Abstract

The original meaning of “aesthetics”—sensitivity—has, for centuries, tended to be narrowed down to only pleasurable impressions, excluding “terrible beauty”. Moreover, it has tended to be reduced to European standards of beauty or deformity. This reduction in popular usage is, however, misleading, rendering us blind to the fact that aesthetics has always been, not least due to increasing doubts about the viability of neo-Platonic kalokagathia and increasing cultural contacts with non-European aesthetics from classical antiquity via the Middle Ages and Preromanticism to the present day. Globalization has, so far, continued and intensified a long-running development: the ongoing provocation of comfort by estrangement, of the ever changing Self by the ever intruding Other.