ABSTRACT
Beauty is central to the notion of culture, and the free pursuit of beauty is that which offers us the key to escaping the brutal limitations of the aesthetic mind. Within Western culture there are two primary and perennial approaches to the pursuit of beauty: the Platonic/Augustinian and the Aristotelian/ Aquinian. As discussed in detail above, beauty is reduced to aesthetics via the Aristotelian distinction of perfection from moral goodness, a distinction later developed under Conceptualism and then advanced by an interpretation of Scholasticism. That interpretation of Scholasticism is consummated in the work of the empirical and emotivist Scholasticism of Kant and his epigones, particularly Nietzsche and Heidegger. There is a wide variety of tactics by which to advance an aesthetic worldview, but they all share a single and common aesthetic strategy. That strategy foundationally relies upon the purposeless metaphysics of existentialism. It centers on a subjective-objectivity where reason is reduced to a matter of taste and ultimately the will. Consequently reasonable conversation is replaced by sheer assertion or denial—be it ironic and detached or violently engaged.
