Introduction

Form is often defined in opposition to matter, to the immediate sense data, as well as to content, theme, meaning, or function, as an organizing principle or structure. From the visual recognition of the characteristic and perceptible nature of a thing, or of a class of things, to the abstract sense of essence, form reveals itself as a cognitive constant—something that allows us to know or recognize distinct entities. This cognitive connotation of form is a recurring theme in the long tradition of Western aesthetics, which lends it an importance not shared by merely sensory qualities.

The notion of form was, in fact, decisive for the very establishment of aesthetics as an autonomous philosophical discipline throughout the eighteenth century. As is well known, this concept plays a central role in the Kantian project, which aims to ground the possibility of claiming universality for our judgments of taste. In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, beauty is identified with a purposiveness without purpose, formal, without reference to other values, to knowledge, morality, or utility; this means that it does not concern the object’s material nature or the agreeableness in sensation, but rather the perception of the various elements that constitute it and that awaken a harmonious and pleasurable relation between the faculties of the judging subject.

At the moment of its birth, form occupies a significant portion of aesthetics’ concerns also in a negative sense. This explains, for example, the efforts of Kant and other authors throughout the nineteenth century to characterize the sublime as resistance to form or as formlessness. The same holds for the notion of emptiness in Eastern philosophies.

Formalism—that is, the analysis of form as a means of judging the value of artworks—was associated with modernism and interpreted as a mode of analysis that is ahistorical and insufficiently critical. Contemporary art called into question many modernist premises, causing formalist criticism to sound definitively anachronistic as concerns about taste began to look obsolete.

For Roland Barthes, however, the more clearly defined a system is in its forms, the more permeable it proves from the standpoint of historical criticism. The antiformalism that prevailed in art-critical discourse in the 1970s can be explained, in large part, by a confusion between two types of formalism: one that concerns itself essentially with morphology, a restricted formalism, and another that views form as structural. Thus, structuralism, as conceived by Barthes, can be understood as an expanded formalism. After all, there is a history of forms, of structures, of texts, and the very idea that forms can be autonomous is itself historical, attesting to the inescapability of another central concept for aesthetics in its modern origins: that of history.

More than the mere incorporation of a new object, the need to conceive of thought itself historically constitutes a major trend in eighteenth-century philosophical thought, one that is particularly pronounced in the German tradition. From the outset, this movement maintained strong ties to the artistic realm—not merely as a field to which historicism was applied, but as a realm in which it discovered itself and unfolded most fully, thereby establishing an intimate bond between art and history. In aesthetics, this meant a break with central ideas that underpinned the interpretation of art, such as authority, the universality of reason, and the normativity of good taste. Just as one could no longer regard the eternal and static reason of a certain classical rationalism as the guiding principle of thought, neither would there be a timeless canon that determined the properties of a universal and paradigmatic beauty by which to judge art. In a break with classical poetics and their normative aims, philosophy should turn its attention to the arts with a renewed understanding of their genesis and development as they have unfolded in diverse ways throughout history.

This approach to philosophical aesthetics finds its earliest seeds in an author whose love for the Greeks as models would seem to set him apart from this trend: Winckelmann. But it is precisely in his focus on Greek art as an expression of a historical collectivity that the consideration of art according to rules and prescriptions is inflected by a genetic view of the ideal—glimpsed through the works in their development, as well as in their decline. By embracing and radicalizing this Winckelmannian historical perspective, Herder effectively founded historicism in Germany, rebelling against the normative impositions of Neoclassicism and asserting, in the arts of each period and people, an expression that is complete and unique in itself.

Notably, Hegel brings this historicization of art to one of its culminating points in the early nineteenth century. Drawing on a system that incorporates the historical as a hallmark of thought itself, Hegel proposes an interpretation of art history that seeks—in harmony with the unity of reason—to account for the broad heterogeneity of different eras and artistic forms. Viewed dialectically, the form and content of art cease to be rigidly separated, watertight opposites (on the one side, the law or style; on the other, the works) and instead appear in their historical process of mutual transfiguration, in different ways across different eras. Hegel investigates in detail the historical process of art, from its emergence in symbolic, Eastern art, through the classical art of the Greeks, to Romantic art, which originated in Christianity and extends into modernity. The core of Hegel’s investigation of this history lies in the relationship between form and content, which manifests itself in distinct ways at each stage of art’s historical development. While in symbolic art content predominates over form—which remains alien to it and therefore abstract—in classical art, the Idea (or Form) is fully realized in the external phenomenon and in human events (in the Contents). Thus, according to Hegel, only classical (Greek) art fully realizes the identity between form and content, bringing art to its zenith. This unity between form and content, spirit and matter—characteristic of classical art—is, however, dissolved in Romantic art—the art of Christianity—in which the spirit detaches itself from matter and becomes autonomous. This marks the moment of discovery of the spirit’s subjectivity, of its interiority, which will permeate art until its final moment in modernity. In this new stage of its development, the form of art, according to Hegel, once again detaches itself from its content, assuming preponderance.

This dialectical transmutation between form and content can be observed concretely in the poetic genres typical of modernity: the novel, analyzed by Lukács in The Theory of the Novel, and modern drama, examined by Peter Szondi in Theory of the Modern Drama. Both express the dissolution and loss of the immanent unity characteristic of bourgeois life (in the case of the novel, the dissolution of the form of the epic, and in the case of modern drama, the dissolution of the dramatic form). By attesting to the emergence of form in epic drama—which makes the form-content split a formal principle in and of itself—Szondi, in his own way, ties in with this Hegelian and, at the same time, Lukácsian theory, highlighting that epic drama, from a dialectical perspective, would be an attempt to resolve the problem of the dissolution of the concept of classical drama.

>Drawing also on eighteenth-century discussions of autonomy and disinterested pleasure, there is yet another tradition that spans the twentieth century and is marked by Clive Bell’s aesthetic hypothesis. In this tradition, form is a crucial operator of identifiability—that is, a condition of possibility for theories that aim to provide a real definition of art. However, and perhaps counterintuitively, even in Bell’s work, the application of the “form” operator maintains an internal relation with an affective dimension, albeit restricted to a specific type of emotion—namely, aesthetic emotion. Thus, throughout the twentieth century and into our own, this tradition has given rise to a whole set of tensions between different dimensions at play in the artistic processes of production and reception, representing various theoretical strategies that focus at times on properties, at times on attitudes, and at times on symbolism. The theme of our Congress, “Form, Time, History,” can recover these tensions transversally: how might we conceive of form not as a locus of reduction, but as the locus of an engagement of attention in time—an engagement whose intelligibility stems from dialogues within both the art world and the broader, historicized social context—thereby breaking with the epistemic solipsism of equally reductive versions of cognitivism? And, at the same time, how can we conceive of this locus in a way that does not reduce form to a mere instrument, but rather as a means of articulating the content of these conversations by way of its own media, such that there can be no paraphrasing without distortion of its expressiveness? What is the role of criticism as an activator or mediator of this medium-specific expressiveness? This is what contemporary aestheticians such as Dominic Lopes, John Gibson, Elizabeth Schellekens, Eileen John, Richard Eldridge, and María José Alcaraz León have been exploring, building on paths opened by thinkers such as Danto, Stolnitz, Goodman, Walton, Sibley, and others.

With the aim of fostering philosophical debate drawing on these three fundamental concepts of the aesthetic tradition, the 18th. International Congress of Aesthetics Brazil invites researchers to address some of the issues relevant to this vast field of theoretical inquiry or to explore possible connections between them.

Event outline

The 18th edition of the International Congress of Aesthetics Brazil will be held between Nov 22th and Nov 26th 2027. All activities will take place presentially at Universidade Federal da Bahia, Salvador/BA, Brazil. There will be conferences held by guest speakers and tables with three presentations selected from the submissions, grouped by theme. Submissions may be entered by master and doctorate students, as well as by doctors and professors. For the tables, there is the possibility of submitting a panel, if three researchers wish to present their work together.

Themes

The 18th International Congress of Aesthetics Brazil: Form, Time, History will accept presentations connected to one of its main themes.

  • Art Criticism and Curatorship
  • Design, Architecture, Cities and Spacialities
  • Aesthetics and Art History
  • Philosophical Aesthetics
  • Aesthetics, Brazil and Decolonization
  • Aesthetics and Identities
  • Aesthetics and Psychoanalysis
  • Aesthetics of the Body
  • Ethics and Aesthetics
  • Philosophy and Literature
  • Cultural Industry
  • Meta-aesthetics and Metacriticism
  • Aesthetics and Politics
  • Technology and Media

Funding

The organization of this event has received funding grants from the Graduate Program in Philosophy at Universidade Federal da Bahia.