The End of Aesthetic Life?

It is ironic that the discipline of aesthetics, one of whose topics is beauty, has been treated as an ugly stepchild by analytic philosophy.

Pressed to defend this neglect, one might complain that aesthetics in the analytic mode revolves around a limited menu of ideas, recirculating since the 18th century; and that writing about art is best left to critics, who can be no less theoretical than philosophers but are better equipped to interpret actual works of art; they also tend to write more elegant prose.

I don’t say this judgement’s fair. The editor of Philosophy and Literature, Denis Dutton, ran a Bad Writing Contest whose winners were often literary scholars, their prose impenetrable and their theories meretricious and obscure. Taken from Paul Fry’s book, A Defense of Poetry, this sentence tied for third place in 1996:

It is the moment of non-construction, disclosing the absentation of actuality from the concept in part through its invitation to emphasize, in reading, the helplessne…