Bonhoeffer on amusing ourselves to death: Mature aesthetic existence as antidote to everyday aestheticism

Abstract

In 1985, Neil Postman famously and presciently bemoaned a world "amusing itself to death". Ironically and significantly, it is amidst the atrocities of Nazism and the struggle against Hitler that from his prison cell Bonhoeffer reflects on a faithful Christian response to sensory immediacy, calling for the church to found Kierkegaard's notion of aesthetic existence anew. This, he suggests, should neither entail an embrace of aesthetic existence as absolute, nor the rejection of aesthetic existence in favour of ethico-religious existence. Rather, it should be the polyphonous celebration of Christological this-worldly reality, an affirmation of the penultimate in light of the ultimate. While Bonhoeffer's musical metaphors help to articulate Bonhoeffer's argument, they are more than illustrative mechanisms. If on the one hand, the metaphors capture the centrality of aesthetic existence in being Christian, on the other, the metaphors themselves implicitly point toward the question of the formative nature of aesthetic existence and whether Bonhoeffer's own musical experience shaped his theology.