Spre o înţelegere a categoriilor estetice de Frumos şi Sublim/Towards an Understanding of the Aesthetic Categories of the Beautiful and the Sublime

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to emphasize the philosophical importance of the Beautiful and the Sublime, in the light of the meaning of life. In addition, some of their opposite categories such as ugliness, kitsch or grotesque will be analyzed as well. The aesthetic judgements (or the judgements of taste) about nature, art or even some products of technology are considered fundamentally subjective, but the appropriate philosophical concept is intersubjectivity. After all, there must be some kind of agreement among the aesthetic subjects or at least some of them. Also, other aesthetic attitudes and artistic movements like the so-called performance art or conceptual art will be taken into consideration. Apart from the ussual meaning of these aesthetic values I will underline their specific autonomy. Of course, the aesthetic categories cannot be defined simply by proximate genus and specific difference, but only by analogy. In the end, I claim that the Beatiful and the Sublime are the pillars of artistic creation and of human existence seen as a work of art, through wich the other aesthetic categories come into light.