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BRIDGING THE ABYSS: VICTOR BASCH'S POLITICAL AND AESTHETIC MINDSET*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 April 2013

RAJESH HEYNICKX
RAJESH HEYNICKX*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Architecture, University of Leuven; History Department, University of Antwerp E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This essay cross-examines both the correlation and the disjunction between art philosophy and political reason in the thinking of the French Jewish art philosopher, Kant specialist and socialist politician Victor Basch (1863–1944). Two interwoven lines of questioning will be in play. One considers the extent to which Basch's theory of beauty, which was primarily grounded in a psychological theory of Einfühlung, was a corollary to his political ideas and practices. The other line of inquiry raises questions about how Basch's political position, namely his anti-facist defending of republican values, became influenced by his work on aesthetics. By answering both questions, this article challenges the traditional historiography of interwar aesthetics. The esaay shows how conceptual debates of aesthetics were not just sterile theoretical products, but to a large extent offered an apparatus to diagnose and orientate a rapidly changing world. Therefore this essay develops a reflection about the gaze needed to take in the complex historical situations from which aesthetic reflections grew, and which in turn they addressed.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , April 2013 , pp. 87 - 107
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

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Footnotes

*

I want to thank Stéphane Symons, Samuel Moyn and the two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable suggestions and comments on earlier versions of this article.

References

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36 Basch, “Die Objektivität des Schönen: Diskussion”, 90.

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61 Ludwig, B., “Victor Basch et l'Allemagne: Esquisse d'une relation particulière”, Revue d'Allemagne et des Pays de langue allemande 36/3–4 (2004), 341–58Google Scholar.; F. Basch, “Gender and Survival: A Jewish Family in Occupied France, 1940–1944. The Basch Family”, Feminist Studies, June 2006, online publication, available at http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-5969719/Gender-and-survival-a-Jewish.html.

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66 Illustrative of this kind of portrayal is a description made by the Egyptian freedom fighter Doria Shafik, a former student of Basch at the Sorbonne. Her recollections are cited in Nelson, C., Doria Shafik, Egyptian Feminist: A Woman Apart (Cairo, 1996), 73Google Scholar. Also the politician Louise Weiss had bitter memories of Basch's expressive way of debating. She remembered how during a 1930s discussion on the right of women to vote Basch had formulated his stubborn reluctance by speaking louder and constantly shaking his head: a way of behaving identical with what Aron saw happening during the 1939 debate. Weiss, L., Mémoires d'une européenne (1934–1939) (Paris, 1970), 119–20Google Scholar.

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72 Illustrative of this are the statements made by a pupil of Lalo, Liviu Rusu, who defended her master's sociological work. Rusu, Liviu, Essai sur la création artistique: Contribution à une esthétique dynamique (Paris, 1935), 11–15Google Scholar.

73 As was stressed in an analysis of the scientific field of aesthetics made in 1929 by another leading French art philosopher, Etienne Souriau, it was already at the end of the 1920s that Basch's theory of Einfühlung got pushed aside by Lalo's sociological aesthetics: Souriau, Etienne, L'avenir de l'esthétique: Essai sur l'objet d'une science naissante (Paris, 1929), 25–6Google Scholar.

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