Aesthetic Conflict and Contradiction

Aesthetic Conflict and Contradiction
Author: Samuel Cuff Snow
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2023-10-04
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3111169995

The central claim of this comparative study of Kant and Kierkegaard is that the aesthetic experience of the sublime is both autonomous and formative for extra-aesthetic ends. Aesthetic autonomy is thus inseparable from aesthetic heteronomy. In Part I, through an examination of Kant’s Critique of Judgement and his essays on the French Revolution, the Kantian sublime is shown to conflict with our existing cognitive, moral and political frames of meaning, at the same time that the engagement of the aesthetic judge (Chapter 1) or the enthusiastic spectator (Chapter 2) with this conflict furthers our pursuit of cognitive, moral and political ends. The Kantian sublime is built on the autonomy of aesthetic judgement, which nevertheless has non-aesthetic value. Part II argues that certain aesthetic and ethical-religious figures in Kierkegaard’s work can be shown to be transfigurations of the Kantian sublime, despite the absence of the term. Antigone and the silhouettes from Either/Or embody what I coin the tragic sublime and sublime grief. The God-man in Practice in Christianity is interpreted as a sublime image of contradiction. The figures are submitted to aesthetic representation, while their contradictory interior lives are unrepresentable. The Kierkegaardian sublime is built on a radical critique of aesthetic autonomy, whose failure serves the end of ethico-religious self-formation.

Aesthetic Conflict and its Clinical Relevance

Aesthetic Conflict and its Clinical Relevance
Author: Meg Harris Williams
Publisher: Phoenix Publishing House
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2018-06-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1912567059

Donald Meltzer coined the term 'aesthetic conflict' to describe the emotional complexities of the 'apprehension of beauty'. It had its roots in art, literature, infant observation, and above all, in clinical experience. This concept affirmed and illustrated Bion's formula of L, H, K (Love, Hate, and Knowledge), together with its negative (minus L, H, K) as a revision of Klein's fundamental emotional dynamics of Envy and Gratitude. As such, any emotional situation may be read in terms of either struggling with or retreating from the aesthetic conflict that occurs naturally at all key points of psychic development. Meltzer could be said to have encapsulated the essence of Bion's post-Kleinian trajectory when he wrote that 'If we follow Bion's thought closely, we see that the new idea presents itself as an emotional experience of the beauty of the world and its wondrous organisation.' The contributions in this book are by analysts and therapists from a wide variety of countries working with both children and adults. They have all, in individual ways, found 'aesthetic conflict' a useful frame of reference in terms of illuminating the significance of clinical observation, understanding countertransference responses, or practising the psychoanalytic method itself.

The Apprehension of Beauty

The Apprehension of Beauty
Author: Donald Meltzer
Publisher: Harris Meltzer Trust
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2018-04-30
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1912567075

This volume has grown over the years as a family project of Martha Harris, her two daughters Meg and Morag and her husband, Donald Meltzer. It therefore has its roots in English literature and its branches waving wildly about in psychoanalysis. It is earnestly hoped that it will reveal more problems than it will solve.

Contradiction in Motion

Contradiction in Motion
Author: Songsuk Susan Hahn
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2018-07-05
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1501731149

"Everything is contradictory," Hegel declares in Science of Logic. In this analysis of one of the most difficult and neglected topics in Hegelian studies, Songsuk Susan Hahn tackles the status of contradiction in Hegel's thought. Properly philosophical thinking in the Hegelian mode recognizes that contradiction pervades all organic forms of life. Contradiction in Motion presents Hegel's doctrine of contradiction, once widely dismissed, as one deserving serious consideration. The book argues that contradiction is not a sign of error or incoherence, but rather plays an important role in the development of Hegel's system. The first part of the book sets up Hegel's logic of organic wholes in such a way as to motivate his claim that everything is contradictory. Hahn explores how Hegel tests his abstract logical and methodological apparatus against the more concrete, unmanageable aspects of empirical nature. The second and third parts of the book examine the extent to which Hegel's organic model informs his aesthetics and ethics. Hahn reveals the privileged role of art forms in expressing our consciousness of organic unity and shows how Hegel's organic-holistic conception of cognition and nature, with its distinctively contradictory stance, can be incorporated coherently into his ethics.

Aesthetic Conflict and its Clinical Relevance

Aesthetic Conflict and its Clinical Relevance
Author: Meg Harris Williams
Publisher: Harris Meltzer Trust
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2018-06-30
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1912567040

Donald Meltzer coined the term ‘aesthetic conflict’ to describe the emotional complexities of the ‘apprehension of beauty’. It had its roots in art, literature, infant observation, and above all, in clinical experience. This concept affirmed and illustrated Bion’s formula of L, H, K (Love, Hate, and Knowledge), together with its negative (minus L, H, K) as a revision of Klein’s fundamental emotional dynamics of Envy and Gratitude. As such, any emotional situation may be read in terms of either struggling with or retreating from the aesthetic conflict that occurs naturally at all key points of psychic development. Meltzer could be said to have encapsulated the essence of Bion’s post-Kleinian trajectory when he wrote that ‘If we follow Bion’s thought closely, we see that the new idea presents itself as an emotional experience of the beauty of the world and its wondrous organisation.’ The contributions in this book are by analysts and therapists from a wide variety of countries working with both children and adults. They have all, in individual ways, found ‘aesthetic conflict’ a useful frame of reference in terms of illuminating the significance of clinical observation, understanding countertransference responses, or practising the psychoanalytic method itself.

A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Age of Empire

A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Age of Empire
Author: Michael Gamer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2021-05-20
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1350155063

This volume traces a path across the metamorphoses of tragedy and the tragic in Western cultures during the bourgeois age of nations, revolutions, and empires, roughly delimited by the French Revolution and the First World War. Its starting point is the recognition that tragedy did not die with Romanticism, as George Steiner famously argued over half a century ago, but rather mutated and dispersed, converging into a variety of unstable, productive forms both on the stage and off. In turn, the tragic as a concept and mode transformed itself under the pressure of multiple social, historical and political-ideological phenomena. This volume therefore deploys a narrative centred on hybridization extending across media, genres, demographics, faiths both religious and secular, and national boundaries. The essays also tell a story of how tragedy and the tragic offered multiple means of capturing the increasingly fragmented perception of reality and history that emerged in the 19th century. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.

The Bloomsbury Anthology of Aesthetics

The Bloomsbury Anthology of Aesthetics
Author: Joseph J. Tanke
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 650
Release: 2012-08-02
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1441138269

Drawing from ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary sources, this textbook offers a comprehensive and systematic historical overview of aesthetic theory.

Aesthetics and Morals in the Philosophy of David Hume

Aesthetics and Morals in the Philosophy of David Hume
Author: Timothy M Costelloe
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 162
Release: 2013-01-11
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1135197873

The book has two aims. First, to examine the extent and significance of the connection between Hume's aesthetics and his moral philosophy; and, second, to consider how, in light of the connection, his moral philosophy answers central questions in ethics. The first aim is realized in chapters 1-4. Chapter 1 examines Hume's essay "Of the Standard of Taste" to understand his search for a "standard" and how this affects the scope of his aesthetics. Chapter 2 establishes that he treats beauty in nature and art and moral beauty as similar in kind, and applies the conclusions about his aesthetics to his moral thought. Chapter 3 solves a puzzle to which this gives rise, namely, how individuals both accept general standards that they also contravene in the course of aesthetic and moral activity. Chapter 4 takes up the normative aspect of Hume's approach by understanding moral character through his view of moral beauty. The second aim of the book is realized in chapters 5-7 by entertaining three objections against Hume's moral philosophy. First, if morality is an immediate reaction to the beauty of vice and the deformity of virtue, why is perfect virtue not the general condition of every human individual? Second, if morality consists of sentiments that arise in the subject, how can moral judgments be objective and claim universal validity? And third, if one can talk of "general standards" governing conduct, how does one account for the diversity of moral systems and their change over time? The first is answered by showing that like good taste in aesthetics, 'right taste' in morals requires that the sentiments are educated; the second, by arguing against the view that Hume is a subjectivist and a relativist, and the third (chapter 6), by showing that his approach contains a view of progress left untouched by any personal prejudices Hume himself might harbor. The book concludes in chapter 7 by showing how Hume's view of philosophy affects the scope of any normative ethics.