This study offers a comparative investigation into selected figurative and nonfigurative, monochromatic (and mainly monochromatic) artworks by Ad Reinhardt, Ultimate Painting nr 39 (1963), Yves Klein, Monochrome bleu (IKB 3) (1956) and The thin red line (1970) by Douglas Portway. The aim of this research is to examine the possible subjective, meaningful function of the seemingly objective artworks. The selected artworks represent the formalist tendency of the high-Modernist conception of art-as-art, or the artwork as an autonomous objective object. At first sight the objective artworks seem to refute the subjective intentions of the artists who present them as both an externalisation of subjective experience and as possibly meaningful to the viewer. The investigation into the possible subjectively meaningful artworks is guided by an Existential approach to the aesthetic experience, as proposed by Nietzche’s Dionysian and Apollonian concepts as well as Sartre’s conceptualisation of néantisation and the imagination respectively. Both philosophers describe aesthetic experience as a meeting between both subjective and objective elements of their philosophy. The experience of the aesthetic (in the artworks) ultimately leads to a subjective space within which the seemingly objective artworks function as a subjective platform on which the Existential search for meaning can be considered (and possibly relieved). / MA (History of Art), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014

The question of this thesis is whether the individual can resolve the problem of culture crisis in her own case. Culture crisis is a historical moment in which our culture leads us to expect a world drastically different from the one in which we find ourselves. This thesis will focus on the experience of Generation Y in the fall-out of the 2008 Recession. It will be argued that we need a Wittgensteinian view of language in order to account for the phenomenon of culture crisis. It will be suggested that our individual has to be a Nietzschean individual in order to resolve the problem of culture crisis in her own case. Potential incompatibilities between a Wittgensteinian view of language and the Nietzschean individual will be considered and rejected. It will be concluded that in order to resolve the problem of culture crisis in her own case the individual must change the way she lives.

In the following study I reappraise the nineteenth century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897). Burckhardt is traditionally known for having served as the elder colleague and one-time muse of Friedrich Nietzsche at the University of Basel and so his ideas are often considered, by comparison, outmoded or inapposite to contemporary currents of thought. My research explodes this conception by abandoning the presumption that Burckhardt was in some sense "out of touch" with modernity. By following and significantly expanding upon the ideas of historians such as Allan Megill, Lionel Gossman, Hayden White, Joseph Mali, John Hinde and Richard Sigurdson, among others, I am able to portray Burckhardt as conversely inaugurating a historiography laden with elements of insightful social criticism. Such criticisms are in fact bolstered by virtue of their counter-modern characteristic. Burckhardt reveals in this way a perspicacity that both anticipates Nietzsche's own critique of modernity and in large part moves well beyond him. Much of this analysis is devised through a genealogical approach to Burckhardt which places him squarely within a cohesive branch of post-Kantian thought that I have called heterodox post-Kantianism. My study revaluates Burckhardt through the alembic of a "discursive" post-Kantian turn which reinvests many of his outré ideas, including his radical appropriation of historical representation, his non-teleological historiography, his various pessimistic inclinations, and additionally, his non-empirical, "aesthetic" study of history, or "mythistory," with a newfound philosophical germaneness. While I survey the majority of Burckhardt's output in the course of my work, I invest a specific focus in his largely unappreciated Greek lectures (given in 1869 but only published in English in full at the end of the twentieth century). Burckhardt's "dark" portrayal of the Greeks serves to not only upset traditional conceptions of antiquity but also the manner in which self-conception is informed through historical inquiry. Burckhardt returns us then to an altogether repressed antiquity: to a hidden, yet internal "dream of a shadow." My analysis culminates with an attempt to reassess the place of Burckhardt's ideas for modernity and to correspondingly reexamine Nietzsche. In particular, I highlight the disparity between Nietzsche's and Burckhardt's reception of the "problem of power," including the latter's reluctance - which was attended by ominous and highly prescient predictions of future large-scale wars and the steady "massification" of western society - to accept Nietzsche's acclamation of a final "will to power." Burckhardt teaches us the value of history as an active counterforce to dominant modern reality-formations and in doing so, his work rehabilitates the relevance of history for a world which, as Burckhardt once noted, suffers today from a superfluity of present-mindedness.