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Bergson develops Nietzsche’s key concept of evolution as a creative process and follows Nietzsche in postulating a vital force of nature. For Nietzsche the latter was a ‘tremendous shaping, form-creating force’ (ungeheure gestaltende herformschaffende Gewalt), for Bergson it is élan vital, a vital impulse. For Nietzsche the forces that produce phenomena are considered in terms of “dynamic quanta, in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta” (Colli 1967:; Schacht 1992:). Bergson continues this process-oriented trajectory by proposing that phenomena are fundamentally dynamic and interconnected.
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For most of human history art has been associated with religion and spirituality. This changed with the advent of modernity. Religion was one of the victims of modernity and the rise of science. In this sense science had a massive impact on society. On the other hand modern science distances itself from morality: it lends itself to Kant’s division of human faculties into rational, moral and aesthetic. Science remains in the rational divorced from the task of creating values for society. And it can argued that art follows the logic of modernist specialisation and remains in the domain of the aesthetic, also divorced from morality. This is the phenomenon we can refer to as aestheticism. Anti-aestheticism fundamentally refers to a putative attempt to release art from aestheticism, to bring it “into life”, to make it a moral force resisting the alienating, nihilistic, materialism of capitalism.
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If you thought relational aesthetics (Bourriaud 2002) was something new then read this the celebrated fragment 116 in which Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) defined romantic poetry thusly: (more…)
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