Arte ed esperienza estetica nella filosofia della vita di Jean-Marie Guyau

Abstract

There are two interpretations according to which we can consider Jean-Marie Guyau’s philosophy as a philosophy of life: 1) the concept of life is a fulcrum of Guyau’s philosophy, the principle that lends a framework to all of the areas of his reflection: ethics, aesthetics, sociological studies on religion and education, psychological research on the idea of time; 2) the concept of life becomes a fulcrum for a new way of philosophizing, compared to which art and aesthetic experience take on the role of exemplars. In this work, primarily this latter interpretation will be relevant. We will first reconstruct the aesthetics of existence thematized by Guyau in his historical-critical analysis of epicureanism and then go on to investigate the characters and objectives of a generalized concept of aesthetics that places a high value on the sensory, bodily, and emotional aspects of taking pleasure in beauty; finally, we will focus on the relational nature of the esthetic-artistic experience, which densely and creatively links the organism to the environment, the subject to the object, and the individual to society.