Aesthetics and counter-modern philosophy

Andrew Bowie’s *Aesthetics and subjectivity from Kant to Nietzsche* emphasizes the role of aesthetic theory in the development of post-Kantian notions of the subject. He points out that some philosophers challenged Cartesian and Kantian views by direct appeal to aesthetic experience: “these theories . . . regard the experience of natural and aesthetic beauty and the fact of aesthetic production as vital to understanding self-consciousness.” In particular, the theorists who employ aesthetic conceptualities focus on music, and Bowie suggests there is strong continuity between theories that focus on music music, a non-representational art, and various moves in contemporary philosophy – the later Wittgenstein, Hedegger, post-structuralism – that “reject the model of language as the representation of pre-existing ideas of the subject, or as the representation of pre-existing objects in the world.” He urges contemporary opponents of the Enlightenment to pay more attention to “earlier versions of that suspicion to be found in the history of aesthetic theory.”