Romantic
(1800-1900 C.E.)
One way of looking at aesthetics in the nineteenth century is to see it as a heritage of Immanuel Kant. Kant had brought together the empiricist and rationalist traditions from the eighteenth century in a single synthesis. Empiricism emphasized that sense was the basis of knowledge and that aesthetics was the most immediate form of sense. Rationalism did not ignore sense, but rationalist insisted that sense without order and coherence was meaningless. Kant found the order for sense in the mind itself and gave sense a place at the foundation of knowledge. The aesthetic was understood as the preconceptual basis for both moral practice and theoretical concepts. G.W.F. Hegel developed the mental side of Kant’s insight into a logical and historical system. Hegel’s followers gave aesthetics an increasing role in his system. In the other direction, romanticism developed Kant’s aesthetic intuition and his concepts of genius and imagination into a poetics of sense and feeling. This development was not all due to Kant, of course, but Kant provides a convenient point of reference for the developments that followed.
One of the most important changes in aesthetics was the Kantian separation of the aesthetic from concepts and theory. Increasingly after Kant, aesthetics was understood as an autonomous realm either independent of or opposed to conceptual thought. Feeling did not need reason as a faculty or reasons as justification. In some versions of an autonomous aesthetics, it was believed that reliance on concepts would repress feelings and make aesthetic experience impossible. One consequence of such theories was that aesthetics was treated as something isolated culturally from the everyday world. Art existed for art’s sake. The rising industrial world had appalled many toward the end of the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, many felt that beauty could be found only in art which opposed the commercial world. The unreality of art was felt not as a disadvantage but as its virtue. The danger, of course, was that aesthetics would become as unreal as its advocates wanted it to be.
One way to avoid that danger was to recognize a close relation between aesthetics and religion. If aesthetics was unworldly, so was religion. If aesthetic feeling did not depend on reasons or justification, neither did faith. Religious piety had long depended on feeling as its essence. Revelation was inward. Aesthetic feeling and religious feeling could easily be associated with each other. Both were ways out of an unacceptable, to the religious thinker, an ungodly world. If the identification between religious and aesthetic feeling could be sustained, then the aesthetic was no less real but more real than the ordinary world. Inspiration frequently was used in aesthetics in ways that parallel earlier doctrines of divine inspiration. In the nineteenth century, the emphasis of such inspiration was on the feeling it produced.
A second important Kantian legacy was the identification of aesthetics with knowledge. A basic problem for aesthetics, particularly among rationalist, had been that feeling seemed opposed to reason. Feeling and knowing were so different that they had nothing in common. Knowing something was a rational process that no longer depending on feeling. Aesthetics would then be nothing more than a first step to be left behind as soon as rational people could acquire more accurate ways of knowing. Kant showed that that version of rationalism could not be correct. Aesthetic intuition was indeed the first step, but instead of leaving it behind, the mind transformed it into action and concepts. Accordingly, aesthetics was always a part of knowledge. Hegel took these possibilities seriously, and a whole tradition of German philosophy after Hegel tried to turn aesthetics into systematic philosophy. How far could the mind shape reality? Perhaps the mind itself was the model for reality and for history. Artists, particularly poets, found themselves in the role of philosophers. If what was required for knowledge was imagination and genius, then the arts were the place to look.
In many ways, the development of this theme was at odds with the doctrine of aesthetic feeling. The movement in the arts and philosophy known as romanticism incorporated elements of both. "Romanticism" is difficult to pin down to a single doctrine or movement. Its very nature was to defy rational examination and appeal directly to an intuition of the self. It might be regarded as an inward movement that is then projected outward on to the world. But romanticism also was productive. It did not stop with aesthetic feeling but turned that feeling into a creative force. In the words of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the creative mind of the poet repeats the creative act of the infinite I AM. According to Percy Bysshe Shelley, poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Much of the romantic argument was taken quite literally and romantics such as the poet Lord Bryon acted out their theory in their lives. Bryon died in Greece, where he had gone to join the Greeks fighting for independence from Turkey. From romantic theory emerged a belief in a creative imagination and a view of the artist as a personality and a hero. Romantic artists tried to be at once above the world and against it. They knew, but they also felt, and their knowing was a product of the intensity with which they feel.
Kantian aesthetics and its developments in Hegel and his followers as well as in romanticism produced a philosophical reaction. Instead of the mind shaping the world, the world may shape the mind. Materialism and determinism rejected the mental priority of the mind and ideas. One important form of deterministic philosophy was based on the biological and zoological work of Charles Darwin. Darwin’s interpreters and followers seized on his theories as a natural account of history that needed no human intervention. Darwinism had two forms. Its biological form emphasized that life evolved according to a process of competition and selection. Those life forms best equipped to survive were the future; choice and will had nothing to do with it. From this biological theory, a corresponding social theory developed. Those people who are best equipped to survive in a society would do best and be most successful. So success was a sign of ability, and poor and unsuccessful people deserved their place because they were not equipped to do better.
Darwinism had its aesthetic counterpart. Art and beauty have limited survival value, but they are economic forces. A materialist, Ludwig Feuerbach, reminded philosophers that we are what we eat. Karl Marx located art as a support to the class that made it possible. These and other materialist theories can be thought of as a direct inversion of Hegel’s evaluation of Kant’s theories into a theory of history. Matter, not mind, is what has a history, according to this view. To understand what takes place in history, including art, we must look for what does the work and who pays.
An even more radical inversion of the Hegelian movement extended to romanticism and used the connection between religious feeling and art. Romanticism, with all its revolutionary fervor, is essentially positive about what the artist can do and the effects that art can have. Creative imagination is a good thing, and the self and personality are positive goods if they can be freed from their bondage to the ordinary. But the self also can be felt as a burden, and its isolation can be a cause of anxiety and fear. Thinkers who inverted romanticism and Hegel’s positive history discovered and abyss that only faith can overcome. Individuals are thrown back upon the negative side of their personalities and feel a darkness in the soul. The Danish writer, Soren Kierkegaard, explored that inversion and located the aesthetics as a stage in the soul’s confrontation with its own dread (the beginning of existentialism). A century later, Kierkegaard’s aesthetics found its echoes in the post—World War I despair that produced the movement known as existentialism. Existentialism insists that the optimism about historical progress was only an illusion. The destruction of World War I seemed to bear this out. Aesthetics could be a freedom only without hope or absolutes of any kind. An even more radical inversion of Hegel’s idealism is found in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. For Nietzsche, only a complete dialectical inversion offers any historical hope. Rather than framing aesthetics as a religious feeling, Nietzsche contrasted the aesthetics of light with the aesthetics of descent and denial. Apollo, the god of light, dialectically opposes Dionysus, the god of ecstatic self destruction. An aesthetics of reason and clarity opposes an aesthetics of rebellion and denial. God must die in order for anyone to be free, but freedom is terrible as well as joyful. These radical inversions incorporate the aesthetic into their picture, but they do not produce the kind of concrete relations between productivity and theory in their own time that one finds in romanticism. The romantics were poets first and theorists second. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and their followers tried to turn theory into poetry. Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche provide inspiration in the twentieth century to new movements in art and philosophy that may or may not be accurate reflections of their nineteenth century contexts.
A much more significant problem for aesthetics in the nineteenth century is its social and political transformation. The extended century identified, running from the French Revolution to World War I, is marked by significant cultural turns. In France, the Revolution degenerated into the Terror. A revolution that began as an attempt to throw off aristocratic domination in favor of social freedom turned on itself and slaughtered not only aristocrats but also its own intellectuals. The eighteenth century Enlightenment thinkers had been very optimistic about the direction of history. The American Revolution bore out that optimism for many, but the Terror undermined it. In aesthetics and the arts as well, the degeneration of what had seemed an act of human freedom into a bloodbath deeply influenced philosophers and artists alike. It became much more difficult to believe that the self and its sensations were essentially good. In England, in particular, the combination of industrial society and empire building came into conflict with the finer feelings for art and the aesthetic. Critics like Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin looked at history and tried to find some meaning in it. Art, they believed, had a social responsibility. They were pulled in opposing directions. They wanted to save art from the madness of an increasingly coarse society, but they also expected art to elevate at least some parts of that society and counteract the evil influences of money and power.
At the end of the century, the battlefields of World War I raised slaughter to unprecedented levels, and the established social and cultural fabric of Europe was changed irrevocably. In between, philosophers of art and theoretically aware artists sought ways to reconcile their art with the industrial age and its grim side effects. Aesthetic autonomy had to compete with social responsibility. Realism and naturalism challenged romanticism. The freedom of artists was difficult to reconcile with theories of scientific and economic determinism. The fundamental problem of nineteenth century aesthetics was how to reconcile its reliance on aesthetic feeling and experience with the realities of economic struggle and social disruption. The problem was not so much solved as abolished on the battlefields of France.
Nineteenth century aesthetics defies systematic reduction. The different theories are interwoven in complex mixes. A massive academic literature developed, particularly in Germany, but it is far less important than the eccentric but seminal writers such as Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, who went their own way. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were to have their major influence only much later. Much of the significant aesthetic writing in the nineteenth century is also criticism or art theory by practicing artists or critics. The nineteenth century was a century of movements in painting, poetry, the novel, and music. Romanticism, realism, and impressionism influenced each other as theory and as practice. For a century devoted to systematic philosophies, all of these movements create an impression of difference and diversity.
The selections in this section begin with Hegel, who, no matter how difficult his prose, was the philosophical master of the century. Schopenhauer rejected Hegel’s historical dialectic and saw himself as the true inheritor of Kant and Plato. Friedrich Nietzsche followed Schopenhauer; his philosophy anticipated the breakdown of order and confidence that we have experienced in the twentieth century. John Ruskin represented the critic as well as the connoisseur and brings us into direct contact with art history. Leo Tolstoy, one of the great novelists of the century, appears here as a theoretician.
| Last Updated: 10/19/22 |