Aesthetics

When thinking about the aesthetic judgment on the beautiful that constitutes the central theme of the first part of the Critique of Judgment, we need to acknowledge that one predicates individual and accidental objects to be beautiful by means of a singular judgment, yet at the same time, it is based on the a priori principle accompanied with universality and necessity. It can be regarded as paradoxical and ambiguous, but those are the essential characteristics of reflective judgment of taste. Thus, the aesthetic judgment on the beautiful will be dealt with in the pure and transcendental realm of critical philosophy, since its claim of normativity ought to assure the universal communicability of judgment for everyone in spite of its essential singularity of sensation. In consequence, the aesthetic judgment of taste must presuppose a deduction in the Kantian meaning. This paper will focus on these issues of communicability and singularity of sense, mainly within the spectrum of Kant’s critical philosophy. The main themes discussed here are the conception of sensus communis, which regulates our judgment of taste, and the notion of deduction as a guarantee of the legitimacy of such judgment.

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This paper aims to clarify the transition process of Zong Baihua’s application of Confucianism (Kongzi, Mengzi) and Taoism (Laozi, Zhuangzi) for the purpose of establishing his unique Chinese art theory from the 1930s to the 1970s. In his earliest articles regarding Chinese art theory in 1932, Zong defined the ideal “aesthetics” as a discipline that took distinct phenomena of art in certain cultures into accounts while it reflected the cosmic view pursued by the culture. There, he mainly referred to the concepts of Confucianism and Taoism to explain Chinese pre-modern art theory and art phenomena. Further, from the middle of the 1930s to the 1940s, he theorized the possibility of connecting philosophy to art phenomena via the discovery of the thought of Zhuangzi. However, after the 1960s, he reconsidered the role played by classic philosophy in “aesthetics” at large and thus turned to utilize pre-modern art theory, instead of classic philosophy, to re-explain art phenomena, while he attempted to construct a mutual complementation system of Confucianism and Taoism as the reflection of cosmic view underlying Chinese art phenomena.

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Ernst Kris and Ernst Hans Gombrich started to research on caricatures in the 1930s and attempted to accomplish the unfinished project. This paper examines the potential of their caricature study in terms not only of the theoretical exploration but also of the curatorial praxis. In 1936 Kris organized an exhibition featuring drawings of Honoré Daumier at the Albertina in Wien with Gombrich’s support. This event suggested their intention to intervene in “the dark times”, which seemed to come closer to the absurd world that Daumier sketched about half a century ago. The two art historians focused on political performativity in their articles on caricatures. The discussion splits into two directions: contextualizing it in the art history and psychological analysis of its mechanism. On the one hand, Kris and Gombrich located caricature in the series of image-magic, with which people confuse an effigy with a real person. On the other hand, it is revealed from the psychoanalytical perspective how caricature gives beholders a comical impression. Kris applied Sigmund Freud’s argument on wit to the visual persuasion of caricature. Finally, this paper concludes that caricature is a technique that converts politically sublime energy into an aesthetical benefit.

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This study aimed to elucidate how articles related to music theory and acoustics in Hugo Riemann’s (1849-1919) Musik-Lexikon changed during his lifetime from the first (1882) to the eighth edition (1916). In the recent development of Riemann studies (Rehding 2003, Holtmeier 2011), the significance of Musik-Lexikon has not been surveyed. This work includes many revised articles and various types of revisions. Specifically, the publications of his Handbuch der Harmonielehre (1887) and Vereinfachte Harmonielehre (1893) brought to the fourth edition (1894) a turning point in articles on harmony, whereas the new terminology and symbol notation permeated gradually only until the seventh edition (1909). Regarding articles on acoustic fields, the criticism of psychological and physiological methods led his Lehre von den Tonvorstellungen in the eighth edition (1916), which could truly contribute to music theory. Regarding harmonic dualism, an ambivalence concerning the application of undertones was detected among the editions. Furthermore, the incremental historicization of his own theory and the evaluation of other theorists lost coherence in the text. Thus, the editions of Musik-Lexikon can be considered as the essence of Riemann’s theoretical development, revealing fluctuation in his descriptions. It suggests that Musik- Lexikon encouraged Riemann to situate his functional theory within the broader history.

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