Beyond autonomy in eighteenth-century British and German aesthetics

315 Pages·2021·8.313 MB·English

by  Karl Axelsson, Camilla Flodin, Mattias Pirholt

Beyond Autonomy in Eighteenth-
Century British and German
Aesthetics
This volume re- examines traditional interpretations of the rise of modern
aesthetics in eighteenth- century Britain and Germany. It provides a new account
that connects aesthetic experience with morality, science, and political society.
In doing so, it challenges long- standing teleological narratives that emphasize
disinterestedness and the separation of aesthetics from moral, cognitive, and
political interests.
The chapters are divided into three thematic parts. The chapters in
Part I demonstrate the heteronomy of eighteenth- century British aesthetics.
They chart the evolution of aesthetic concepts and discuss the ethical and poli-
tical significance of the aesthetic theories of several key figures: namely, the
third Earl of Shaftesbury, David Hume, and Adam Smith. Part II explores the
ways in which eighteenth- century German, and German-oriented, thinkers ex-
amine aesthetic experience and moral concerns, and relate to the work of their
British counterparts. The chapters here cover the work of Kant, Moses Mendels-
sohn, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, and Madame de Staël. Finally, Part III
explores the interrelation of science, aesthetics, and a new model of society in
the work of Goethe, Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Friedrich Hölderlin, and William
Hazlitt, among others.
This volume develops unique discussions of the rise of aesthetic autonomy in
the eighteenth century. In bringing together well- known scholars working on
British and German eighteenth- century aesthetics, philosophy, and literature, it
will appeal to scholars and advanced students in a range of disciplines who are
interested in this topic.
Karl Axelsson is Senior Lecturer in Aesthetics at Södertörn University, Stock-
holm, Sweden. His most recent book is Political Aesthetics: Addison and
Shaftesbury on Taste, Morals and Society (2019). Axelsson is also the S wedish
translator of the third Earl of Shaftesbury’s The Moralists, a Philosophical
Rhapsody (forthcoming).
Camilla Flodin holds a PhD in Aesthetics from Uppsala University and is
currently Lecturer and Research Fellow in Comparative Literature at Södertörn
University, Stockholm, Sweden. She has published extensively on Adorno’s aes-
thetics and the art- nature relationship in German Romanticism and Idealism.
Flodin is also a contributor to the Oxford Handbook of Adorno (forthcoming).
Mattias Pirholt is a Professor of Comparative Literature at Södertörn University,
Stockholm, Sweden. His most recent book publications include Grenzerfahrun-
gen: Studien zu Goethes Ästhetik (2018) and Das Abenteuer des Gewöhnli-
chen: Alltag in der deutschsprachigen Literatur der Moderne (co- edited with
Thorsten Carstensen, 2018).
Routledge Studies in Eighteenth- Century Philosophy
Hume’s Moral Philosophy and Contemporary Psychology
Edited by Philip A. Reed and Rico Vitz
Kant and the Problem of Self- Knowledge
Luca Forgione
Kant on Intuition
Western and Asian Perspectives on Transcendental Idealism
Edited by Stephen R. Palmquist
Hume on Art, Emotions, and Superstition
A Critical Study of the Four Dissertations
Amyas Merivale
A Guide to Kant’s Psychologism
via Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Wittgenstein
Wayne Waxman
Kant and the Continental Tradition
Sensibility, Nature, and Religion
Edited by Sorin Baiasu and Alberto Vanzo
Beyond Autonomy in Eighteenth- Century British and German
Aesthetics
Edited by Karl Axelsson, Camilla Flodin, and Mattias Pirholt
Kant’s Critical Epistemology
Why Epistemology Must Consider Judgment First
Kenneth R. Westphal
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.
routledge.com/Routledge- Studies- in- Eighteenth- Century- Philosophy/
book-s eries/SE0391
Beyond Autonomy in
Eighteenth- Century British
and German Aesthetics
Edited by
Karl Axelsson,
Camilla Flodin, and
Mattias Pirholt
NEW YORK AND LONDON
First published 2021
by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging- in-P ublication Data
Names: Axelsson, Karl, 1976– editor. | Flodin, Camilla, editor. |
Pirholt, Mattias, 1975– editor.
Title: Beyond autonomy in eighteenth-century British and
German aesthetics / edited by Karl Axelsson, Camilla Flodin,
Mattias Pirholt.
Description: New York : Routledge, 2020. |
Series: Routledge studies in eighteenth-century philosophy |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020020453 (print) | LCCN 2020020454 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367347963 (hbk) | ISBN 9780429330254 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Aesthetics, British—18th century. | Aesthetics,
German—18th century.
Classification: LCC BH221.G72 B49 2020 (print) |
LCC BH221.G72 (ebook) | DDC 111/.85094109033—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020453
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020454
ISBN: 978-0-367-34796-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-33025-4 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
Contents
List of Contributors vii
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
KARL AXELSSON, CAMILLA FLODIN, AND
MATTIAS PIRHOLT
PART I
Aesthetic Concepts, Morality, and Society in
the British Tradition 19
1 The Evolution of Aesthetic Concepts 1700–1800 21
PETER DE BOLLA
2 Beauty, Nature, and Society in Shaftesbury’s
The Moralists 47
KARL AXELSSON
3 Force Makes Right; or, Shaftesbury’s
Moral- Aesthetic Dynamics 70
NEIL SACCAMANO
4 Civilization in Eighteenth- Century Britain:
A Subject for Taste 94
MARIA SEMI
5 Adam Smith’s Aesthetic Psychology 112
EMILY BRADY AND NICOLE HALL
vi Contents
PART II
British and German Liaisons 133
6 Aesthetic Autonomy Is Not the Autonomy of Art 135
PAUL GUYER
7 From Spiritual Taste to Good Taste? Reflections on the
Search for Aesthetic Theory’s Pietist Roots 161
SIMON GROTE
8 Is there a Middle Way? Mendelssohn on the
Faculty of Approbation 180
ANNE POLLOK
9 Germaine de Staël and the Politics of Taste 201
KAREN GREEN
PART III
Science and a New Model of Society Around 1800 215
10 Goethe’s Exploratory Idealism 217
MATTIAS PIRHOLT
11 Physics as Art: Johann Wilhelm Ritter’s
Construction Projects 239
JOCELYN HOLLAND
12 Hölderlin’s Higher Enlightenment 258
CAMILLA FLODIN
13 Rethinking Disinterestedness Through the Rise
of Political Economy 277
NATALIE ROXBURGH
Index 299
Contributors
Karl Axelsson is Senior Lecturer in Aesthetics at Södertörn University,
Stockholm. He is the author of Political Aesthetics: Addison and
Shaftesbury on Taste, Morals and Society (Bloomsbury, 2019) and
The Sublime: Precursors and British Eighteenth- Century Concep-
tions (Peter Lang, 2007). Axelsson is also the Swedish translator and
editor of the third Earl of Shaftesbury’s The Moralists, a Philosophi-
cal Rhapsody (Thales, forthcoming).
Emily Brady is the Susanne M. and Melbern G. Glasscock Director
and Chair, Glasscock Center for Humanities Research, and Pro-
fessor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University. Her research inter-
ests span aesthetics and philosophy of art, environmental ethics,
and eighteenth-c entury philosophy. Her book publications include
Aesthetic Concepts: Essays After Sibley (co-e dited with Jerrold
L evinson, Oxford University Press, 2001), Aesthetics of the Natural
Environment (Edinburgh University Press, 2003), and The Sublime
in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature (Cambridge
University Press, 2013). Currently, she is working on a philosophical
history of aesthetic theory and nature in the eighteenth century.
Peter de Bolla is Professor of Cultural History and Aesthetics at the
University of Cambridge. He directed the Cambridge Concept Lab
between 2013 and 2017, and his most recent monograph is The Ar-
chitecture of Concepts: The Historical Formation of Human Rights
(Fordham University Press, 2013), which won the Patten award in
2014.
Camilla Flodin holds a PhD in Aesthetics from Uppsala University and
is currently Lecturer and Research Fellow in Comparative Literature
at Södertörn University, Stockholm. Her research interests include the
aesthetics of early German Romanticism, Idealism, and Adorno. She
has published extensively on Adorno’s aesthetics and the art-n ature
relationship in, for example, Estetika: The Central European Journal
of Aesthetics, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, British Journal for
the History of Philosophy, and Adorno Studies. Flodin is co- editor
viii Contributors
of a special issue of Adorno Studies on “Adorno and the Anthropo-
cene” and a contributor to the Oxford Handbook of Adorno (Oxford
University Press, forthcoming).
Karen Green is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Mel-
bourne. She has been a pioneer in the movement to include women’s
philosophical texts in the history of philosophy, concentrating largely
on their contributions to political and ethical thought. Her book
publications include The Woman of Reason: Feminism, Humanism
and Political Thought (Polity, 1995), A History of Women’s Political
Thought in Europe, 1700–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2014),
and The Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay (Oxford University
Press, 2019). A monograph, Catharine Macaulay’s Republican En-
lightenment, is currently in press with Routledge.
Simon Grote is Associate Professor of History at Wellesley College. He
is the author of The Emergence of Modern Aesthetic Theory: Reli-
gion and Morality in Enlightenment Germany and Scotland (Cam-
bridge University Press, 2017) as well as numerous articles on early
eighteenth- century German and Scottish intellectual history.
Paul Guyer  is the Jonathan Nelson Professor of Humanities and
Philosophy at Brown University, where he has taught since 2012, and
the Florence R. C. Murray Professor in the Humanities emeritus at
the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught from 1982 to 2012.
He previously taught at the Universities of Pittsburgh and Illinois-
Chicago. He received his AB and PhD from Harvard University. He is
the author, editor, and/or translator of more than twenty- five books,
including translations of Kant’s first and third Critiques and com-
mentaries on Kant’s theoretical philosophy, practical philosophy, and
aesthetics. He published A History of Modern Aesthetics in three vol-
umes in 2014, Kant on the Rationality of Morality in 2019, and Rea-
son and Experience in Mendelssohn and Kant in 2020. He is a past
president of the American Society for Aesthetics and the Eastern
Division of the American Philosophical Society, and is a Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Nicole Hall is an independent scholar working primarily in philosophical
aesthetics. She was awarded her PhD, Aesthetic Perception, N ature
and Experience, from the University of Edinburgh and has since
held a Fernand Braudel postdoctoral fellowship at the Institut Jean
Nicod, Ecole Normale Supérieure. Within aesthetics, her interests lie
in the nature of aesthetic experience, environmental aesthetics, and
philosophy of film, and she has curated various art exhibitions. Her
research intersects with the philosophy of mind and perception, and
draws upon work on cognitive science and the emotions.
Contributors ix
Jocelyn Holland is a Professor of Comparative Literature at California
Institute of Technology. Her research explores the intersections be-
tween literature, science, and other discourses around 1800. Her book
publications are German Romanticism and Science: The Procreative
Poetics of Goethe, Novalis, and Ritter (Routledge, 2009); Key Texts
by Johann Wilhelm Ritter on the Science and Art of Nature (Brill,
2010); and, most recently, Instrument of Reason: Technological Con-
structions of Knowledge around 1800 (Bloomsbury, 2019). She has
co- edited journal editions on diverse topics, including the anomaly,
the Archimedean point, equilibrium, the aesthetics of the tool, and
theories and cultural practices of time- keeping. Her current project
examines emerging theories of technology in the eighteenth century.
Mattias Pirholt is a Professor of Comparative Literature at Södertörn
University, Stockholm. His main research interests are German
eighteenth- century and Romantic aesthetics and literature, modern-
ism, postwar literature, and conceptual history. He has published ex-
tensively on Goethe, Herder, Moritz, and the early Romantics as well
as on Walter Benjamin, Thomas Mann, and Ingeborg Bachmann.
His book publications include Metamimesis: Imitation in Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Early German Romanticism (Cam-
den House, 2012), Grenzerfahrungen: Studien zu Goethes Ästhetik
(Winter Verlag, 2018) and Das Abenteuer des Gewöhnlichen: Alltag
in der deutschsprachigen Literatur der Moderne (co- edited with
Thorsten Carstensen, Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2018).
Anne Pollok is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of
South Carolina, Columbia/SC. In 2010, she published her book Fac-
etten des Menschen (Meiner), which, together with her editions on
Mendelssohn’s aesthetics and his Phädon, earned her the Moses-
Mendelssohn- Award in 2013. Besides numerous publications and pre-
sentations centered around Mendelssohn’s and Schiller’s aesthetics,
Pollok’s work focuses on the legacy of the eighteenth century in Ernst
Cassirer’s and Susanne Langer’s Philosophy of Culture. Her recent
invited talks and papers concern, in particular, the aesthetic and his-
torical dimensions of symbolic formation that come to the fore in the
writings of female philosophers of the late eighteenth century.
Natalie Roxburgh is Lecturer in English at the University of Siegen,
where she is writing her Habilitationsschrift/postdoctoral thesis on
rethinking aesthetic disinterestedness in nineteenth- century Britain.
Her research and teaching focus on literature at the interstices of sci-
ence, economics, and politics. She is the author of Representing Public
Credit: Credible Commitment, Fiction, and the Rise of the Financial
Subject (Routledge, 2016) and has published essays in Eighteenth-
Century Fiction, Mosaic, and elsewhere.