Overview

This study examines how key figures in the German aesthetic tradition — Kant, Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel, and Adorno — attempted to think through the powers and limits of art in post-Enlightenment modernity. Ayon Maharaj argues that the aesthetic speculations of these thinkers provide the conceptual resources for a timely dialectical defense of “aesthetic agency”— art’s capacity to make available uniquely valuable modes of experience that escape the purview of Enlightenment scientific rationality. Blending careful philosophical analysis with an intellectual historian’s attention to the broader cultural resonance of philosophical arguments, Maharaj has two interrelated aims. He provides challenging new interpretations of the aesthetic philosophies of Kant, Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, and Adorno by focusing on aspects of their thought that have been neglected or misunderstood in Anglo-American and German scholarship. He demonstrates that their subtle investigations into the nature and scope of aesthetic agency have far-reaching implications for contemporary discourse on the arts. The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency is an important and original contribution to scholarship on the German aesthetic tradition and to the broader field of aesthetics.

Full Product Details

Author:   Dr Ayon Maharaj (Vedanta Society of Southern California in Hollywood, USA)
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint:   Bloomsbury Academic
Edition:   NIPPOD
Dimensions:   Width: 15.60cm , Height: 1.20cm , Length: 23.40cm
Weight:   0.331kg
ISBN:  

9781472579591

ISBN 10:   1472579593
Pages:   208
Publication Date:   17 July 2014
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Undergraduate ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

"Preface Acknowledgements Abbreviations of Primary Texts Introduction: The Crisis of Art in Modernity 1. Aporias of Aesthetic Pleasure in Kant’s ‘Analytic of the Beautiful’ 2. The ""Great Gulf"" of the Third Critique: Kant's Ambivalence about the Role of Aesthetic Pleasure in Moral Lif 3. Kant Romanticized: Aesthetic Intuition as Redemption in Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism 4. Hegel contra Schlegel: On the Aporetic Epistemology of Romantic Irony 5. Art’s ‘After’ and the Dialectical Possibilities of Irony in Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics 6. The Idealist Legacy: Adorno’s Dialectical Retrieval of Aesthetic Agency in Aesthetic Theory Epilogue: Art as Force: From Critical Suspicion to Dialectical Immanence Notes Bibliography Index"

Reviews

How can we both be enraptured and shaken by the experience of art and yet also continuously suspicious of art's promises, seductions, and potentially dangerous uses? Is this complex attitude even coherent, let alone fruitful? By tracing and evaluating the stances on art of Kant, Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Altieri, Ayon Maharaj arrives at a compelling account of the work of art as a haunting force that eludes both reduction to any definite message and dismissal as an empty entertainment. In this way, Maharaj brings the tradition of German aesthetic theory strikingly to life in relation to current plights and possibilities of human life in culture. -- Richard Eldridge, Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor of Philosophy at Swarthmore College, USA Maharaj's book offers consistent and intense philosophical analyses of the basic arguments shaping the aesthetic theories of Kant, Schelling, Schiller, Nietzsche, and Adorno. But Maharaj also pursues more elaborate ambitions that make its path through those arguments a compelling statement of what might be possible for this mode of self-reflection. Because aesthetics has our pleasure in imagined objects at its core, these philosophers used these inquiries to establish powers of human agency that could find a home nowhere else in Enlightenment philosophy. One might imagine aesthetics charged with the role of a new theology articulating the project of restoring aspects of the sacred within a disenchanted world. Because Maharaj elaborates so compelling a sense of this shared project, it seems as if the commentator ultimately has the task of composing a dialectical structure articulating how the mind finds a satisfying home in a most unsatisfying world. It is no accident that he concludes with Adorno. -- Charles Altieri, Rachel Stageberg Anderson Chair in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley, USA The real strength of Maharaj's account comes in the patient and detailed narrative he develops of the infuence of this aporetic reading of Kant, from Schiller through to figures as late as Theodor Adorno ... develops a number of original and searching accounts ... the author persuasively develops a fresh reading of Hegel's philosophy as based on a dialectical development and appreciation of Schelgelian irony ... This book succeeds admirably in articulating a fresh and coherent genealogy of post-Kantian aesthetics. Its impressive range has not prevented its author from producing incisive and original work on all the philosophers it incorporates. -- Owen Hulatt, University of York * British Journal for the History of Philosophy * An original and meticulously crafted account of aesthetic agency in its conceptual evolution from Kant to Adorno . . . What sets this work apart from comparable works exploring the art-agency relation from Kant onward is that it deftly plays between antithetical attitudes toward the notion of aesthetic agency. . . The work presents a historically grounded analysis of how these competing tendencies of art -- enchantment and disenchantment -- stand in various stages of dialectical interdependence with one another. . . One has to commend this work as a powerful and timely defense of aesthetic agency. It is a welcome line of argument for those of us who can neither naively ascribe to art the power of spiritual redemption nor cynically reduce art to the purpose of entertainment, pleasure, or emotional catharsis. * Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, Jason M. Miller, Warren Wilson College *

How can we both be enraptured and shaken by the experience of art and yet also continuously suspicious of art's promises, seductions, and potentially dangerous uses? Is this complex attitude even coherent, let alone fruitful? By tracing and evaluating the stances on art of Kant, Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Altieri, Ayon Maharaj arrives at a compelling account of the work of art as a haunting force that eludes both reduction to any definite message and dismissal as an empty entertainment. In this way, Maharaj brings the tradition of German aesthetic theory strikingly to life in relation to current plights and possibilities of human life in culture. -- Richard Eldridge, Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor of Philosophy at Swarthmore College, USA 20121121 Maharaj's book offers consistent and intense philosophical analyses of the basic arguments shaping the aesthetic theories of Kant, Schelling, Schiller, Nietzsche, and Adorno. But Maharaj also pursues more elaborate ambitions that make its path through those arguments a compelling statement of what might be possible for this mode of self-reflection. Because aesthetics has our pleasure in imagined objects at its core, these philosophers used these inquiries to establish powers of human agency that could find a home nowhere else in Enlightenment philosophy. One might imagine aesthetics charged with the role of a new theology articulating the project of restoring aspects of the sacred within a disenchanted world. Because Maharaj elaborates so compelling a sense of this shared project, it seems as if the commentator ultimately has the task of composing a dialectical structure articulating how the mind finds a satisfying home in a most unsatisfying world. It is no accident that he concludes with Adorno. -- Charles Altieri, Rachel Stageberg Anderson Chair in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley, USA 20120730 The real strength of Maharaj's account comes in the patient and detailed narrative he develops of the infuence of this aporetic reading of Kant, from Schiller through to figures as late as Theodor Adorno ... develops a number of original and searching accounts ... the author persuasively develops a fresh reading of Hegel's philosophy as based on a dialectical development and appreciation of Schelgelian irony ... This book succeeds admirably in articulating a fresh and coherent genealogy of post-Kantian aesthetics. Its impressive range has not prevented its author from producing incisive and original work on all the philosophers it incorporates. -- Owen Hulatt, University of York British Journal for the History of Philosophy

How can we both be enraptured and shaken by the experience of art and yet also continuously suspicious of art's promises, seductions, and potentially dangerous uses? Is this complex attitude even coherent, let alone fruitful? By tracing and evaluating the stances on art of Kant, Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Altieri, Ayon Maharaj arrives at a compelling account of the work of art as a haunting force that eludes both reduction to any definite message and dismissal as an empty entertainment. In this way, Maharaj brings the tradition of German aesthetic theory strikingly to life in relation to current plights and possibilities of human life in culture. -- Richard Eldridge, Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor of Philosophy at Swarthmore College, USA Maharaj's book offers consistent and intense philosophical analyses of the basic arguments shaping the aesthetic theories of Kant, Schelling, Schiller, Nietzsche, and Adorno. But Maharaj also pursues more elaborate ambitions that make its path through those arguments a compelling statement of what might be possible for this mode of self-reflection. Because aesthetics has our pleasure in imagined objects at its core, these philosophers used these inquiries to establish powers of human agency that could find a home nowhere else in Enlightenment philosophy. One might imagine aesthetics charged with the role of a new theology articulating the project of restoring aspects of the sacred within a disenchanted world. Because Maharaj elaborates so compelling a sense of this shared project, it seems as if the commentator ultimately has the task of composing a dialectical structure articulating how the mind finds a satisfying home in a most unsatisfying world. It is no accident that he concludes with Adorno. -- Charles Altieri, Rachel Stageberg Anderson Chair in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley, USA The real strength of Maharaj's account comes in the patient and detailed narrative he develops of the infuence of this aporetic reading of Kant, from Schiller through to figures as late as Theodor Adorno ... develops a number of original and searching accounts ... the author persuasively develops a fresh reading of Hegel's philosophy as based on a dialectical development and appreciation of Schelgelian irony ... This book succeeds admirably in articulating a fresh and coherent genealogy of post-Kantian aesthetics. Its impressive range has not prevented its author from producing incisive and original work on all the philosophers it incorporates. -- Owen Hulatt, University of York British Journal for the History of Philosophy

Author Information

Ayon Maharaj is Assistant Professor in the Departments of Philosophy and English at Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda University in West Bengal, India. He was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and the University of Oxford.

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