The Value of the Exception: Aesthetics Did Not Always Flow into History. The Schopenhauer Case|IL VALORE DELL’ECCEZIONE: NON SEMPRE L’ESTETICA CONFLUÌ NELLA STORIA. IL CASO SCHOPENHAUER

The Value of the Exception: Aesthetics Did Not Always Flow into History. The Schopenhauer Case. According to Koselleck’s observation, it’s in the «transcendental definition of history as a category of reality and reflection» that the long process in which poetics was closely intertwined with history came to an end, until «aesthetics was [not] absorbed by history». Indeed, although we must accept Koselleck’s observation as correct and highly instructive, it must be said that on the one hand it’s reductive to identify aesthetics with poetics (or rhetoric), just as it would be limiting to think that the problem of history is concentrated in that of its “adequate exposition”, and on the other hand the way in which that relationship between poetics and history has been consummated does not seem without exceptions. Net of the provocative vocation of his thought, the position expressed in § 51 of the World as will and representation, then treated in more extensive form in the thirty-eighth chapter of the Supplements, and recalled lastly in § 233 of the Parerga and paralipomena, is to be taken as the trace of an evident dissonance, worthy of some attention, considering that Schopenhauer not only included his exposition of history in pages dedicated to the theme of art (and precisely to operate a divergence between poetics and history), but basically didn’t bother to trace an accurate philosophy of history, although alluding to his as the “true” one.