Heller, A: Concept of the Beautiful
Beschreibung:
The main purpose of this book is to explicate the problematic relationship between the heterogeneity of what is experienced as beautiful and the homogeneity of the conceptualization of that experience, or attempt at such a conceptualization in the era of modern philosophy. While the heterogeneity of what is experienced as beautiful was permitted, and indeed celebrated, in the dominant ancient conception-for example, in the Symposium and Phaedrus of Plato-the need for homogenization in the later appropriation of Plato and in the Enlightenment period relegated the beautiful to the privileged domain of artworks. In her analysis Agnes Heller provides a unique and significant emphasis on the original 'life content' of the experience of the beautiful, which becomes lost in the modern system of the arts.
This book details the history of the concept of the beautiful, starting with a distinction between the 'warm' metaphysics of beauty and the 'cold' one modeled on Plato's Janus-faced relationship to beauty, and ending with a fragmented yet hopeful vision propagated by the likes of Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Adorno. The most important intellectual figures to write about beauty in Western metaphysics and in the post-metaphysical age are examined in this book.
PrefaceEditor's EssayThe Concept of the Beautiful, by Agnes HellerIntroduction: What Went Wrong with the Concept of the Beautiful?Chapter 1: The Platonic Concept of the BeautifulChapter 2: Enlightenment, or the This-Worldly Concept of the BeautifulChapter 3: Kant's Concept of the BeautifulChapter 4: Departure and Arrival: Hegel's AdventureChapter 5: The Fragmentation of the Concept of the Beautiful