artintelligence

Although I love theory, and this essay has to be about love as it concerns humanity and death, I also have a great deal of sympathy with Pierre Bourdieu when he characterised theory as  “conceptual gobbledygook” . Bourdieu was referring to Anglo-American rationalistic scientism in sociology when he wrote that, but he also turned a similar criticism towards the intelligentsia in his book Distinction.  The philosophisation of the image has taken us away from any clear image of ourselves in contrast to the classical and Christian tradition with its heroism and hope. Although, this is not entirely true, because we have to agree with Nietzsche that the image of God on the cross is supremely sado-masochistic, a taste of things to come as it were. Even Nietzsche didn’t really get the picture, he was still wrapped up in classicism when he created the image of the Overman. After Auschwitz that man is now over. (more…)

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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