Modern Aesthetics and Democratic Life: The Struggle for Aesthetic Freedom

It’s hard to imagine a timelier appearance of a monograph than Jörg Schaub’s Modern Aesthetics and Democratic Life. Right now, the same democratically elected representatives who make a show of gilding the pillars of democracy in faux gold are at the same time steadily chipping away at its already shaky foundations. It’s no wonder a generation and a half of skeptics (younger folks in particular) are beginning to wonder if this unquestionably precious thing called “democracy” is all it’s cracked up to be. More worrisome still is that some aren’t sure it’s worth all the effort of preserving it from undemocratic forces. The beauty of Schaub’s book is how convincingly it shows us that it is. Drawing on the best insights of a philosophical legacy that perceived government by and for the people as something more than campaigning and casting ballots, he argues that democracy is a way of life—and indeed, at its best, a richly aesthetic way of life.

Schaub situates this argument at the often-overlooked intersection of political philosophy and aesthetics. The original and attractive thesis it offers is roughly this: that a crucial dimension of freedom concerns our liberation with respect to perception, emotion, and imagination. He argues that the aesthetic is not a peripheral or merely decorative concern for political philosophy, but essential to the achievement—and, just as importantly, the failure—of recognition. “Recognition” here has all the weight originally ascribed to it in the nineteenth century, as the crux of G. W. F. Hegel’s expansive, and often contested, account of mutual freedom. But Schaub lightens it, makes it more familiar, by showing us the fascinating aesthetic dimension of recognition, a dimension strangely absent from a very active tradition of recognition theory. Through well-chosen and highly relevant case studies (socialist critiques of capitalism, feminist consciousness-raising, campus "safe spaces”), the argument moves well beyond the abstract moral, legal, and political forms of Hegelian recognition and illustrates nicely how the achievement of recognition also depends on how we engage in the world aesthetically.

Schaub’s book is not the first (or the last) to diagnose contemporary social and political conflict through a lens considerably broader than the liberal vocabulary of rights and freedoms dominating much Anglophone political philosophy today. But it certainly is a welcome and meaningful contribution to recognition theory in that it turns us away from a fixation on finding new institutional arrangements or revised principles of justice, and points us—in true Hegelian fashion—to the myriad ways the aesthetic operates in everyday social and political life. Here, Schaub tells us, is where we discover (or re-discover) democracy in lived form.

The argument unfolds across three major movements. The first recovers a capacity-based view of modern aesthetics from figures such as Baumgarten, Du Bos, and Addison, and develops a notion of aesthetic subjectivity as the “self” constructed from sense perception, emotion, and imagination. This is more than antiquarian scene-setting: it establishes the conceptual resources Schaub needs to argue that aesthetic experience, properly understood, involves capacities that can be developed, exercised well or badly, and—here’s where recognition comes in—thwarted or denied. The second movement shows where Schaub’s thesis is grounded in Hegel’s writing. A novel reading of Hegel's Aesthetics shows that the theory of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) discussed there seems to require something like aesthetic recognition if it is to do justice to the full range of ways individuals can be recognized (or misrecognized) by others. On this Hegelian foundation, the argument builds a critical theory of aesthetic recognition in its own right. The advantage is that it clarifies a broader set of conditions on which recognition succeeds or fails. But it also addresses the ways aesthetic recognition co-exists (or conflicts) with other forms of recognition, such as the moral and political. Schaub’s book closes a notable gap in our theoretical picture of recognition. But more importantly, it helps diagnose at least some of what has gone wrong in contemporary politics by getting political philosophy to take seriously the sensory, emotional, and imaginative experience of democratic life.

One of the most significant outcomes of Modern Aesthetics and Democratic Life is that it puts into conversation philosophical traditions that rarely speak to one another with this degree of fluency. First, Schaub shows that the tradition of political philosophy concerned with recognition, freedom, and democratic life has much to discuss with the rich tradition of aesthetic theory running from Hegel through critical theory and beyond. Further, Schaub draws on an impressively wide catalog of sources, the productive interchange between them doing much to overcome the analytic/continental divide that continues to constrain both traditions. Above all, Schaub makes an original and compelling case that how we experience the world aesthetically—in the broadest sense of that term—matters enormously to our sense of self and to whether we are able to live full, autonomous lives. If freedom really does rest on recognition, then Schaub makes a convincing case that it rests in part on the quality and availability of our sensuous and imaginative engagement with the world, and further, that any theory of freedom that ignores this is incomplete.

So I agree fully with the argument’s conclusion that a healthy democratic society is one in which individuals experience recognition in the aesthetic register. But I think there are places where the argument’s premises could be strengthened, particularly if it is to convince skeptics of the philosophical traditions it leans on. For example, “aesthetic” does a lot of work here. And I think Schaub is right to treat the term in its most expansive sense. But this inclusiveness runs the risk of flattening important distinctions. It’s not obvious that we ought to treat the aesthetic experience of art as identical or even similar to, say, the aesthetic experience of nature—especially from a Hegelian perspective. Plenty of Hegelians (Danto, Rockhill, myself, etc.) find plausible reasons to hold engagement with art in higher regard than most everyday experiences. That’s not to say we’re right in holding these different kinds of aesthetic experience. But I'd at least want to be convinced that aesthetic experience of art is qualitatively similar enough to other forms of aesthetic experience (sunsets, daydreaming, a good meal, etc.) to warrant any claims concerning a general aesthetic experience and its role in mutual recognition.

Further, it’s worth acknowledging that Schaub’s account of aesthetic recognition is primarily of negative utility. Really, it’s an account of misrecognition, intended to identify clear cases of recognition’s denial or failure, as in each of the case studies discussed. It’s not his aim, nor should it be, to specify the exact conditions under which recognition is successfully achieved. And, in any case, providing a conceptual framework to identify and understand instances of misrecognition strikes me as a more practical (and interesting) goal than analytic precision. But one does want perhaps a little more guidance in the basics of recognition successfully achieved, especially since, as Schaub notes, norms of aesthetic recognition are “typically contested”, always “subject to re-interpretation”, and are therefore even less settled and less well understood than other norms of recognition (e.g. norms of legal recognition)" (p. 166). So a fuller picture of what these norms look like and how they operate within the aesthetic seems like fertile soil for Schaub’s theory.

The final point, related to the last, concerns how this emphasis on misrecognition applies to one of the book’s central case studies: Hegel's notoriously brash critique of romantic irony (Friedrich Schlegel’s, in particular). Schaub uses this material effectively to illustrate the kind of pathology that underwrites aesthetic misrecognition. As a diagnostic tool, this deployment of the concept works well. But I’d push back a bit against the claim, made around page 225, that Hegel offers no indication of what a non-pathological form of aesthetic freedom might look like. The seeds of such an account are already present in Hegel's distinction between Socratic and romantic irony, and there is a further, though brief, discussion of K.W.F. Solger’s concept of irony toward the end of the section of the Lectures on Fine Art devoted to Schlegelian irony that gestures toward a fundamentally different and potentially non-pathological account of irony. It’s not exactly an alternative, positive account of irony Hegel offers here, but it does point in that direction, and further developed, it might strengthen Schaub's case that Hegel's resources extend beyond diagnosis to something more constructive.

These are relatively minor quibbles in the context of the book’s considerable achievement. This is an excellent and original manuscript that deserves a wide readership across modern political, aesthetic, and critical theory, as well as across the analytic-continental divide. Schaub has identified a genuine lacuna in the recognition-theoretic tradition and filled it with an account that is historically grounded, philosophically rigorous, and attentive to pressing contemporary controversies. Modern Aesthetics and Democratic Life represents a major contribution to modern political and aesthetic thought, and it deserves widespread attention from scholars across both analytic and continental traditions.