Abstract

The present article aims to show the relationship between style and design. From Kant's "Critics of Judgment", up to Nietzsche's thinking, the lack of a system and of a world-view causes both the absence of a unifying style and the fragmentary nature of thinking. From this basis we are able to draw a genealogy of design: the design does not work anymore on perception, but inside perception, bypassing the conscious thinking. Beauty aims to shock the conscience, rather than to cultivate it. The concept of beauty reaches the problem of a mass culture which can be the crisis of culture itself. The concept of «standard» eliminates the distinction between subject and object. Design in the consumer society determines every kind of utilization and takes all its possibilities into account, from a pot to the greatest urban plans. This problem finds its metaphysical expression in Heideggers discussion on the dictatorship of «man» and also in Musil's "The Man without qualities".