The Career of Aesthetics in German Thinking

Summary

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

At any rate, the hopes placed by German thinking in aesthetics were enormous. Aesthetics was to be at times the better ethics, at other times the better epistemology, and at still other times simply the best philosophy. Since Kant's days, however, sceptical voices have been heard repeatedly that have wanted to transfer aesthetics back to the modest state of a subdiscipline; but they have not succeeded in doing so. Aesthetics up until today continues to be one of the great temptations of German philosophy (and not solely of German philosophy, if we think of the later Michel Foucault or the later Nelson Goodman).