Blog Marcos L. Mucheroni Filosofia, Noosfera e cibercultura

The idea that there is a liquefaction of aesthetics in modernity is as modern as the concepts of freedom, state and mainly: subjects and objects.
In this death of aesthetics, some authors have already written, the beautiful is merely an exposition of the sensible of the idea in works of art, and it would be from them that the contradiction created in modernity between subject and object would be solved, thus a work of art would be : “The first intermediate link between what is merely external, sensitive and transitory, and pure thinking” was perhaps less liquid, would be “scientific.”
Hegel acknowledged in Kantian philosophy a “breakthrough in relation to other aesthetic theories”, since, according to the apex philosopher of idealism, the possibility of unification between spirit and nature would give for art, but refuses it when realizing that would lead to a insurmountable dualism between subject and object, in a rather rude synthesis we would say: “the idealist demon.”
But he does not overcome this “demon,” as Hegel said: “… the artistic beauty was recognized as one of the means that resolves and brings to unity a contradiction and opposition between the spirit resting in himself abstractly and nature . … Kant’s philosophy felt this point of unification in its necessity, as it also recognized and represented it in a determinate way. “(HEGEL, 2001, p. 74)
The book by the German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, Die Errettung des Schönen  (The Salvation of the Beautiful) (Fischer Verlag, 2015, without translation to Portuguese or english) gives a new guiding thread to the question of the beautiful, with what he has already called other books of “lack of negativity of our era”.
It uses in its language the ideas of the “positive” and “negative”, to designate super consumption, whether of commodities, information and capital, rather prefers diversity than alterity, rather difference than distinct, and thus in the aesthetic to the rugged, and aesthetic is for Han an apology to the smooth, the polite, the pornographic and not the erotic (in the sense of eros).
Subjectivity is confusingly smooth, without interiority and difficulties (without suffering we have already said it), submits to a simplicity that wants to flatten and polish, therapies to overcome fear, distress, religious worship is the repetitive and pure ” indoctrination “, reading without any hermeneutics and full of old and outdated exegesis, lectures should amuse and not teach, media are confused with their ends (which is for-communication).
The liquefied is that liquefazem everything, to be according to its smoothness, its ugliness and its absence of negativity and contradiction, is more than idealism is “pure idealism”, bodies that look like dolls, faces without expression or of unique expression, absence of mimesis, we will return to it, but here it is enough repetitive, imitative, mere representation, false receptivity, the act of resembling, and in the background the presentation of the self (no alter).

HAN, B.C. Die Errettung des Schönen  (The Salvation of the Beautiful), DE: Fischer Verlag, 2015.
HEGEL, George W. Curso de Estética (Aesthetics courses). BR. São Paulo: Edusp, 2001.