Stefan Morawski 
On Bitter-Juicy Philosophizing Via Aesthetics 
For the late Iga Ciszewska who should be with us. 
1 
T h e r e is no compulsory , i nne r or ou te r , r e q u i r e m e n t to pract ice 
philosophizing aesthetics. True indeed that the roots of this discipline are 
philosophic and also in the middle of the XVIIIth century when it reached 
its sovereignty and name, the process took place within philosophy in the 
case of Baumgarten and Sulzer. However, even then Lessing's and Diderot's 
intellectual endeavours and achievements were of a different nature. And 
later, as is well-known, i.e. in the XIXth century, aesthetics underwent a long 
period of trying and testing its science-like potential. With changing forms 
and assumpt ions this t rend endures till our day. Not to necessarily 
philosophize amounts, e.g. to practice art or literary criticism, ask about 
the values and their criteria with reference to psychological or sociological 
norms, accept or question what according to the ruling conventions, 
institutionally (art academies, museums, galleries, professional publications, 
etc.) is acknowledged as a standard aesthetic vocabulary, share the interest 
in the same prevailing themes and motifs, and analyze what the given seminal 
categories meant and mean now; all that we observe everywhere and note 
at the congress debates. In one word - one can easily and securely live and 
prosper without engaging aesthetics, treated as the equivalent of philosophy 
of art, in the philosophizing enquiries and meditations. To philosophize or 
not is a matter of conscious choice and option. But when we start with such 
a premise, we have to lay down what we understand by this peculiar activity. 
In the next section of my paper I shall undertake this task, distinguishing 
four-fold the philosophizing practice with regard to our domain. This will 
form the main body of my reflections. In the final section I shall consider 
the problem which seems to me fundamental, namely why today, at the 
present cultural juncture , philosophizing via aesthetics in a definite way 
should be recommendable and primary, as well as why it has to be bitter-
juicy as the title of my essay foretells. 
Filozofski vestnik, XX (2/1999 - XIVICA), pp. 35-42. 35 
Stefan Morawski 
2 
A 
Of the four discerned kinds of philosophizing via aesthetics the first 
which is to be listed used to be the most f requent and continues to be such. 
It rests on the more or less adequate, direct relationship of given aesthetic 
ideas, consequential to a system of thought. In this sense we assign a certain 
thinker to the family of Kantism or phenomenology, hermeneut ics or 
Marxism. This dependence on adopted presumptions and axioms was and 
is variously exercised. It can be revealed by mere extension of the concepts 
and solutions presented by one of the great minds, say Dewey or Heidegger, 
or Lukacs. However, it may also be an interpretation of the philosophical 
fundamentals applied to the field of aesthetics, say of Husserl who himself 
in counterdistinction to Ingarden left this domain of problems almost 
untouched. Still another example could be practicing, for instance, a 
Wittgensteinian philosophy of art. Wittgenstein articulated some opinions 
on art and aesthetic experience, but no doubt, they invite the scholars who 
want to be the followers of his Philosophical Invegistations to reconstruct, 
complete and develop them. This kind of philosophizing is notoriously less 
appreciated because it is admitted in general that it is mostly the repetition 
of the notions already sifted and digested. Unjustly so as there is no end of 
creative potentiality in enriching heritage by re-interpretation (if only it 
possesses vital significance). 
B 
Another version of philosophizing attitude and approach stems from 
examining the foundations and sense of aesthetics. It was already born in 
the beginnings of our century and instigated by the turn ing-point in 
humanities which was brought by Dilthey and later by Rickert. The question 
which has to be put concerned first the understanding instead of explanatory 
procedures as the proper means (method) to command the intricacies and 
secrets of the artistic realm. However , soon it a p p e a r e d tha t even 
understanding may be fallacious. Bullough was forced to ponder whether 
any theoretical strategems are able to meet the peculiarities of the aesthetic 
phenomena. This crisis was never fully overcome but cunningly silenced, 
stating that the aesthetic theory and its subject-matter are never entirely 
compatible and such un-correspondence is to be assented to by all scholars, 
natural scientists included. The meta-aesthetic consciousness was awakened 
again several decades after the hinted-above discussion took place. It now 
took a radical shape on behalf of the doubts raised by the very subject of 
36 
On Bitter-Juicy Philosophizing Via Aesthetics 
study. Once the idea of art grew to be dubious, which commenced with the 
fifties, philosophy of art became suspect as well. Philosophizing touched upon 
the possible precariousness of aesthetics, its scholarly exhaustion or replacing 
its hitherto practice by meta-aesthetic reflection. The latter was to embrace 
revising the ambitions and the triumphs of aesthetics, uncovering the sources 
of its defeats, meditations on another discipline (theory of culture?) which 
could take over its dowry while facing the increasing, global predomination 
of mass culture, etc. Anyway, philosophizing engaged in this variety of 
checking one's own balance-sheets had to be engaged in thinking on the 
civilisational and cultural vicissitudes of our day. And so it happened. 
C 
After the period of anti- and /o r (post-) aesthetics which, as expected, 
began to wane with the end of the 80s and was rapidly exchanged for so 
called post-modernism (trying in different fashions to reinstate the legitimacy 
and authority of aesthetic studies), interest in philosophizing meditations 
became rather poor. This occurred to be natural as the initiative to face 
directly the problem of mass culture predominating on the social scene 
belonged to the sociologists. They spurred research on consumerism and 
its mainstays. An instructive specimen of this type of reflection is presented 
by Mike Featlierstone in Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (1991), who 
set forth the idea of the global aesthetization as the very symptom of the 
continuing transformation and the breakthrough in dealing with the artistic-
aesthetic values. His reasoning ran as follows: When the main vehicle and 
propelling factor of social circulation grew to be consumption and with it 
advertising and marketing, all goods (chiefly the material) called for styling 
because they had to be quickly sold and thus leave room to newer samples. 
But not only the pursuit after the highest profit determined this kind of 
behaviour. Democracy brought more education, improved on the whole 
taste, and created a new class of managers (here the author draws on Pierre 
Bourdieu's concept of cultural intermediaries). As the information and 
symbolic sphere advanced to the rank of one of the essential commodities, 
no wonder that the entire environment began to undergo the aesthetic-
oriented change. Everything was to attract the senses by its prettiness, the 
streets as well as the interiors had to be beautified, and supermarkets and 
walls became the focus of artistically conceived entertainment. Featherstone 
writes about the carnavalisation of culture. What in medieval times was a 
Great Ritual Break, a Feast making one conscious of everyday grey realities, 
what much later the avant-garde, since Dada, treated as the Big Provocation 
to undermine the status quo, today we read, is a colloquial surrounding. The 
37 
Stefan Morawski 
more fragmentary, simultaneous and multi-faceted stimulations attack our 
mind and the more we get entangled in the network of ubiquitous media, 
the clearer we begin to understand that the life is shaped now by various 
spectacles and by hedonistic needs. We realize, futhermore, that within the 
domain of constant shows and omnivorous pleasures, the aesthetic ones build 
the topical body of our well-being. Once we agree that today mass culture 
and consumerism plus carnavalisation make the very sense of our existence, 
instead of philosophizing via aesthetics we should - Featherstone justly 
concludes and proves it splendidly by his scrutiny - rather concentrate on 
the theory of culture. It is the mainstay of fundamental questions and potential 
answers to them. 
This p h e n o m e n o n of global aes thet iza t ion me t sha rp coun te r -
arguments. Jean Baudrillard, one among many, pointed to the effect of an-
aesthetizing everything when any event or any object becomes beautified. 
The xero (zero) result of such manoeuvres was reaff i rmed in ano the r 
m a n n e r by Odo Marquard . And precisely this ob j ec t i on m a d e the 
springboard of Wolfgang Welsch, who campaigned against this superficial 
and trivial all-over aesthetics in defence of the philosophizing approach which 
should consider aesthetics most seriously as our epoch turns it into the chief 
organon (instrument) of philosophy. In two books: Ästhetisches Denken (1990) 
and Grenzgänge der Ästhetik (1996) his a rgumenta t ion is no t so much 
addressed against the styling of our e n v i r o n m e n t , ou r dresses, o u r 
behaviour, etc. (as he finds all these facts natural and somewhat, though 
flat tening, prolonging the old no t ion of homo aestheticus), as towards 
enhancing a strong demarcat ion line between the shallow display of 
cosmeticized realities and deep aesthetics (Tief-Ästhetik) which reaches to the 
sources of our being. Welsch maintains that from Nietzsche till Foucault and 
the Parisian School of deconstruction we experienced an epistemological 
watershed. Our Cartesian epistemology got shaken, Logos rules no more. 
Rationality was revealed in its many shades and aspects, b lended with 
irrational elements. Art, true, remained the basic field of discovering the 
drawbacks of Reason, abstract thinking, schematic divisions, etc. but more 
important than the boldest avant-garde revelations was and is the direct 
contact through our senses, emotions and imagination with the world 
founded on aisthesis. This should be understood not in the Kantian (Schein) 
but in the Aristotelian fashion. This aisthesis uncovers the riddles of our 
cognition, the passages between different powers of mind, their co-mingling, 
the interplay of the known and the obscure {der blindeFieck), the transversality 
of the discourse which is rarely linear, while being most often multi- faceted. 
Hence too, the aisthesis becomes the organon of philosophizing which is far 
38 
On Bitter-Juicy Philosophizing Via Aesthetics 
away from the Schellingian concept. There - art endowed with intellectual 
intuition had to speak out the truth of being; here - the paradoxes and 
paralogisms of our existence become unveiled thanks to taking into account 
the theory in its various forms and its constant dialogue with practice, 
sensibility with regard to the concrete, accidental, precarious, many-facial, 
episodic, as well as putting the metaphoric-narrative language on an equal 
footing with the analytico-synthetic discourse. Aesthetizing is grasped then 
fundamentally as philosophizing. There is no mere play with words and no 
perverse coquetry when Welsch introduces the term Sinnwahrnehmung in 
the function of his key-concept. Perception coalesces with penetrating the 
profound sediments of being; aesthetics embraces both. 
D 
The last kind I am keen to distinguish is the outcome of critical learning 
from the three hitherto outlined. It presumes that there is at hand no single 
system of thought on which aesthetic thinking could and should depend. It 
is inclined to preserve the post-aesthetic attitude in the context of permanent 
alertness, i.e. to resist the dogma-like pretences of knowing for certain that 
philosophy of art is eternal, very important and useful (as the wisest guide 
of art and its corollaries) as well as well-armed because of its equipment 
which it collected over the long ages. However, it bids farewell to post-
aesthetics. All its seminal arguments were already told, and no one will today 
applaud the entire aesthetic heritage and apply amnesty to its obvious errors. 
In one word, to continue it without a break would be a loss of energy. As for 
Welsch's idea, it is of priceless value but raises objection because of the 
arbitrary interpretation of aisthesis which remains fuzzy and shifting of the 
entire weight of argumentation to aesthetics as the organon of philosophy. 
What Welsch indeed and rightly has in mind is actually the rehabilitation of 
mythos and the watchful control of what Logos seizes. Let us leave aside the 
question of the transversal reason which demands separate discussion. The 
very concept of another philosophizing is to be by all means confirmed, but 
why should it be reduced via the preponderance of mythos to aisthesis (and 
additionally replacing art) remains unclear. Anyhow, we are on the old 
territory of philosophy rearranging its household, resetting its axiology, 
dismissing its marshals, etc. That is why the return to philosophizing without 
restoring any extra-privileges upon aesthetics seems far more justified than 
almost identifying aesthetics and philosophy. 
In this variety of philosophizing, among others, via aesthetics, the all-
over aesthetization of the world and chiefly as Welsch has it, of post-modern 
epistemology becomes one of the salient issues. But this problem has to be 
39 
Stefan Morawski 
put in the critical light. Aisthesis is by its nature passive. Should not the cultural 
self-therapy concentrate on being creative in a special sense? This continues 
on with a much broader discussion of the flood of mass culture and the 
vulgarization of homo aestheticus. Philosophizing of this kind amounts to 
meditation upon where we are at the present-day point of culture and 
civilisation. It is a two-channelled meditation - thanks to and through the 
glasses of the most eloquent and best works of art and on the ground of the 
ubiquitous media with their vanity fair, with Madonnas, Jacksons, cyber-space, 
and all sorts of simulacra, which were described and commented on by 
Featherstone (but alas, without any distance). The meditation on our destiny, 
our axiological foundations, our challenge against the one-sided, trivial 
logocentrism, our re-assessing the sensual and carnal richness, and our ability 
to dissent in the struggle with so-called neo-tribalism (Maffesoli). All these 
questions could be put beyond the realm of art, beyond everyday multi-
faceted spectacles, and the aesthetic experiences, cheap or precious. That is 
one of the main pieces of evidence that the genuine philosophizing of our 
days cannot and should not be grasped as absolutized aisthesis on diverse 
levels. Nonetheless, for us because of the special vantage po in t this 
complicates matters first of all, because it entails asking incessantly: »What 
is aesthetics for?« instead of repeatedly dri l l ing the t heme »What is 
aesthetics?« Already at the Xllth International Congress for Aesthetics in 
Madrid (1992) in my plenary appearance , I laid stress on the p rope r 
hierarchy of the two approaches. I cited Marquard and followed him in this 
respect because while everything gets turned (from bottom to top and vice 
versa) and the feeling of crisis knocks on all minds, to dwell on definitions 
seems to be a miserable occupation. 
5 
It was most certainly evident to my listeners that while characterizing 
the fourth kind of philosophizing via aesthetics, I encapsulated in this 
characteristic my own viewpoint. The epitome of it consists in emphasizing 
the reflections on the human whither and thither at the cultural crossroads 
of our history, when we ponder on the present-day condition and sense of 
art as well as the aesthetic broadly rendered. In other words, philosophizing 
does not amount to looking after and building the world-view on aisthesis. 
It means replying by meditation (in whichever way and from different angles) 
to the present-day civilisational and cultural turn , no t forget t ing the 
generalities of our human condition (en face being, Jemeinigkeit, the other 
40 
On Bitter-Juicy Philosophizing Via Aesthetics 
self, history, transcendence). Philosophizing thus grasped, when it happens 
via aesthetics and art, has its advantages and privileges because both are 
the most sensitive ins t ruments responding to the challenges of time. 
Noteworthy, the search after aisthesis and its passionate upgrading is the very 
sign of this extraordinary sensitivity to what occurs around and within us. 
The bitter-juicy combination of such endeavours still has to be elucidated. I 
name this species of reflection juicy because any investigatory examinatorial 
philosophizing with its dilemmas, paradoxes and aporetic knots makes us 
lucidly aware of who we are and what is our existential stake. I do not share 
the belief voiced nowadays more frequently that there occurs the twilight of 
philosophy burdened always with the task of universalizing and integrating 
the Weltbild. Philosophizing faces this burden but it realizes that it is too heavy 
for us and never satisfactorily embodied. It is yet a juicy thinking just on 
behalf of many world-views competing with each other and the impossibility 
of fixing my final solutions, yet at the same time on being of the irrevocable 
temptation not to give up the effort of totalizing the understanding of 
ourselves and the realities around. This reflection via art and aesthetics which 
arrestingly pluralizes the horizons of thought and being is moreover juicy 
because of the spasmatic consciousness of both the no t-quite-certainty where 
we are heading (what type of labyrinth we are in?), and knowledge of where 
we are now at the historical and cultural turning-point. With this endowment 
part ly lucid , part ly m u d d l e d we are fo rced to choose, i.e. take the 
responsibility either for our dissent or conformity. I have always opted and 
continue to opt for resistance to the status quo especially when taking into 
consideration the cripplehood and trivialities of the contemporary civilisation 
plus culture. It is a juicy feeling to be able not to accept the allegedly fatal 
transformations which change our lives into all-over popular, dazzling and 
maddening super-spectacles. Beware, no doomsday is endorsed by me here 
although my hurrah-optimistic opponents state that I belong to the Don 
Quixotic family of nostalgic mourners (like Adorno, Steiner, Levinas, the 
famous Polish artists CzeslawMilosz and KrzysztofPenderecki, etc.). Granted 
that I try not to adjust myself to the new post-modern axiology and lust from 
this deliberate non-adjustment, I draw the mostjuicy energy of being myself. 
Hier steh ich und kann nicht anders! 
Why then the bitterness? Because my vision of homo aestheticus breaks 
again and again, because the counter-powers triumph over their victories 
and reiterate their gigantic pageantries, because the European cultural 
identity cherished since the medieval time is menaced, and because the 
osmotic processes between the best Far East lessons of how to revalue our 
values and our axiological stock proceed slowly and not rarely with defeats. 
41 
Stefan Morawski 
Summing up, bitterness because philosophizing in my vein (among others 
via aesthetics and art) is weakly efficient; all-permissive homogeniz ing 
consumerism gains more and more scores and most probably will still be 
the winner in the coming years. Bitterness because philosophizing (in all its 
dimensions and aspects) is not trusted enough, although, beyond any doubt, 
it co-moulds our way of being-in-the world. Bitterness because philosophizing 
via art and aesthetics which constitutes the most suitable intercultural and 
existential bridges, frequently stumbles on its way, falls and is often seen as 
a laughing stock. But the battle won't stop. We have to stand up again and 
follow our destiny of bitterjuicy philosophizing. Spes contra spem. 
42