in our conversations about art. (shrink)

This essay utilizes Plato's insights into the role of shame in dialogical interactions to illuminate the aesthetic dimensions of deliberative democracy. Through a close analysis of the refutation of Polus in Plato's dialogue, the "Gorgias", I show how the emotion of shame is central to the unsettling, dynamic, and transformative character of democratic engagement and political judgment identified by recent aesthetic critics of Habermas' model of communicative action and democratic deliberation. Plato's analysis of shame offers a friendly amendment (...) to these aesthetic critiques by showing how the psychological forces at the heart of shame make the outcome of our political engagements with others uncertain and unsettling, even while they make possible the kind of self-reflexivity necessary to foster the deliberative virtue of sincerity or truthfulness. (shrink)

This paper examines the points of disagreement between Petrus Camper and J. W. von Goethe regarding the existence of the inter-maxillary bone in humans as the link between man and the rest of nature. This historical case illustrates the fundamental role of aesthetic judgements in scientific discovery. Thus, I shall show how the eighteenth century discovery of the inter-maxillary bone in humans was largely determined by aesthetic factors—specifically, those sets of assumptions and criteria implied in the aesthetic (...) schemata of Camper and Goethe. I argue that the relevance of scientifically ascertainable morphological properties that count as evidence for the existence of bona fide anatomical structures depend on the aesthetic schema adopted by the communities assessing the classification. At the same time, I propose and explain mechanisms by which aesthetic considerations might determine the acceptability of empirical claims about the world. Based on the reconstruction of the arguments of Camper and Goethe, I conclude that aesthetic considerations play a substantive role in both the generation and preliminary evaluation of scientific hypotheses. This paper suggests a complementary relation between the mediation of aesthetic criteria in theory choice and in scientific discovery in that while aesthetic considerations in theory choice lead to conservatism; in the context of discovery they often lead to innovation. (shrink)

In this brief work, which is the English version of Die Permanenz Der Kunst, translated and revised by Marcuse and Erica Sherover, Marcuse offers a critique of and a contribution to Marxist aesthetic thought. In contrast to Marxist orthodoxy which explains works of art as the products of social class consciousness, and which thus reduces their truth and quality to "the totality of the prevailing relations of production", Marcuse claims that the political potential of art lies not in its (...) explicitly revolutionary content, nor in its societal context, but precisely "in art itself, in the aesthetic form as such". Marcuse draws his examples of authentic art from eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature, while he explicates and defends the claim that the revolutionary character of art lies in its "transhistorical substance," a substance constituted by its "aesthetic form," which he tentatively defines as "the result of the transformation of a given content into a self-contained whole: a poem, play, novel, etc.". Although Marcuse proffers his criticisms of advanced capitalist and state socialist ideologies to his readers throughout the text, the main thrust of his criticism is directed to Marxist treatments of art which devalue "nonmaterial forces, particularly of the individual consciousness and subconscious and their political function" ; these "nonmaterial forces" for Marcuse are Eros and Thanatos, whose tension is doubly mediated by aesthetic form: first in the sublimation or stylization of content performed by the artist, and second in the de-sublimation which occurs in the audience's perception of these works of art. In these processes of sublimation and de-sublimation, the play of the "metasocial forces" of Eros and Thanatos is exhibited "between individual and individual, male and female, humanity and nature". According to Marcuse it is through such exhibition of forces that individuals "reclaim their subjectivity, their inwardness" and consequently transcend their social determination, although for Marcuse this reclamation cannot be directly translated into political praxis. (shrink)

From the point of view of reflected postmodernity, Ágnes Heller constructs her own discourse of aesthetics on the basis of György Lukács’s contribution. She locates aesthetics in her social philosophy, philosophy of history, and ethics, transforming aesthetics from a ‘Marxist Renaissance’ to a ‘post-Marxist’ position, and points out that the paradoxes of modern culture can be avoided by a personality that is autonomous and moral in action. The notion of the beautiful character in everyday life is a symbol of the (...) ideal type of society and of the good life in contrast to the God-forsaken world of modern dilemmas and the domination of the sublime in postmodernism. It is the expression of freedom and democracy in the contemporary age. Heller’s neo-humanist aesthetics is in essence the presentation of her cultural politics as a Great Republic. (shrink)

An increasing sensitivity towards films and other forms of visual experience has become apparent in social theory. Recent explorations of new media of communication and entertainment have criticized the emphasis on the hegemonic or manipulative power of cultural industries and popular forms of leisure. Films, like many other discursive and visual forms, have been considered as signifying practices and investigated as processes of production, exhibition and reception. This article takes these recent contributions as its point of departure and investigates two (...) Brazilian films, made in the 1950s and 1990s, based on a play that retells the Greek legend of Orpheus in Brazilian social and cultural settings. This article considers the different historical contexts, explores discursive and visual forms of representation, struggles for power within the narratives, unconscious systems of signification, and makes some considerations about the aesthetic dimension present in each film. (shrink)

What appears irrelevant or negligible to readers of one cultural tradition may be seminal and indispensable to those of another. This article studies a prominent Chinese mode of living—the earnest pursuit of the aesthetic qualities of life—to help bridge the “impasses of noncommunication” in cross-cultural understanding. It constructs the working concept of “the aesthetic dimension of life” from Chinese formative thoughts before it applies the concept to the reading of “Forever by Your Side,” a “short-short story” by (...) a contemporary peasant writer in China. The discussion focuses on how the ethical and the aesthetic are mutually entailing and how aspirations for the aesthetic in life affect human actions in general and ordinary people’s everyday choices and behavior in particular. Approaching the story from Chinese cultural tradition and analyzing it with Chinese conceptual paradigms, this article offers an in-depth understanding of contemporary China in its civilizational context and shows a way to overcome obstacles of cross-cultural communication. (shrink)

Recently, Critical Theory has been revisited due to the relevance of its critique of contemporary forms of alienation. This critique allows the unveiling of structural ele- ments of contemporary ways of life, offering an accurate analysis of the material and subjective causes of the current environmental crisis. An example of this contribution is Herbert Marcuse’s book Counterrevolution and Revolt, published in 1972. This article addresses the relationship between aesthetics and political ecology established in the main theses of Marcuse’s book. The (...) objective is to present how Marcuse employs the German philosophical tradition, more specifically elements of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment and Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, to constitute a conceptual project of emancipation based on what he calls the aesthetic dimension. The article concludes by claiming that Marcuse’s critics and formulation entail a double requirement in which the field of Aesthetics has a central role. (shrink)

Introduction: Play, Power, and the Western Mentality Whereas play has always had an important, if sometimes unthemat- ized, role in Western literary ...

Kant often seems to suggest that a cognition – whether an everyday cognition or a scientific cognition – cannot be beautiful. In the Critique of Judgment and the Lectures on Logic, he writes: ‘a science which, as such, is supposed to be beautiful, is absurd.’ (CJ 184 (5:305)) ‘The expression "beautiful cognition" is not fitting at all’ (LL 446 (24:708)). These claims are usually understood rather straightforwardly. On the one hand, cognition cannot be beautiful since on Kant’s account, it is (...) all about concepts whilst beauty is defined by its non-conceptual nature. On the other hand, beauty cannot contribute to cognition since the former is grounded on subjective feelings whilst cognition is all about objective knowledge. However, I will argue that Kant’s view of the relationship between cognition and beauty is not as straightforward as it may seem, and that both of these claims are in fact false. As I will show, cognition can be beautiful, and the feeling of beauty is cognitively valuable. Yet it is not because beauty is a sign of the truthfulness of a theory. Nor is it because the process that gives rise to the feeling of beauty, the free play, furthers scientific progress. Rather, it is because the experience of beauty stimulates our cognitive powers and thereby enhances our cognitive activity. On this basis, contrary to what is usually thought, cognition can, and in fact should, be beautiful for Kant. (shrink)

Ethics, Aesthetics and the Historical Dimension of Language collects together Gadamer's most important untranslated writings on ethics, aesthetics and language. With a substantial introduction by the editors exploring Gadamer's ethical project and providing an overview of his aesthetic work, this book collects Gadamer's writings on ancient ethics, including the moral philosophy of Aristotle, and on practical philosophy. In the final section, Gadamer's writings on art and language are collected, including his examination of poetry, opera and painting among other (...) art forms, and such topics as artistic language and translation. This important collection is a useful resource for scholars in philosophy, studying hermeneutics, continental, 20th-century and German philosophy. (shrink)