Aleš Eijavec 
Aesthetics as Philosophy 
1 
In many respects philosophy is no different from other fields of knowledge, 
with perhaps one exception which, nonetheless, is of paramount importance. 
I have in mind the critical nature of philosophy or, rather, philosophical 
activity. No matter how we define philosophy and no matter from which 
cultural tradition we commence our attempts to determine what philosophy 
is, we are confronted with the fact that philosophy proper doesn't exist if it 
doesn't posses this self-reflective strain, i.e. of being not only a thought about 
the extant reality but also a critical thought about thinking as such. 
After knowledge became thoroughly specialized in the 19th century and 
after Althusser's claims in the seventies that Marx discovered the continent 
of the science of history, the postmodern turn of the early eighties brought 
with it not only the end of the belief into the scientificity of philosophical 
discourse a n d in to its epistemological suppor t bu t also a thorough 
reconfiguration of the relationship between the natural and the human 
sciences, philosophy included. We could view philosophies such as Plato's, 
late Heidegger's, that of late Merleau-Ponty or the early Lyotard not only as 
efforts to reduce the difference between reflection and authenticity but -
somehow paradoxically - also as philosophical attempts to preclude the loss 
of this critical edge not by retaining the distance required by critical reflection 
but instead by collapsing critique and individual or social practice. Philosophy 
which went the farthest in this direction was that of the young Karl Marx 
and his »critique of everything existing« with its cont inuat ion in the 
undertakings to materialize theory through historical practice, an effort 
resulting in a similar failure as attempts of Russian constructivism, Tatlin, 
and especially productivism, to materialize avant-garde art in utilitarian social 
practice. In both cases the result was the complete loss of the essence of the 
primary activity. The failure of such efforts reveals not only the impossibility 
of carrying out such a project and the need to start the philosophical critique 
of knowledge and itself as its segment every time anew, but that at the same 
time the need for the consciousness of the irreducibility of differences 
between various spheres and realms is required. The collapsing of various 
Filozofski vestnik, XX (2/1999 - XTVICA), pp. 11-23. 11 
Aleš Erjavec 
spheres, the dedifferentiation, the desire to attain the undifferentiated self 
and the primordial unity, are all parts of the same impossible search for a 
transparency and a transformation without a residue. 
One of the causes for such a desire is the very nature of theoretical 
knowledge, philosophy included. Philosophy is an activity springing up from 
the Greek preoccupation with vision, from the predominance of ocular-
centrism,1 to use Martin Jay's term, a preoccupation inherent to the Greek 
thought and revealed, for example, in its language which abounds with visual 
metaphors. Both features have given rise to the hypothesis that without such 
an abundance of visual metaphors and, generally speaking, dependence 
upon vision, theory itself would not come into being, for its emergence was 
essentially dependent upon vision and the inherent privilege this offers to 
static entities or immovable essences at the expense of the flux of changing 
phenomena. 
That philosophy emerged within the ocularcentric universe of the 
ancient Greece signifies, therefore, that the significance assigned to static 
essences is at the core of philosophical activity, the millennial history of which 
could also be perceived as a continuous effort to bridge or overcome the 
gap between such static essences and what was perceived as a dynamic or 
dialectic flux of antagonisms of history, society, and the human psyche. 
2 
Although postmodernity and postmodernism have lost much of their 
previous purpor t I view these two not ions as highly relevant for any 
contemporary discussion of philosophy and aesthetics. What I have in mind 
can be illustrated best by quoting two authors, the first being Wolfgang Welsch 
and the other Zygmunt Bauman. In an influential article published in 1988 
and titled »Modernity and Postmodernity«, Welsch claimed that, »Post-
modernity is traversed by the recognition that totality cannot arrive without 
establishing as an absolute a certain particularity which is then inevitably 
tied to a destruction of other particularities. [...] Postmodernity begins where 
totality ends.«2 
' Cf. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes. The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought 
(Berkeley: University of California Press 1993) and, especially, Martin Jay, »The Rise of 
Hermeneut ics and the Crisis of Ocularcentrism«, Force Fields (New York: Rout ledge 
1993), pp. 99-113. 
2 Wolfgang Welsch, »Modernité et postmodernité«, Les cahiers de Philosophie (Postmoderne. 
Les termes d'un usage), no. 6 (automne 1988), p. 33. 
12 
Aesthetics as Philosophy 
Another equally insightful observation was made at approximately the 
same time by Zygmunt Bauman. In his opinion, »What has happened in 
recent years could be articulated as the appearance of a vantage point which 
allows the view of modernity itself as an enclosed object, an essentially 
comple t e p roduc t , an episode of history, with an end as much as a 
beginning.«3 In Bauman's view, which I find very congenial, modernity is 
no t something that has actually ended by the advent of postmodernity. 
Postmodernity is instead characterized exactly by the emergence of the 
consciousness of a possible closure of modernity itself, of the consciousness 
of the possibility of the end of modernity. Before, modernity was viewed as a 
project stretching into temporal infinity; now it possesses a beginning as well 
as a possible ending. 
Both Welsch and Bauman - as well as a series of other thinkers - viewed 
in the eighties postmodernity as a positive notion, replete with possibilities 
offered by the emergence of particularities, the newly attained dignity of 
which arose from the ashes of the now obsolete notion of totality - a process 
today visibly on its way and at work already in Foucault's book The Order of 
Things f rom two decades earlier. Therein the notion of totality was already 
s imul taneous ly d e c o n s t r u c t e d and replaced with the new o rde r of 
discontinuities, with these being closely related to particularities that Welsch 
mentions. 
It is safe to assume that the humanities in general and philosophy and 
aesthetics in particular fared no different than other fields of knowledge. In 
all a trend toward particularization developed in the last two decades. If the 
international congresses of aesthetics can serve as an indication of what those 
of us who turn our head when somebody calls beh ind us, »Hey you, 
aesthetician!«, and find ourselves interpellated into such a subject, do, we 
see that aestheticians over the world are mainly concerned with issues of 
art, culture and beauty (probably in this order). Two other facts are that 
with few exceptions the contemporary postmodern world and its commu-
nicational and informational plethora have made us not only to depend 
upon similar references and often work on related issues, bu t that the 
previous global division in to what Richard Shus te rman has called 
»philosophical empires«4 - but which could just as easily be called »aesthetic 
empires« - is increasingly becoming a past phenomenon. Globalization has 
3 Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), p. 117. 
4 Cf. Richard Shusterman, »Aesthetics Between Nationalism and Internationalism«, The 
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 51:2, Spring 1993, p. 161. Cf. also Aleš Erjavec, 
»Philosophy: National and International«, Metaphilosophy, 28:4, October 1997, pp. 329-
345. 
13 
Aleš Erjavec 
affected not only products of mass production and consumption such as the 
globally marketed material commodities, but also symbolic commodities 
called theories, authors and visions of the world (of visions du mondeoi which 
in the sixties Lucien Goldmann wrote about). In the words of Wolfgang 
Welsch again, »Strictly speaking there is no longer anything absolutely 
foreign.«5 
One of the f requent features associated with postmoderni ty is its 
purported break with the past. As I sketched above, by using Bauman's 
analysis, it would be more proper to claim that postmodernity is the end or 
the Ausgangoimodernity, although not exemplified by the dedifferentiation/' 
for this is to an excessive measure dependent upon the early fascination with 
the purportedly epochal break between modernity and postmodernity. This 
dedifferentiation of the previously au tonomous spheres should not be 
equated with particularization; the first denotes a disintegration of fixed 
borders between realms, while the second signals the emergence of a 
situation which doesn't allow for a totalizing elimination of particularities, 
for there no longer exist a reductionist and exclusivist common denominator 
- or if it does, it exists only in the plural form, as well as in a transitory, and 
hence a relative one. 
I find the notion of postmodernity as the present (and perhaps final) 
phase of modernity of relevance for it allows us to take into consideration 
what are at the same time global social and historical processes and events 
and simultaneously those restr icted to the much na r rower fields of 
philosophical and aesthetic inquiry. 
Among the generally accepted features of postmodernity - this being 
true also of its philosophical critics - are a globalization of culture, the 
erosion of the distinction between high or elite art and mass culture, etc. 
What is less frequently noted is that aesthetics and philosophy too have 
ceased being pure academic endeavors and are increasingly becoming active 
ingredients of activities as varied as politics, design, and even forestry. We 
may well argue that some of these appl icat ions of aesthetics may be 
problematic, but we should nonetheless follow Wittgenstein's dictum that 
to know what a word means we should look how it is used. 
These may be the margins of philosophy and aesthetics. Nonetheless, 
especially in the realm of what Wolfgang Welsch has frequently criticized as 
the »aestheticization of everyday life« and its transmogrification into an 
ingredient of »experience«, hence changing the world into »a domain of 
5 W o l f g a n g Welsch, »Transcul tura l i ty . T h e C h a n g i n g F o r m of C u l t u r e s T o d a y « 
(manuscript). 
6 Cf. Scott Lash, Sociology of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1990), esp. pp. 11-15. 
Aesthetics as Philosophy 
experience,«7 aesthetics and theories linked to new forms of communication 
and technological means have helped establish these as radically different 
from those of the (mostly modernist) past. The so-called »new media« and 
the euphoria associated with such technical and technological advancements 
have offered a new field of research, but at the same time heightened 
expec ta t ions that a complete ly new realm of the aesthetic and the 
experienced was in the making. Even if this was not the case, it nonetheless 
helped broaden (in a certain or specialized field, but within the realm of 
the social nonetheless) the extant notion of aesthetics. 
What occurred in aesthetics resembled developments in other realms 
or areas of knowledge: the notion of aesthetics commenced to encompass 
theoretical activities of Eastern cultures, the former sociology of culture, 
semiotics, psychoanalysis and even ecology. Such broadening or extension 
of the meaning of the word was a positive phenomenon, although it also 
instigated the current confusion and increased vagueness of the term. At an 
aesthetics conference one can find today papers on Plato, Schopenhauer's 
aesthetics, the aesthetics of the stratosphere, soap operas, on Playboy bunnies, 
Wittgenstein and dress codes in primitive or contemporary societies. 
Despite the criticism aimed at interpretation of postmodernity as a 
period of dedifferentiation, to a certain extent such a diagnosis merits further 
discussion. It is true that aesthetics, for example, is a typical discipline of 
philosophy which came into existence as a consequence of the differentiation 
occurring within modernity and that current broadening of this notion is 
also a consequence of the changed circumstances in our organization of 
knowledge. 
That this is possible is furthermore due to the undisputedly increased 
permeability of the aforementioned »philosophical empires«: a few decades 
ago certain works of philosophy or aesthetics would patently appear out of 
place within a different cultural or philosophical empire: these could have 
been the case not only with Indian works in a Polish environment, for 
example, but just as well with French works in a British environment or British 
in a German one and vice versa. Not that many classical works were not a 
par t of the global culture, but they were there either as a part of the 
philosophical canon or as a marginal phenomenon. This is no longer so: 
today authors from various countries and cultures employ similar or same 
references and are treating theories not much differently from cuisine or, 
to give a more elevated example, literature or the fine arts. 
Another reason for such a situation is that aesthetics is increasingly an 
activity which strives to be to an essential extent related to on-going human 
7 Wolfgang Welsch, Undoing Aesthetics (London: Sage, 1997), p. 2. 
Aleš Erjavec 
practices. These are not necessarily artistic, but in most cases certainly are 
cultural ones. The sixties and seventies demolished the barrier between high 
and low in art. Special import possessed structuralism and related semiotics 
which effectively relegated to oblivion the notion of art as a paradigm of 
creativity and its most desired emanation. Art now became a slightly elevated 
realm within the global sphere of culture, with both these terms often being 
discarded as obsolete totalizing notions, to be replaced with concrete works 
and the signifying practices these offered and were the results of. This 
viewpoint was supplement by another one, namely that it was (neo) avant-
garde art which was acceptable for it avoided capitalist commodification. 
When in the eighties and especially nineties aesthetics, art and artwork 
again commenced to gain theoretical interest, what then appeared as the 
object of aesthetic inquiry became so broad that it carr ied almost no 
definable distinctions. The notion of experience started to seep into the 
theoretic realm of aesthetics, while art became such an oblique entity that it 
could acquire almost any form, shape and temporal (and especially transient) 
status. In such a situation the institutional theory of art started to be globally 
proliferated. At the time of its formation in the sixties this theory validly 
mirrored the New York art scene and aptly described the way in which an 
artwork therein came into existence and the mechanisms by which it earned 
appreciation. The institutional theory fur thermore signaled the demise of 
normative aesthetics, a process which was strengthened and gained global 
dimensions as it spread to other artworlds. As Bauman not iced, »the 
institutional theory of art (as an institutional theory of any other value 
domain) sounds the death knell to the philosophers' dream of control. What 
has been put in the place of the absolute principles that only they had access 
to and only they were able to operate, is this evasive, unwieldy, unpredictable 
entity of 'consensus' . [...] What is new is not the authority of consensus, but 
the fact that the kind of consensus which now seems to possess the reputation-
bestowing authority is not the consensus of the philosophers.«8 
Institutional theory of art detected and articulated a change which was 
in the sphere of art proper engendered mainly by Duchamp and his artistic 
subversions. It nonetheless, in spite of its lack of normative foundations, 
described possible artworlds which formed relatively self-contained spheres, 
peopled by the required inhabitants who together created the consensus 
mentioned by Bauman. With the advent of postmodernism a new situation 
developed: art and culture have become so democratized and so widespread 
that very often consensus is not even attempted. To the authors and their 
audiences suffices the act of making and then exhibiting or showing their 
8 Bauman, op. cit., p. 139. 
16 
Aesthetics as Philosophy 
artifacts. What is occurring is no longer a process, the executors of which 
desire to have their artifacts integrated into the extant culture and artworld 
and do this either by assimilating or tearing down the old norms (a process 
the Czech aesthetician Jan Mukarovsky could in the thirties still describe as 
the p redominan t in art), but instead an act which requires no special 
af f i rmat ion f rom the b roader society or its segments which are more 
artistically or aesthetically inclined. Instead, the act of making appears almost 
identical to the act of consumption. It is no longer important how the 
audience will respond to a work, i.e. if, and how, it will communicate with 
it; instead it is the creative experience which authentically represents the 
purportedly ontological dimension of such a work. We therefore speak of 
autopoetics which are incommensurable and not subjected to totalizing 
normative notions and frameworks. It is also for this reason that the border 
between art and nature is lowered or eradicated: if a work of art can be any 
human artifact, it can also be any natural artifact, for no spiritual dimension 
is required for its specific and distinct ontological status. 
3 
Institutional theory as a theoretical articulation of the then extant art 
offered an appropriate response to the artistic world of the neo-avant-gardes 
of the sixties and early seventies. As Bauman observed, it also revealed the 
fact that philosophers, among others, have lost their position as legislators 
and were transformed into interpreters. I wish to argue that under the present 
pos tmodern condit ions, when frequently this same theory is not only 
proliferated further but broadened and applied indiscriminately, it may 
become again valid to ascribe to philosophers, aestheticians and others the 
role of legislators, although this legislature can of course no longer be based 
on transcendent or ideological foundations. I believe it is high time to do 
this, for the revolt against the fetish of art has for a long time now been a 
victim of its own success. The current omnipresent freedom suffocates art 
and causes it to become irrelevant, for it allows for any activity or object 
that a certain person wishes to designate as such, to be called art hence 
effectively denigrating its meaningful signification. 
As Michel Foucaul t observed in 1983, one of the great roles of 
philosophy »could be characterized by saying that the task of philosophy is 
to describe the nature of the present, and of 'ourselves in the present'.«9 
9 Quo ted in Michel Foucault , Politics. Philosophy. Culture. Interviews and Other Writings: 
1977- 1984, edi ted by Lawrence D. Kritzman (NewYork: Routledge, 1988), p. 36. 
17 
Aleš Erjavec 
The same should be demanded of aesthetics if it is to be a philosophical 
aesthetics. I interpret aesthetics primarily as a philosophy of art. This it can 
be allowing and suppor t ing at the same time the exis tence of o t h e r 
interpretations of aesthetics, such as Welsch's, for example, who argues for 
an aesthetics which »will do justice to all usages of the expression.«10 While 
I fully agree with his Wittgensteinian interpretation of the term and of its 
multifarious usages, it needs to be added that Welsch at the same time elevates 
aesthetics to a paramount position within philosophy, ascribing »aesthetic 
character« to cognition11 and ascribing to ethics the role of »a subdiscipline 
of aesthetics«.12 What appears problematic is not his broadening of the notion 
of the aesthetic on to various realms of human activity and nature, etc., but 
his designation of aesthetics as a philosophical activity aimed at a similarly 
broad domain. It is this collapsing of the aesthetic and of aesthetics that I find 
hard to accept. Aesthetics as philosophy of art (and perhaps cul ture) 
continues a long tradition, reaching back at least to Hegel. The artistic is 
not necessarily also the aesthetic, for although the two overlap they are not 
identical. If we limit aesthetics to the broad domain of the aesthetic we loose 
a conceptual set of tools which may enable us to analyze and evaluate the 
present-day artistic endeavors, in an attempt to regain the critical and hence 
necessarily also normative edge of aesthetic philosophical reflection. By 
opting for such an aesthetics directed towards art I am not propagating 
aesthetic, philosophical or artistic exclusivism and denigration of everything 
incompatible with whatever norms are imposed by such an aesthetics; I wish 
instead to re-establish art as a relatively distinct phenomenon requiring its 
relatively distinct theoretical reflection. This view is a corollary of a position 
which has recently been expressed also by Arthur Danto. In his opinion, 
»there is a kind of transhistorical essence in art, everywhere and always the 
same, but it only discloses itself through history.«13 
It would seem that such a criterion proffers a similar relativism as is 
the one existing in the present »artglobe«. This is not so, for while it is true 
that the viewjust described allows for an infinite variety of artistic endeavors, 
it at the same time does not ascribe to all of them the name and hence the 
status of art. As stated before, there is no practical or theoretical need to do 
so, for the current practice in the infinite number of artworlds of the world 
is such that the »interesting« — of which Henri Lefebvre wrote already in the 
10 Welsch, op. cit., p. 18. 
11 Ibid., p. 22. 
12 Ibid., p. 24. 
13 Arthur Danto, After the End of Art. Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Pr inceton, 
Mass.: Princeton University Press 1997), p. 28; cf. also p. 95. 
18 
Aesthetics as Philosophy 
fifties - has replaced the »artistic«. It is high time to re-evaluate certain 
traditional values and regain and implement their meaning and function, 
but this time, retaining also the consciousness of their historical settings and 
the difference between them and those of the present. Hence a similar 
consciousness, as that pertaining to postmodern art, could be implemented 
in aesthetics (and perhaps elsewhere): the consciousness of contingency but 
at the same time of the need for certain rules and norms, both of which 
may be relative and t ransient , no t d e p e n d e n t u p o n essentialist and 
transcendent foundations, but upon continuously and incessantly renewed 
similar or related conditions of possibility. The fear of any normativity 
imposed from above or behind is unwarranted, for it cannot be promoted 
and implemented under present conditions. This may, finally, be what 
Wolfgang Welsch promulgates in his vision of the aesthetic, for his notion 
too aspires to a cer ta in universality which is probably but a certain 
anthropological or human condition, based on the view that »all 'fundaments' 
display an aesthetic coun tenance together. Or, more precisely: non-
fundamenta l i sm means jus t this - that the supposed ' fundaments ' are 
aesthetically constituted.«14 
It now becomes clear why, according to Welsch, aesthetics cannot be 
limited to art only: if it would have been, it would omit the broader spheres 
of the aesthetic and would, furthermore, include only those which are artistic 
but not necessarily aesthetic.15 
4 
I want to suggest a solution to the dilemma offered by Welsch, i.e. of 
choosing between aesthetics as a philosophy of art and philosophy of aisthesis. 
My answer would that we can have the pie and eat it, too. In other words, I 
opt for an aesthetics understood as a philosophy of art, but at the same time 
an aesthetics which can legitimately attain and carry other meanings which 
are in multifarious ways connected and related to this concept and term. I 
wish to offer two interrelated reasons for such a designation of aesthetics. 
The first concerns the concept of transculturality as suggested by Welsch 
14 »Transculturality«. 
15 It should be noted in passing though, that the aesthetic - as implied by Walter Benjamin, 
fo r example - may be a m u c h more problemat ic not ion tha t the artistic, for the 
au tonomy and therefore the consciousness of the value of the artistic is related also to 
the tradit ion of the Enl igh tenment , while the notion of nature and the aesthetic as 
p ro f fe red by romanticism or Michel Foucault, for that matter, i.e. as the making of 
the perfect self, bo th carry with them numerous dilemmas known from history. 
19 
Aleš Erjavec 
in the afore quoted essay. The author draws our attention to a curious fact 
related to the reasons for his introduction of this concept. He writes: »The 
diagnosis of transculturality refers to a transition, or to a phase in a process 
of transition. It is a temporary diagnosis. It takes the old conception of single 
cultures as its point of departure, and it argues that this conception - although 
still seeming self-evident to many people - is no longer descriptively adequate 
for most cultures today. Instead, the diagnosis of transculturality views a 
present and future states of cultures which is no longer monocultural but 
cross-cultural. The concept seeks to conceptually grasp this transition. [...] 
The process of transition obviously implies two moments: the ongoing 
existence of single cultures (or of an old understanding of culture's form) 
and the shift to a new, transcultural form of cultures. With respect to this 
double character of the transition, it is conceptually sound and even necessary 
to refer to single cultures of the old type as well as to point the way to 
transculturality.«16 
Why couldn't we make a similar claim - with a slight twist, perhaps — 
concerning aesthetics? Aesthetics could then be interpreted as abroad notion 
- encompassing all phenomena to which the adjective »aesthetic« could be 
assigned - and, at the same time, retain or ascribe to aesthetics the meaning 
of philosophy of art. It would then be the tension between these (and other 
tentative) interpretations of aesthetics which would - and in fact do - together 
form aesthetics as such. It would be this difference which would be essential, 
a difference arising also from the historical situation in which it now comes 
into being, a situation exemplified by this enormous reconfiguration of 
traditional taxonomies. Aesthetics also is in a temporal transitional stage, 
allowing for reinterpretation and the investment of new meanings. It is 
currently an empty signifier akin to Fredric Jameson's »vanishing mediator«, 
offering an opening in the otherwise firm and homogenous membrane of 
discursive and symbolic reality. It currently denotes what it has been in the 
past and what it could denote in the future - if we decide to influence the 
course of events. 
My second a rgumen t for such a l ine of r eason ing is r e la ted to 
contemporary events and processes in art and culture. I claimed before that 
the present situation in art and culture is one of normative vacuity. I cannot 
offer here extensive arguments for such a statement, suffice it to say that in 
my view the purportedly »central« artistic events - ranging f rom the 
Documenta exhibitions in Kassel, through some of the Venice biennials of 
this decade, to the 1997 »U3« exhibition in Ljubljana curated by Peter Weibel 
- as well as certain philosophical critiques of such events, such as that of 
16 Welsch, »Transculturality«. 
Aesthetics as Philosophy 
Paul Crowther, for example, in his most recent book,17 all reveal the present 
intermediary nature of our global art and culture, akin to the notion of 
postmodernism and postmodernity as previously analyzed by Welsch and 
Bauman. Could we not claim that the present normative vacuity is in fact 
created by the transitional nature of this very art, where old forms are 
acquiring new contents and where in a new reality we are in search of new 
concepts? Could we not claim that the present apparent artistic uniformity, 
arising from the freedom to assign the title or label of art to any phenomenon 
whatsoever, offering the impression of a spent nature of the art events just 
mentioned, arises from the old modernist scheme or interpretation of avant-
garde art which was aimed — according to Adorno and the Habermasian 
tradition which was then appropriated by the artistic, curatorial and theoretic 
elite of the last two and a half decades - at defending and promulgating 
avant-garde art because of its authenticity within the inauthentic capitalist 
world? Could it not be argued that the current cultural and artistic situation/ 
s in the world arise, on the one hand, from their propensity to multiply 
infinitely (hence requi r ing and acquiring local character and »local« 
evaluations) and, on the other hand, from their continuous global and hence 
general or even uni form presence and existence? In short, f rom their 
transitory nature, the accrual of which exceeds that of the modernist past? 
That this is so attest not only the mentioned demise of concepts such as 
alienation and reification, but also requests for new cognitive mappings 
within which art would again acquire its place. 
Within such a context it would of course be erroneous to require, as 
Welsch does, aesthetics to restrict and »link the concept of the aesthetic 
exclusively to the province of art and [to] want to fence it off completely 
f rom daily life and the living world partout, practicing [thus] aesthetic-
theoretical provincialism.«18 Aesthetics - or, rather, aestheticians - should 
become involved in art, practicing aesthetics in relation to and in connection 
with art and culture and not exclusively isolate themselves within the towers 
of the academia, a practice often carried out in the pastin and implied in the 
statement just quoted from Welsch. Aesthetics as philosophy of art and also 
of culture should develop as a relatively distinct theoretic activity, although 
17 Paul Crowther, The Language of Twentieth-Century Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 
1997). 
18 Welsch, »Aestheticization Processes: Phenomena, Distinctions and Prospects«, Theory, 
Culture & Society, 13:1, February 1996, p. 11. 
19 Symptomatic for such a situation within aesthetics was the fact that only in the late 
eighties did aestheticians at the international congress of aesthetics find the concept 
of pos tmodernism, for example, at all relevant for their discussions. 
21 
Aleš Erjavec 
still remaining a part of aesthetics, the whole of this forming the same big 
family, usually possessing the necessary family resemblances . Such a 
permeability of concepts has been in the humanities occurring for a few 
decades at least, ranging from history and art history to philosophy. 
Which reasons should prompt aesthetics and aestheticians to acquire 
such an activist role within the realms of art and culture? 
First among these, since it is the most obvious, is the present obsoleteness 
of strict divisions among various social practices. Staying aloof in aesthetics 
or philosophy is today possible only if we completely and consciously retreat 
from our everyday life which is globalized as never before and influenced 
by global and local events and information to an equal if not greater extent. 
The second reason is the evaluative vacuity of contemporary art scene 
and the preponderance of watered-down, simplified and nicely packaged 
philosophical and aesthetic theories by theorists who drop names, pick up 
artists and discard criteria, all in the name of combat against the obsolete 
danger of fetishization and autonomization of art. A reason for such a course 
of events was also the self-critical stance of philosophy, its decomposition 
into various theoret ical currents , and the genera l adversity towards 
normativi ty. 
The third reason is that art cannot be anything and everything. If it wants 
to be something, be this some-thing contingent as other phenomena, us 
included, are, some semblance of criteria have to be articulated. A relatively 
recent attempt in this direction was that of the »reenchantment of art«20 or 
of Richard Shusterman in his Pragmatist Aesthetics (1992) for example, while 
the others that I am familiar with, are mostly continuations of the mentioned 
combat against the p re sumed d a n g e r of art ist ic fe t i sh iza t ion a n d 
autonomization. The strength of such arguments rests on the weakness and 
absence of any aesthetic theory attempting to argumentatively offer different 
or opposed views - or even strengthen the one that I here criticize. A possible 
argument against this third reason could be that art requires no criteria and 
can actually be anything and everything. Such an argument is not hard to 
dispute: every term, applied too broadly, looses its significance. Even in 
anarchist aesthetics the concept opposed was no t tha t of art, b u t of 
institutionalized art, of art locked in museums and galleries, of art as an 
object in contrast to art as an event. It is the current »anything goes« slogan 
which contributes to the current anaestheticization and which causes 
numerous contemporary works to remain expressive devices only, with no 
actual aesthetic or artistic value which both are directly dependent upon the 
w Cf. for example Suzi Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art (New York: T h a m e s & H u d s o n 
1991). 
22 
Aesthetics as Philosophy 
social response of the audience, be it small or large. The resulting void, 
besides being filled by mass culture, is also being compensated by traditional 
or classical art which is an object of increased public interest. 
The fourth and final reason, or even causa finalis maybe, is that art 
matters, or can matter. If we are to retain the notion of art for a specific and 
special realm of human activity which enables us to establish a specific form 
of human intersubjectivity and, at the same time, enhances our self-awareness, 
be it in a conscious or corporeal way, art can retain its tentative role in human 
society and in individuals. This role can also be played by other social acts 
and activities, but not equally well. It is - or it could be - up to aesthetics to 
develop these notions, concepts and normative frameworks, not as something 
to be imposed upon art - this is not only undesirable but impossible — but as 
something to be worked on together with art. It now becomes clear that any 
relevant aesthetics today must be linked to and involved with art. 
In the present transient period, characterized by a transculturality, a 
p le thora of reconceptualizations, with the search for new notions and 
mappings with which to grasp our present - with profound philosophical 
questions and challenges — a renewed place should be found for aesthetics 
too. I opt for an aesthetics which is strongly linked to philosophy, on the 
one hand, and to art, on the other. Other options are viable, valuable and 
valued. If, though, we ascribe to art an existential role exceeding that of 
quotidian aestheticization and of randomly feeding the Imaginary, aesthetics 
has to accept art as its relevant, if not necessarily privileged object. Should 
we decide to ascribe to art such a place, we should then also accept as one 
of the essential ones the interpretation of aesthetics as a philosophy of art 
and culture. 
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