Esthetic Regime of Modernity: the notion of beauty in new German philosophical and literary discourse

Abstract

The article discusses the role of the aesthetic category of beauty in the contemporary philosophical and literary discourse. With reference to the significance of the phenomenon of beauty during the classical period in the development of German literature and its idealistic and high-flown interpretation by Schiller (beauty is freedom), J.W. Goethe (latent symbolism of the beautiful and the meeting of finite and endless inside the sensual world), F. Hölderlin (humanism of beauty), we present modern considerations about beauty by philosophers and writers who reveal the ambivalence of beauty as a mass phenomenon in modern culture, which nonetheless has lost its transcendence. Saving Beauty by the Korean-born German philosopher Byung-Chul Han has been analyzed. The philosopher substantiates modern “aesthetics of the smooth” as a revelation of the essence of “positive society” which aims at eliminating as much negativity as possible in connection to experiencing the beautiful (wonder, amazement, feeling moved). That is why the experience of beautiful, according to the philosopher, is impossible when faced with following and likes. Modern writers have a critical response to widespread manipulative social technologies which are introduced under the motto of beauty. It is also noticeable that under current circumstances it is extremely hard to formulate “additional moral value” of beauty that would at least in some way approach the classical ideal. We are speaking of Endless Beauty (“Schönheit und kein Ende”) by Reinhard Jirgl. Hoping for the poetic to become a shelter for beauty is Swiss literary critic and writer Ilma Rakusa. It is noted that beauty becomes a subject for consideration for those writers who are following a special esthetic vision in their creativity. Ilma Rakusa is one of those who perceives the world with her eyes and then recreates unexpected manifestations of the regular and mundane with the help of modernist techniques and a particularly flexible and musical language which, despite a brief portrayal and quick associations, never distances itself from everyday language, compressing it to extraordinary thickness in such a way. In his essay W. Genazino diagnoses “destructibility of beauty” in the world (“Von der Bruchbudenhaftigkeit des Schönen”). Under such circumstances, subjectivity as it is becomes the component of beauty itself. Subjectivity as an instance of beauty should be always attentive in order to find beauty inside the ugly reality. Only art is for W. Genazino a place where human I can come to terms with reality. So writers come to establishing “literary beauty” in the world where “everybody forgot about beauty” (W. Genazino).