One Step Away From Wholeness. The Relation Between the Notion of “Almost” and Traditional Aesthetics in the Heidelberg Aesthetics

Abstract

In my study, I examine the Heidelberg Aesthetics by György Lukács, specifically from the point of view of how he describes the specific subject of the aesthetic experience in his “reception theory”. I argue that the young Lukács constructs the position of the subject of an aesthetic experience in a similar way to classical aesthetic education theories but in an eschatological model that anticipates the aesthetics of Western Marxism at the same time. I claim that the aesthetic subject that forms itself at the gate of salvation, but always only at its gate, that yearns for salvation and creates itself as a multitude of infinite problems, leads to the theory closer to the (Marxist) critical thinking of the second half of the 20th century than Lukács’s own later (Marxist) work: The Specificity of the Aesthetic.