The Question of the Aesthetic

Abstract

This book provides a justification for the renewed study of the aesthetic in times during which the aesthetic is often regarded as mere diversion from our national and global crises. It offers a “defense” of aesthetic education in these times. Working within the philosophical tradition that dissociates the aesthetic from utility, it argues not only that uselessness has important utility, but that attention to the aesthetic is not incompatible with attention to politics, and might even be more powerful politically if politics were not the direct object of its working. Among the various theories and examples this book offers, the introduction adds one,by way of Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, that can be taken as an argument for the centrality of the aesthetic to human well being.