«LA BELLE ÂME» ET LES BEAUX OBJETS DE NOTRE TEMPS
"THE BEAUTIFUL SOUL" AND THE BEAUTIFUL OBJECTS OF OUR TIME

Summary/Abstract: We are surrounded by beautiful objects but by bad social relations, would one conclude after the evaluation of the state of our society. But the article does not deal with sociology of art, and lesser with political sociology. Its aim is to give an epistemological and ethical substantiation of an important problem in the present philosophical debates. After defining the objects and their functions, one shows a) the reciprocal compensation between the beautiful and the other functions of objects, b) the historical separation between the concepts, and c) the formation of the idea of unity and reciprocal translatability of the beautiful, the good and the true. The twofold and intertwining relation of the modern man and the world (on the one hand, it is able to consider only the individual, but not the concrete universal: the characterisations and the concepts, as the beautiful, have not in view the relations between domains, but only the objects considered individually/in an isolated way; on the other hand, the modern man cannot translate (reciprocally) neither the domains nor the concepts) does correspond to the concept – actually, to the epistemological model – of Hegel’s beautiful soul (belle âme/ die schöne Seele). The result is the monstrous (Sloterdijk’s translation of Kant’s sublime) visible in all the objects, despite their aesthetisation. The idea of unity (and thus, of reciprocal translatability, Kant) of the beautiful, the good and the true – and the critique of the disjunction between the aesthetics, the ethics and the search for the rational knowledge – are opposed to the monstrous in order to demonstrate the necessity of this reciprocal translation but also the real tendency of the present-day people to assume the competence to assess the beautiful beyond appearances.

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