a history of modern aesthethics 3 volume set

1

Introduction

This work offers a history of philosophical aesthetics from the begin-

ning of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-fi rst. In

the eighteenth century, I examine developments in Britain, France,

and the German-speaking lands, not yet a unifi ed country. At the end

of the eighteenth century, the fi eld of aesthetics was intensively culti-

vated in Germany, and throughout the nineteenth century that land

retained its prominence in the discipline. This is refl ected in the prom-

inence of German aesthetics in my account of this period, although I

consider British developments as well, and the emergence of the fi rst

serious American aesthetic theory at the very end of the century; I

touch only fl eetingly on some moments in French aesthetics in this

period. I continue the story of German aesthetics into the twentieth

century, indeed to the start of the twenty-fi rst, but give much more

space to American as well as British aesthetics in the last century (with

one indispensable Italian adopted into British aesthetics). I do not dis-

cuss twentieth-century French aesthetics at all, although that subject

would dominate many a discussion of twentieth-century aesthetics,

especially if written by a literary theorist instead of by a philosopher, in

part because I want to give adequate space to the rediscovery of many

fi rst-rate British and American aestheticians in the fi rst part of the cen-

tury who have been unjustly neglected since the enormous impact of

Ludwig Wittgenstein on British and American philosophy, and in part

because I believe that the emphasis on linguistic models and textuality

that have dominated French aesthetics in the period of structuralism

and poststructuralism has distracted attention from what I take to be

the core subject matter of the discipline of aesthetics since its inception

in the eighteenth century, namely, the study of the nature and value of

aspects of the human experience of art and (sometimes) nature. Some

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A History of Modern Aesthetics, Volume 12

of the late nineteenth- and early-twentieth century German philoso-

phers who will be discussed here have also received little attention in

recent years, and I want to give them room to breathe as well. That I

do include some unusual fi gures as well as exclude some of the usual

suspects is part of why I call this work, large as it is, only a , not the his-

tory of modern aesthetics.

That said, this opening sketch still raises all sorts of questions. What

do I mean by philosophical aesthetics – is that a contrast to some other

kind, or is it just redundant? What do I mean by dividing the fi eld

up into three different national traditions, although different ones

in the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries? And for that matter,

what do I mean by dividing the work up into volumes on three centu-

ries – aren’t the years on the calendar that end with “00” utterly arbi-

trary dividing lines? I can suggest answers to some of these questions

immediately. As for my second and third questions, I can say that

sometimes there have been separate national traditions and some-

times there have not been – for example, eighteenth-century German

aesthetics fully absorbed what was happening in France and Britain,

but the reverse was not the case, and while in the fi rst part of the

twentieth century there was not much interaction between British

and American aesthetics, in the second part there was, and some of

the leading fi gures even divided their careers between the two coun-

tries. So sometimes my national boundaries are important, sometimes

not. And this intersects with the question of the calendar – sometimes

major changes in the fi eld have come closer to a year ending in “00”

in one place than in another. We will deal with these questions in due

course.

The harder question is what I mean by “philosophical aesthetics.”

In one way, the answer to this question is relatively clear: By philo-

sophical aesthetics, I mean works and discussions that are in some

way continuous with the topics of aesthetics as it is currently pursued

in philosophy departments, whether written by people who in their

own lifetimes taught philosophy or otherwise conceived of themselves

as philosophers or not. Some fi gures whom we would more readily

identify as critics or art theorists or even practicing artists, such as

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in the eighteenth century, John Ruskin in

the nineteenth, and Walter Benjamin in the twentieth, come into my

story when they either refl ected recent developments in philosophy or

triggered them, but in general my history of philosophical aesthetics






Introduction 3

is not a history of art or literary criticism or theory. 1 However, I would

hardly pretend that the dividing line between philosophical aesthetics

and criticism is always clear, and there are surely critics whom I could

have included in my narrative but have not. They or their shades may

take comfort in the fact that there are also philosophers I could have

included in my account but have not.

But even with this caveat, I have not really given much of an answer

to our question, for philosophers themselves have not always been

clear about what the subject of aesthetics is, and even those who have

attempted to be clear have not always agreed with each other, that is,

with other philosophers at the same time or at different times. Indeed, in

the eighteenth century, German philosophers used the term “aesthetics”

and British and French writers did not, although they were practicing

the same subject; and in the nineteenth century Germans and others

using the term did not always mean the same by it as those who used it

in the eighteenth century had. Some of the later philosophers equated

aesthetics with the philosophy of art while some of the earlier philoso-

phers had conceived the fi eld more broadly, as dealing with a kind of

experience we can have of nature as well as art – as a few philosophers

have again begun to do. As I suggested a moment ago, I do think the

core of the subject is a concern with a certain kind of experience, and

that an exclusive focus on a special kind of language or discourse is too

narrow a conception of the fi eld – that is not only part of the reason I do

not discuss recent French aesthetics, but, as I argue in Volume III, such

a conception of the fi eld was also a problem with the initial infl uence

of Wittgenstein in Anglo-American aesthetics. But beyond this, I think

there is little value in attempting to stipulate a clear defi nition of the

fi eld in advance: How philosophers have conceived of the boundaries of

the fi eld has been part of its history, and we will simply have to see how

that history goes. The history will have to defi ne the fi eld for us rather

than the other way around. I might even suggest that this situation is not

unusual in philosophy: While certain approaches to philosophy, such as

those of Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, or the eighteenth-century German

rationalists led by Christian Wolff, might raise the expectation that works

of philosophy above all should be able to begin with a clear statement of

1 Such as Ren é Wellek’s classical History of Modern Criticism 1750–1950 , 7 vols. ( New Haven :

Yale University Press , 1955 –92 ) or the multiauthored volumes of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism from antiquity to the present (nine volumes thus far, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1989–).







their subject matter and central issues, other philosophers, such as the

young Kant, have argued that in philosophy defi nitions come not at the

beginning but at the end, if at all. In any case, the proper subject matter

of aesthetics and the proper questions for it to ask have themselves been

problematic and contested issues since the very word “aesthetics” was

fi rst introduced.

For example, since the 1820s, when Georg Wilhelm Friedrich

Hegel gave infl uential lectures in Berlin on the “Philosophy of Art or

Aesthetics,” 2 many have assumed that the term “aesthetics” just means

the philosophy of art or, more specifi cally, fi ne art; and if it is assumed

that art is a distinctive and cohesive set of human practices and prod-

ucts including imaginative literature such as poetry, fi ction, and drama,

the sister arts of music and dance; and the visual arts such as painting,

sculpture, architecture and possibly garden design and landscape archi-

tecture as well, then it would seem to follow that the topic of the fi eld of

aesthetics as the philosophy of art would also be well defi ned. So even if

it were true that in antiquity or the Middle Ages there was no conception

of any essential connection between, say, literature and the visual arts,

thus that the idea of the unity of these various pursuits is itself a modern

invention, as some have argued, 3 it would still be the case that for much

of the period to be covered here, that is, for most of the nineteenth and

all of the twentieth centuries, the topic of aesthetics would be clear: the

philosophy of art.

But this restriction of aesthetics to the philosophy of fi ne art has also

been contested. In the eighteenth century, many philosophers, whether

they used the name “aesthetics” yet or not, held that aesthetics deals

not only with philosophical problems about the fi ne arts, including what

2 See, for example, Philosophie der Kunst oder Ä sthetik. Nach Hegel. Im Sommer 1826, Mitschrift Friedrich Carl Hermann Victor von Kehler , ed. Annemarie Gethmann-Seifert and Bernadette

Collenberg-Plotnikov ( Munich : Wilhelm Fink Verlag , 2004 ) . Until recently, Hegel’s lec-

tures on aesthetics were known in the form of a posthumous compilation edited by

Heinrich Gustav Hotho and fi rst published in 1835, four years after Hegel’s death, then

revised in 1842. Hotho’s version was the basis for the standard English version, G.W.F.

Hegel , Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art , trans. T.M. Knox , 2 vols. ( Oxford : Clarendon Press ,

1975 ) .

3 See Paul Oskar Kristeller , “ The Modern System of the Arts ,” Journal of the History of Ideas 12 ( 1951 ): 496 – 527 and 13 (1952): 17–46 , reprinted in his Renaissance Thought and the Arts: Collected Essays ( Princeton : Princeton University Press , 1980 ), pp. 163–227 , and

Larry Shiner , The Invention of Art: A Cultural History ( Chicago : University of Chicago

Press , 2001 ) . But for criticism of Kristeller’s claim, see James I. Porter , “ Is Art Modern?

Kristeller’s ‘Modern System of the Arts’ Reconsidered ,” British Journal of Aesthetics 49

( 2009 ): 1 – 24 , and Porter , The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation, and Experience ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2010 ), pp. 26–40 .






Introduction 5

differentiates them from other characteristic human practices and prod-

ucts and also what unites them into a distinctive class, but also with cer-

tain responses we may have to nature as well, paradigmatically, to borrow

a common way of putting it, our “ideas” or “feeling of the beautiful and

the sublime.” 4 Indeed, when he fi rst coined the name of the discipline in

his 1735 master’s thesis, Philosophical Meditations concerning some Matters pertaining to Poetry , the twenty-one-year-old German Alexander Gottlieb

Baumgarten had used his new term to connote a novel fi eld of inquiry,

parallel to ordinary logic, that would have as its subject not pure ideas

( νοητα ) but sensory objects ( αισθητα ) in general, including both things

present to the senses ( sensualibus ) and things imagined in the absence

of present sensation ( phantasmata ), and which would “direct the inferior

faculty of cognition” as a “science of how something is to be sensitively

cognized.” 5 This defi nition does not contain any explicit reference to

art at all or to a distinctive kind of experience that we might have in

response to nature as well as art, but instead suggests that aesthetics con-

cerns the contribution of sensory experience to knowledge in general.

Yet the inclusion of this defi nition at the end of a book about poetry

makes it clear the intended discipline includes at least this particular

fi ne art, and in the defi nition that Baumgarten provided fi fteen years

later, in his massive although incomplete Aesthetica , the fi rst work on aes-

thetics to be entitled simply “Aesthetics,” he does make explicit refer-

ence to art. In this work, he writes that aesthetics, although it is still the

“the science of sensory cognition” in general, is also the “theory of the

liberal arts, the logic of the inferior faculty of cognition, the art of think-

ing beautifully, the art of the analogue of reason.” 6 What Baumgarten

meant by “the logic of the inferior faculty of cognition” and “the art of

4 See Edmund Burke’s famous work of 1757, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Beautiful and Sublime ; modern edition ed. J.T. Boulton ( London : Routledge & Kegan

Paul , 1958 ) , and Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime , trans. Paul Guyer, in Immanuel Kant , Anthropology, History, and Education , ed. Robert B.

Louden and G ü nter Z ö ller ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2007 ), pp. 18–62 ,

and in Immanuel Kant , Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings , ed. Patrick Frierson and Paul Guyer ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press ,

2011 ), pp. 11–62 . The latter edition includes Kant’s extensive notes in his own copy of

the Observations . 5 Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten , Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinen-

tibus/Philosophische Betrachtungen ü ber einige Bedingungen des Gedichtes , ed. Heinz Paetzold

( Hamburg : Felix Meiner Verlag , 1983 ) , §§CXV, CXVII.

6 Baumgarten, Aesthetica (1750–58), §1; in Hans Rudolf Schweizer , Ä sthetik als Philosophie der sinnlichen Erkenntnis: Eine Interpretation der ‘Aesthetica’ A.G. Baumgartens mit teilweiser Wiedergabe des lateinischen Textes und deutscher Ü bersetzung ( Basel and Stutgart : Schwabe &

Co ., 1973 ), pp. 106–7 .







the analogue of reason” may still go well beyond our present-day concep-

tion of aesthetics, but his expressions “the theory of the liberal arts” and

the “art of thinking beautifully” certainly point toward our present con-

ception, for by the term “liberal arts” he would have meant, in medieval

fashion, at least the arts of grammar and rhetoric, pointing toward what

we call literature, and music, if not the arts that centrally involve physical

media and the techniques to work them, such as painting, sculpture, and

architecture. 7 But the point to be drawn for now from Baumgarten’s own

indeterminacy about the proper subject of his new discipline is just that

whether or not the concept of the fi ne arts is a modern construct, the

question of the proper subject matter of the philosophical discipline of

aesthetics has itself been contested during the past three centuries and

is therefore a question that can be addressed only over the course of the

following narrative rather than one that can be settled at the outset.

The present work began as part of an attempt to answer the ques-

tion of how philosophy got from the situation that John Locke described

at the end of his Essay concerning Human Understanding in 1690, when

all knowledge could be divided into physics or natural philosophy, eth-

ics, and semiotics or logic, the “doctrine of signs,” 8 to the contemporary

practice of philosophy, where we recognize as distinct subfi elds of phi-

losophy not just ethics and logic, but philosophy of physics, philosophy

of biology, philosophy of language, philosophy of logic, philosophy of

mathematics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of history, and so on, in

some quarters even philosophy of sport, of love, of sex, and, of course,

philosophy of art. 9 But my narrative does not begin in 1690 or any other

date in the late seventeenth century, because, although there were earlier

rumblings, notably the French “Quarrel between the ancients and the

moderns,” 10 the debate that I present as central to the modern discipline

7 See H.M. Klinkenberg , “Artes liberales/artes mechanicae,” in Historisches W ö rterbuch der Philosophie , edited by Joachim Ritter , 13 vols. ( Basel : Schwaber & Co ., 1971– 2007 ) , vol. 1,

pp. 531–3, and Wolfgang Ullrich , “Kunst/K ü nste/System der K ü nste,” in Karlheinz

Barck , Martin Frontius , Dieter Schlenstedt , Burkhart Steinwachs , and Friedrich

Wolfzettel , editors, Ä sthetische Grundbegriffe , 7 vols. ( Stuttgart : Verlag J.B. Metzler , 2000 –

5) , vol. 3, pp. 556–616, at p. 571.

8 John Locke , An Essay concerning Human Understanding , ed. P.H. Nidditch ( Oxford :

Clarendon Press , 1975 ) , Bk. IV, ch. xxi, §§1–4, p. 720.

9 That is, the present work was originally intended to be one volume in the Cambridge

series The Evolution of Modern Philosophy , edited by Gary Hatfi eld and myself. As a law-

yer who represents himself has a fool for a client, so perhaps does an editor who edits

himself.

10 See R é my G. Saisselin , The Rule of Reason and the Ruses of the Heart: A Philosophical Dictionary of Classical French Criticism, Critics, and Aesthetic Issues ( Cleveland : The Press of






Introduction 7

of aesthetics did not really begin until after 1700. 11 Yet neither does the

narrative begin with Baumgarten’s baptism of the discipline in 1735,

because that was an adult baptism. By the time Baumgarten coined that

name the fi eld of aesthetics was already a thriving subject in academia

and indeed a thriving business in the republic of letters at large, not only

in Germany but in France and Britain as well, with numerous and exten-

sive contributions from academic philosophers but also from other men

of letters, focusing on the question that I do regard as being at the heart

of modern aesthetics: whether aesthetic experience, whether unique to

art or common to both art and nature, is best considered a distinctive

form of knowledge, an emotional experience, or an exercise of the imag-

ination that is more like play than it is like knowledge or emotion – or

whether it can only be understood through a combination of all three

of these approaches. As already suggested by my epigraphs, my own con-

clusion from my study of the history of aesthetics is that a pluralistic

approach will provide us with more insight into the nature and value of

our experience of art and nature and with a more satisfying basis for our

engagement with the works of art and nature than any reductionist or

monistic approach can do.

Case Western Reserve University , 1970 ) , “Ancients and Moderns,” pp. 5–14. The classi-

cal work by Richard Foster Jones , Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Scientifi c Movement in Seventeenth-Century England , 2nd ed., ( St. Louis : Washington University Press , 1961 ) , as

its title suggests, concerns debates in natural science and touches upon the debate about

the arts only in passing (e.g., pp. 33–4). For a general work that does address late sev-

enteenth-century aesthetics more extensively, see Richard Scholar , The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Early Modern Europe: Encounters with a Certain Something ( Oxford : Oxford University

Press , 2005 ) .

11 Thus the present history begins precisely where the History of Aesthetics by W ł adys ł aw

Tatarkiewicz ends; the only overlap between his history and mine is in the discussion of

three early eighteenth-century French and Swiss writers: Du Bos, Crousaz, and Andr é .

W ł adys ł aw Tatarkiewicz , History of Aesthetics , vol. 3, Modern Aesthetics , ed. D. Petsch , trans.

Chester A. Kisiel and John F. Besemeres ( Warsaw : Polish Scientifi c Publishers , 1974 ;

reprinted Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1999), pp. 429–37. Apart from the basic fact that

by “modern” Tartakiewicz meant the Renaissance through the end of the seventeenth

century while I mean by the same term the eighteenth century to the present, there are

differences in approach between his work and mine as well: He discusses art theory and

criticism more than what I call philosophical aesthetics; his work is divided between brief

commentary and extracts from his authors, while although I will let my authors speak

in their own voices as much as possible, my quotations will be woven into my interpreta-

tions; and precisely because he ends his history at the beginning of the eighteenth cen-

tury, aesthetics in English and German, which blossomed in that century, are not heavily

represented in his work. The aesthetic theories of the German- and English-speaking

lands from the beginning of the eighteenth to the beginning of the twenty-fi rst century

will be the heart of the present work.







I argue that this debate emerged in the second decade of the eighteenth

century, the years from 1709 to 1720 (the decade straddling the birth of

Baumgarten himself in 1714), with seminal contributions being made

during this decade by the English nobleman Anthony Ashley Cooper,

the third Earl of Shaftesbury, whose education had been overseen by

none other than John Locke, who during his variegated career had been

the secretary, political adviser, and personal physician of the great Whig

magnate the fi rst Earl of Shaftesbury, the philosopher’s grandfather; by

the English parliamentarian, playwright, and essayist Joseph Addison; by

the French diplomat, historian, antiquarian, and critic the Abb é Jean-

Baptiste Du Bos; 12 and by the German philosophy professor Christian

Wolff. Shaftesbury fi rst published his treatise The Moralists , which con-

tains an infl uential discussion of the relation between beauty and value

in general (and which also rejects much of the philosophy of his one-

time mentor), in 1709, and included it in his collection Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times in 1711; in 1712 he wrote A Letter concern-ing the Art, or Science of Design and a treatise entitled Plastics or the Original Progress and Power of Designatory Art . In June and July of 1712, Addison

published a series of essays on “The Pleasures of the Imagination” in

the widely read periodical The Spectator that he co-edited with Richard

Steele, although these essays were solely his. In 1719, Du Bos published

his Critical Refl ections on Painting, Poetry, and Music , a work that was read

throughout Europe including Britain well before its English translation

in 1748. In 1720, Wolff included some remarks about pleasure and

beauty in his Rational Thoughts on God, the World, and the Soul of Man , his

“German Metaphysics,” that would found the school of German thought

from which Baumgarten and others whom we will consider emerged,

and although Wolff subsequently devoted much of his own boundless

energy to the philosophy of natural science and to moral and political

philosophy, his voluminous works even include a treatise on architecture

as part of his textbook on mathematics. For purposes of this book, the

modern discipline of aesthetics is regarded as having commenced with

these works of the second decade of the eighteenth century, and as hav-

ing continued unabated since that time, although certainly with upheav-

als from time to time.

12 The name of this writer is often printed as “Dubos,” but I follow the form used on the

title page of the 1748 English translation of his work, Critical Refl ections on Poetry, Painting and Music , 3 vols. trans. Thomas Nugent ( London : John Nourse , 1748 ) , and used by

such a modern authority as Baldine Saint Girons , in Esth é tiques du XVIIIe si è cle: Le Mod è le Fran ç ais ( Paris : Philippe Sers é diteur , 1990 ), pp. 17–42 .






Introduction 9

But despite this burst of activity, or Baumgarten’s baptism of the fi eld

a decade and a half later, or the defi nition of the “fi ne arts” as a group

by Charles Batteux another dozen years on, it nevertheless would be mis-

leading to suggest that the discipline of aesthetics commenced ab novo

at any point in modernity. Aesthetics has always been part of philosophy.

Alfred North Whitehead famously said that all of philosophy could be

regarded as a series of “footnotes to Plato.” 13 This may be an exaggeration

when it comes to some areas of modern philosophy, but it could be said

about aesthetics with much justice. The discipline of aesthetics can be

thought of as the collective response to Plato’s criticisms of many forms

of art in his Republic as worthless for the purposes of knowledge and dan-

gerous to morality because of their uncontrolled effect on our emotions.

The response to these criticisms began with Aristotle, perhaps even with

other works of Plato himself. In any case, it is the central claim of this

book that aesthetics since the beginning of the eighteenth century has

also been in the business of responding to Plato, often tacitly although

sometimes explicitly, sometimes defending the cognitive value of aes-

thetic experience and with that its moral value, but sometimes replacing

the assumption that aesthetic experience must have cognitive value with

two new ideas – the idea that a full range of emotional responses to art

or nature is a good thing, not a bad thing, whether it has any immediate

moral value or not, and the idea that the free exercise of our human

capacities of mind and even of body is an intrinsically pleasurable and

for that reason good thing, without regard to further cognitive or moral

utility at all. As we will see, each of these ideas – of the cognitive value of

aesthetic experience, of the emotional impact of aesthetic experience,

of the free play of our distinctively human capacities – has taken many

different forms, and they have sometimes entered into different combi-

nations with each other, sometimes not. Tracing out the different forms

and combinations of these ideas – and suggesting that greater value lies

in their synthesis than in their separation – is the task of this work. That

I have organized my narrative around these three ideas is another rea-

son this work is called only a history of modern aesthetics – there are no

doubt other ways to do it. 14

13 Alfred North Whitehead , Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929), corrected edi-

tion, ed. David Ray Griffi n and Donald W. Sherburne ( New York : Free Press , 1978 ) ,

p. 39.

14 I have discussed some other approaches to the history of modern aesthetics in “History

of Modern Aesthetics,” in Jerrold Levinson , The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics ( Oxford :

Oxford University Press , 2003 ), pp. 25–60 (an article that might better have been called







Since these ideas have taken so many different forms, it would be as

hopeless to begin by attempting precise defi nitions of any of them as I

argued it would be hopeless to begin with a precise defi nition of aesthet-

ics itself. Instead I introduce the history of modern aesthetics with a brief

look at Plato’s criticism of the arts and some of the traditional responses

to it, and then say something more about the varieties of response to

Plato that entered into aesthetics at the beginning of the eighteenth cen-

tury and have been developed in many ways since then. The classicist

James Porter has argued that Plato’s philosophy, which fi nds value in art

only to the limited extent that some art can be seen as leading to knowl-

edge of the eternal forms that are for Plato the ultimate reality, is itself a

response to earlier ways of thinking about art that emphasized the sensory

experience of matter or the physical, such as paint, stone, and sound. 15

Porter’s argument is powerful and richly detailed, and restoring the

importance of our sensory experience of the physical world, something

already hinted at by Baumgarten’s emphasis on the sensory, became a

“Historiography of Modern Aesthetics”) . In particular, I discussed there the approaches

of three works: Terry Eagleton , The Ideology of the Aesthetic ( Oxford : Blackwell , 1990 ) ;

Luc Ferry , Home aestheticus: The Invention of Taste in the Democratic Age , trans. Robert de

Loaiza ( Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 1993 ) ; and Jean-Marie Schaeffer , Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger , trans. Steven Randall ( Princeton :

Princeton University Press , 2000 ) . I will not repeat my arguments from that article here,

nor will I in general engage in overt polemics with other scholars in this work; there is

too much ground to be covered to allow that indulgence. It will have to suffi ce to say

here that I fi nd Ferry’s argument that the development of modern aesthetics, especially

with its emphasis on the universal validity of taste, went hand in hand with the develop-

ing idea of an open and democratic public sphere far more convincing than Eagleton’s

contention that aesthetic theory was just one more instrument for domination by elites,

while I agree with Schaeffer that the turn to a “speculative theory of art” in post-Kantian

fi gures such as Hegel and Martin Heidegger was problematic, but my argument will be

that the problem was as much with the reductionist as with the metaphysical character

of this turn. Here I might also mention the great work by Francis Sparshott , The Theory of the Arts ( Princeton : Princeton University Press , 1982 ) , who divides the history of aesthet-

ics into the “classical” line, which includes both “arts of disengaged communication,”

which in turn subsumes “imaginative play,” and “arts of beauty,” and the “expressive line”

(pp. xi–xii); this division certainly makes room for the complexity of approaches to aes-

thetics but does not in my view recognize the dominance of the cognitivist approach to

aesthetics throughout its history, and suggests that expression is an alternative concept

to beauty, when, as we shall see, for many it has been meant as an explanation of beauty.

Finally, I would also mention Einf ü hrung in die Ä sthetik by the Hegel scholar Annemarie

Gethmann-Siefert ( Munich : Wilhelm Fink Verlag , 1995 ) , who distinguishes between two

paradigms in aesthetics, those of “intuitable truth” and “beautiful action” (p. 9); this

division comes close to my division between the aesthetic theories of truth and play, but

it does not recognize the aesthetics of emotional impact as a distinct line of thought that

may or may not be combined with one or both of the others.

15 See Porter, The Origins of Aesthetics in Ancient Greece , chs. 2 and 3 , pp. 70–176.






1

Periodization is always one of the great challenges for historiography.

Deciding how to defi ne the nineteenth century in the history of aesthet-

ics is no exception. For some purposes, such as political and diplomatic

history, a “long nineteenth century,” running from 1789 to 1914, that

is, from the French Revolution to the outbreak of World War I, might

make sense, although if the Revolution is considered well within the

eighteenth century and the Napoleonic era considered a continuation

of that era, then the nineteenth century might only run from 1815 to

1914, which is in any case exactly one hundred years. In aesthetics, there

are many if not more possibilities, due to different developments in dif-

ferent national traditions or even within single national traditions. Thus ,

in the case of Britain, the eighteenth-century fl ourishing of the fi eld was

largely completed with Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man of 1785 and Archibald Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste of 1790, but it made sense to include Dugald Stewart in the eigh-

teenth century, even though some of his relevant work was published

only as late as 1810, because of his proximity to the intellectual world

of those authors. In Germany, the situation is even more complicated.

It would be perfectly natural to think of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment of 1790 as the culmination of the developments that began in

Germany with Wolff and of the developments that began in Britain with

Hutcheson and Hume, as well as conceiving of it as a conclusive rejec-

tion of a tradition that began in France with Du Bos, and then to think

of everything coming after Kant as part of a new epoch. Thus, in German

aesthetics, the nineteenth century might begin after 1790. But we have

already treated several prominent authors whose main works in aesthet-

ics were published later in the 1790s, or even the fi rst decade of the

1800s, namely Schiller, Goethe, von Humboldt, and even Herbart, in the

Introduction


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last chapter of the previous book, because of their intellectual proximity

to Kant; and Herder’s Kalligone , published in 1800, which some might

regard as the last year of the eighteenth century and others as the fi rst

year of the nineteenth century, certainly had to be treated there because

it is so explicitly a critique of Kant. However, a new school of philosophy,

still conceiving of itself in relation to Kant but breaking more radically

with his thought, namely the era of German Idealism, while it would

become the dominant school of thought in Germany in the fi rst half of

the calendar’s nineteenth century, and reverberate in Anglo-American

thought for much of the second half of the century, began as early as

1794, with Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s fi rst Wissenschaftslehre (“Theory of

Science”), before Schiller had even published his main essays in aes-

thetics; and Fichte’s precocious colleague Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph

Schelling was also well-embarked on his publishing career before the

end of the 1790s. In addition, the broader German artistic and intel-

lectual movement known as Romanticism, although that is generally

considered a nineteenth-century movement, was also well under way

before the end of the decade, and that movement had reverberations

within academic philosophy. So, in the end, perhaps we can only say

that in German aesthetics the eighteenth century continued into the

1790s and the nineteenth century began in the same decade, depending

upon what fi gures and movements we are considering. And that is how I

have proceeded and will continue to proceed, with some of the fi gures I

have already discussed as part of the eighteenth century, such as Schiller,

Goethe, and Herbart, nevertheless having remained active in the 1790s

or well beyond, while others who are now to be discussed, such as the two

Friedrichs, H ö lderlin and Schlegel, representing the Romantics, and

Schelling, the fi rst representative of German Idealism, having at least

begun their careers in the 1790s as well.

As we will see, the question where to begin the nineteenth century in

the history of aesthetics is largely a question about where to begin it in

Germany, since while in the eighteenth century there was great activity in

the fi eld in Britain and France as well as in Germany, although German

aesthetics in that period was more affected by British and French devel-

opments than the other way around, in the fi rst part of the nineteenth

century Germany was defi nitely the center of new developments in aes-

thetics while the subject largely disappeared from the British or indeed

the Anglo-American academy. Moreover, such extra-academic authors

in Britain and America who did make signifi cant contributions to the

fi eld, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and even






Introduction 3

John Stuart Mill, to some considerable extent worked in the penumbra

of the German philosophers, particularly Schelling. We will return to a

truly independent British tradition in aesthetics only when we turn to

the work of John Ruskin beginning in the 1840s, a fi gure who might

seem to be more of an art (and social) critic than a philosophical aesthe-

tician, but who was both so strongly infl uenced by the previous British

tradition in aesthetics and had such an impact on the subsequent devel-

opment of more philosophical aesthetics in Britain that he cannot be

left out of our story. German aesthetics rather than its own eighteenth-

century tradition was largely dominant in France in the fi rst part of the

nineteenth century too, as we will see when we comment on the work of

Victor Cousin (although France will play a smaller role in the remainder

of this work than it did in the eighteenth century).

When we try to fi nd an end for the nineteenth century, developments

in Britain and America will become as important as developments in

Germany, and we will fi nd that in all three national traditions we will

again have to allow the end of the nineteenth century to overlap with

the beginning of the twentieth century. In Germany, we can use 1914 as

the dividing line between the centuries, because the two movements that

still were dominant up until that date, namely Neo-Kantianism and the

“empathy” schools, had their origins as early as the 1870s, and radically

different movements, such as the aesthetics of Heidegger and his fol-

lowers, did not begin until after the Great War – although Heidegger’s

unique form of realism began as a critique of Neo-Kantianism, thus the

dividing line of 1914 may be sharp but is hardly an impermeable barrier.

So our discussions of the aesthetics of Neo-Kantianism and empathy will

continue past 1900, and indeed our discussion of the empathy school

will include consideration of several American and British texts, deeply

infl uenced by the German leaders of the school, published between

1905 and as late as 1913. In Britain and America, however, things are

more complicated. The leading aesthetician in Britain at the turn of

the century was Bernard Bosanquet and the leading aesthetician in

America at that time was George Santayana; their fi rst books in aesthet-

ics respectively, Bosanquet’s History of Æ sthetic and Santayana’s Sense of Beauty , were published just four years apart, in 1892 and 1896, and both

authors could easily be treated as nineteenth-century fi gures. But even

though Bosanquet published another important work in aesthetics as

late as 1915, Santayana remained productive throughout the fi rst half

of the twentieth century, and thus, while I will treat Bosanquet’s work as

the culmination of nineteenth-century aesthetics in Britain, I will treat







Santayana as founding twentieth-century aesthetics in America. This

means that Clive Bell’s widely discussed Art of 1914, although it could

easily be treated as a late document of the nineteenth-century “art for

art’s sake” movement, will be treated as part of twentieth-century British

aesthetics, and that makes sense too, because Bell’s work was so closely

associated with the literary and artistic circle known as “Bloomsbury,”

focused around the two Stephens sisters, Virginia Wolff and Vanessa

Bell (Clive’s wife), and that is very much a movement of the twentieth

century.

Another decision that has to be made here is where, both chrono-

logically and nationally, to discuss the Italian Benedetto Croce. Italian

aesthetics as such has not been and will not be part of the story told

here, although a case could certainly be made that our discussion of

eighteenth-century aesthetics should have made room for Giambattista

Vico; but Croce was such an infl uential fi gure in British aesthetics into

the 1930s and even beyond that British aesthetics in that period cannot

be understood without him, and therefore his work will be discussed as

part of the history of British aesthetics. And likewise, while the publica-

tion date of his fi rst main work in aesthetics in 1902 and even his second

main contribution in 1913 might allow for his inclusion in the nine-

teenth century, his impact on twentieth-century British aesthetics clearly

calls for his inclusion there. So, in this work the history of nineteenth-

century British aesthetics will conclude with Bernard Bosanquet, and,

strange as it might seem, the history of twentieth-century British aesthet-

ics will begin with Benedetto Croce.

So much for the chronology of this and the next volume. Now for a

few words on the substance of the history of nineteenth-century aesthet-

ics to be presented in this volume. As we saw in Volume 1, Kant’s philos-

ophy of fi ne art synthesized his version of the theory that the intrinsically

pleasurable free play of our mental powers is the essence of aesthetic

experience that was developed in mid-eighteenth-century Scotland and

Germany with a version of the theory that aesthetic experience is a dis-

tinctive form of the apprehension of truth that had been the core of aes-

thetic theory since the time of Aristotle. Kant brought these two strands

of aesthetic theory together in his conception of “aesthetic ideas” as the

source of “spirit” in fi ne art and of genius as the uniquely artistic capacity

for the creation and communication of aesthetic ideas, for, by means of

this concept, he postulated that in both the production and the recep-

tion of fi ne art the imagination freely plays with and around the intellec-

tual content furnished by ideas of reason. A natural response to Kant’s






Introduction 5

twofold synthesis would have been to add to it the third main line of

thought in eighteenth-century aesthetics, the emphasis on the emotional

impact of art by such fi gures as Du Bos and Kames that Kant had held at

arm’s length, indeed explicitly rejected, and that a few in the 1790s, such

as Heydenreich and Herder, had attempted to preserve. But that is not

what happened. Instead, even Kant’s twofold synthesis was quickly sun-

dered by the next generation, and Kant’s combination of the aesthetics

of play with the aesthetics of truth as well as the aesthetics of emotional

impact were rejected in favor of a purely cognitivist aesthetics. This is

particularly evident in the three great aesthetic theories to take the stage

after Kant, those of Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Hegel. While each

preserved some of the outward trappings of Kant’s aesthetics, they each

transformed Kant’s conception of aesthetic ideas as a form of free play

with truth back into a more traditional conception of an apprehension

of truth that is certainly different from other forms of cognition but does

not really involve an element of free play. Schelling and Schopenhauer

in particular both rejected Kant’s idea that aesthetic experience is intrin-

sically pleasurable because it is a free play of our mental powers, replac-

ing that theory with the view that for the most part aesthetic experience

is pleasurable only because it releases us from the pain of some other-

wise inescapable contradiction in the human condition. To borrow terms

used by Edmund Burke a half-century earlier, they replace Kant’s con-

ception of aesthetic response as a “positive pleasure” with a conception

of it as “the removal of pain” or “delight” as a merely “negative” or “rela-

tive” form of pleasure. 1 In particular, even though Schopenhauer recog-

nizes that there is some pleasure in aesthetic response that goes beyond

mere relief at the removal of pain, he explicitly identifi es the pleasure

of aesthetic experience with relief from all other emotions, thus clearly

rejecting that the arousal of emotions in any form is an essential or char-

acteristic aim of art. Thus both he and Schelling nevertheless maintain

that all of the pleasure in aesthetic experience comes through cognition

alone rather than from a free play of our cognitive powers. In the case of

Hegel, while his thesis that artistic beauty is the sensible appearance of

what he calls “the Idea” can be taken as his version of Kant’s own theory

of aesthetic ideas as the spirit of fi ne art, both the theories that aesthetic

experience is a form of play and the theory that art aims at the arousal

of emotions – which Hegel associates with Mendelssohn – are explicitly

1 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Part One, sections III–V.







rejected. All three thus transmute Kant’s aesthetics back into a version

of cognitivism.

Before we turn to Schelling, we will begin this part with a brief discus-

sion of the aesthetics of German Romanticism, to be represented here

primarily by the work of Friedrich Schlegel although with a briefer com-

ment on the work of Friedrich H ö lderlin as well. From a philosophi-

cal point of view, the aesthetics of Romanticism might be regarded as

a new version of the Neo-Platonism of Shaftesbury of a century earlier,

thus presenting a potential for seeing art as offering the possibility of

a three-way synthesis of our responses to the true, the good, and the

beautiful; but Romanticism was a short-lived movement, at least in phi-

losophy, shoved off the stage by Idealism precisely because its theory of

art was not exclusively cognitivist; this is explicit in Hegel. And, paus-

ing to look at a broader range of cultural fi gures in Germany, Britain,

and America before we turn from Schelling to Schopenhauer, we will

see that it was the philosophy of Schelling and not of Schlegel that was

the dominant infl uence; thus, Jean Paul, Coleridge, and Emerson were

all strongly infl uenced by Schelling. Meanwhile, within more profes-

sional philosophy, it was Hegel who dominated the scene in the decade

before his death in 1831 and for several decades afterward, in spite of

some resistance even in Berlin, such as from the theologian Friedrich

Schleiermacher, who defended something closer to Kant’s earlier theory

of play. But Schleiermacher’s lectures on aesthetics, which began shortly

after Hegel joined him at the university in Berlin, did not have the same

infl uence as Hegel’s.

Hegel’s infl uence would remain strong in Germany at least until about

1860, when Neo-Kantianism began, as much as a form of resistance to

Hegelianism as a genuine revival of Kantianism. Thus leading aestheti-

cians of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, such as Christian Hermann Weisse,

Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Karl Rosenkranz, and Rudolf Lotze, all

worked within recognizably Hegelian frameworks, although we will see

that some of these thinkers, especially Vischer, began to make room for

the Kantian idea of free play and for the recognition of the emotional

impact of art as well within the confi nes of their Hegelian framework.

Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s son Robert Vischer would emphasize the

idea of “empathy,” the reading of our own emotions back into inani-

mate objects, as one way of making room for an emotional response to

art, and that would generate a whole school of German empathy theo-

rists that had infl uence in Britain and the United States as well, lasting

beyond 1900. At the same time, the Neo-Kantians, in both their Marburg






Introduction 7

and Southwestern schools, would make room for the emotional impact

of art within a framework that is not particularly Kantian at all, by seeing

art as a vehicle for the cognition of our own emotions. This approach

will still be visible in Britain half a century later, in the aesthetics of R.G.

Collingwood, although he was more overtly infl uenced by Benedetto

Croce’s idiosyncratic mixture of Kantianism and Hegelianism. That,

however, will be addressed in Volume 3.

Meanwhile, Schopenhauer, although he had published his main work

on aesthetics – the third book of The World as Will and Representation – the

same year that Hegel merely began lecturing on the subject at Berlin

(and when Schleiermacher gave his less infl uential lectures as well) was

eclipsed by the fame of Hegel, and his star began to rise only later, espe-

cially during the years of pessimism that followed the failed liberal revo-

lutions of 1848 across Europe. But once Schopenhauer’s star did rise, he

had enormous infl uence, on the practice of the arts, especially literature

and music, but also within philosophy, if not exactly academic philoso-

phy, through Nietzsche and the now less known Eduard von Hartmann

(Nietzsche was an academic for a decade, but a classical philologist, not

a philosopher). In the case of Nietzsche in particular, we will see that

while his fi rst book and his only book devoted exclusively to aesthetics,

The Birth of Tragedy , was very much infl uenced by Schopenhauer, in some

passages in later work he began to revive the Kantian idea of free play.

We shall also see that the famous “art for art’s sake” movement, identi-

fi ed more with literary fi gures such as Charles Baudelaire, Walter Pater,

and Oscar Wilde than with professional philosophers, and certainly not

overtly infl uenced by Schopenhauer, can nevertheless be associated with

the Schopenhauerian idea of art as an instrument for detachment from

concerns of ordinary life. That attitude in turn can be seen as carrying

over into some twentieth-century movements, such as the Bloomsbury

aesthetics of Clive Bell and Roger Fry, although again that will be a mat-

ter for Volume 3. At the same time, these British movements, both the

later stages of the art for art’s sake movement or aestheticism, as it is

also called, as well as the Bloomsbury aesthetics of the early twentieth

century – can also be seen as rejecting the underlying cognitivism of

the main home-grown form of aesthetics in mid-nineteenth-century

Britain, namely the aesthetics of John Ruskin, so Ruskin will also be

considered in the present volume. I shall conclude this part by looking

at two other fi n-de-si è cle theorists, namely Bernard Bosanquet and Leo

Tolstoy, who, though very different in almost every way, nevertheless

shared a reductive rather than expansive approach to aesthetic theory.







Bosanquet, part of the British Hegelianism that fl ourished in the late

nineteenth century while Neo-Kantianism was replacing Hegelianism in

German itself, maintained a basically cognitivist approach to aesthetic

experience. Tolstoy, on the contrary, promulgated an aesthetics of emo-

tional arousal, but one of such narrow scope – for him, the sole function

of art is the communication of religiously benefi cial emotions – that he

set back the cause of recognizing the emotional impact of art as much

as the Idealism of Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Hegel had done at the

beginning of the century. Collingwood’s argument that only the clarifi -

cation of emotions and not the arousal of emotions can be a legitimate

aim of art, to be considered in Volume 3, can be understood as a rejec-

tion of Tolstoy’s view, even forty years later.

Around the same time as Nietzsche was taking some steps toward

reviving the theory of play, the Berlin philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, a

much less orthodox Neo-Kantian than either his Marburg or Southwest

contemporaries, developed a “poetics” that came as close as anything

in the nineteenth century did to reestablishing a threefold synthesis of

the aesthetics of truth, feeling, and play that had been hinted at by a

few of Kant’s immediate predecessors or successors but that had been

rejected by Kant himself. However, Dilthey’s version of a threefold syn-

thesis would remain an isolated example of aesthetic nonreductivism in

the nineteenth century.

These are some of the fi gures and themes to be considered in the pre-

sent volume. Let us now turn to them.






1

In Volume 1, we saw how two alternatives were developed during the

course of the eighteenth century to the traditional approach to aesthetic

experience as a form of cognition or insight into truth, what has been

called here the aesthetics of truth, namely, the idea that aesthetic expe-

rience is a free play of our cognitive or more broadly mental powers,

the aesthetics of play, and the recognition of the emotional impact of

aesthetic experience, especially the experience of art, the aesthetics of

emotional impact. A few thinkers, including Moses Mendelssohn and

Johann Georg Sulzer in Germany and Lord Kames in Britain, at least

suggested a comprehensive attitude to aesthetic experience synthesizing

all three of these, but Immanuel Kant rejected the importance of emo-

tional response in aesthetic experience and in his theory of fi ne art com-

bined only the traditional aesthetics of truth with the novel aesthetics

of play. Among Kant’s immediate contemporaries and successors, a few

made gestures toward adding emotional impact into Kant’s mix.

But as we saw in Volume 2, the predominant response among Kant’s

most prominent successors in the early nineteenth century was not

to add emotional impact back into a comprehensive aesthetic theory;

rather, they accepted Kant’s exclusion of emotional impact but also

rejected his theory of play, thus reverting to an essentially cognitivist

approach to aesthetics, although with a decidedly metaphysical twist.

This was certainly true in the cases of Friedrich Schelling, Arthur

Schopenhauer, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, although their

contemporary Friedrich Schleiermacher sketched an aesthetic the-

ory comprehending all three approaches, and some of the fi gures to

whom the infl uence of Schelling was communicated by Samuel Taylor

Coleridge, such as William Wordworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John

Stuart Mill, also sought to recognize the emotional impact as well as

Introduction


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cognitive signifi cance of art, particularly poetry, even if they stopped

short of recognizing the element of sheer play in aesthetic experience.

In the generation that followed Hegel, Friedrich Theodor Vischer espe-

cially tried to make room for both the Kantian aspect of play and the

non-Kantian aspect of emotion in aesthetic experience, the latter under

the term “empathy” that was developed into an approach to aesthetics

by his son Robert, Theodor Lipps, and others. Friedrich Nietzsche, after

his early work under the infl uence of Schopenhauer, also sought room

for the idea of play, and some of the critics associated with the aestheti-

cist movement, namely, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, suggested com-

prehensive rather than reductive approaches to aesthetics. Among the

Neo-Kantians, Wilhelm Dilthey, a student of Schleiermacher as well as

of Kant, recognized the compatibility and equal importance of cogni-

tion, imagination, and emotion in his poetics.

But as we now turn to the twentieth century, we will see that this

comprehensive approach to aesthetics was not immediately pursued.

In Germany, very different thinkers such as the Marxists Georg Luk á cs

and Theodor Adorno, on the one hand, and the existential phenom-

enologist Martin Heidegger, on the other, adopted purely cognitivist

approaches to aesthetics, thus reprising the history of German aes-

thetics a century earlier, although eventually Herbert Marcuse on the

Marxist side and Hans-Georg Gadamer on the Heideggerian side tried

to make room for free play in their conceptions of aesthetic experience.

In Britain, two major infl uences at the outset of the twentieth century

were the cognitivist theory of Benedetto Croce and the formalist the-

ory of the Bloomsbury writer Clive Bell, both reductive theories, and

British aestheticians then struggled to broaden those conceptions of

aesthetic experience and the aesthetically signifi cant aspects of art. In

the United States, twentieth-century aesthetics, indeed aesthetics as a

branch of academic philosophy at all, can be regarded as beginning

with the 1896 work of George Santayana and reaching a characteris-

tically American form in the pragmatist aesthetics of John Dewey. The

examples of Santayana and Dewey encouraged a more comprehensive

approach to aesthetics in the United States than elsewhere, as will be

seen from our examination of some now-less-well-known aestheticians

from the fi rst half of the century who deserve to be remembered, fore-

most among them DeWitt Parker, T.M. Greene, and D.W. Gotshalk.

At midcentury, however, the enormous impact of the work of Ludwig

Wittgenstein on the fi eld of aesthetics, resisted at fi rst perhaps only by

Monroe Beardsley, steeped as he was in the thought of Kant and Dewey,






Introduction 3

once again produced a narrowing of approach in aesthetics, and only

the efforts of some of the most creative philosophers infl uenced by

Wittgenstein, such as Richard Wollheim and Stanley Cavell, suggested

ways to restore a broad rather than narrow approach to aesthetics. In

an Epilogue, we will consider how the relations among the three main

modern approaches to aesthetics have continued to play out among a

small sample of recent contributors to the fi eld.

As mentioned in the General Introduction to this work, the present

volume will, with very few exceptions, omit discussion of French aesthetic

theory in the twentieth century. There are multiple reasons for this. For

one, the reception of recent French aesthetic theory in the United States

and Britain has been far greater in the fi elds of literary and cultural stud-

ies than in academic philosophy, at least in philosophy with an “analytic”

orientation, and the present work refl ects the latter orientation, indeed

could perhaps fairly be said to tell the history of aesthetics insofar as it

leads up to philosophical aesthetics as practiced in analytically oriented

departments in the United States, Britain, and Germany at the present

time. And this fact about the reception of recent French aesthetics is

not an accident. Much recent French thought, paradigmatically that of

the late Jacques Derrida but of many others as well, has been a “post-

structuralist” response to the “structuralism” of the linguist Ferdinand

DeSaussure and the anthropologist Claude-Levi Strauss. The structur-

alists approached various forms of human thought and activity on the

model of a language with fi xed syntactical and semantical categories (the

“structure”), and the poststructuralist response has been to argue, in

myriad ways befi tting the thesis, that language is not like that, but instead

consists of an indeterminate and indeed effectively infi nite possibility

of internal relations, with meaning always “deferred” from one term to

another and never fi xed by either a unifi ed subject or a unifi ed world of

objects. Common to both structuralism and poststructuralism has been

the assumption that the object of investigation – whether language liter-

ally, human social relations, or works of art – is always a “text” that stands

on its own, either allowing or defeating interpretation. This approach

may have its merits, but it is fundamentally different from the under-

lying assumption of aesthetic theory in Britain, the United States, and

Germany throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centu-

ries, and certainly in France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

as well, namely, that works of art do not exist on their own, but are prod-

ucts of as well as triggers of human experience of an objective world, an

experience of which aesthetic experience may be one distinctive form







but one that still is part of a genuine interaction between real subjects

and real objects. For this reason, it seems to me that poststructuralism

is diffi cult to integrate into the history of mainstream modern aesthet-

ics as it has developed from the eighteenth century onward, and I have

chosen to tell the latter. A second reason is a matter not merely of space

and time but also of justice: To tell the story of French aesthetic theory

in the twentieth century not only would have added years to the already

lengthy gestation of this work, but would either have required either an

additional volume of its own or else the elimination of a great deal of the

material included in the present volume. But the latter option would no

doubt have meant the elimination of a great deal of my discussion of the

now-little-known accomplishments of American and British aesthetics in

the fi rst half of the twentieth century, and that is not a price I would have

been willing to pay; on the contrary, the retrieval of the work of such fi g-

ures as Samuel Alexander, DeWitt Parker, T.M. Greene, and many more,

and even the rescue of the work of the never completely forgotten R.G.

Collingwood from its customary simplifi cation or even caricature, have,

as it turned out, become one of the primary ambitions of this volume.

Meanwhile, there has been no dearth of expository work on the recent

French thinkers whom I will not be discussing. 1

For reasons of space, I will also be omitting discussion of the treat-

ment of aesthetics within the phenomenological approach to philoso-

phy initiated by Edmund Husserl, with the notable exception of Martin

Heidegger, without whom no history of twentieth-century aesthetics or

twentieth-century philosophy more generally could make any pretense

to completeness. There are certainly fi gures within the phenomenolog-

ical movement who continue to be read and continue to be worthy of

being read, and who could be discussed among the heirs to Heidegger,

such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty; the latter’s sev-

eral essays on perception in the visual arts, especially his famous essay

“Cezanne’s Doubts,” are gems. 2 The Polish literary theorist Roman

1 See, for example, Clive Cazeaux , ed., The Continental Aesthetics Reader , second edition

( London : Routledge , 2011 ) ; numerous works by Frederic Jameson beginning with The Prison-House of Language ( Princeton : Princeton University Press , 1972 ) ; numerous works

by Jean-Michel Rabat é , e.g., The Future of Theory ( Oxford : Blackwell , 2002 ) ; Richard

Kearney , The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Post-Modern Culture ( London : Routledge ,

1994 ) , Part III; and Isobel Armstrong , The Radical Aesthetic ( Oxford : Blackwell , 2000 ) .

2 This essay and several others are conveniently collected, along with commentaries,

in Galen A. Johnson , ed., The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting

( Evanston : Northwestern University Press , 1993 ) .






Introduction 5

Ingarden, 3 infl uenced more by Husserl than by Heidegger, would also be

worthy of inclusion, along with other Polish aestheticians such as Stefan

Morawski 4 and the historian W ł adys ł aw Tatarkiewicz, author of a three-

volume History of Aesthetics 5 that stops at the end of the seventeenth cen-

tury, just where the present one begins. Much of this work, as Ingarden’s

titles in particular suggest, could readily be assimilated to what I have

called in this book the cognitivist tradition in modern aesthetics, and

the discussion of it would show that the interest of this approach was far

from being exhausted in the twentieth century. But as my interest in this

volume lies more in describing the way leading aestheticians in the twen-

tieth century attempted to break out from a purely cognitivist approach

rather than just adding more detail to it, and as, again, in the course of

my work on this volume I arrived at the ambition of conducting an exer-

cise of retrieval on behalf of pre-Wittgensteinian Anglophone aesthetics,

I am going to have to exclude discussion of all this material. As is evident,

the present volume is large enough already.

3 See Roman Ingarden , The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic, and the Theory of Literature , trans. George C. Grabowicz ( Evanston : Northwestern

University Press , 1973 ) ; Cognition of the Literary Work of Art , trans. Ruth Ann Crowley and

Kenneth R. Olson ( Evanston : Northwestern University Press , 1973 ) ; and Ontology of the Work of Art: The Musical Work, Painting, Architecture, the Film , trans. Raymond Meyer with

John T. Goldthwait ( Athens : Ohio University Press , 1989 ) .

4 Stefan Morawski , Inquiries into the Fundamentals of Aesthetics , foreword by Monroe

C. Beardsley ( Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press , 1974 ) .

5 W ł adys ł aw Tatarkiewicz , History of Aesthetics , 3 vols. ( The Hague : Mouton , 1970 –4) . This

work is more of a sourcebook than a work of interpretation, although it remains of value

precisely for that reason. Tatarkiewicz ’s more interpretative work is History of Six Ideas: An Essay in Aesthetics , trans. Christopher Kasparek ( The Hague : Martinus Nijhoff , 1980 ) .






Part One

GERMAN AESTHETICS IN THE

TWENTIETH CENTURY

German writers dominated the fi eld of aesthetics in the late

eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries, and their prom-

inence in the preceding narrative, in the last part of Volume 1 and

through much of Volume 2, has refl ected that fact. German intellectual

life, indeed German life in general, was repeatedly disrupted in the twen-

tieth century, by the First World War, by the rise of National Socialism

and the Second World War and the enforced emigration or destruction

of many professors and writers, largely but not exclusively Jewish, that

accompanied those events, and then by the division of the nation and

the Cold War that followed; and German philosophy including aesthet-

ics was not excepted from all these upheavals. But in spite of and to some

extent because of all these disruptions, as well as because of the tradition

of German aesthetics over the preceding two centuries, debate over the

nature and value of the arts and of experience of them remained lively

throughout the twentieth century. In order to make room for the exten-

sive development of aesthetics in twentieth-century Britain and the United

States, our survey of twentieth-century German aesthetics will have to be

even more selective than were our surveys of eighteenth- and nineteenth-

century German aesthetics. But we will nevertheless consider a number

of the most important German (or German-writing) aestheticians of

the twentieth century, including Georg Luk á cs and Martin Heidegger

(although not others in Germany, France, or Poland who hewed more

closely to the original phenomenology of Heidegger’s teacher Edmund

Husserl), whose views were formed in the period between the two world

wars, and who may to some extent be taken as representing left- and

right-wing thought during those years, and then Hans-Georg Gadamer,

Theodor W. Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse, who although they to some

extent carried on the interwar debates, published their most important

7






8 German Aesthetics in the Twentieth Century

works after the Second World War, and, at least in the case of Gadamer

and Marcuse, in spite of both having begun as students of Heidegger,

introduced a new theme, or reintroduced an old one, into twentieth-

century German aesthetics, namely, the idea of play. We will also briefl y

consider several more contemporary German fi gures, including Dieter

Henrich, in turn the foremost student of Gadamer.






9

It might seem strange to take Gy ö rgy Luk á cs (1885–1971) and Martin

Heidegger (1889–1976) as the main examples of German aesthet-

ics between the two world wars. Not only were there other important

philosophers who wrote on aesthetics (such as Ernst Cassirer, whom

however we will consider as part of the history of twentieth-century aes-

thetics in the United States, where at least until recently his infl uence

was much greater than in Germany); not only was Luk á cs not German

at all, but Hungarian (although, like many other urban Hungarian

Jews, he was of German descent, and throughout his life wrote his main

works in German); above all, they were at opposite ends of the political

spectrum, Luk á cs known as a Marxist for most of his life and even fl our-

ishing in the Stalinist Soviet Union while Heidegger was permanently

tainted by his affi liation with the Nazis in the 1930s even if he withdrew

from any offi cial position other than his professorship after his year as

the Nazi-appointed rector of his university in 1933–4 (he retained his

membership in the party until the end of the war). But in spite of all

their differences, Luk á cs and Heidegger shared one trait that binds

them together and makes them representative of German aesthetics

in their time: a focus on art and aesthetic experience as a vehicle of

important truth, truth about human society in the case of Luk á cs and

about human being itself, as something even more fundamental than

society, in the case of Heidegger. For that reason they will be consid-

ered together in this chapter. Ernst Cassirer, who might also be consid-

ered a major contributor to aesthetics during the interwar period, had

his major infl uence in the United States after World War II and for that

reason will be considered in our discussion of American rather than

German aesthetics.

1

German Aesthetics between the Wars

Luk á cs and Heidegger






German Aesthetics in the Twentieth Century10

1. Luk á cs

The extraordinary devastation of World War I marked a caesura

throughout European culture, academic philosophy by no means

excluded, but above all in Germany: While some individuals who had

made their mark before 1914 made further contributions after 1918

(for example, Volkelt and Groos) and a few who had just begun to work

before 1914 reached the height of their powers after 1918, it is natural

to divide German intellectual history, including German philosophy, into

the period before 1914, still essentially part of the nineteenth century,

and the period after 1918, which can itself be divided into the period

before the Second World War and the period after. The fi rst of these

periods will concern us in this chapter, and the second in the next.

One fi gure who started his career before the war and even contin-

ued it during the war but who wrote his most substantial works after the

war, indeed for fi fty years after the war, was Gy ö rgy Luk á cs. Luk á cs was

born in Hungary and spent some fateful periods of his life there, but he

studied and worked in Germany and Austria and then, when as both a

Communist and a Jew, he became unwelcome there, he spent the years

of the Third Reich in the Soviet Union. But his work in aesthetics, with

which he began and ended his career, was not only deeply rooted in the

history of German aesthetics but also written largely in German, so it

can be discussed as part of the history of German aesthetics. In German

Luk á cs published under the name “Georg” rather than “Gy ö rgy,” and so

we can henceforth refer to him.

Luk á cs was born in 1885, the son of a Jewish bank director in Budapest

(originally named “L ö winger”), who would often support his son fi nan-

cially even after the latter became an active Communist and thus attacked

the class that made his own existence possible. After an early attempt at

a career as a dramatist, Luk á cs studied law and economy and received a

degree in public administration in 1906. But he would put that expertise

to work only briefl y in a stint as minister of education in the short-lived

Hungarian Republic of 1919; otherwise, he devoted himself to litera-

ture and philosophy. He received another degree in 1909 for the fi rst

chapters of what would be published as A History of the Development of the Modern Drama in Hungarian in 1911; in that same year Luk á cs pub-

lished his fi rst work in German, a collection of essays entitled The Soul and the Forms . 1 His Jewish background blocked him from an academic

1 Gy ö rgy Luk á cs , Soul and Form , trans. Anna Bostock ( New York : Columbia University

Press , 2010 ) .






a history of modern aesthethics 3 volume set

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