Confessions of a 'new aesthete': A response to the 'new philistines'

New Left Review

Volumn , Issue 225, 1997, Pages 127-133

  Bowie, Andrew ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0038879162     PISSN: 00286060     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
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References (45)

1. Dave Beech and John Roberts 'Spectres of the Aesthetic', NLR 218, p. 126.
2. Andrew Bowie, Aesthetcs and Subjectivity, From Kant to Nietzsche, Manchester 1990.
3. Beech and Roberts, 'Spectres of the Aesthetic', p. 108.
4. Ibid. p. 106.
5. This is not easy that I think the ethical issues unimportant: in From Romanticism to Critical Theory. The Philosophy of German Literary Theory, London 1997, I try to develop some of the ethical implications of aesthetic experience against Heidegger, and in the tradition of the Romantics and Adorno.
6. In From Romanticism to Critical Theory I show how, despite his 'new aesthete' status, Eagleton is prey to some of the same reductions.
7. Beech and Roberts, 'Spectres of the Aesthetic', p. 108.
8. Ibid. p. 109.
9. Aesthetics and Subjectivity, p. 263.
10. Beech and Roberts,'Spectres of the Aesthetic', p. 117.
11. The phrase comes from Hilary Putnam, Realism and Reason. Philosophical Papers Vol. 3, Cambridge 1983.
12. I will touch on this below, but given that 1 take 340 pages of From Romanticism to Critical Theory to make substantial sense of it, I shall have to leave the issue pretty open. I do, incidentally, think that power plays some role in all forms of communication - and that power can be legitimately exercised - but I do not think truth can be reduced to it, for the reason just given: the claim cannot even be asserted without either selt-contradiction or paradox.
13. See, for instance, Dieter Henrich, 'Fichte's Original Insight', in D. Christensen, ed., Contemporary German Philosophy. Vol. 1, Pennsylvania 1982, pp. 15-53;
14. Manfred Frank, 'Is Self-Consciousness a Case of présence à soi?', in David Wood, ed., Derrida: A Critical Reader, Oxford 1992, pp. 218-34.
15. In On the History of Modern Philosophy, written between 1833 and 1834 Schelling, for example, maintains in thoroughly Lacanian vein, 'But the subject cannot grasp itself as what it is, for precisely in attracting itself [in 'reflection'] it becomes an other, this is the basic contradiction, we can say the misfortune, in all being'. On the History of modern Philosophy, Cambridge 1994, p. 115.
16. Beech and Roberts, 'Spectres of the Aesthetic:', p. 107.
17. Ibid., p. 127. Whatever this means: who or what does the 'pre-ordering' and what could 'guarantee' subjectivity?
18. Ibid. p. 126. The naïveté of this appeal to what itself entails a very emphatic sense of the unity of the self (how otherwise is guilt to be avoided?) would never have occurred to Romantic thinkers like Schelling, who were aware that, given the nature of sett-consciousness, there is no aspect of conscious life which is free of some kind of contradiction. It is because of the contradictions that we are driven to seek unity via knowledge and pleasure, but one cannot ever finally conjure the contradictions away.
19. Ibid., p. 120.
20. This can be true of any form of utterance or articulation, but it does not matter in most cases that this is so. It is precisely when it begins to matter that one cannot give an exhaustive or adequate description that the significance of the aesthetic becomes apparent.
21. It is, of course, the piece most often cited in this connection by Adorno.
22. Peter Kivy, The Fine Art of Repetition, Cambridge 1993, p. 19.
23. Herbert Schnädeibach, Zur Rehabilitierung, da animale rationale, Frankfurt 1992, p. 271.
24. Beech and Roberts, 'Spectres of the Aesthetic', p. 120.
25. See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, Manchester 1985.
26. I. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Frankfurt 1968, B, p. 172, A, p. 133.
27. Heidegger, of course, made this issue the basis of his early work, culminating in Being and Time. See Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory.
28. Heidegger, of course, made this issue the basis of his early work, culminating in Being and Time. See Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory.
29. As I suggest in From Romanticism to Critical Theory, one of the many advantages of Schleiermacher's scandalously neglected theory of art is that it sees no final difference between aesthetic production and reception: they are merely degrees of the same activity.
30. This is the extreme position in Dialectic of Enlightenment: see Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory, ch. 9 for a more nuanced view.
31. Albrecht Wellmer, Zur Dialektik von Moderne und Postmoderne, Frankfurt 1985, p. 39.
32. Beech and Roberts, 'Spectres of the Aesthetic', pp. 125, 126.
33. Ibid., p. 126.
34. I am aware that the notion of 'spectre' is supposed to avoid such dialectical dependence, but I can see no way in which it can do the work Beech and Roberts wish it to without becoming involved in the trap I suggest here.
35. Much the same objection made here to Beech and Roberts can be made to Malcolm Bull's essay, 'The Ecstasy of Philistinism', NLR 219, pp. 22-41. Bull writes of a 'liberation from art itself (p. 41) suggested by philistinism based on Nietzsche's version of Socrates in The Birth of Tragedy. This position presupposes that what belongs to the aesthetic can be clearly demarcated, and thus that one can advocate the 'destruction of art' (p. 40). I do not think that the boundaries between the aesthetic and its other are either as clear or as rigid as this. If art is linked to freedom in the way I suggest, this position - which does have the advantage of involving serious historical reflection on the notion of philistinism - is potentially even more reactionary than Beech and Roberts's. Bull also shares Beech and Roberts's idea that it is hard to find real examples of philistines: to make a start, a list of a few choice former Tory MPs would surely suffice. Theoretical difficulties sometimes disappear in the face of the real social world.
36. Beech and Roberts, 'Spectres of the Aesthetic', p. 127.
37. John Roberts, 'Notes on 905 Art', Art Monthly, no. 200, October 1996, p. 4.
38. Beech and Roberts, 'Spectres of the Aesthetic', p. 127.
39. For a critique of Benjamin's reliance on theology, see my From Romanticism to Critical Theory, ch. 8.
40. Try, for example, Furtwängler's recordings of Brahms Symphonies during and after the War, which emphatically 'rewrite the borders' of our understanding of Brahms' relationship to the Classical and Romantic traditions.
41. Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory, ch. 9.
42. See Andrew Bowie, 'Romanticism and Technology', Radical Philosophy, no. 72, July-August 1995; and From Romanticism to Critical Theory.
43. See Andrew Bowie, 'Romanticism and Technology', Radical Philosophy, no. 72, July-August 1995; and From Romanticism to Critical Theory.
44. From Romanticism to Critical Theory, ch. 9 and the conclusion.
45. Some of what Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Novalis, Schlegel, Schleiermacher and others say just repeats old errors or produces new ones, but if one is to escape the merely historicist tendency of much work on their philosophy, one needs to look for the moments where they open new perspectives on the future, not for the ways in which they are merely part of their era. The new perspectives often only become fully apparent when an idea they adumbrated comes to play a major role in subsequent theory. The contemporary philosophical interest in their work has come about precisely because the work has proved to be durable, by posing questions which have returned to haunt philosophy today. Neither in the arts, nor in philosophy does tradition just mean repetition.