A dialectical approach to aesthetics in the age of post-metaphysical modernity.

摘要

This dissertation offers a close and original reading of G. W. F. Hegel's Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik1 (Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art),2 centred on the aesthetic category of the sublime and on the modes of allegory and irony. The central problem of investigation is the surreptitious function of the sublime and irony as radical forms of negativity in Hegel's aesthetic discourse, despite his explicit curtailment of these categories and modes to the distant past in Hebraic poetry and Aristophanic comedy, respectively. By unveiling the actual functioning of the sublime and irony as radical forms of negativity in Hegel's aesthetic discourse this dissertation seriously calls into question Hegel's generally acknowledged status as a classicist.;KEYWORDS: Aesthetics, the Sublime, Irony, Dialectics, Communication.;1 Hegel's Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik are in volumes 13-15 of his Werke in zwanzig Bänden , ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Marcus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970). 2Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. 2 vols., trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). Hereafter HA.;Over seven chapters this dissertation traces the development of aesthetics as a philosophical sub-discipline from the work of Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel to critical theorists Theodor W. Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, and Albrecht Wellmer. The primary focus of the dissertation is Hegel's Aesthetics, his overcoming of Kantian formalism, the aesthetic category of the sublime and the mode of Romantic irony, and finally, Hegel's legacy in twentieth-century aesthetic theory. The unifying thread that runs through all seven chapters is the contemporary relevance of dialectical thinking; that is, thinking through the relation (of identity and non-identity) between subject and object, and form and content in aesthetic production and reception. My work contributes to the field of aesthetics by demonstrating the contemporary relevance of dialectical thinking, which has gone out of fashion in some contemporary theoretical circles, including post-structuralism, discourse ethics, and analytical philosophy, all three of which deem themselves to be post-metaphysical; that is to say, to have exhausted and gone altogether beyond the philosophy of the subject, or philosophy of consciousness, and have turned instead to linguistic philosophy. The dissertation explores issues in Continental philosophy of language with the conviction that neither the dialogic approach to communicative action between subject and subject, nor the semiotic approach to signification has exhausted focus on the dialectical relation between subject and object.