Kantian disinterested aesthetic pleasure descends from magical fetish worship

Evidence

The disinterested pleasure that according to Kant is aroused by works of art, can only be understood by virtue of historical antitheses still at work in each aesthetic object. The thing disinterestedly contemplated pleases because it once claimed the utmost interest and thus precluded contemplation. The latter is a triumph of enlightened self-discipline. Gold and precious stones, in the perception of which beauty and luxury still coexist undistinguished, were honoured as magical. The radiance they reflect was thought their own essence. Under their power falls whatever is touched by their light. This was early used in the mastering of nature. Jewels were seen as instruments for subjugating the course of the world by its own cunningly usurped power. The magic adhered to the illusion of omnipotence. This illusion was dispelled by mind’s self-enlightenment, but the magic has survived as the power of radiant things over men, in whom they once instilled a dread that continues to hold their eyes spellbound, even after they have seen through its claim to domination. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 250

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A whole genealogy of beauty in one sweep: disinterested contemplation as a residue of fetishist dread, enlightenment as the source rather than opponent of the aesthetic.
• XREF: This continues the Dialectic of Enlightenment’s myth/enlightenment entanglement into aesthetics proper. — connects to: Mechanical reproduction of beauty destroys the unconscious idolatry that made beauty vital; Kantian ethics made morality rational and shorn of embodied form, displacing Aristotelian ethics — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival…, 191; Kant’s sublime frames aesthetic feeling as subjection to commanding violence — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the…, 602 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Modern occultism reanimates objects the way commodity fetishism does #expands (0.82) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 259
• Kant defines the sublime as an accord-discordant emotion of attraction and repulsion #qualifies (0.80) — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 594
• Civilization’s bondage breeds longing that becomes worship of a transfigured nature #corroborates (0.80)
• Kant’s sublime frames aesthetic feeling as subjection to commanding violence #complicates (0.78) — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 602
• Both aesthetic mood and money-possession liberate the self from resistant reality #corroborates (0.78) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 451
• Kantian ethics made morality rational and shorn of embodied form, displacing Aristotelian ethics #complicates (0.75) — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 191
• Beauvoir rejected Kantian ethics for presupposing a closed voluntarist circularity #responds-to (0.72) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 428
• Sadism originates in desire’s failure to sustain reciprocal incarnation #expands (0.70)