Beyond Beauty by Vercellone Federico

Author:Vercellone, Federico
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2017-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter IV

From Negativity to the Event

Adorno after Heidegger

Philosophy of Art as Rearguard

At this point, a fundamental question arises: does the twentieth century have its own ideal of beauty? Or is this epoch doomed to ugliness? It goes without saying that these issues are so peremptory they border on brutality, so little philosophic in their demanding a yes or a no— answers that are hard to give so drastically. However, the peremptoriness of this question is what allows some progress to be made on this subject.

In any case, I want to tackle this issue head on. The question about the beauty or ugliness of twentieth-century forms of art classified as avant-garde depends on the actuality—or more, the persuasiveness—of the classical structure of the philosophy of art, which first appeared at the end of the eighteenth century and continued to develop in the following years. In short, whether avant-garde art can be considered beautiful is a philosophical question that can be answered competently only by an art that is inspired by philosophy. That is, it depends on philosophy whether art is beautiful or not. This is no norm, but rather a consideration historically grounded on the tenth book of Plato’s Republic.

Of course this is paradoxical, but whether something can be considered beautiful depends on the usage of the concept. So the crisis of the beautiful is first of all a metaphysical crisis, which depends on the difficulty of unifying all the artistic phenomena within the metaphysical concept of beauty. The latter is an ultimate paradigm of meaning, which went from the heights of metaphysics to the suburbs of the philosophy of art, but still remembers its origin. Therefore, to deal with the concept of beauty it is necessary to state that it lives only as long as an art inspired by philosophy is possible; when this stops existing, so does the very concept of beauty.

But there’s more. Without philosophy there is no art, and this goes even further: without philosophy there is no beauty. After all, art embodies a fallen transcendental that stems from beauty in its original appearance. The comparison between aesthetics and artistic avant-garde reveals precisely a tension of this kind, in which the ideal of beauty—maybe contradicted, distorted, pained—lives on in a relationship of dialectic polarity with an art that, despite all, does not give up on its philosophical inspiration.

In this respect, it is hard not to think of a philosophical witness of an artistic avant-garde such as Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, who always remained true to the bond between aesthetics and metaphysics in a manner that was as strong as it was actually extreme and almost residual. His is an extreme testimony also as regards the historical awareness of his own position: Adorno still clings to the belief that the truth, or better, the “aesthetic” truth can be proclaimed solely and exclusively by philosophy. This is a conscious practice of the paradox. And in this case the paradox does not merely protect the proximity and the distance between metaphysics and aesthetics by means of a delicate pas de deux.

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