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The Career of Aesthetics in German Thinking
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
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In German philosophy of the last 250 years, aesthetics has played a leading part. Any arbitrary list of great names contains mainly authors who either have written classical texts on aesthetics or are strongly influenced by aesthetic reflection, for instance, Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, and Adorno – the few exceptions being Husserl and Frege. It is not by chance that Frege is one of the founding fathers of modern Anglo-Saxon philosophy, where, generally speaking, aesthetics has had only marginal influence. That is not an insignificant difference. The wildest dreams of one tradition were focused on logic, those of the other on aesthetics.
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References
1 Baumgarten, A. G., Theoretische Ästhetik, trans. and ed. Schweizer, H. R. (Hamburg: Meiner, 1983)Google Scholar.
2 Reflections on this complementarity in Baumgarten are analysed by Scheer, B., Einfiihrung in die philosophische Ästhetik (Darmstadt: Primus,1997)Google Scholar; along these lines are the arguments advanced by Gabriel, G., Zwischen Logik und Literatur. Erkenntnisformen von Dichtung Philosophie und Wissenschaft (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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4 That is, the ‘full presence’ of a sensuously perceivable phenomenon is not open to cognitive access; it cannot be reduced to the empirical constitutionof an object of the sensory world; it is a givenness of the object that cannot be described as the composition of this object. The relation of complementarity between aesthetic and conceptual knowledge that Baumgarten envisioned is thereby annulled.
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6 Philosophical theories from Schelling to Adorno have tried repeatedly to reverse this order of precedence. Such reversals, however, merely reproduce the compulsion to establish an order of precedence, where only one constellation of forms of world interpretation can prevail.
7 From the revelation of the absolute to the self-contemplation of cultural worlds — that is the course taken by the history of art (and of our dealings with art) in Hegel.
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16 ‘Fireworks [being prototypical for artworks]are apparition kat exochen: They appear empirically yet are liberated from the burden of the empirical, which is the obligation of duration; they are a sign from heaven yet artifactual, an ominous warning, a script that flashes up, vanishes, and indeed cannot be read for its meaning.’ Ibid., p. 81.
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