The Aesthetic Turn in Philosophy, Art and Society

Traces the widespread aesthetization of society through crucial turns in the history of philosophical aesthetics.

Aestheticizing Society makes a significant and original contribution to understanding the contemporary aesthetic turn. By examining its constituent layers through crucial stages in the history of philosophical aesthetics, Sverre Raffnsøe situates sensory experience and affective expression as ubiquitously present and decisive.

Moving through previous aesthetic turns including classical prescriptive poetics via Plato, Boileau, and Baumgarten, Raffnsøe highlights the beginnings of modern aesthetics in the relationship between aesthetic experience and expression, and traverses the golden age of aesthetics through Kant, Schiller, and Hegel. The notion of an absolute and autonomous art is explored alongside the development of aesthetic experience that invites the subject to transgress and renegotiate given reality.

What is unique about the current aesthetic moment, Raffnsøe argues, is that human beings now configure their own nature as they relate to an aestheticized society, revealing striking implications of the present aesthetic turn for self-comprehension, the formation of self-revelation and self-transformation.