A Study Of Agnes Heller's Thoughts On Aesthetic Modernity

Modernity and aesthetic modernity is a focus of contemporary academic researches, which has become a kind of tendency derived from the crisis of modernity. Whether modern society and modern spirit are exhausted, whether modern aesthetic culture comes to its end, these have become unavoidable problems for contemporary researchers in Aesthetics. Fundamentally, the answers to these problems involve in the possibility of moderns' survival. As a result, positively or negatively answering them, we cannot simply stay at the level of claims full of passions. Instead, we should seriously trace back to modernity itself, analyze its genesis, characteristics and paradoxes, and more importantly diagnose its symptoms in order to find the real causes and degree of crisis of its illness. Only by so doing, can one judge on the possibility of survival of modernity and aesthetic modernity. Just with such an attitude, Agnes Heller, as a major philosopher, Ethicist, political philosopher, social philosopher of Budapest School, surveys some aspects about modernity and aesthetic modernity. She reveals the becoming agency and characteristics and irresolvable contradictions of modernity including aesthetics through a series of studies from the antiquity to Renaissance, to modern times, to postmodern period. She doesn' t think, however, the modernityis over. On the contrary, she recognizes that its potentials haven' t been realized fully up to now. So she attempts to reconstruct modernity and Aesthetics. In fact, Agnes Heller' s studies for almost five decades show us a genealogy of cultural modernity and thus form her particular thoughts on aesthetic modernity. It stands for the main Aesthetics of Budapest School, which also is continuity and development of Marxist Aesthetics in the postmodern context.Agnes Heller' s thoughts on aesthetic modernity may offer some advice for our contemporary aesthetic reconstruction, contributing to the researches of modernity and aesthetic modernity at home in particular. Until now, however, few scholars at home and aboard have systematically studied Heller' s Aesthetics and fewer have probed into it from the perspective of aesthetic modernity. This is what this dissertation attempts to do.This dissertation on Heller' s thoughts about aesthetic modernityconsists of five parts. Part One firstly outlines some representativetheories of aesthetic modernity. First, it remarks on the definition ofaesthetic modernity from three perspectives, namely autonomy,sensibility, and time, and reveals their own structures of function. Itshows the aesthetic modernity, which is traced back to Renaissance andwhich becomes conscious for Baudelaire, is made up of paradoxicaltensions with confrontation and complementarity. And then it discussesthe fundamental framework of Heller' s thoughts on the aestheticmodernity, especially concentrates on her inheriting and updating ofdefinitions of aesthetic modernity, and the complicated relationsbetween the institution of historical imagination which ischaracteristic of aesthetic culture and the institution of technologicalimagination which is characteristic of reason and utility.Part Two discusses Heller' s characteristics of the aesthetic modernity during Renaissance. It mainly develops in two aspects: on thefirst level, it analyzes the genesis of the independent aesthetic sphere by showing the separation of the art from everyday life, ethics, religion, and science, and showing the relation between art and politic institution and economy; on the second level, it reveals the dynamic, individuality, and subjectivity of art of Renaissance. These characteristics of the aesthetic modernity in this period just appear at birth, so it is intermediate from the ancient times to the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. For Heller, this kind of aesthetic modernity is an ideal type of a person's existence. Part Three discusses Heller' s recognition about aesthetic modernity during the process of differentiation of spheres. Heller reveals the common and particular characteristics of aesthetic...