AESTHETICISM. - It is a designation, with fluctuating boundaries, of a way of feeling and thinking that subordinates reality and the values of life to art and to aesthetic judgment. Art is such a synthesis of ideality and sensibility, of reason and feeling, of the infinite and the finite, such a creative joy and surge of contemplative pleasure, that a satisfied resting of life in it may seem legitimate.
The manifestations of aestheticism return, with varying emphasis, throughout the whole history of culture, characterizing above all the ancient world of Greece and the modern world that descends from Romanticism. One can distinguish a naive aestheticism, that is, unreflective, spontaneous, which is the one from which the civilization of the Greeks was born; and a reflective, conscious aestheticism, by which the Romantic movement is characterized. Classicism and Romanticism, in many respects antithetical expressions of the human spirit, are joined ideally and historically in their common aesthetic ground. One can also distinguish an aestheticism of the object and an aestheticism of the subject: in the first, the image of art is divinized, as happens in the idol-aestheticism of classical antiquity that is the fruit of theogonic fantasy; in the second, the subject of art is divinized, as happens in the Romantic "genius" that is felt as the expression of a primordial, sovereign and creative force. From Fichte's inspiration descends a titanic aestheticism that takes pleasure in a reality dominated by the free and creative spirit; but this disposition alternates for the most part, in the Romantic spirit, with the other, depressive and anguished one, of the poet who cannot contain within his image a reality overflowing and hostile. The poet-titan alternates with the poet-martyr; and thus an aestheticism of mastery is interwoven and often confused with an aestheticism of escape which, rejecting common life and perceptual reality as banal, takes refuge in the rarefied atmosphere of rare impressions, wrung from the overexcitation and the subtlety of the senses. French decadentism, which in the penultimate decade of the last century descends from Baudelaire's inspiration, accentuated the character of the delicate and aristocratic aestheticism which, velvet-coating a sensual and voluptuous abandonment with ideality, runs through English literature with Shelley, Coleridge, Keats, and reaches an unprejudiced and provocative expression in the decadentism of O. Wilde. R. Wagner stirs in the German world the program of a constructive aestheticism that redeems the collectivity by virtue of music, but he himself employs musical enchantment as a persuader of dissolution and death. F. Nietzsche experiences in himself the fruits of an aestheticism, strained, beyond logic and current morality, into desperate superhuman assertions. Wagner and Nietzsche attract and repel each other as the solar side and the nocturnal side of their art attract and repel each other.
The drama intrinsic to aesthetics, in all its historical expressions, governs the disconnectedness of a life that does not respect the just proportion among the human values of the true, the good and the beautiful.
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Luigi Stefanini