The dialogicality of peircean esthetics

Abstract

This article explores the dialogicality of the subject-matter of Peircean Esthetics. Following Herbart, the American pragmaticist, in his maturest account (1911),conceives of Esthetics as a science that deals with the two kinds of τὸ καλόν, namely with the nobility of conduct (realized in action) and with sensuous beauty (experienced in art and nature), though he systematically predilects the former, i.e. the study of the conditions of the imagination of an ultimate end that is admirable in itself (thus considering the end esthetically in its firstness, as a possible quality) and which is presupposed in the study of the conditions of its actualization as a summum bonum (thus considering the end ethically in its secondness, as a norm grounding dyadic relations of conformity of self-controlled conduct to it). As the esthetic (dis)approval of ends reveals the ultimate ground of imagining the unity of a possible practical identity, Esthetics uncovers theconditions of an inner freedom that makes self-governed conduct possible in the first place; not, however, as a transcendental given, but as the result of pedagogic practices (Sect. I). Next, we analyze how esthetic dialogicality originates from the first-personal stance of the fundamental question it asks: “[W]hat am I after?” (II.1); we differentiate the parties, phases, and presuppositions of this dialogicality (II.2); and analyze the role an ideal – in its methodeutic concretization as a habit of feeling “grown up under the influence of a course of self-criticisms and of heterocriticisms” – plays for the semeiotic causality involved in shaping conduct (II.3).