Aesthetics and Metaphysics: Collisions of Modernity

Abstract

The article deals with the topic of the relationship between aesthetics and meta­physics. It considers how this relation emerges in some areas of modern philoso­phizing – domestic and foreign. The author pays special attention to how it is read in the actual-sounding meanings of the classical tradition. Laying down the boundaries within transcendental metaphysics (it goes without saying that the boundaries themselves can change, reshape, be revised), Kant in the third “Critique” believes that the principles of the ability of aesthetic judgment are not part of metaphysics, but can only be adjacent to theoretical and practical philoso­phy. What, in fact, does this proximity to the parts of metaphysics imply, how adequate are the boundaries drawn if we consider them in the totality of ideas and attitudes of critical transcendentalism? Already in the first “Critique” aes­thetics, in fact, enters the metaphysical panorama when Kant uses the artistic technique of personification when discussing the question of the world concept of philosophy. The problem of modern understanding of metaphysics seems even more complicated: it is enough to recall the problem of metaphysical a posteriori analyzed in some works, which opens up significant prospects for the develop­ment of aesthetics. The author then refers to the position of M. Heidegger, which he defines as a skeptical denial of the aesthetic logos of metaphysics. The analy­sis of the works of the German philosopher shows that the connection between aesthetics and metaphysics in modern times becomes the subject of a separate problematization. The varieties of its understanding, which can be generalized as an articulation of the paradoxical character of a aesthetic consciousness, were pro­posed by Russian philosophers as well (V.A. Podoroga, M.K. Mamardashvili).