The Aesthetics of the Present in Baudelaire: Reversing Platonic Transcendence

This article employs a library-based methodology and an interdisciplinary approach to examine the relationship between Plato’s and Baudelaire’s views on aesthetic works. Plato’s belief in “art as representation” has dominated Western thought for centuries. This theory subordinates beauty to truth and its representation. If, for Plato, truth is universal, constant, and eternal, then authentic beauty must also possess these characteristics. Baudelaire was the first thinker to rebel against this longstanding Platonic tradition, advocating, instead, for the fleeting and transient nature of beauty. The Baudelairean artist denies the Platonic divide between the eternal and the temporal, embracing precisely those elements Plato considered mere shadows and illusions. From Baudelaire’s perspective, contrary to Plato’s view, beauty does not signify transcendence beyond the here and now. On the contrary, the beauty of anything lies in its “being present.” Baudelaire replaces Plato’s concept of “transcendence as surpassing and superiority” with “transcendence as immanence.” In this sense, every tradition has its modernity, and the authentic artist is the one who discovers this modernity. Baudelaire opposes Plato’s theory of “art as representation” because the novel—that is, the unique and individual—cannot arise from representation. Baudelaire’s negative view concerning photography can also be traced to this opposition to representation. For Baudelaire, the Platonic relationship between philosophy and art is reversed, where philosophy itself assumes an aesthetic dimension.
 
Extended Abstract
1. Introduction
Platonic worldview subordinates beauty to truth and its representation. In this regard, a long tradition has always reduced art to representation. If art is representation, then the matter of representation becomes more important in artistic evaluation. True art, in turn, must be in the service of philosophy and its quest for truth. The value of representation remains in its universality, constancy, and eternality. Baudelaire was the first thinker to rebel against this longstanding Platonic tradition, advocating instead for the fleeting and transient nature of beauty. There has always been a tension between the eternal and the immanent. The present study aims to answer the following questions: How does Baudelaire rebel against the Platonic eternal-temporal dichotomy, and connect the eternal to the temporal in the light of modern aesthetics? And in what ways does Baudelairean transcendence move away from Platonic transcendence?
 
2. Methodology
This article employs a library-based methodology and an interdisciplinary approach to examine the relationship between Plato’s and Baudelaire’s views on aesthetic works. The study correlates the traditional and modern discourse on aesthetics. Through this discursive comparison, the present article highlights the Baudelairean philosophy and pinpoints his point of departure from Plato in ontology.
 
3. Theoretical Framework
The crossroads of philosophy and art have always produced new ideas. Philosophy, as thirst for truth, stands alongside art, as thirst for beauty. Plato’s belief in “art as representation” has dominated Western thought for centuries. This theory subordinates beauty to truth and its representation. World history, according to Susan Sontag, is the history of the authority of representation (Sontag, 1996: 4). Just as Plato forced artists to become philosophers, the dominance of representation in art has always caused the work of art to refer to something outside itself. Of note here is Baudelaire’s approach to the present and his notion of immanence. When Descartes spoke of the human subject, he was referring to a supratemporal-spatial being; in other words, the artist must transcend the particularity of the present to represent the truth. According to Plato, everything tangible, partial, multiple, and changeable is defective and evil. It follows that in this view, beauty is equivalent to good and ugliness is equivalent to evil.

4. Discussion and Analysis
Unlike Plato, Baudelaire believes that one cannot ignore the partial, tangible, and everyday beauty in favour of the eternal beauty. From Baudelaire’s perspective, the ideal presents itself in the form of events, behaviours, places, time, and particular, singular, and everyday objects, and never refers to an abstract, transhistorical, and universal world which is free from the constraints of time and space. On the contrary, it bears the color and appearance of its present time, and it is this “stamp of time” that makes it original and ideal. When we separate things from their essence, they become hallucinations and illusions. In the Baudelairean worldview, opposite poles do not run away from each other, but merge into each other, and something leaks from one into the other; this is a world of contagions, not distances. The reversal of the relationship between time and eternity is the liberation of art from the constraint of “representing eternal truth;” art is not supposed to be a copy of truth. This is also the reason for Baudelaire’s hostility to photography. Photography, in his view, is a technology of representation which he claims to be much more efficient than the arts, such as painting, in representing objects.
 
5. Conclusion
The experience of the present refuses conceptual representation, because the novelty of the present is lost in representation and recognition; in other words, what is represented cannot be novel. Accordingly, in the Platonic world, everything is old, repetitive, and imitative. In a child’s world, however, everything seems to bloom in the present, before his eyes. Such was the flâneur, the Parisian wanderer, whom Baudelaire discovered: thirsty for the impulses and shocks and vibrations of the city and the hero of seeing and hearing and touching. Baudelaire is the illustrator of an age that is not afraid of experiencing.
 
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