Aesthetic categories of uniqueness and peculiarity and the risk of their use in axiological context

Abstract

The main subject of the article are uniqueness and peculiarity – both as terms that function within the theoretical-aesthetic discourse and as words playing a significant role in everyday language. They are commonly use outside the context of aesthetics and philosophical reflection on art and overused by institutions carrying out tasks in the field of socio-cultural policy to promote events, phenomena and objects, even though both their etymology, semantics and linguistic pragmatics indicate that they are problematic. This is because there is a certain level of inherent judgement present in their lexical definitions, and they acquire additional evaluative value in different contexts. Moreover, based on dictionary definitions it can be seen that “uniqueness” and “peculiarity” are words functioning in a semantic family that poses a risk of blurring meanings. This in turn results in ambiguity in the aesthetic-normative evaluation of phenomena described by notions of uniqueness and peculiarity as terms functioning in the theoretical-aesthetic discourse. The analysis of word origins, the characterization of the normative potential of “uniqueness” and “peculiarity” as well as words related to them, and the emphasis on the role of the context in which they occur, juxtaposed with their basic meaning in selected modern languages, will highlight the key linguistic problems in everyday experience, but also to point to terminological issues significant from the point of view of specialist discourse