Enlightenment in Europe

Enlightenment is a recurrent movement within the history of thought that demands justification of all current values, customs, and beliefs vis-à-vis the faculty of reason. As such, it neither advances its own set of philosophical doctrines nor can it be reduced to being the primary characteristic of eighteenth-century thought. Rather, it is a periodic event in the intellectual history of the West and in recent years also of non- Western cultures, in which reason becomes more concerned with its own operations than with specific contents. In the history of philosophical thought, Enlightenment has a cleansing function that often provides a new freedom and sense of discovery for the spirit of inquiry. Yet, although it generally claims to proceed both in the analytic and the synthetic mode, more often than not it focuses its energies on dismantling previous systems without advancing to new concrete and coherent contents. Thus, Enlightenment periods tend to give rise to subsequent philosophical movements that aim to work out specific contents without relinquishing the critical use of reason achieved by Enlightenment efforts and, hence, to make good on the unfulfilled Enlightenment promise to unite analytic and synthetic functions of reason.

In a narrower sense, Enlightenment refers to the dominant, albeit not exclusive, philosophical movement of the eighteenth century in Europe and North America as well as the literary and cultural production at large that is influenced by this thinking. As is the case with almost every historical period, the Enlightenment cannot be dated with precision. Moreover, its beginning and duration differ in different countries. And because the Enlightenment was also adopted as a certain style of government, it had social and political ramifications that did not always coincide precisely with purely intellectual events and, hence, must be dated separately without entirely divorcing them from the intellectual currents. Intellectually, one could let the Enlightenment in England begin in 1689, the year of the publication of Locke’s (1632–1728) Letters on Toleration. In Germany, 1687 was suggested for a starting date, the year in which Christian Thomasius (1655–1728) first announced and held a university lecture in German instead of Latin, the standard language of discourse in universities.

Alexander Baumgarten

Immanuel Kant's (1724–1804) towering presence at the end of the eighteenth century tends to throw a shadow backward in history, eclipsing many of the less forceful and original thinkers. The situation is no different in philosophical aesthetics. Although Kant's 1790 Critique of Judgment – unlike the 1781 Critique of Pure Reason that received little friendly attention until Reinhold's Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie (Letters on the Kantian philosophy) of 1786–7 – created a fanfare on the philosophical scene (some slight delay in reception notwithstanding), it did not emerge from out of the blue. Kant had already reacted against previous, albeit more modest attempts to ground a philosophical aesthetics – attempts, however, that ultimately failed to establish an aesthetic paradigm to serve as a starting point for productive elaborations or dissent for future generations.

The pre-Kantian philosophical aesthetics were not meant to be a break with the dominant philosophical system, namely, that of Leibniz and Wolff. Instead, they should be considered elaborations of it that nolens, volens helped to undermine the foundations that they labored to strengthen. When Alexander Baumgarten (1714–1762) introduced the plan for aesthetics as a new philosophical discipline with its own name, he did so in order to prop up the traditional rationalist metaphysics by making it more encompassing. Yet Baumgarten's attempt to consolidate rationalism turned, under his hands, into a critical endeavor.

Our narrative of the German aesthetic tradition has reached the present. Yet we have come to no conclusion, if by conclusion we mean closure, the end of an intentional development and a telos to be reached. We end our story, because to continue it would mean to step into the realm of prediction. Hegel is right when he says that philosophy awakens only at the end of a day to look back, to wonder, to sort out, and to find a logic in events that escape the immediacy of the present.

The current stage of aesthetics is one of revivalism. Yet while all of the twentieth-century aesthetic positions revived previous notions, there was hardly a time when almost all paradigmatic theories were taken up simultaneously. Today, however, some philosophers return to Baumgarten in order to replace aesthetics as a philosophy of art with the original notion of aesthetics as sense perception. Those, for example, who champion an ecological aesthetics argue for such a shift in the conception of aesthetics as a discipline. Others aim to restrict the notion of aesthetics to art, yet warn of a philosophical overburdening of art. These thinkers see the post-Kantian development in aesthetics as a wrong turn toward the cognitive. For them, to place demands upon art, like to grant access to the absolute and to contain truth unavailable through philosophy, does art no favor. Rather, art needs to be freed from the heterogeneous claims that philosophy heaps upon it.

Without much doubt, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) is the one philosopher of art with the largest influence on artists, on their understanding of themselves, and on their artistic production. The list of those who acknowledge debts to Schopenhauer is long: the writers Friedrich Hebbel, August Strindberg, Thomas Hardy, Emile Zola, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarmé, Joseph Conrad, André Gide, Robert Musil, Samuel Beckett, W. B. Yeats, Jorge L. Borges, Thomas Bernhard, and Arno Schmidt; the painter Eugene Delacroix; the composers Richard Wagner, Arnold Schönberg, Sergey Prokofiev, and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakoff, as well as numerous others. Yet as pronounced as Schopenhauer's influence on the artistic community itself is, his effect on significant philosophers in general and on philosophical aesthetics in particular is negligible. With the exception of Friedrich Nietzsche, who is less a disciple than an idiosyncratic commentator with his own agenda, Schopenhauer's thought on art remained isolated in the history of ideas. Hence, his writings do not mark the beginning of a new productive approach to the riddle of art as much as they signal the beginning of the dismantling of the idealist tradition. Historically, the importance of Schopenhauer does not result so much from his effect on future thinkers; it lies in the fact that with him, the skeptical reaction against the achievements of idealism sets in and is clearly visible.

The questions regarding art and beauty are as old as philosophy itself, or older, considering that Homer, Hesiod, and Pindar already reflect on the role and particular gifts of the poet. Yet for the longest time, art and beauty have been treated separately for the most part. The two notions were generally discussed in the context of other philosophical issues in which art and beauty played only a subordinate role. Philosophically, beauty more often than not was treated in the context of metaphysics, be it for Plato, Plotinus, or Thomas Aquinas. The concept of art, on the other hand, underwent a long series of permutations that have by no means reached an end. The tendency was for the concept of art to become narrower and to exclude more and more activities and products. Crafts, trades, and skills were originally all included in the concept of art, understood as τὲχνη and ars; the equation of art with the fine arts was a very late development.

No art, whether as practical know-how or as a member of the fine arts family, was ever considered autonomous before Kant. Art was imbedded in a social, pedagogical, theological, or merely economic program that regulated its production. Not until the eighteenth century were the questions regarding art's epistemological and practical value, and about the nature of the work of art and of beauty, integrated into a systematic, independent philosophical discipline that then became known as aesthetics.

Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger's (1889–1976) writings on art renew the romantic paradigm in the philosophy of art for the twentieth century. Despite all his criticism of the idealist tradition, Heidegger insists with Schelling on art as a Wahrheitsgeschehen, a truth-event, that is, an occasion when truth becomes conspicuous. Still, Heidegger differs from his romantic precursor in that he does not elevate art to that height where it becomes the only access to truth. Rather, he allows for some few alternative events in which truth reveals itself as well. Nevertheless, Heidegger agrees with Schelling insofar as both thinkers place art as an “organon of truth” above the propositional correctness of science and, hence, some versions of philosophy.

Heidegger begins to write about art in the 1930s. He deals with this subject in his lectures on Hölderlin and Nietzsche of the 1930s and 1940s; in 1935 he gives the lecture “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks” (The origin of the work of art) in Freiburg and repeats it the following year in Zurich and Frankfurt am Main. Although this text was the most probing and systematic of his pronouncements on art, it was not published until 1950 when it appeared as the opening essay of the book Holzwege (Paths in the wood). In 1951 the essay “Bauen Wohnen Denken” (Building dwelling thinking) followed, in 1969 “Die Kunst und der Raum” (Art and space).

Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) takes Kant's Critique of Judgment as the starting point for his philosophical investigations of beauty and art. As he writes in the first letter of Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (On the aesthetic education of man in a series of letters, 1795): “I will, to be sure, not conceal from you the fact that it is Kantian principles upon which the propositions that follow will for the most part be based.” And yet, from early on, the Kantian aesthetic paradigm does not satisfy Schiller. More and more Kant's division of nature and freedom comes to be seen as part of the problem of modernity in which man's faculties are pitched against each other and never come to a full development and a harmonious unification. As much as Kant served as the inspiration for Schiller's turn toward philosophical aesthetics, his subjective and ahistorical stance was soon considered by Schiller to be one of the main obstacles not only to a productive aesthetics but also to ethical thought as an investigation of the duties of man toward himself, as well as to his polity.

Before Schiller's encounter with Kant's aesthetic theory – this fact is often forgotten in the reception of Schiller's thought on art and beauty – he went through a Baumgartenian phase characterized by the association of sensuality and beauty with inferior cognition.

Ernst Cassirer's neo-Kantianism

By and large, the neo-Kantian schools in Germany were not very interested in questions of aesthetics. Art and beauty mostly took second place to epistemology and ethics. Two notable exceptions are the Kant scholar Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) and the young Georg Lukács (1885–1971), who also began his philosophical career under the influence of neo-Kantianism. Cassirer was, in fact, one of the founders of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek, better known as the Warburg Institute, where he collaborated closely with the art historians and theoreticians Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl during the years 1926–33. Still, despite a multivolume study on the philosophy of symbolic forms, Cassirer never presented a unified and fully developed theory of art. It is nevertheless possible to reconstruct his position based on a number of essays, lectures, and book chapters all dealing with the problems of aesthetics and its history. In this context, however, the main focus will be Cassirer's attempt to “rejuvenate” Kant's aesthetic theory, because after the challenge to the paradigmatic aesthetics of the idealists by Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, we now return to precisely these paradigmatic positions.

Against the positivist notions of aesthetics that had been developed toward the end of the nineteenth century in the works of Helmholtz, Fechner, and others, who had attempted to reduce the sense for beauty and art to a physiological response, Cassirer stresses the uniqueness of the aesthetic experience as something that cannot be elucidated by scientific research.

Art and Society

In Theodor W. Adorno's (1903–1969) philosophy, we find much the same gesture as in Heidegger when it comes to the inheritance of classical German philosophy. While Adorno sets himself in a position of both opposing and continuing idealism, he tends to gloss over his debts to early romantic aesthetics. Although Schelling is mentioned with approval several times in Ästhetische Theorie (Aesthetic theory, 1970), Adorno is very shy in spelling out his reliance on the philosophy of art of the former as an “organon of truth.” Instead, throughout his philosophical and critical writings, Adorno's struggle with Hegel occupies a place in the foreground. His 1966 Negative Dialectics is written with the aim of inheriting, as well as dismantling, Hegel's legacy. Here, Adorno attempts to prove that the dialectical model with its synthesis as reconciliation always produces a totality that does injustice to those moments that necessarily escape the concept. Hegelian dialectics reduces all individuality to something that can be subsumed under a concept to be then integrated into a general movement. Against this idealist heritage Adorno pitches his own conception of philosophy: “Philosophy's true interest at this historical moment lies where Hegel, agreeing with tradition, demonstrated his disinterest: with the concept-less, singular and specific.” Adorno terms this singularity that remains irreconcilable with conceptual thought the nonidentical, a term that resurrects Kant's noncognizable thing-in-itself against Hegel's totalizing dialectics, and that also plays a prominent role in Adorno's theory of art.

Kierkegaard

Aesthetic thought is central to Søren Kierkegaard's (1813–1855) philosophy, yet hardly another thinker – with the possible exception of the early Emmanuel Levinas – regards aesthetics with such disdain. Whereas idealist philosophy had granted art and beauty a privileged position in its various systems, Kierkegaard's reaction against idealism at large also affects his valuation of the aesthetic sphere. Intentionally, he reaches past the idealists in his attempt to redefine aesthetics as a sphere of life and inquiry; but unintentionally, he falls beneath the level of discussion that aesthetics had achieved during the previous decades. Kierkegaard opposes the idealist systems, especially the one advanced by Hegel, since for him their intellectual efforts remain irrelevant to quotidian life. The categories of being and becoming, so prominent in Hegel's Logic, have to be replaced in Kierkegaard's view by that of existence. Ontology, logic, and metaphysics are all given an anthropological spin by Kierkegaard. Many areas of philosophical inquiry are left altogether untouched by him – there is no philosophy of nature, hardly an ontology, little in terms of a philosophy of history, barely any political philosophy, in short, nothing resembling a philosophical system. Instead, Kierkegaard's thinking centers around the notion of existence that for him denotes the act of living considered as a unity of thought and feeling (both emotionally and sensually), desire and action. Yet this unity not only is not given as a preexisting mode of being for man; it is perpetually in a most precarious balance.

If Kant's Critique of Judgment marks the low point of classical German philosophy in respect to the philosophical significance attributed to the work of art, the writings of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) mark the peak in the estimation of art's role for philosophy. In Schelling's early writings, art is not merely one of many possible objects of philosophy but, rather, an integral part of it. Moreover, art is considered indispensable insofar as it is seen as the only means of completing the philosophical system that Schelling proposes. It might go too far, though, to advance the thesis, as Dieter Jähnig does, that only in Schelling's work, even more precisely, only in the sixth chapter of the System des transzendentalen Idealismus (System of transcendental idealism) of 1800, did Western philosophy envision an intimate mutual dependency of art and philosophy. The fact is that romantic philosophy in general esteemed art as the necessary completion of philosophical investigation. Schelling is probably the one who thought through this position with the most philosophical rigor and who contributed the most coherent investigation, but this is due to the fact that Schelling remained committed to the idea of the philosophical system, whereas most romantics took a much more ambivalent stance toward systematic philosophy and the demands it places on the form of argumentation. Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) declared: “It is equally deadly for the spirit to have and not to have a system. Thus, one will have to decide to combine both.”

With Hegel the age of paradigms in aesthetics comes to an end. But there are two ways to understand the term “end.” On the one hand, it can mean the goal of a structured development that brings something into its own, its telos, by fulfilling its inherent possibilities. On the other hand, end merely signifies the final point of a stretch of time, generally no better or worse than any previous one. Especially in the nineteenth century, Hegel's philosophy at large was understood in the former sense, namely, as the completion of German idealism as well as the epitome of its achievements. In regard to his philosophy of art, the analogous argument that portrays Hegel as the capstone of systematic aesthetic thought has been advanced. Obviously, these are not value-neutral judgments, but they rest on the (Hegelian) assumption not that truth is a historical process but that it becomes transparent for itself in the course of history. Hence, the narrative that regards aesthetics as culminating in Hegel's version of it understands it as superior to the previous attempts, because its explanatory power is greater, its integration into the system of philosophy more convincing, and most of all, its claim to truth can be better substantiated. As is well known, such teleological narrative fell largely out of favor in the twentieth century, and it has mostly been replaced by the conviction that Hegel's schlechte Unendlichkeit (bad infinity, i.e., an open-ended historical process) provides the superior model over utopian and teleological versions of history.

If the single most influential text in the history of philosophical aesthetics were to be chosen, Immanuel Kant's (1724–1804) Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of judgment) of 1790 might very well turn out to be the one that a majority of philosophers would point to. Despite all the good reasons they can list for their justification, the selection of the third Critique is peculiar, because in the history of philosophical aesthetics (that properly only begins with precisely this publication), Kant is probably the one thinker who attributes the least significance to the work of art. And yet Kant must be regarded as the philosopher who at the same time claimed an importance for the aesthetic judgment that is on a par with those of a cognitive and moral nature. Kant, however, does not understand an aesthetic judgment to refer exclusively to art. In fact, for him most aesthetic judgments are not about art, but nature. They are about beauty in natural objects, as well as about our experience of the sublime.

The Critique of Judgment was written not as a theory of art and beauty but as an exploration of that faculty that is meant to guarantee the unity of reason, as Kant explains in his introduction. After having written the first two Critiques, he encountered the difficulty that the principles of pure reason and of practical reason are not identical and that, therefore, a gap had opened between theory and practice or freedom and nature.