Implications for the Aesthetics of Zubiri’s Thinking

Abstract

This essay deals with the assessment of Aesthetics’ current situation and the study of the contribution from Spanish philosopher Xavier Zubiri’s thought to this discipline. With that aim, the author goes roughly through the history of aesthetic thinking until today, so that the reader may perceive the originality of Zubiri’s proposal as well as the possibilities it encompasses for an ulterior development of such discipline. The main features of Zubiri’s philosophy —strictly grounded in metaphysics— are described to illustrate his contribution to Aesthetics. This base on metaphysics allows avoiding an hermeneutic reductionism of Aesthetics, as it happens —according to the author— with other current proposals. Furthermore, Zubiri’s proposition to refer to the aesthetic as a transcendental faculty —such as the «affecting feeling»— enables escaping from intellectualism and rescuing the autonomy of the aesthetic dimension of reality without reducing it to the good or the neutral being. This proposal is an alternative to Max Scheler’s theory that, nevertheless, takes on again the transcendental structure of reality like it happened within Western metaphysical tradition.