Studi di estetica

L’estetica di Nietzsche: l’umano tra salute e malattia

Francesco Cattaneo — 2023-12-01

Nietzsche’s life and thinking have been deeply influenced by the experience of illness and the related struggle to health, in a way that goes far beyond the very well-known episode of his mental breakdown. In the first part of this paper the history of the reception of the topic is reconsidered, focusing on the initial, “moral” interpretation of health and illness in Nietzsche, on the later stances of Thomas Mann and Georges Canguilhelm, the former offering a psychological perspective, the latter a physiological one, and ending with an overview of newer studies on the question. The second part deals with Nietzsche’s understanding of human finitude, suffering and death, and contrasts it with post-humanist and trans-humanist assumptions. Health in Nietzsche is not standardized; it’s a result of self-cultivation, that is, of the full development of one’s potenBal. In the end an idea of health as a dynamic balance is developed, that also draws oh Gadamer’s reflections on the art of medicine and on the practical dimension of human experience.

Apollineo, dionisiaco, perturbante. L’estetica di Nietzsche e il paradosso dell’automa

Simone Zacchini — 2024-02-01

This article aims to explore the meaning of the notion of the “uncanny” in Nietzsche’s Birth of tragedy. To read today this work is to encounter a text that has preserved intact the force of its philosophical message: man is such only in the alternance and coexistence of health and illness, Apollonian and Dionysian, art and life. The role of Socrates’ philosophy in Nietzsche’s The birth of tragedy, however, needs to be reconsidered. Socrates is also, according to this reading, an “uncanny” figure. This article is dedicated to an analysis of the aesthetical leitmotif of Nietzsche’s philosophy and a comparison between The birth of tragedy and Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann. Topics are the complex relationship between health and illness and the difference between humankind and mechanical robots or automata.

Una sensibilità affinata sugli spigoli della malattia. La “grande salute” come potenziamento epistemico ed estetico tra Friedrich Nietzsche e Theodor Fontane

Ludovica Boi — 2024-02-01

The article connects the topic of health in Nietzsche’s thought with the perspective that emerges from some novels of Theodor Fontane, by leaning on a close interaction between philosophy and literature. It is shown that two of Fontane’s characters, Victoire von Carayon from the novel Schach von Wuthenow and Waldemar von Haldern from the novel Stine, embody and depict specific Nietzschean ideas concerning the relationship between the experience of illness and the development of a higher cognitive faculty. How could be thought the latter? It is a greater awareness of oneself, one’s feelings and needs, and a better intuitive capacity. Illness is seen, therefore, not as a mere negative, i.e., as something simply disabling, but rather as a challenge for deeper self-knowledge and empowerment. The concepts of health and illness thus end up flowing into each other, since health cannot be isolated from illness, which acquires a new meaning.

Nietzsche’s physiology of aesthetics, and the aesthetics of physiology

Richard J. Elliott — 2024-02-01

Nietzsche announces his intentions to publish a “physiology of aesthetics”, namely a naturalistic explanation for how aesthetic judgements are grounded in the physiology of both the one experiencing the work, and the creator of it. But as well as the physiological reduction of aesthetic judgements, Nietzsche in many places across his oeuvre frames the apparatus of physiology, especially the prescriptive dimension of self-cultivation, in terms amenable to being treated as ‘aesthetic’. The first section will mount a (re-) defense of the use of aestheticized language for discussing Nietzschean self-cultivation. The second section demonstrates an aesthetic evaluation of capacities that make possible the acquisition and removal of instinctual components, ultimately arguing for Nietzsche’s qualified indeterminism regarding the capacity for self-cultivation. The third section will assess the pres- ence of another aesthetic measure, this time in terms of envisaging one’s psycho-physiology by reference to an external spectacle. The final section discusses metaethical questions stemming from Nietzsche’s prescriptive language regarding the aestheticization of our physiology.

Dalla patobiografia alla genealogia. Salute e malattia nelle Vorreden nietzscheane del 1886

Luca Lupo — 2024-02-01

In 1886, Nietzsche felt the need to exercise a retrospective look at the works he had written up to that point. Hence, the writing of a series of prefaces (Vorreden). They can be considered and read as a thematically unified textual body. Rereading them as a unified work allows us to recognise their value as an “auto-pathobiography”. In it, the concepts of health and illness occupy a central position that Nietzschean research has long been questioning. Nevertheless, in reflecting on health and illness, in the Vorreden, Nietzsche also prepares the fundamental epistemological move that will enable him to gradually and increasingly shift his speculative focus from the autoanalytical and biographical to the genealogical plane and authorise him to look at his main object of research, the moral phenomenon, as no other thinker had done before.

La musica come pharmakon. Nietzsche, Wagner e il concetto di salute tra estetica e fisiologia

Alice Giordano — 2024-02-01

The concept of “health”, in Nietzsche’s philosophy, is not opposed to that of disease but incorporates it within itself. The paper aims to show how being in “good health” has, according to Nietzsche, a physiological significance that is intimately connected to aesthetics. Richard Wagner’s music is the iconic example of how rhythm from medicine can become poison and lead a body to décadence. Even in some patients with neurological diseases, musical rhythm can function as medicine, which does not work equally for everyone but according to individual, embodied laws.

Nuanced excesses. Fullness of life and illness in Nietzsche’s aesthetics

Manuel Mazzucchini — 2024-02-01

The aim of our paper is to question the problem of artistic creation as a transfiguration of suffering. We will point out that health is always a state to be looked at with the eyes of a convalescent, and how in particular there can be no artistic creation that is not accompanied by a condition of suffering. Our interpretive key will be the faculty of perceiving nuances, a topic that often appears in Nietzsche’s later writings, and the relationship between the nuance and the affirmative power of art. Finally, we will consider whether the taste for nuance is not itself a sign of a profoundly suffering nature, aristocratically devoted to detachment from all that is grossly general.

Environmental Aesthetics and “being moved by nature”. Reflections for rethinking the theory of the sublime

Valeria Maggiore — 2024-02-01

In the age of Anthropocene, can aesthetics propose a not prevaricating behavioural model towards nature, leading to a new conception of humanity based on our being moved by nature? In this article, we will try to answer this question, exploring how some exponents of contemporary Environmental Aesthetics have examined the significance of human emotional responses to nature. Starting from the assumption that Kant defines the sublime as a motion of the soul, we wonder how aesthetics can reinterpret this concept to affirm not human superiority over nature but his being part of it. To do so, we will turn our attention not only to some exponents of Environmental Aesthetics but also to Schopenhauer's concept of the sublime and the thought of Arne Næss, the father of the Deep Ecology movement.

The question of language in René Magritte’s aesthetics

Chiara Scarlato — 2024-02-01

Throughout the present paper, I propose an analysis of René Magritte’s artwork Les mots et les images (La Révolution surréaliste, 1929) in connection with a reflection on the associated theories he formulated in the handout for his London lecture (1937). Read in reference to selected writings (and in erratic observation with other artworks of his oeuvre), the eighteen propositions of Les mots et les images, along with their development in the 1937 document, might help at investigating the aesthetic principles that guide and characterise Magritte’s reflection around language. In this same regard, in the last part of my article I will focus on Michel Foucault’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe (1973) and, particularly, on the distinction between resemblance (ressemblance) and similitude (similitude). These last remarks, I argue, offer the opportunity not only to think about the way in which images and words are related to each other in Magritte’s works, but also to inves- tigate the vital issue of language, which has occupied a crucial place within French thought.

From photography to synthography. Aesthetic remarks on synthetized images

Lorenzo Manera — 2024-02-01

Firstly, this contribution proposes to address synthographies – images generated through Text-to-image technologies – by deepening the epistemological shift related to the possibility of transposing the image-creation process from the analogue arts to the notational ones (or, by drawing on Nelson Goodman's terminology, from the “autographic” to the “allographic” forms of art).
Secondly, the paper highlights how synthographies can be considered partly autographic and partly allographic, since the linguistic prompts constitute only the notational aspect of the generated images. Furthermore, this contribution argues that the recent critiques around such images, which referenced aspects related to the absence of authorial presence and mechanicality, characterised the history of photography since its beginning.
Finally, the contribution explores how the possibility to create synthographies that are almost indistinguishable from photographies easily might further separate the interaction between the detective and the depictive functions to the advantage of the latter, erasing what remains of the visual reliability and documental value of images.

Sound hyletic. Themes for an aesthesiology of hyle

Elia Gonnella — 2024-02-01

The notion of hyle seems problematic for a phenomenological foundation of experience. For this very reason, its completed invalidity was generally postulated. At the same time, there are many reflections in Husserlian writings that help us understand it better. This paper attempts to show how hyletic experience, by existing in the lived body, triggers in parallel rhythmic, vibrating, and sonorous experiences as bodily experiences. Sounds are experienced by the body before any reflections or conscious experiences of them. In this way, the aporetical instance of hyletic data founds a proposal of resolution in the fundamental corporeal experience of sound.

Robin Becker, David Hagen, Livia Von Samson (a cura di), Ästhetik nach Adorno. Positionen zur Gegenwartskunst. Berlin, Verbrecher Verlag, 2022, pp. 284

Elettra Villani — 2024-02-01

Olga Katharina Schwarz, Rationalistische Sinnlichkeit. Zur philosophischen Grundlegung der Kunsttheorie 1700-1760. Leibniz – Wolff – Gottsched – Baumgarten. Berlin-Boston, de Gruyter, 2022, pp. 371

Alessandro Nannini — 2024-02-01

Richard Shusterman, Esperienza estetica e arti popolari. Prospettive somaestetiche su teoria e pratica tr. it S. Marino e T. Gallo, Milano-Udine, Mimesis, 2023, pp. 226

Giovanni Mugnaini — 2024-02-01

Jay David Bolter, Maria Engberg, Blair MacIntyre, Reality media. Augmented and virtual reality Cambridge (MA)-London, The MIT Press, 2021, pp. 248

Lorenzo Manera — 2024-02-01

Mark Johnson e Jay Schulkin, Mind in nature. John Dewey, cognitive science, and a naturalistic philosophy for living Cambridge (MA)-London, The MIT Press, 2023 (consultato in formato epub)

Danilo Manca — 2024-02-01

On Yuriko Saito, Aesthetics of care: practice in everyday life. London, Bloomsbury, 2022, pp. 232

Yuriko Saito — 2024-02-01