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Aesthetics 23

(4) that it (unreasonably) requests approval by others (see Kant 2001). In
connection with beauty, Kant also dealt with the aesthetic category of the
sublime (das Erhabene): something observable that generates amazement,
anxiety, and awe and transcends the beautiful. It is these two categories that
form the pillars of his philosophy on aesthetics.
Though a host of other great thinkers, including Schiller, Schelling, Hegel,
Schopenhauer, and Marx, to mention but a few, also dealt with aesthetics,
it was Kant’s approach that became the most influential for decades to
come, especially among art historians and philosophers of art. In fact, it still
informs, directly or indirectly, the work of many scholars studying beautiful
objects and sublime phenomena. However, the acceptance of Kant’s cerebral
and rational perspective on how experiences of the beautiful and the sublime
could be understood implied a number of problematic divides through which
aesthetics was framed as a rather limited field of inquiry.
The most immediately obvious is the further delineation of the split
between the realm of the senses or the body and that of reason or the mind,
which Baumgarten so ardently wished to bridge. This implied that the
senses and the body were of little or no relevance for the understanding
of the sensorial and emotional impact of all kinds of imagery and objects,
in the sphere of religion, for instance, on their beholders. We might call
this process the de-sensualization or disembodiment of aesthetics (see Plate
2005). The eye became a mind’s eye and the ear a mind’s ear, whereas the
rest of the senses were numbed or an-aesthetized (see Buck-Morss 1992).
Only with the rise of phenomenology, particularly as it was developed by
Merleau-Ponty in his work on perception (1945), aisthetic experiences and
knowing reappeared once again on centre stage. Merleau-Ponty’s Causeries
(2002 [1948]) explicitly dealt with such experiences in connection with
the rise of modern art (see also Dufrenne 1973). Artists were aiming for
representations of reality that were more in accordance with the fact that we
do not perceive the world through our eyes alone but with all our senses:
our entire body. It has been his work, among that of others, that has inspired
many scholars from different disciplines in the second half of the twentieth
century to design approaches that transcend the bodiless and dematerialized
aesthetic theory in the philosophy of art.
The second divide relates to the fact that neo-Kantian aesthetic theory
was almost exclusively applied to what became known as high or modern art
(i.e., art stored and exhibited in special places and spaces) and not to what
was degradingly labeled as low art or kitsch: mass-produced imagery and
objects meant to be consumed by vast numbers of people. In this connection,
it is important to realize that this distinction between high art and low ran
more or less parallel with a third divide that came into existence with the
Enlightenment: the separation of the artistic from the religious realm.