Article ID: CBB188022223

Spinoza's Counter-Aesthetics (2020)

unapi

Spinoza says very little about art or literature in his work; a fact which partly explains the absence of references to him by the German initiators of aesthetics in the eighteenth century, including Baumgarten, Kant and Hegel. Spinoza's resolute opposition to teleology, however, provides an even more compelling reason for his absence, given the teleological conception of literary and artistic form common to the notion of aesthetics at the time of its emergence. Is it possible to fashion a counter-aesthetics from the materials provided by Spinoza's philosophy? I argue that his reading of the great Spanish Baroque writers, especially Luis de Góngora and Baltasar Gracián (whose works were found in his library), provided him with an alternative conception of literary form based on a rejection of formal coherence and closure in favor of constitutive incompleteness and an opening to the infinite.

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Authors & Contributors
Darbord, Bernard
Evans, Meredith
Fiorentini, Erna
Holland, Jocelyn
Kennedy, Duncan F.
Kozodoy, Maud
Journals
Acta Baltica historiae et philosophiae scientiarum
Aleph: Historical Studies in Science and Judaism
Eighteenth-Century Life
Journal of the History of Ideas
Llull: Revista de la Sociedad Española de Historia de las Ciencias y de las Técnicas
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Publishers
Princeton University
University of California, Berkeley
de Gruyter
Ediciones Polifemo
Princeton University Press
Routledge
Concepts
Poetry and poetics
Aesthetics
Science and literature
Medicine and literature
Teleology
Medicine
People
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von
Kant, Immanuel
Spinoza, Baruch
Wordsworth, William
Blake, William
Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle
Time Periods
18th century
19th century
17th century
Medieval
Renaissance
15th century
Places
Spain
Germany
Great Britain
Rome (Italy)
Italy
England
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