Estetyczna cisza szumu morskich fal, czyli o utracie źródłowego doświadczenia

Abstract

THE AESTHETIC SILENCE OF THE SOUND OF SEA WAVES: ON THE LOSS OF ORIGINARY EXPERIENCE

The article presents the history of the formation of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline from the perspective of the relationship between human beings, art, and nature. As a theory of sensory cognition, this discipline emerged from a primordial and embodied experience of the external world. Kant’s concepts of beauty and the sublime, still in the Critique of Judgment, referred to the subject’s response to objects and phenomena of the natural world; however, in the philosophies of Schiller and Hegel they were narrowed to works of art alone, understood as products of artistic practice. Although nature did not disappear entirely from the field of aesthetic inquiry, it was drastically marginalized. The modern program of aesthetics thus identified the aesthetic with the artistic, rendering the experience of the natural world secondary to the experience of art. This process was met with criticism in the mid-twentieth century by Theodor W. Adorno, who undertook – ultimately without bringing it to completion – an attempt to restore significance to the experience of nature.