Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Aesthetics as Secular Millennialism: Its Trail from Baumgarten and Kant to Walt Disney and Hitler

Aesthetics as Secular Millennialism: Its Trail from Baumgarten and Kant to Walt Disney and Hitler

Bennett, Benjamin

Paperback

Series: New Studies in the Age of Goethe

PhilosophyFiction AnthologiesRussian History

ISBN10: 1611486580
ISBN13: 9781611486582
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Published: Feb 25 2015
Pages: 300
Weight: 1.05
Height: 0.90 Width: 6.00 Depth: 8.80
Language: English

The concept of secular millennialism summarizes a crucial point made by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism: that twentieth-century totalitarian movements, in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union under Stalin, are not nationalistic but essentially millennialist, focused on the achievement of a universal world order. The question of whether totalitarian thinking can be located in a secular millennialist tradition is brought to the forefront in Aesthetics as Secular Millennialism: Its Trail from Baumgarten and Kant to Walt Disney and Hitler byBenjamin Bennett. Bennett contends that the new philosophical science of aesthetics--beginning in the eighteenth century with Baumgarten, Kant, and Schiller--is the source of such a tradition.

Bennett uses the term aesthetics to designate a tradition which begins under that name but, in the course of the nineteenth century, concerns itself less directly with questions of beauty or art while not losing its secular millennialist tendency. He argues that modern philosophical hermeneutics, in Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer, belongs to the aesthetic tradition. Bennett explores the realistic novel as the main vehicle by which aesthetic tradition maintains itself in the nineteenth century and attracts a large popular following. The argument culminates in a discussion of relations among aesthetics, totalitarian propaganda, and the totalitarian imagination with its dream of human omnipotence (Arendt). Aesthetics as Secular Millennialism also maintains an attentiveness to instances of resistance against the aesthetic impetus in history--hence ultimately against totalitarianism.

1 different editions

Also available

Also in

Philosophy

View All