Aesthetic Freedom and Ethical Obligation: A Review of the Construction of Lyotard's Theory of the Sublime

Abstract

Abstract: Applying the aesthetic theory of Immanuel Kant into contemporary cultural context, Jean-François Lyotard finds that due to grand narratives such as ideology and technological sciences, aesthetic feeling is no longer a free game between intellectuality and imagination, and aesthetics has become something "permitted" and "realistic". Lyotard criticizes grand narratives, claiming that art could break up the framework of grand narratives only if it jettisons the limits of recognizable representations and presents "the unpresentable". Lyotard therefore integrates avant-garde art as well as other theories into his postmodern aesthetics of the sublime. He believes that free aesthetic activities of contemporary culture could only be realized with the postmodern sublime. Moreover, introspection represented by aesthetic activities, according to Lyotard, is a unique human mentality different from techno-science, which, as he holds, is the basis for aesthetics and ethics, and could keep human thoughts free. Hence Lyotard regards the sense of the sublime as an ethic feeling, and forms his ethic theory about obligation based on aesthetics.

Key words: Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard, the sublime, aesthetics, grand narrative, ethics

CLC Number:

Ma Xiaoyuan. Aesthetic Freedom and Ethical Obligation: A Review of the Construction of Lyotard's Theory of the Sublime[J]. Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art, 2018, 38(5): 69-76.

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