Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Idealism in aesthetics and literature
- 1 The legacy of Idealism and the rise of academic aesthetics
- 2 Hegel's philosophical theory of action: the concept of action in Hegel's practical philosophy and aesthetics
- 3 Tragedy and the human image: German Idealism's legacy for theory and practice
- 4 Romanticism as literary Idealism, or: a 200-year-old way of talking about literature
- 5 Idealism in nineteenth-century German literature
- 6 Idealism in nineteenth-century British and American literature
- 7 Elements of Schopenhauer's thought in Beckett
- 8 German Idealism and the philosophy of music
- 9 The music of German Idealism
- 10 ‘Refiner of all human relations’: Karl Friedrich Schinkel as an Idealist theorist
- 11 Influences of German Idealism on nineteenth-century architectural theory: Schelling and Leo von Klenze
- 12 ‘Making a world’: the impact of Idealism on museum formation in mid-nineteenth-century Massachusetts
- 13 Hegel, Danto and the ‘end of art’
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
8 - German Idealism and the philosophy of music
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Idealism in aesthetics and literature
- 1 The legacy of Idealism and the rise of academic aesthetics
- 2 Hegel's philosophical theory of action: the concept of action in Hegel's practical philosophy and aesthetics
- 3 Tragedy and the human image: German Idealism's legacy for theory and practice
- 4 Romanticism as literary Idealism, or: a 200-year-old way of talking about literature
- 5 Idealism in nineteenth-century German literature
- 6 Idealism in nineteenth-century British and American literature
- 7 Elements of Schopenhauer's thought in Beckett
- 8 German Idealism and the philosophy of music
- 9 The music of German Idealism
- 10 ‘Refiner of all human relations’: Karl Friedrich Schinkel as an Idealist theorist
- 11 Influences of German Idealism on nineteenth-century architectural theory: Schelling and Leo von Klenze
- 12 ‘Making a world’: the impact of Idealism on museum formation in mid-nineteenth-century Massachusetts
- 13 Hegel, Danto and the ‘end of art’
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
German Idealism began with Leibniz and lasted until Schopenhauer, with a few central European after-shocks in the work of Husserl and his followers. That great epoch in German philosophy coincided with a great epoch in German music. It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that Idealist philosophers should have paid special attention to this art form. Looking back on it, is there anything of this prolonged encounter between music and philosophy that we can consider to be a real advance, and one that we should draw on? Many have thought so, not least because Idealism, as it matured in the post-Kantian period, inherited the adulation for art in general, and music in particular, that we find in the writings of the German Romantics, notably in Schiller, Tieck and Wackenroder. The post-Kantian Idealists connected aesthetic experience with their claims to reveal the secret meaning of things, in the infinite, the absolute, the transcendental, the ineffable or some other such object of a quasi-religious devotion. Such we find in the writings of Schelling, Fichte, Hegel and Schopenhauer, the last of whom made music not only an object of philosophy, but a prime example of it. Music, Schopenhauer wrote, is not unconscious arithmetic, as Leibniz had claimed, but unconscious philosophy, since in music the inner essence of the world, which is will, is made directly present to the intellect.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Impact of IdealismThe Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought, pp. 168 - 181Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013
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