SOURCE: Smyth, John Vignaux. “Erotic Aesthetics.” In A Question of Eros: Irony in Sterne, Kierkegaard, and Barthes, pp. 223-59. Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1986.

In the following excerpt, Smyth explores Kierkegaard's concept of irony as well as his inclusion of philosophy and science within the realm of aesthetics.

The aesthetic is always hidden; insofar as it expresses itself it is coquettish.

Søren Kierkegaard

The basic error of sophistic aesthetics is to consider beauty merely as something given, as a psychological phenomenon.

Friedrich Schlegel

Purposelessness and caprice in and of themselves can never have a place in the activity of the beautiful. There must be a higher order recognizable and this is only to be understood through irony.

Karl Solger

The accidental is just as absolutely necessary as the necessary.

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