The aesthetic dimension in the António Quadros’ thought

Abstract

For António Quadros, existence is the first category of being, as opposed to essence, with feeling constituting a gnoseological path that precedes reason; if sensation and reason are articulated in the same process of perception and apperception, reason is still obliged to admit other modes of access and metaphysical revelation of being, whether the symbol, the myth or the dream, which simultaneously signals the speculative in a path different from existential thinking of an ontological or phenomenological nature. There is no “man” but human beings in a concrete situation, a fact that makes any abstract dimension of the human impossible, as well as its subtraction from a cosmic order whose hierarchy comprises the human, the natural and the divine, constituting the nature is the mediator between the other two poles. This mediation occurs through the symbol, the greatest power of aesthetic communicability that every work of art presupposes.