Aesthetics, Vol. I
Written in the early 1970s during the last years of his life, as if harvesting a lifetime of reflection, Aesthetics is Dietrich von Hildebrand’s comprehensive two-volume study and defense of beauty and art.
Hildebrand rehabilitates the concept of beauty as an objective rather and purely subjective phenomenon. His systematic account renews the Classical and Christian vision of beauty as a reliable mode of perception that leads humanity toward the true, the good, and ultimately the divine. There is no more important issue in our culture—sacred or secular—than the restoration of beauty. And there is no better place to start this urgent enterprise than Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Aesthetics.
Dana Gioia | From the Foreword
Reviews & Commentary
From scholars, students, and readers
Aesthetics not only inspires and instructs us on how to look and listen to beautiful things, it also provides us with fruitful conceptual distinctions for understanding and articulating the aesthetic values and disvalues we experience in nature and art.
For the English-speaking reader who has studied the works by von Hildebrand previously available in English (on topics ranging from value to affectivity to liturgy), these volumes on beauty are an indispensable completion of the whole. For readers new to von Hildebrand, they present an excellent introduction.
Hildebrand’s Aesthetics is a work that deserves intensive and extended examination. It is a major contribution to the Catholic philosophical tradition and should be of interest to philosophers of all sorts, not just those working in aesthetics.
Hildebrand offers a passionate and original analysis of art and various aesthetic questions. He contemplates beauty in nature, in human life, and in every kind of artwork. The range of his discussion is impressive, especially in light of the seriousness and detail with which he treats his topics. His pages brim with unexpected insights into things most people don’t think twice about, such as the beauty of a blue sky.
Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Aesthetics is not only an important work in aesthetic theory but also a seminal phenomenological treatise. It beautifully captures the importance of value and disvalue and their meaning for our lives as human persons
Antonio Calcagno
in Canadian Society for Continental PhilosophyVon Hildebrand’s Aesthetics, recently translated into English and published by the Hildebrand Project, is a monumental work applying the phenomenological approach and a Christian and classical focus to the field of aesthetics.
This text is essential to a modern engagement with aesthetics, and von Hildebrand’s value response method breathes new life into this philosophical discipline.
Olivia Gulino
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