André Malraux vs Traditional Aesthetics

This short paper is an English version of a contribution I will make to a colloquy in 1926 in Paris entitled "Les Voyages d'art d'André Malraux." The paper compares Malraux's thinking with what, for convenience, I call “traditional aesthetics,” by which I mean certain key ideas that have characterised aesthetics since its inception in the eighteenth century - ideas advanced by figures such as Kant, David Hume, and other Enlightenment thinkers still prominent today in the current version of traditional aesthetics often called “analytic aesthetics”. The paper argues that, due to its eighteenth-century assumptions, traditional aesthetics is, not surprisingly, obsolete and unlike Malraux's thinking, no longer capable of explaining the unprecedented universal world of art we know today.