Today, aesthetics faces especial challenges, as the boundaries of what classifies as aesthetics are becoming increasingly blurred. This is evidenced by the talk among art critics of the “transgression of art and the arts” and among cultural critics of the “aestheticization of the lifeworld”. The mention of the transgression of the arts is meant to indicate that today we increasingly face hybrid works that can no longer be duly explained by relying on the development logic of a specific genre. Moreover, art has ever more absorbed elements alien to art, has opened itself out to everyday life. Both trends emphasis the fundamental issue: What is art? And this issue has always been connected with other fundamental questions: Is there an intrinsic logic of the aesthetic that can be distinguished from that of the non-aesthetic in the first place? And if so, what does this imply for the talk among cultural critics of an aestheticization of the lifeworld? For this relates to a diagnosis that perfectly complements that of the transgression of art and the arts. Aestheticization refers to a process in which formerly non-aesthetic areas, such as ethics and politics, are changed by aesthetics making pronounced inroads into them. And, or so the critics suggest, this is not just beneficial: because aestheticization by no means merely refers to a surface phenomenon. On the contrary, the process in question is assumed to affect the deeper structure of our ethical view of ourselves and our political culture. Ethics thus gives way to an individualistic aesthetics of existence; politics is replaced by its spectacular performance. The concept of aestheticization thus designates a profound transformation of ethics and politics, namely a transformation that alienates ethics and politics from themselves by dint of being aesthetic. Here, the aesthetic does not seem to be a threat from the outside and instead a form of distortion that undermines ethics and politics from within, gnawing away at their normative substance.

While the diagnosed transgression of the arts thus questions the line dividing the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic as regards the field of the aesthetic, the diagnosed aestheticization of the lifeworld focuses on the line dividing the aesthetic from the non-aesthetic as regards the field of the non-aesthetic. This also means that the two can clearly not just be juxtaposed at the external level. This does not, however, render the question on the relationship between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic obsolete. Far from it, it simply reframes it: The thrust must now be on gaining from these two diagnoses a better understanding of how they differ.

A closer look is therefore required. As in both debates, the aesthetic functions as the superordinate concept for highly different phenomenon, whose interrelationships bear examining. For example, and this is reinforced by the reciprocal transgression, the question needs to be asked as to the relationship now between art and design. How do these two forms of aesthetic practice relate to each other? Is there a unique politics of art, and one for design that is somehow complementary? As regards the cultural critics’ talk of aestheticization, we need by contrast to establish whether the designation aesthetic does not at times simply get used as a rhetoric device to exclude elements from politics and ethics that are not originally aesthetic anyway. To clarify this not only must we take a careful look at all the purportedly aesthetic phenomena that are discussed under the label of aestheticization. One must also examine the ethical-political problems that prompt the critique and highlight the linkage between the highly different motivations involved. Finally, the current debates on transgression need to be put in an historical perspective. Are these really new phenomena? And is this true of both critical contexts? If so, then what role do technological and economic factors play in each of the two trends?

Depending on how one approaches these questions, and so much is obvious, then the impact this has on how aesthetic practice should see itself today is immense. I see my role at the HfG Offenbach not least to entail encouraging such fundamental debate and contributing to it. Put differently, I believe the oblique stroke between philosophy and aesthetics in the professorship’s description (Philosophy/Aesthetics) is a permeable membrane. For given the current issues of the limits of the aesthetic what we encounter is something that has always been the case: One cannot conduct a meaningful aesthetics if one refuses to include issues from the fields of theoretical and practical philosophy. This also applies conversely in that key ideas from theoretical and practical philosophy would get ignored if one did not explore the aesthetic dimensions to our theoretical and practical relationship to the world. My work is interested in exchange with others in both respects and therefore seeks to prevent any self-curtailing of philosophy such as arises by its customary division into specialist fields.