The Aesthetic Dimension

Abstract

The aesthetic dimension cannot validate a reality principle. Like imagination, which is its constitutive mental faculty, the realm of aesthetics is essentially “unrealistic”: it has retained its freedom from the reality principle at the price of being ineffective in the reality. The basic experience in this dimension is sensuous rather than conceptual; the aesthetic perception is essentially intuition, not notion. This chapter shows that the notion of aesthetics results from a “cultural repression” of contents and truths that are inimical to the performance principle. In Kant’s philosophy, the basic antagonism between subject and object is reflected in the dichotomy between the mental faculties: sensuousness and intellect; desire and cognition; practical and theoretical reason.

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