The Construction of Modern Aesthetics from A Historical Perspective and The Opportunity of Aesthetic Life Today

Aesthetics became a basic philosophy branch/discipline with the book Aesthetica published by Baumgarten in the 18th century. Although aesthetics as a term is based on the concept of aisthanestai, which means to perceive and to sense in Greek, and aesthetics was a subject of philosophical discussion in this period, the fact that aesthetics became an independent philosophy discipline was realized with modern philosophy. Along with modern philosophy, the relation between beautiful and good we encountered in the Greeks, the essential value of beautiful that encompasses the whole of life was shattered, and especially the ethics-aesthetics relation came to an end. Aesthetics is confined to an inquiry purely on beautiful in a sensual extent. The surprising thing is that with this limited point of view, aesthetics as the subject of beauty in pre-modern period, could not be deepened and seem primitive due to its ethical aspect extending to the whole of life. Modern aesthetics has progressed with conceptual analysis and evaluations to reinforce this understanding. However, as Hakkı Hünler tries to show in his original work, Estetik’in Kısa Tarihi, in this judgment of modern aesthetic life as a product of a period in which the self was fragmented, is one-sided and one-dimensional. On the contrary, aesthetics as a branch of philosophy in the modern and post-modern periods, has led beauty to lose its essentiality and gradually become instrumental in search of making everything new in a way that will break from its roots. We can only see this problem with a historical reading on aesthetics. In this context, the article aims to bring Hünler’s impressive historical reading back to the agenda and to investigate the possibilities of a purely non-instrumental aesthetic life today.