ABSTRACT
AESTHETICS, ETHICS AND AESTHETICISM When faced with legitimate works of art, people most lacking the specifi c competence apply to them the perceptual schemes of their own ethos, the very ones which structure their everyday perception of everyday existence. These schemes, giving rise to products of an unwilled, unselfconscious systematicity, are opposed to the more or less fully stated principles of an aesthetic.1 The result is a systematic ‘reduction’ of the things of art to the things of life, a bracketing of form in favour of ‘human’ content, which is barbarism par excellence from the standpoint of the pure aesthetic.2 Everything takes place as if the emphasis on form could only be achieved by means of a neutralization of any kind of affective or ethical interest in the object of representation which accompanies (without any necessary cause-effect relation) mastery of the means of grasping the distinctive properties which this particular form takes on in its relations with other forms (i.e., through reference to the universe of works of art and its history).
