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The Career of Aesthetics in German Thinking

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Extract

In German philosophy of the last 250 years, aesthetics has played a leading part. Any arbitrary list of great names contains mainly authors who either have written classical texts on aesthetics or are strongly influenced by aesthetic reflection, for instance, Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, and Adorno – the few exceptions being Husserl and Frege. It is not by chance that Frege is one of the founding fathers of modern Anglo-Saxon philosophy, where, generally speaking, aesthetics has had only marginal influence. That is not an insignificant difference. The wildest dreams of one tradition were focused on logic, those of the other on aesthetics.

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Papers
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1999

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References

1 Baumgarten, A. G., Theoretische Ästhetik, trans. and ed. Schweizer, H. R. (Hamburg: Meiner, 1983)Google Scholar.

2 Reflections on this complementarity in Baumgarten are analysed by Scheer, B., Einfiihrung in die philosophische Ästhetik (Darmstadt: Primus,1997)Google Scholar; along these lines are the arguments advanced by Gabriel, G., Zwischen Logik und Literatur. Erkenntnisformen von Dichtung Philosophie und Wissenschaft (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgment, trans. Pluhar, Werner S.(Indianapolis: Hackett,1987), £12, p.68Google Scholar.

4 That is, the ‘full presence’ of a sensuously perceivable phenomenon is not open to cognitive access; it cannot be reduced to the empirical constitutionof an object of the sensory world; it is a givenness of the object that cannot be described as the composition of this object. The relation of complementarity between aesthetic and conceptual knowledge that Baumgarten envisioned is thereby annulled.

5 Hegel, G. W. F., Hegel's Introduction to Aesthetics, trans. Knox, T. M., intro. Charles Karelis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 19Google Scholar.

6 Philosophical theories from Schelling to Adorno have tried repeatedly to reverse this order of precedence. Such reversals, however, merely reproduce the compulsion to establish an order of precedence, where only one constellation of forms of world interpretation can prevail.

7 From the revelation of the absolute to the self-contemplation of cultural worlds — that is the course taken by the history of art (and of our dealings with art) in Hegel.

8 Schopenhauer, Arthur, The World as Will and Representation, vol. I, trans. Payne, E. F. J. (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), p.17Google Scholar (italics in original).

9 Ibid., p. 195.

10 Ibid., p. 197.

11 Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Whiteside, Shaun, ed. Michael Tanner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), p. 16Google Scholar.

12 There is an element of this position already in Kant when he says of the work of art that it displays aesthetic ideas that are not fully graspable in terms of understanding; whereas in Kant it is the richness and power of the human mind that is demonstrated here, for Nietzsche it is the limits of every intellectual effort (the arbitrariness and one-sidedness of all of its constructions) that is celebrated in artistic experience.

13 Adorno, Theodor W., Aesthetic Theory, ed. Adorno, G. and Tiedemann, Rolf, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press,1997), pp. 93.fGoogle Scholar

14 Adorno, Theodor W., Negative Dialectics, trans. Ashton, E. B.(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 10Google Scholar. [Translator's note:Translation altered slightly.]

15 Adorno, , Aesthetic Theory, p. 79Google Scholar.

16 ‘Fireworks [being prototypical for artworks]are apparition kat exochen: They appear empirically yet are liberated from the burden of the empirical, which is the obligation of duration; they are a sign from heaven yet artifactual, an ominous warning, a script that flashes up, vanishes, and indeed cannot be read for its meaning.’ Ibid., p. 81.

17 Ibid., p. 82

18 Ibid., p. 72 and Adorno, Theodor W., ‘Valérys Windstriche’, in Noten zur Literatur, I (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), p. 200Google Scholar.

19 Adorno, , Negative Dialectics, p. 28Google Scholar.

20 Valéry, Paul, ‘Eupalinos’, in Eupalinos. L'âme et la danse. Dialogue de l'arbre (Paris: Gallimard, 1944)Google Scholar.