AESTHETICISM. — This is a designation, with fluid boundaries, for 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 ideality and sensibility, of reason and feeling, of the infinite and the finite, such creative joy and impulse toward contemplative pleasure, that a satisfied acquiescence of life in it may seem legitimate.
The manifestations of a. recur, with varying emphasis, throughout the entire history of culture, characterizing above all the ancient world of Greece and the modern world descended from Romanticism. One may distinguish a naïve a., that is, an unreflective and spontaneous one, from which Greek civilization arose; and a reflective, conscious a., by which the Romantic movement is characterized. Classicism and Romanticism, in many respects antithetical expressions of the human spirit, are ideally and historically united in their common aesthetic foundation. One may also distinguish an a. of the object and an a. of the subject: in the former, the image of art is deified, as occurs in the idol-a. and in the classicism that is the fruit of the theogonic imagination; in the latter, the subject of art is deified, as occurs in the Romantic “genius,” which is felt as the expression of a primordial, sovereign, and creative force. From Fichte’s inspiration there descends a titanic a. that takes pleasure in 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 disposition, of the poet who is unable to contain within his image a reality overflowing and hostile. The poet-Titan alternates with the poet-martyr; and thus an a. of mastery is often interwoven and confused with an a. of escape which, repudiating ordinary life and perceptual reality as banal, takes refuge in the rarefied atmosphere of rare impressions, extracted from the overstimulation and refinement of the senses. French Decadentism, which in the penultimate decade of the last century descended from the inspiration of Baudelaire, accentuated the character of a delicate and aristocratic a. which, clothing a sensual and voluptuous abandonment in the velvet of ideality, passes through English literature with Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats, and reaches an uninhibited and lashing expression in the Decadentism of O. Wilde. R. Wagner sets in motion in the German world the program of a constructive a. that would redeem the community through the power of music, but he himself employs musical fascination as a persuader toward dissolution and death. F. Nietzsche experiences in himself the fruits of a
21. ENCICLOPEDIA CATTOLICA
V.(from Ch. H. Kleubens, Die Kunst der Letter, Lippia 1958, p. 15)