This study examines how key figures in the German aesthetic tradition—Kant, Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel, and Adorno—attempted to think through the powers and limits of art in post-Enlightenment modernity. The aesthetic speculations of these thinkers, Maharaj argues, provide the conceptual resources for a timely dialectical defense of “aesthetic agency”— art’s capacity to make available uniquely valuable modes of experience that escape the purview of Enlightenment scientific rationality. The book has two interrelated aims. First, it provides new interpretations of the (...) aesthetic philosophies of Kant, Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, and Adorno by focusing on aspects of their thought that have been neglected or misunderstood in both Anglo-American and German scholarship. Second, it attempts to demonstrate that their subtle investigations into the nature and scope of aesthetic agency have far-reaching implications for contemporary discourse on the arts. (shrink)

Kant's philosophical achievements have long overshadowed those of his German contemporaries, often to the point of concealing his contemporaries' influence upon him. This volume of new essays draws on recent research into the rich complexity of eighteenth-century German thought, examining key figures in the development of aesthetics and art history, the philosophy of history and education, political philosophy, and the philosophy of religion. The essays range over numerous thinkers including Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, Meyer, Winckelmann, Herder, Schiller, Hamann and Fichte, (...) showing how they variously influenced, challenged, and revised Kant's philosophy, at times moving it in novel directions unacceptable to the magister himself. The volume will be valuable for all who are interested in this distinctive period of German philosophy. (shrink)

When, in 1735, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten added a new discipline to the philosophical system, he not only founded modern aesthetics but also contributed to shaping the modern concept of art or 'fine art'. In The Founding of Aesthetics in the German Enlightenment, Stefanie Buchenau offers a rich analysis and reconstruction of the origins of this new discipline in its wider context of German Enlightenment philosophy. Present-day scholars commonly regard Baumgarten's views as an imperfect prefiguration of Kantian and post-Kantian (...) aesthetics, but Buchenau argues that Baumgarten defended a consistent and original project which must be viewed in the context of the modern debate on the art of invention. Her book offers new perspectives on Kantian aesthetics and beauty in art and science. (shrink)

This anthology, part of a three-volume series devoted to German aesthetic and literary criticism from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, charts the development of aesthetic and literary theory in Germany in the latter half of the eighteenth century and its emancipation from the hitherto dominant influence of France. This development helped to produce an unprecedented flowering of German culture and art which culminated in the classicism of Goethe and Schiller and in the rise of the Romantic movement, with (...) momentous consequences for Europe as a whole. The texts gathered together here represent the main theoretical phases in this process. Their unifying theme is classicism and the author examines the theories of Winckelman, Lessing, Herder, Schiller and Hamann. The volume concludes with Goethe's essay on Winckelmann, which is both a reaffirmation of neo-classical principles and a definitive statement of the mature Goethe's own aesthetic theory. (shrink)

Applying Aesthetics to Everyday Life surveys current debates in the field of everyday aesthetics, examining its history, methodology and intersections with cognate research areas. Lisa Giombini and Adrián Kvokacka bring together an international team of renowned scholars who are shaping the present and future of the discipline. They demonstrate how the historical origins of everyday aesthetics emerges across the history of Western aesthetic thought, from Renaissance thinkers to the modern German philosophers Baumgarten, Kant and Heidegger. Chapters shed light on (...) the field's methodological underpinnings, tracing its theoretical foundations back to epistemology and ethics and assess the potential of everyday aesthetics as a theoretical tool. They reveal its interdisciplinary nature and how it assists various fields of inquiry, including environmental and urban aesthetics, conservation ethics and the philosophy of art. Through fresh explorations of its origins, background and contemporary developments, this collection advances a new definition of everyday aesthetics and provides a cutting edge reflection on the world we inhabit today. (shrink)

In continuity with the first volume of the series, edited by Corey W. Dyck and Falk Wunderlich, whose focus was on "Logic, Mind, Epistemology, Science and Ethics," this collection of essays carries on an impressive project in the history of thought and ideas that, due to its breadth and depth of analysis, can be compared to Dieter Henrich's monumental Konstellationen. Probleme und Debatten am Ursprung der idealistischen Philosophie. Yet, while the latter's program aimed at tracing the personal and intellectual relations (...) between the various figures of German idealism, here the goal is to bring out of the shadows the German panorama of the second half of the eighteenth... (shrink)

The volume comprises selections from the major work of Kant, Schopenhauer, and Hegel, as well as from Fichte and Schelling, some of whose writings are translated here for the first time. The volume comprises selections from the major work of Kant, Schopenhauer, and Hegel, as well as from Fichte and Schelling, some of whose writings are translated here for the first time. It thus provides a much fuller context for the German Idealist movement than has been hitherto available in (...) any comparable form in English. The texts reveal aesthetic philosophy and literary criticism not as abstract of peripheral disciplines but as absolutely central topics in the mainstream of German Idealist thought. Dr Simpson's introduction places the writers and their work in an appropriate intellectual context, and his extensive annotation seeks to clarify and render more accessible their complex and often elusive ideas. (shrink)

This collection of essays constitutes the first history of modern Japanese aesthetics in any language. It introduces readers through lucid and readable translations to works on the philosophy of art written by major Japanese thinkers from the late nineteenth century to the present. Selected from a variety of sources (monographs, journals, catalogues), the essays cover topics related to the study of beauty in art and nature. The translations are organized into four parts. The first, "The Introduction of Aesthetics," traces the (...) formation of notions of "beauty," "culture," and "art" in Japan. It includes discussion of the creation of the museum in Japan and the frenetic efforts of Nishi Amane, Okakura Tenshin, Ernest Fenollosa, and Mori Ogai to introduce German, British, and French aesthetic thought to the Japanese. This is followed by three sections that examine the transformation of the aesthetic field into an academic discipline that flourished at three major Japanese universities. "Aesthetics at Waseda University" begins with an essay on the spiritualism and idealism of Onishi Hajime and continues with essays on the impact of German Lebensphilosophie ("philosophy of life") on Shimamura Hogetsu and Takayama Chogyu, and work by the major Waseda aesthetician of the twentieth century, Aizu Yaichi. Thinkers of the Tokyo School adopted a "scientific" method in the study of art theory. Part 3, "Aesthetics at the University of Tokyo," focuses on the ideas of Otsuka Yasuji (holder of the world’s first Chair of Aesthetics), Onishi Yoshinori, Watsuji Tetsuro, Abe Jiro, Takeuchi Toshio, and Imamichi Tomonobu. The section concludes with a look at the contemporary philosopher Sakabe Megumi. The last section, "Aesthetics at the University of Kyoto," includes essays on Nakagawa Shigeki and Fukada Yasukazu, pioneers in the field of aesthetics, and on the philosophy of art of the "Kyoto School," which was deeply inspired by the thought of Nishida Kitaro. Finally the work of Kuki Shuzo, an influential teacher of Western philosophy at the University of Kyoto, is examined. A History of Modern Japanese Aesthetics is a companion volume to Modern Japanese Aesthetics: A Reader (UH Press, 1999). (shrink)

The first book of its kind, German Aesthetics assembles a who's who of German studies to explore 200 years of intellectual history, spanning literature, philosophy, politics, and culture.

The rationalisation of the world is answered in Germany by an Aesthetic Revolution (Winckelmann, the romantic movement). It culminates in Nietzsche, and becomes a conservative revolution in the 1920s. After 1945, Beckmann and M. Walser embody the necessity of the aesthetic perspective.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.4 (2003) 565-566 [Access article in PDF] Kai Hammermeister. The German Aesthetic Tradition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xv + 259. Cloth, $60.00. Paper, $22.00. This history of German (or more accurately, Germanic) aesthetics surveys the tradition stretching from Alexander Baumgarten to Theodor Adorno. The author has divided his survey into three thematic parts. In the first, "The Age (...) of Paradigms," Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, Kant, Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel establish the principal approaches to aesthetics and the philosophy of art that will structure the tradition. In the second part, "Challenging the Paradigms," Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche raise critical problems with the positions of their forebears. In the final part, "Renewing the Paradigms," Cassirer, Lukács, Heidegger, Gadamer, Marcuse, and Adorno revive elements of the classical tradition for twentieth-century purposes. As one might expect, covering fifteen complex figures in a relatively short book makes for a survey primarily of the surfaces of their thought. Even so, the exercise may be useful for those with no knowledge of German aesthetics who would like a quick introduction.From the outset the author establishes a plan to consider each philosopher's work in terms of his ontological treatment of art, the epistemic role he attributes to art and beauty, and the practical functions he assigns art. In the early chapters the author dutifully addresses these matters at the end of each chapter, but from Hegel on, the author's commitment to this structure seems to wane. It becomes more difficult to discern these assessments of each philosopher as the book progresses. It is an odd feature of the book that its [End Page 565] author announces these "principles of comparison" so explicitly in the introduction, but does not consistently apply them.There is also inconsistency in the author's choices regarding whose theories to directly criticize. In some cases (with Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Cassirer, for example), Hammermeister offers quite global criticisms of the philosophers' views, while in other cases (with Kant, Schiller, Schelling, Heidegger, and Gadamer) he provides very little criticism. The book does not advance a philosophical position from which to understand why some figures in this tradition, but not others, warrant sharp criticisms that on occasion (with Kierkegaard, for example) amount to blanket dismissals.The second part of the book, "Challenging the Paradigms," stands in an uncertain relationship to the first part, "The Age of Paradigms." Hammermeister advertises Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche as thinkers intent on dismantling the aesthetic-theoretical systems of their predecessors, and there is no doubt much truth in this assertion. Yet these chapters offer little in the way of explicit elaboration of precisely which views of which prior thinkers each of these rebels seeks to undermine. Schopenhauer, for example, is presented as a champion of Kantian aesthetic disinterestedness, while his delirious antipathy for Hegel is hardly discussed. Kierkegaard's famous disagreements with Hegel receive little attention, either.The third part, "Renewing the Paradigms," advances one of the author's principal claims in the book: that twentieth-century German(ic) philosophers recapitulate the sequence of positions in the classical Kant-Schiller-Schelling-Hegel development. Cassirer revives Kant; Lukács and other neo-Marxist thinkers revive Schiller; Heidegger is far more indebted to Schelling than he acknowledges. To some extent the author's proposal is a useful heuristic, especially regarding Cassirer and Lukács. With Heidegger problems begin to arise. Hammermeister argues that Heidegger shares with Schelling a view of art as a "truth-event," but this, of course, would be a view that Heidegger also shares with Hegel. When Hammermeister notes (189) that for Heidegger truth can happen in practices other than art, this strengthens a comparison to Hegel (despite the profound differences between Heidegger and Hegel), rather than to Schelling (for whom art alone is the organon of truth, at least in the System of Transcendental Idealism that Hammermeister treats as the most Schellingian of Schelling's texts).As with the author's other overarching structures for the book, the paradigm-renewal claim also loses momentum halfway through. Hammermeister appropriately presents... (shrink)

In the context of a broad discussion on the relationship between historical research and aesthetic appreciation of historically remote literature in the first decade of the DVjs, Erich Auerbach presents a reading of Dante’s Commedia that combines both. In his article, »Entdeckung Dantes in der Romantik« in the DVjs of 1929, Auerbach declares that he developed this approach (further elaborated in the same year in the book Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt) essentially from considerations found in Schelling and Hegel, (...) from whom he also inherits certain metaphysical presuppositions. The particular conception of realism inherent in this reading of Dante (to be unfolded in Auerbach’s book Mimesis in 1946) is further sharpened in the essay »Figura« of 1939 by the use of the hermeneutic concept of figural typology – albeit at the price of a certain distortion of the historical tradition of this concept. Thus, Auerbach adds a powerful instrument to literary studies, which in the following generations, in accordance with the polysemy of the Latin term figura, is often used in a somewhat unspecific way, now no longer following a conception of literature as mimesis, but as the locus of ambiguity par excellence. (shrink)

Broad in its geographic scope and yet grounded in original archival research, this book situates the inception of modern aesthetic theory – the philosophical analysis of art and beauty - in theological contexts that are crucial to explaining why it arose. Simon Grote presents seminal aesthetic theories of the German and Scottish Enlightenments as outgrowths of a quintessentially Enlightenment project: the search for a natural 'foundation of morality' and a means of helping naturally self-interested human beings transcend their own (...) self-interest. This conclusion represents an important alternative to the standard history of aesthetics as a series of preludes to the achievements of Immanuel Kant, as well as a reinterpretation of several canonical figures in the German and Scottish Enlightenments. It also offers a foundation for a transnational history of the Enlightenment without the French philosophes at its centre, while solidly endorsing historians' growing reluctance to call the Enlightenment a secularising movement. (shrink)

Volume 28, Issue 4, July 2020, Page 848-850.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.4 (2003) 565-566 [Access article in PDF] Kai Hammermeister. The German Aesthetic Tradition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xv + 259. Cloth, $60.00. Paper, $22.00. This history of German (or more accurately, Germanic) aesthetics surveys the tradition stretching from Alexander Baumgarten to Theodor Adorno. The author has divided his survey into three thematic parts. In the first, "The Age (...) of Paradigms," Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, Kant, Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel establish the principal approaches to aesthetics and the philosophy of art that will structure the tradition. In the second part, "Challenging the Paradigms," Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche raise critical problems with the positions of their forebears. In the final part, "Renewing the Paradigms," Cassirer, Lukács, Heidegger, Gadamer, Marcuse, and Adorno revive elements of the classical tradition for twentieth-century purposes. As one might expect, covering fifteen complex figures in a relatively short book makes for a survey primarily of the surfaces of their thought. Even so, the exercise may be useful for those with no knowledge of German aesthetics who would like a quick introduction.From the outset the author establishes a plan to consider each philosopher's work in terms of his ontological treatment of art, the epistemic role he attributes to art and beauty, and the practical functions he assigns art. In the early chapters the author dutifully addresses these matters at the end of each chapter, but from Hegel on, the author's commitment to this structure seems to wane. It becomes more difficult to discern these assessments of each philosopher as the book progresses. It is an odd feature of the book that its [End Page 565] author announces these "principles of comparison" so explicitly in the introduction, but does not consistently apply them.There is also inconsistency in the author's choices regarding whose theories to directly criticize. In some cases (with Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Cassirer, for example), Hammermeister offers quite global criticisms of the philosophers' views, while in other cases (with Kant, Schiller, Schelling, Heidegger, and Gadamer) he provides very little criticism. The book does not advance a philosophical position from which to understand why some figures in this tradition, but not others, warrant sharp criticisms that on occasion (with Kierkegaard, for example) amount to blanket dismissals.The second part of the book, "Challenging the Paradigms," stands in an uncertain relationship to the first part, "The Age of Paradigms." Hammermeister advertises Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche as thinkers intent on dismantling the aesthetic-theoretical systems of their predecessors, and there is no doubt much truth in this assertion. Yet these chapters offer little in the way of explicit elaboration of precisely which views of which prior thinkers each of these rebels seeks to undermine. Schopenhauer, for example, is presented as a champion of Kantian aesthetic disinterestedness, while his delirious antipathy for Hegel is hardly discussed. Kierkegaard's famous disagreements with Hegel receive little attention, either.The third part, "Renewing the Paradigms," advances one of the author's principal claims in the book: that twentieth-century German(ic) philosophers recapitulate the sequence of positions in the classical Kant-Schiller-Schelling-Hegel development. Cassirer revives Kant; Lukács and other neo-Marxist thinkers revive Schiller; Heidegger is far more indebted to Schelling than he acknowledges. To some extent the author's proposal is a useful heuristic, especially regarding Cassirer and Lukács. With Heidegger problems begin to arise. Hammermeister argues that Heidegger shares with Schelling a view of art as a "truth-event," but this, of course, would be a view that Heidegger also shares with Hegel. When Hammermeister notes (189) that for Heidegger truth can happen in practices other than art, this strengthens a comparison to Hegel (despite the profound differences between Heidegger and Hegel), rather than to Schelling (for whom art alone is the organon of truth, at least in the System of Transcendental Idealism that Hammermeister treats as the most Schellingian of Schelling's texts).As with the author's other overarching structures for the book, the paradigm-renewal claim also loses momentum halfway through. Hammermeister appropriately presents... (shrink)

Enlightenment - both the phenomenon specific to the eighteenth century and the continuing trend in Western thought - is an attempt to dispel ignorance, achieve mastery of a potentially hostile environment, and contain fear of the unknown by promoting science and rationality. Enlightenment is often accompanied and challenged by countercultures such as German Romanticism, which explored the nature of fear and deployed it as a corrective to the excesses of rationalism. The Aesthetics of Fear in German Romanticism uncovers (...) the formative role this movement played in the development of dark or negative aesthetics. Recovering a missing chapter in the history of the aesthetics of fear, Paola Mayer illustrates that Romanticism was a crucial transitional phase between the eighteenth-century sublime and the early twentieth-century uncanny. Mayer puts literature and philosophy in dialogue, examining how German Romantic literature employed narratives of fear to radicalize and then subvert the status quo in society, culture, and science. She traces the development of this aesthetic from its inception with pre-Romantics such as Jean Paul Richter to its end in Joseph von Eichendorff's critical retrospective, and juxtaposes canonical authors such as E.T.A. Hoffmann - the father of the modern fantastic - with writers who have previously been ignored. Today, when the dark side of science looms in the foreground, The Aesthetics of Fear in German Romanticism points to the power of a literary movement to construct competing currents of thought. (shrink)

(2011). Diotima's Children: German Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 353-355.

Among his generation of intellectuals, the eighteenth-century German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder is recognized both for his innovative philosophy of language and history and for his passionate criticism of racism, colonialism, and imperialism. A student of Immanuel Kant, Herder challenged the idea that anyone--even the philosophers of the Enlightenment--could have a monopoly on truth. In Herder: Aesthetics against Imperialism, John K. Noyes plumbs the connections between Herder's anti-imperialism, often acknowledged but rarely explored in depth, and his epistemological investigations. Noyes (...) argues that Herder's anti-rationalist epistemology, his rejection of universal conceptions of truth, knowledge, and justice, constitutes the first attempt to establish not just a moral but an epistemological foundation for anti-imperialism. Engaging with the work of postcolonial theorists such Dipesh Chakrabarty and Gayatri Spivak, this book is a valuable reassessment of Enlightenment anti-imperialism that demonstrates Herder's continuing relevance to postcolonial studies today. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Directions in Contemporary German AestheticsMatthew PritchardÄsthetisches Denken, 6th ed., by Wolfgang Welsch. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1990 (2003), 223 pp.Aisthetik: Vorlesungen Über Ästhetik Als Allgemeine Wahrnehmungslehre, by Gernot Böhme. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2001, 199 pp.Ästhetische Korrespondenzen: Denken Im Technischen Raum, by Reinhard Knodt. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1994, 166 pp.The relationship between the Anglo-American and German aesthetic traditions is a paradoxical one. On the one hand, acquaintance with one or more (...) figures from the “great tradition” in German aesthetic thought over the last 250 years is a given for most philosophically oriented writers on aesthetics in Britain and America. Thinkers such as Kant or Adorno form a real and abiding part of our background. In some cases the connection with German intellectual lineages goes a good deal further. As an extreme case, take Terry Eagleton’s The Ideology of the Aesthetic,1 whose engagement with German thought is so deep that I have come across it as a set text for aesthetics courses in German universities (despite the fact that none of the dozen authors Eagleton analyzes are cited in their original language). On the other hand, interest in contemporary German aesthetics in English and American circles appears to be relatively slight. One would have little idea, from reading any of the philosophical journals in English, of just how much activity there is in this area, only a small proportion of which has been translated, cited, or reviewed. And yet the past two decades have seen the publication of dozens of relevant books by German authors, many proposing independent theoretical approaches. Among these—aside from the books reviewed here—are the substantial work done on performance and performativity by Erika Fischer-Lichte (Ästhetik des Performativen, 2004) and Dieter Mersch (Ereignis und Aura, 2002); the theoretical oeuvre of the prize-winning literary critic Karl Heinz Bohrer, of which Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Appearance, originally published in 1981, has made it into English; Ruth Sonderegger’s Romantic-leaning plea Für eine Ästhetik des Spiels (2000); Dieter Heinrich’s work on the philosophy of art and subjectivity, Fixpunkte: Aufsätze [End Page 117] und Essays zur Theorie der Kunst (2003); Martin Seel’s Aesthetics of Appearing (2004); the traditional neo-Kantian perspective of the late Rüdiger Bubner as set out in his Ästhetische Erfahrung (1989); Gábor Paál’s Was ist schön?—Ästhetik und Erkenntnis (2003); Konrad Paul Liessmann’s Reiz und Rührung: Über ästhetische Empfindungen (2003)... the list could be continued. And this is not to mention empirical-psychological approaches, works on the history of aesthetics, the reception accorded to analytical aesthetics and American philosophers such as Goodman and Danto, or the continuation of European poststructuralist and Frankfurt School traditions (for example, in the work of Albrecht Wellmer and Christoph Menke).Given this large “backlog” of writing not yet assimilated into Anglo-American discussion, it makes sense to be selective and range a little further than the most recently published texts. Owing to sheer diversity, I cannot honestly claim that the three books I am going to discuss here are “representative” of the interests driving contemporary German aesthetics. But I have chosen them for certain common traits, traditions, and emphases that seem to me to present a stimulating contrast with the approach of Anglo-American philosophical aesthetics, while retaining many points of contact with non-German thought. That the contrast does not come down to the crass standoff of “analytical” vs. “Continental,” and all the clichés about academic style that go with it, should become obvious. It is more interesting than that, and although I want to leave the details to the discussion of the three books, I can mention at the outset a few aspects I regard as important. One is that none of these authors addresses themselves exclusively to either the philosophy of art or to the aesthetics of nature and the environment. Instead they tend to make points relating to both, or to regard both as aspects of a single situation. “Environmental aesthetics” in Anglo-American philosophy—for instance, the work of Allen Carlson—is not only of recent date but is still a subdiscipline separated from aesthetics... (shrink)

As illustrated in Goethe's famous novel of the same name, elective affinities are powerful relationships that crystallize under changing conditions. In this new book, Lydia Goehr focuses on the history of elective affinities between philosophy and music from German classicism, romanticism, and idealism to the modernist aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adorno and Arthur C. Danto. Aesthetic theory, she argues, depends on a dynamic philosophy of history centered on tendencies, yearnings, needs, and potentialities. With this in mind, she recasts (...) the theses of Adorno and Danto regarding the death or end of philosophy, art, music, and human experience as arguments for continuation and survival. _Elective Affinities_ tracks the migration of aesthetic and critical theory from Germany to the United States following the catastrophic period of the twentieth century marked by the Second World War. (shrink)

Raymond Geuss has been a distinctive contributor to the analysis and evaluation of German philosophy and to recent debates in ethics. In this new collection he treats a variety of topics in ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of history with special reference to the work of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Adorno. Two of the essays in the volume deal with central aspects of the philosophy of Nietzsche. The collection also contains an essay on the history of conceptions of 'culture' and (...) one on the ethics of Ernst Tugendhat. The remaining three essays focus on questions in aesthetics. The volume will be of interest to students of modern philosophy, German intellectual and cultural history, and literary theory. (shrink)

The second volume of _Analytical Psychology and German Classical Aesthetics_ builds on the previous volume to show how German classicism, specifically the classical aesthetics associated with Goethe and Schiller known as Weimar classicism, was a major influence on psychoanalysis and analytical psychology alike. This volume examines such significant parallels between analytical psychology and Weimar classicism as the methodological similarities between Goethe’s morphological and Jung’s archetypal approaches, which both seek to use synthesis as well as analysis in their attempt (...) to understand the world. It also focuses on the project of the construction of the self, which, it is argued, is not only a personal but also a cultural activity. This book, like its previous volume, aims to clarify the intellectual continuity between Weimar classicism and analytical psychology. It will be of interest to both students and scholars in the fields of analytical psychology, comparative literature, and the history of ideas. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer undoubtedly belong among the most important representatives of twentieth-century phenomenological hermeneutics, which represents, in turn, one of the major traditions within so-called continental philosophy. Respectively teacher and pupil, during their long and philosophically intense lives and careers Heidegger and Gadamer greatly contributed to the development of philosophical thought in our age, providing significant and often decisive contributions in various fields of philosophical inquiry. Their main works, Being and Time (1927) and Truth and Method (1960), respectively (...) amount to the great "classics" of contemporary philosophy, both being extraordinarily influential books without which the history of twentieth- and also twenty-first century philosophy as we know it would not be conceivable. This book addresses a number of problems concerning aesthetics, metaphysics, language and philosophical anthropology, by focusing on Heidegger's and Gadamer's specific contributions in these fields, and by establishing fruitful and original comparisons between their views and those of other relevant thinkers of our time, such as Hannah Arendt, Richard Rorty and John McDowell. The book adopts a comparative approach that portrays the complex philosophical problems and concepts at the core of this investigation from various points of view, thus broadening the philosophical horizon, generating a more comprehensive perspective, and underlining the compatibility of different philosophical views. (shrink)

György Alajos Szerdahely, the first professor of aesthetics in Pest, publishes his Aesthetica in 1778, a work, written in Latin, that not only engages with the eclectic university aesthetics of late-18th-century Germany and Central Europe, but also marks the beginning of the Hungarian aesthetic tradition. Szerdahely proposes aesthetics as the doctrine of taste, a philosophical discipline that can polish our manners and social conduct through a sensual-affective Bildung offered by art experiences. Highlighting his sources in both British criticism and (...) class='Hi'>German aesthetics, the paper traces the development of Szerdahely's concept of beauty from beauty as form (uniformity amidst variety) to beauty in motion (sensibility). Initially, Szerdahely argues for unity and variety as the two main constituents of a beautiful object, evoking disinterested contemplation, but he then turns to sensibility as the third necessary condition of beauty: an object becomes aesthetically beautiful only if it has the power to strike the senses (Lux) and stir the affections (Vivacitas), enlivening the whole embodied person. The paper argues that this third principle of sensibility proves to be more emphatic than the first two, leading to (1) the aesthetic conception of beauty as an experiential quality; but more interestingly to (2) the incorporation of the element of self-preservation and self-love into aesthetic experience. The reason for the latter development lies in Szerdahely’s anthropological argument, which traces back every affection to the instantaneous apprehension of good or evil concerning ourselves, implying desire (Adpetitus) or aversion (Auersi) in our reactions. (shrink)

That a symbolic object or work of art participates in what it signifies, as a part within a whole, was a controversial claim discussed with particular intensity in the wake of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment. It informed the aesthetic theories of a constellation of writers in Jena and Weimar around 1800, including Moritz, Goethe, Schelling and Hegel. Yet the twin concepts of symbol and intuition were not only tools of literary and mythological criticism: they were integral even to questions (...) of epistemology and methodology in the fields of theology, metaphysics, history and natural philosophy. The international contributors to this volume further explore how both the explanatory potential and peculiar dissatisfactions of the symbol entered the Anglo-American discourse, focusing on Coleridge, Crabb Robinson and Emerson. Contemporary debates about the claims of symbolic as opposed to allegorical art are kept in view throughout. (shrink)

Aesthetics is the part of contemporary academic philosophy that is concerned with art, beauty, criticism, and taste. As such, it must address metaphysical issues, epistemic problems, and questions of value. This makes it difficult to present a coherent account of the subject matter of aesthetics. In this article, I argue that this difficulty is the result of ambiguities and contradictions that arose in disputes about the relationship between the science of aesthetics, the critique of taste, and the philosophy of art (...) in German philosophy during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. By reconstructing the history of these debates, I hope to shed new light on the origins of aesthetics as a discipline and to explain why its subject matter and status within philosophy are still so difficult to define. (shrink)

History, Metaphors, and Fables collects the central writings by Hans Blumenberg and covers topics such as on the philosophy of language, metaphor theory, non-conceptuality, aesthetics, politics, and literary studies. This landmark volume demonstrates Blumenberg's intellectual breadth and gives an overview of his thematic and stylistic range over four decades. Blumenberg's early philosophy of technology becomes tangible, as does his critique of linguistic perfectibility and conceptual thought, his theory of history as successive concepts of reality", his anthropology, or his studies of (...) literature. History, Metaphors, Fables allows readers to discover a master thinker whose role in the German intellectual post-war scene can hardly be overestimated. (shrink)

Eighteenth-century historiography was not, as Meinecke argued, "the substitution of a process of individualizing observation for a generalizing view of human forces in history." This generally accepted view involves a metaphysics which, though characteristic of nineteenth-century historicism, rejects the primarily contextual evaluation of eighteenth-century historicism. This underlying form of evaluation developed not with individualism, but with aesthetics. Though usually considered a product of the eighteenth century, aesthetic historicism can be traced to the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, which (...) began in the late 1680s and culminated with the "war over Homer" of 1714-1716. This argument explored the problem of evaluating the art of other historical ages. The implications of this position are that historicism was not an essentially German movement and that historicism was not a rigid antithesis to the Enlightenment. (shrink)

There is fast-growing awareness of the role atmospheres play in architecture. Of equal interest to contemporary architectural practice as it is to aesthetic theory, this 'atmospheric turn' owes much to the work of the German philosopher Gernot Böhme. Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces brings together Böhme's most seminal writings on the subject, through chapters selected from his classic books and articles, many of which have hitherto only been available in German. This is the only translated version (...) authorised by Böhme himself, and is the first coherent collection deploying a consistent terminology. It is a work which will provide rich references and a theoretical framework for ongoing discussions about atmospheres and their relations to architectural and urban spaces. Combining philosophy with architecture, design, landscape design, scenography, music, art criticism, and visual arts, the essays together provide a key to the concepts that motivate the work of some of the best contemporary architects, artists, and theorists: from Peter Zumthor, Herzog & de Meuron and Juhani Pallasmaa to Olafur Eliasson and James Turrell. With a foreword by Professor Mark Dorrian and an afterword by Professor David Leatherbarrow,, the volume also includes a general introduction to the topic, including coverage of it history, development, areas of application and conceptual apparatus. (shrink)

In this essay, I aim to reconstruct the first systematic encounter between the modern discipline of psychology and the philosophical and theological tradition of the therapy of the soul in the German Enlightenment. With a detailed investigation of Johann Christian Bolten’s Thoughts about Psychological Cures (1751) and its context, I intend to argue for the importance of the role of Baumgarten’s and Meier’s aesthetics as the connecting link between the previous tradition of medicina mentis and the psychological turn in (...) the therapy of the soul. In more detail, I will examine the influence of aesthetics on three different aspects of the psychological cures, that is, the doctor’s visit to the patient; the treatment of the lower faculties of the soul; and therapeutic efficacy. Finally, I will elucidate the consequences of the foundation of the therapy of the soul on psychological principles for both philosophy and medicine up to the moment in which the “medicine of the soul” will start to be spelled with the Graecizing name of “psychiatry” at the beginning of the nineteenth century. (shrink)

Following suggestions of Isaiah Berlin, Charles Taylor articulates a central doctrine of late eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century German philosophy: “expressivism,” viz., the view that the most valuable human life is one of self-expression. This conception has its historical roots in Rousseau’s proto-Romantic celebration of natural authenticity and in Herder’s deistic naturalism, and has had considerable influence on subsequent philosophers and Western culture broadly. Taylor suggests that this doctrine both draws from philosophical aesthetics and explains the central role aesthetics comes to (...) play in nineteenth-century philosophy as a paradigm, perhaps the highest, realm of human existence. This paper critically investigates this doctrine and its historical-intellectual origins, specifically in connection to modern European aesthetics. I argue that Taylor’s expressivist ideal comprises several elements, which are neither necessarily connected with one another, nor obviously valuable. I propose that the coincidence and valuation of these elements in expressivism may be understood historically to derive from the combination (perhaps conflation) of two central theoretical doctrines in aesthetics concerning beauty. Though this account can explain why philosophers come to endorse something like expressivism, it does not, I suggest, resolve all of the difficulties attendant on this view. (shrink)

This article presents a summary of the main views in Dambeck’s lectures on aesthetics on the basis of all known sources and compares the views thus obtained with views developed in German aesthetics in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, with the aim of finding their chief source and reintegrating them both into German aesthetics and, more narrowly, into the aesthetics taught at Prague University. Johann Heinrich Dambeck constructed his lecture series on the plan of Zschokke’s (...) textbook Ideen zur psychologischen Aesthetik (1793) which has never been taken into account in any other research on his lectures. The close link between Dambeck’s lectures and this textbook compels us to revise the current understanding of the nature of their ideas. Dambeck has so far been most often unproblematically presented as an adherent and disseminator of Kant’s and Schiller’s ideas about aesthetics in the Bohemian Lands. The key textbook on which he bases his university lecture series is, however, intentionally un-Kantian. Zschokke’s Ideen is part of the psychological-anthropological stream of Late-Enlightenment German aesthetics. (shrink)

A classic of 18th-century thought, Schiller’s treatise on the role of art in society ranks among German philosophy’s most profound works. An important contribution to the history of ideas, it employs a political analysis of contemporary society—and of the French Revolution, in particular—to define the relationship between beauty and art. Schiller’s proposal of art as fundamental to the development of society and the individual remains an influential concept, and this volume offers his philosophy’s clearest, most relevant expression. Translated and (...) with an introduction by Reginald Snell. (shrink)

Introduction Herder's status within German intellectual history has largely rested on the premise that he, along with his friend Johann Georg Hamann, ...

Schiller's 1795 essay on the educative function of art is one of the most important contributions to the history of ideas in modern times. This English-German parallel text edition includes a long analytical introduction and extensive notes.

Schiller's 1795 essay on the educative function of art is one of the most important contributions to the history of ideas in modern times. This English-German parallel text edition includes a long analytical introduction and extensive notes.

The relation between gender and aesthetics is central to any formulation of feminist aesthetics, and yet the meanings of these terms are continually contested and revised. Both gender and aesthetics carry diverse, interdisciplinary significations, which are shaped by complex histories of disagreements. When the term “aesthetic” was first introduced in the eighteenth century by the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten, it did not refer to artistic production but rather to the mode of knowledge gained through the senses. Aesthetics today can (...) have at least three different meanings: (1) a general theory of artistic practices; (2) a theory of reception, focused upon how we appreciate or judge natural beauty and artworks; and (3) a theory of sensibility shaping our experience, practice, and knowledge. In this last sense aesthetics does not have to refer to art at all, but is rather concerned with the role of different senses, such as touch, sight, taste, smell, or with different affects: pleasure, pain, or disgust (Korsmeyer 2012). One could make an argument that the affective turn in feminist and queer theory today is also implicitly informed by this third historical meaning of aesthetics, even if theorists themselves do not engage aesthetics directly (Ahmed 2004; Berlant 2011). Gender is also a contested category in feminist philosophy and theory (Chanter 2007); in general it refers to social and political determinations and regulations of biological sex and sexual practices, but there is no consensus on the relationship of gender to power, the body, sexuality, or sensibility. Following feminist theories of intersectionality, introduced by black feminists (Crenshaw 1991), I assume in this chapter that the category of gender is relational, political, and historical; that is, that its significance and its relation to embodiment are shaped by desire and power relations, which also determine the meaning of class, race, labor, environment, and other political phenomena. (shrink)

This book features writing by 17 authors from Germany and from African and Latin American countries on highly diverse aesthetic phenomena as seen from their own different points of view. The texts in this volume all deal with the imperative of ‘decolonization’: they try to highlight aesthetic strategies for the (re)discovery of unthematized, misappropriated, transcultural and even transcontinental histories and memories and aesthetic practices that are absent from or too little perceived within national consciousnesses. Novels, poems and musical performances from (...) the East African region are analysed as intertwined histories of the Indian Ocean and its different languages. Artworks of the Black Atlantic and perceptions of Africa are discussed from, for example, Brazilian perspectives. Within the German context, decolonisation strategies in exhibition practices in ethnological or art museums developed by Nigerian artists are evaluated; new terms such as ‘dividuation’ are proposed to describe these contemporary composite-cultural entanglements, and so on. A stimulating, wide-ranging and heterogeneous portrait of contemporary interwoven world cultures! (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of AestheticsChristopher McClintickThe Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics, by Martha Woodmansee; 200 pp. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, $29.50.Martha Woodmansee’s book The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics deftly employs a historical, materialist focus to trace the growth of the middle-class in eighteenth-century Germany and to analyze its startling, (...) significant effects on literary aesthetics and the construction of canon, genre, and treatment of gender. The first five chapters are devoted, essentially, to an outline of the development of German aesthetics and the concluding chapter to the English reception of Kant. Woodmansee’s study offers much insight into the period and helps greatly to demonstrate “how a cultural formation that evolved as recently as ‘art’ could have entrenched itself so thoroughly that we imagine it always to have existed” (p. 8).Woodmansee’s central contention is that populist theories of aesthetics in Germany and England, which in many ways anticipated important elements of materialist or cultural studies emphases, were muted by canonized writers of the eighteenth century like Schiller, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. These writers propagated instead the Kantian notion of art as a realm separate from other human activities and the distinction between high and low art forms. The first three chapters are particularly strong and provide the historical and methodological underpinning for Woodmansee’s rereading of the history of German aesthetics. Chapter One begins with a discussion of the little-studied German writer Karl Philipp Moritz who, she says, “gave the first unequivocal and systematic expression to what I have called our modern conception of the arts” [End Page 176] (p. 11). Woodmansee points particularly to the fact that Moritz champions the notion of art as having an intrinsic value, an idea that five years later, in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, “came to fruition” (p. 12). In Chapter Two, “Genius and Copyright,” Woodmansee lucidly discusses texts such as Lessing’s essay “Leben und leben lassen,” clarifying the tensions regarding “the emergence in the eighteenth century of writers who sought to earn their livelihood from the sale of their writing to the new and rapidly expanding reading public” (p. 36). The survey includes Herder, Wieland, Fichte, and Goethe, and reveals how these writers’ concerns about the often exploitive relationship of authors and publishers, the growth of a middle-class readership, and the integration of literature into the general economy, greatly contributed to the establishment of the author as the main focus of any critical undertaking.It is Schiller, however, as the archinterpreter and proponent of Kantian aesthetics who is singled out for a particularly thorough rereading. In Chapter Three, Woodmansee writes that Schiller does not represent the kind of political liberality he is purported to in works like On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1793) but instead, “at a historical moment when so much discursive activity was being carried on in the name of the people, sought to write them out of his model of poetry” (p. 75). Schiller’s relationship to the middle-class market and its role in his transcendental aesthetic is graphically traced—from his attempts to penetrate the market and, failing this, his acceptance of, and dependence on patronage, and consequent dismissal of the reading public.In Chapter Six Woodmansee devotes her attention to English criticism, ending somewhat abruptly her discussion of German aesthetics with neoclassicism. Here she clarifies the great influence of Kant on Addison, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, who perpetuated the notion of art as an ideal realm, as well as the idea that criticism is a task which has “essentially to do with the recovery of a writer’s meaning” (p. 55). Woodmansee scrutinizes Wordsworth’s ostensibly nonmaterialist artistic motives partly by discussing the poet’s indefatigable efforts to get parliament to extend copyright laws in order to reward high art projects which, Wordsworth believed, the public could not properly appreciate until a later date. Woodmansee’s materialist focus seriously challenges the contention, as many would have it, that Wordsworth was a champion of the working people.Chapter Five, “Engendering Art,” does not adequately develop the... (shrink)

An abrupt break in the prevailing modes of artistic expression, for many, marks the advent of modernism in the early twentieth century, but revisionary attempts to pin down a precise moment of its emergence remain disputed. History of a Shiver proffers a different approach, tracing the first inkling of modernism instead to the nineteenth century's fascination with music.As Jed Rasula deftly shows, melomania--the passion for music--gave rise to concepts like Richard Wagner's "endless melody" and the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of (...) art, which in turn infused the arts of the fin de siècle with an aura of expectancy, challenging them to induce musical effects by their own means. With each art aspiring to produce the effects of another artistic medium, a synesthetic yearning ran like a shiver through the body of art that would emerge over the next half century. Rasula traces this pan-arts polyphony from German Romantic theory to early experiments in "visual music," encompassing such diverse phenomena as American fixation on Arcadia, early film theory, and the lure of the fourth dimension. All the while, he keeps focus on the paramount historical consequence in elevating music to a new universal aesthetic standard, arguing that Wagnerism was first among modern "isms."In surveying this momentous interplay among arts, History of a Shiver ranges from literature, music and painting to theatre, cinema, dance, photography, and civic pageantry. It retells the story of modernism by recovering not an idea, but a feeling--the hair-raising potential for each painting, literary text, or musical composition to herald an unprecedented domain of human enterprise. (shrink)

One of the lasting influences of German Idealism has been the transformation of aesthetics into a central philosophical concern. My aim here is to show how and why Kant’s and Schiller’s formulations of the problems of moral agency, in particular, constitute an important episode of this development. I argue, first, that it is in the context of Kant’s view of moral agency that aesthetics gains larger purchase than it formerly had (as a response to the problem of the identification (...) of an agent with his external action); second, that Schiller expands the role of aesthetics (in response to Kant’s formulation of it) by intensifying a demand for aesthetic abandon in the agent as a bulwark against the threat of its possible “theatricalization.” It is these heightened demands on the first-personal content of agency that thus began the process of transforming the question of moral agency into an aesthetic one. (shrink)

Largely neglected today, the work of Karl Philipp Moritz was a highly influential source for Early German Romanticism. Moritz considered the form of myth as essential to the absolute nature of the divine subject. This defence was based upon his aesthetic theory, which held that beautiful art was “disinterested”, or complete in itself. For Moritz, Myth, like art, constitutes a totality providing an idiom free from restriction in the imitation of the divine. This examination offers a consideration of Moritz’s (...) aesthetics and mythography, before turning briefly to consider his influence on the authors of Early German Romanticism. An understanding of the role of Moritz’s thought supports a number of recent claims that challenge the conventional reading of Romanticism. At the same time it allows us to see Romanticism’s unconventional realist theological programme, permitting us to overcome the problematic secularising readings of the movement. I would like to thank Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, as well as Fredrick Beiser and Lars Fischer for their help with this project. (shrink)

This study analyses the emergence of aesthetic theory in eighteenth-century Germany in relation to contemporary theories of the nature of language and signs. As well as being extremely relevant to the discussion of literary theory, this perspective casts much light on Enlightenment aesthetics. The central text under consideration shows that the extended comparison of poetry and the plastic arts contained in that major work of aesthetic criticism rests upon a theory of signs and constitutes a complex and global theory of (...) aesthetic signification. His analysis of Laocoon is preceded by chapters which establish the underlying structure and influence of the Enlightenment metasemiotic - that is, the place and function of the sign concept in the culture of the early eighteenth century. As an important reinterpretation of Lessing's Laocoon and of the development of German aesthetic theory, this book will be of special interest to students and scholars of German literature. Moreover, as a significant chapter in the history of semiotics, it will be read with profit by all those concerned with the history of literary criticism and aesthetic theory. (shrink)

This essay provides an overview of the philosophical aesthetics of Hegel and Schelling. Hegel and Schelling understand art to be a central human activity, one that models, rivals, or even supersedes the accomplishments of philosophy. This exalted status attributed to art rests upon a novel conception of art as a distinctive metaphysical and cognitive achievement: art presents the Absolute, ultimate being, in sensible or finite form. Their theories of art are the source, in the history of aesthetics, of the influential (...) claim that artistic value resides in the “unity of form and content” and are also the first philosophies of art that treat art systematically, differentiated both by media (art forms) and in historical periods. (shrink)

The book examines the discourse on attention emerging in the European Enlightenment (1650-1780) with a focus on German philosophy and literature. It argues that this discourse influenced the formation of aesthetic philosophy in the eighteenth century. Notable figures discussed include René Descartes, G.W.F. Leibniz, Christian Wolff, and Alexander Baumgarten.