Ritual Aesthetics

The dissertation develops the notion ”ritual aesthetics” to examine and describe the social value of art in modernity as an infrastructure for collective self-reflection. Inspired by anthropological and sociological understandings of the ritual as a strategy through which communities come together to experience and evaluate the beliefs that bind them together, the dissertation offers a reinterpretation of philosophical aesthetic discourses from the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. The ritualistic reading of thinkers like Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, and G. W. F. Hegel taps into the study’s historical claim about art and aesthetics as a secular substitute for social functions hitherto performed by religion. Conceptually, ritual theory’s conception of sacredness and sacrifice enables an alternative understanding of artistic autonomy that neither instrumentalizes art, nor sees it as something withdrawn from the rest of society. In recognizing art as a site for the “enlivenment” of shared imaginations, the dissertation suggests art as an important societal infrastructure whose mediating work puts people into contact with each other around the ideas they have created of themselves for themselves.