ESTHETICISM. - It is a designation with fluctuating margins, referring to a way of feeling and thinking that subordinates reality and the values of life to art and aesthetic judgment. Art is such a synthesis of idealism and sensibility, of reason and feeling, of the infinite and the finite, such a creative joy and impetus of contemplative pleasure, that it may seem legitimate to find complete satisfaction in life through II.
The manifestations of art recur, with varying emphasis, throughout the history of culture, particularly characterizing the ancient world of Greece and the modern world descending from Romanticism. One can distinguish between a naive, unreflective, spontaneous aestheticism, which gave rise to Greek civilization, and a reflective, conscious aestheticism, which characterizes the Romantic movement. Classicism and Romanticism, in many respects antithetical expressions of the human spirit, are ideally and historically united in their common aesthetic foundation. One can also distinguish between an aestheticism of the object and an aestheticism of the subject: in the former, the image of art is deified, as occurs in the ideal of Classicism, which is the fruit of topographical fantasy; in the latter, the subject of art is deified, as happens in the Romantic "genius," which is felt to be an expression of a primordial, superhuman, and creative force. From Fichte’s inspiration descends a titanic aestheticism that delights in reality dominated by the free and creative spirit; but this disposition is mostly alternated, in the Romantic spirit, with the other, depressive and anguishing, of the poet who cannot contain within his image a reality that overflows and is hostile. The titan-poet alternates with the martyr-poet; and thus an aestheticism of domination is often intertwined and confused with an aestheticism of escape, which, rejecting common life and perceptual reality as banal, takes refuge in the rarefied atmosphere of rare impressions, squeezed from the overexcitement and unbridled excesses of the senses. French Decadence, which in the penultimate decade of the last century descends from Baudelaire’s inspiration, has accentuated the character of a delicate and aristocratic aestheticism that, by veiling sensual and voluptuous abandonment with idealism, permeates English literature through Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats, and reaches an unscrupulous and scathing expression in the Decadence of O. Wilde. R. Wagner agitates in the German world the program of a constructive aestheticism that would redeem the community through the power of music, but he himself employs musical charm as a persuader of dissolution and death. F. Nietzsche experiences in himself the fruits of an
ARS VERSIFICATORIA HYDERI
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EX OFFICINA ROBERTI STEPHANI
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M.D.XXVIII.
(from Ch. H. Kiewicns, Die Kunst der Letter, Leipzig 1858, p. 50)