Habermas on Aesthetics and Rationality: Completing the Project of Enlightenment

TLDR

Habermas, unlike other Frankfurt School thinkers, places aesthetic concerns far from the center of his critical work, yet they remain significant as he seeks to separate reason from the dialectic of enlightenment. The paper argues that Habermas is driven by the same problem to incorporate aesthetic rationality into his project of Enlightenment. The authors interpret that artists and critics are tasked with articulating the inner logic of aesthetics as an expression of authentic subjectivity detached from everyday cognition and practice. Habermas acknowledged an aesthetic type of rationality in the early 1980s, asserting that taste issues can be resolved by rational persuasion from trained experts, but he cautioned against uncritical aesthetic specialization that might glorify arbitrary art at the expense of rationality. The article is titled “Aesthetic rationality.”.

Abstract

It is hard to imagine anyone associated with the Frankfurt School whose work, in manner of form as well as content, is so far removed from the aesthetic as that ofJiirgen Habermas. Aesthetic concerns do not occupy center stage in his critical productions as they do in the more literary oeuvres of Adorno, Marcuse, Benjamin, and Lowenthal. Yet they are important nonetheless, as can be seen from his attempt to extricate reason from the dialectic of enlightenment. It was this dialectic that led his predecessors to seek in aesthetics what could not be attained at the level of formal rationality the utopian anticipation of an emancipated and reconciled form of life. It is this same problematic, I shall argue, that compels him to do likewise. In the early eighties Habermas acknowledged a distinctly aesthetic type of rationality. He insisted that problems of taste could be resolved through rational suasion by trained experts, just as in science and law. On this reading, artists and art critics are assigned the task of working out the inner logic of the aesthetic the expression of authentic subjectivity divorced from everyday cognitive and practical exigencies. Yet Habermas did not endorse aesthetic specialization unreservedly, for he noted that its culmination in an avant-garde counterculture whose celebration of art for art's sake of the responsibility, that is, of the artist only to himself seems more often than not to glorify the arbitrary and arcane at the expense of the rational. Aesthetic rationality