Erkenntnisekel and the development of a democratic aesthetic in the early works of Thomas Mann

The concept of Erkenntnisekel is, according to Helmut Haug, the process of aesthetic perception engendering disgust in the early works of Thomas Mann. This disgust then encourages the process of decay in the vitality of the artist, i.e. decadence. Mann's approach to this problem reached a conclusion in the novelle “Tonio Kröger.” In this text, the title character refocusses his aesthetic activity upon those elements in his environment which represent beauty, vitality, and life. In so doing, the artist hopes to avoid the disgust which would bring about his demise, and he would still be able to create works of art which satisfy his aesthetic needs.;The process of observing, however, necessitates a distancing of artist from object. Thus, Kröger, and by extension Mann, occupies the ironic position of viewing life without being able to participate in it. As such, the balance he maintains is always tenuous and threatens to bring about the artist's destruction. Maintaining this balance, then, becomes an effort which is central to the very person of the artist.;Because politics involve a close observation of society with regards to public policy, Mann, in my reading of his work, approaches politics in the same way he approached arts: as a process of aesthetic interpretation. Just as those with artistic sensitivity are plagued with Erkenntnisekel , he seems to argue in Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen , so societies with political awareness, i.e. democracies, are plagued with a sort of “politisches Ekel” which precludes real artistic creativity and replace them with aesthetic exercises in politics. Mann was very opposed to such a reduction of the arts and resisted attempts by liberals in the first two decades of the twentieth century to turn Germany into a democracy. However, once the republic had been declared after World War I, Mann accepted this fait accompli and set about creating an aesthetic theory based on American individualism in the poetry of Walt Whitman and on Mann's earlier concept of ironic balance which arose out of the artistic theory developed in “Tonio Kröger.”;My final chapter employs the aesthetic theory of a current critic, Isobel Armstrong, to consider Mann's defense of individual and artistic liberty confronted by the totalitarian ideologies of Marxist-Leninism and Naziism as a defense against the totalitarian aesthetic ideologies of today on both sides of the political spectrum supported by theories such as deconstruction and Foucault's reading of hegemony. Democracy always occupies a tenuous social and theoretical status, and Armstrong says that, in the current discussion of literary theory, the category of the aesthetic has been, dismissed by the Marxists and other socialists on the left, had its transcendent power undercut by deconstructionists, and been abused as a source of authority by members of a cultural elite (12–13). Despite this belief, I make the case with Armstrong's support that the category of the aesthetic can be reclaimed for the political center by employing Mann's aesthetic/political approach in defense of democracy.