Some of the images are from some Etsy sites that feature aesthetic aura posters AND for some reason the renewed interest in Cassirer is coming along with some visual pizzazz so please excuse the gratuitous imagery associated with Cassirer.

Once long ago in the early 1980s, I spent some time on a very late afternoon at a photography studio rearranging some furniture with an Exquisitely Beautiful Irish Fashion Model (EBIFM). We got a very strange elaborate rococo couch set up and sat watching the sunset. Then she went away on some errand. Helpfully, about two weeks later, a mutual acquaintance said that she (EBIFM) had reported that I didn’t have an aura.

I assumed that to be found lacking an aura was not a good thing. Maybe I was wrong. I don’t know. Then, many years later, I reported my non-experience with EBIFM to an Ayurvedic Expert (AE). I was told by the Ayurvedic Expert (AE) that my lack of an aura probably merely confirmed that I was a young soul – very bad, but not unusual. The expert (AE) recommended some spiritual deprivation techniques that might lead me to clone myself in a cosmic sense enabling my other, more dissipated, self to hijack (as it were) some kind of counterfeit aura adding some kind of Zeitgeist to my youthful aural mental void.

Being well-acquainted with all the basic techniques of spiritual deprivation, I retired to an anexhoic cartesian chamber to reestablish my sense of abyssal despair. I was well on my way to this state when my eye happened to fall on a very green paperback: Becoming Historical Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth Century Berlin by John Edward Toews. I snapped right back into my vacuous pre-aural self, strapped in, and used my shadow as a makeshift aura, jury-rigged to the tempestuous, cumulo-nimbus-spawned breezes of my soul, followed a star on my left and kept on to morning.

Now, here’s my new young problem: I’m trying to do a multidimensional outline of some form of an aesthetic approach to use when I bring out a new and expanded edition of my old Aesthetics blog (Going Places with Aesthetics). This might possibly be a bit like the kind of “attunement” (Stimmung) or overloaded mood, that Heidegger describes in detail in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (lectures from 1929 when he wasn’t quite a Nazi yet). Freud also mentions Stimmung as something that points consciousness in a direction for better or worse. Anyway, there are a lot of really problematic areas I need to begin to address or at least bring up or the whole Aesthetic Adventure (AA) is going to be hard to move in a relatively clear and positive direction where things get elucidated rather than merely re-problematized. So I’m working on that moody attunement aesthetic for Aesthetics.

To give some examples of problems that come up for me in working on a preliminary, productive approach to Aesthetics: Metaphysics (why the term can be useful); the “animality” of pure perception ( a world without a world?); the Enlightenment (a sketch at least of what happened with that, a story arc for the Enlightenment); Modernism (what is it? When did it happen? Where did it go?); a provisional, simple aesthetic approach ( what does it reveal? How does it relate to putting up aestheticizing posters these days? Or not?); Romanticism (a pretty definite look at that aesthetically pivotal moment); the end of Romanticism (what happened? Where, if anywhere, did it go?); the emergence of the actual Sciences (how they are essentially post-Romantic); the Kantian critiques in the flow of aesthetic understanding from Baumgarten to now and so on.

Starting with some easier things – my take on Modernism and the end of Romanticism is that the two are really not associated except that Romanticism happens to happen just after the earliest stages of Modernism. Modernism, on the other hand, is a symptom of the imposition of a historicist agenda. This agenda is seemingly justified by an authoritarian, paternalistic view of how the outcome of the Enlightenment (in view by 1770) requires submission to a system rigorously based on universal principles as supplied by the Church and/or the State or some other historicized entity. In this scenario, Historicism is used or enacted or pantomimed to show that the hegemonic agenda is the spiritually completed outcome of all of human history. Now this may sound Hegelian, but the Hegelian system was more of an approach than an agenda. Historicism is something else and strongly linked to the Modernist idea of some kind of progressive completion of a better, simpler world just for you. We can see this in Toews’ book where the Hegelians in Berlin were displaced by the new official, Royal Prussian historicist cultural reformation in the early 1840s. Hegel had been dead for a decade, but the new regime needed to clear all that remaining Hegelian influence out of Berlin. In effect, the Hegelians were too “Woke” (or whatever the moral equivalent of “Woke” might be in 1840 in Berlin) and, when Frederick William IV became King of Prussia, out they all went.

On the other hand, by 1840, Romanticism was long gone. It had been generated around a set of agendas that had nothing to do with Modernism. Sure, Romanticism is full of nostalgia, but it sees itself as inherently unsuccessful in aiming all that nostalgia at a properly Historicist set of certified primordial units at arranged in a progressive sequence. Despite this more problematic form of nostalgia as failure, Romanticism still seemed to be the perfect way to show that the comprehensive vision of Historicist history required a glimpse of something else – which by the way is the usual basic Modernist gesture: things have moved on and you are in a usefully simplified version of everything – which is good for you even though you miss out (in the successful, nostalgic Modernist framing) on some set of realms of wonderfully primordial vanished articulations of passionate ambiances (Romanticism or Noble Savagery or the Middle Ages or the Greeks or painters before Raphael or something). So, in 1840, the new regime brought out Schelling to lecture as a non-Hegelian survivor from the vanished brilliance of Early Romanticism. That turned out to be bizarrely anticlimactic – more on that later probably.

But what about those mysterious breezes from proto-Neo-Kantianism that Beiser describes in The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 1796-1880? These leave me in something of that young aura-lacking quandary. In aesthetic terms, the most massively Historicist Phase of Modernism seems to run from about 1830 to about 1870 with Neo-Kantianism’s arrival around 1870 along with Walter Pater and Venus in Furs as part of a modulation of Modernism into a less fixed relation with its various required nostalgic versions of primordial goodness; the Greeks get some variety to their eternal beauty, art gets artier and the savages get sexier. So what’s up with proto-Neo-Kantianism before 1870? I think very early proto-Neo-Kantianism went into eclipse as Early Romanticism collapsed. I’m not sure what Beiser’s take is on all this is BUT his next book after The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism (2014) and Weltschmerz (2016), was an intellectual biography of Hermann Cohen (book in 2018), the most influential Neo-Kantian, and one whose major works came out just after 1870. Even Adorno (in 1959) – not usually all that much of a fan of Neo-Kantianism – mentions Hermann Cohen as a valuable and insightful expositor of Kant. Other than that, he noted (in 1959) that Neo-Kantianism had been “dead” for 40 years (ie after the death of Hermann Cohen in 1918).

Meanwhile in the heart of Berlin, the Altes Museum with its programmatic inner dome functioning massively for weighty Historicism, where, as Toews notes, the idealized statuary, “the tangled flow of naked figures” (the complex universal beauty of the deep Past you can’t get to from Historicism Modernism) leads to even more universal truths with murals with more clothing and particular contexts of some sort, but still in the cosmic flow of universal truth steadily becoming even more universal and true – right up to you and in view all that, you’d better do what the authorities want you to do and why worry? Your universal inner self-realization lets you realize the truth about how that’s what you should do anyway.

I suppose you can rationalize or re-Historicize all of that somehow – but – given how much verbiage around the middle of the nineteenth century is devoted to showing how your inner self is the little bell that huge, universal truths of all kinds beat on day and night to make sure you behave in the right tone and true range of resonances, it’s a wonder anything resembling rational aesthetic thought made it to 1870 to be re-scrutinized and you can’t really blame people a little later like Husserl and Heidegger who tried different ways to ring that little bell with as little input as possible from the Universal Truths of the Historicist Flow of History (a somewhat metaphysically challenging move as it turns out, but one that reminds me of Kant’s own similar efforts in the Critique of Judgement).

Given how these Germanic efforts turned out, you also can’t blame the French after World War Two for wondering if the little bell was ever there at all – always already absent in fact, like an aura that never was.

Sources:

Becoming Historical

Logical Investigations

The Challenge of Surrealism

Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics

The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 1796-1880

Heidegger: The Question of Being and History

The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger’s Being and Time

The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics World Finitude Solitude