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Animalistic Issue

A short note about speciesism and aesthetics

Speciesism and some form of aesthetics, they seem to inevitably go together. This might be so because aesthetics can help give an excuse to prolong a wrong stance that one has taken, a wrong stance that one is acting up to and aware of doing so.

Speciesism comprises the conscious element of violence and active or witnessed (onlooker-) brutality towards a nonhuman animal or nonhuman animals in general.

The consciousness in brutality in speciesism often get aestheticized by putting the act of violence in the frame of doing something supposedly noble, dignified, heroic, “cool”, smartly provocative.

Aesthetics can normally also be a part of a momentum that breaks any chain of self-deception, and be a vehicle to relate to the experienced world. The sense of aesthetics isn’t something value-free, it’s something that depends on the motivations in an onlooker or an artist.

Does the aesthetical understanding in a person seek to rectify her actions and worldview only, and is thus just a means to an end? Or is the sense of aesthetics really the sense of connecting to the outer real world that’s being perceived?

I can relate to the world in a destructive form through the will to destroy and demean it, and I can relate to the world by seeing what is really there.