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Rethinking the Aesthetic in the Century of Taste

The “return of the aesthetic” so often heralded in recent years as a corrective to the excesses of politically oriented criticism might be expected, at the very least, to reinvigorate stagnant debates over the meaning and implications of a long-contested term. Originally coined in the mid-eighteenth century to refer to the philosophy of taste, aesthetics took on a new valence in Kant’s third critique as a discipline concerned more broadly with the cognitive conditions of sensuous perception. In the nineteenth century, Kant’s emphasis on the contemplation of form as the defining feature of aesthetic experience was challenged, in turn, by the Hegelian focus on the content of art as the characteristic expression of an historically situated world view. The twentieth century’s successive embrace and repudiation of the modernist and formalist credos, its more recent literary canon wars, and the sharp disagreements that are still occasioned by such terms as “literary merit” and “artistic value” can all be seen, then, as the continuation of a struggle dating back to the origins of the discipline over the very soul of aesthetic meaning and pleasure.