Abstract: Karl Philipp Moritz's highly abstract aesthetic theories of the sublime and of artistic autonomy, the honest, pragmatic self-reflection in his autobiographical novel Anton Reiser, and his pioneering edited collection of psychological case histories in the Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde approach concepts such as perfection, harmony, and balance through dichotomies such as objectivity/subjectivity, creation/destruction, health/illness, and beauty/desolation. For this reason, Moritz focused on self-development and on perfecting and creating beauty as dynamic processes rather than goals, as negative dialectics that remove that which is expedient in order to uncover what is innate. Moritz wished to understand the function of beauty on the psyche in order to make it useful to mankind and to highlight the value of each human being; however, he simultaneously recognized, was on occasion overwhelmed by, and, in essence, acknowledged the pernicious dissension of human existence. The aim of this essay is to demonstrate how this so-called outsider figure, who still struggles to be accepted into the canon, engaged creatively with the new anthropological worldview—which itself eclectically brought together aesthetics, philosophy, pedagogy, and (avant la lettre) psychology—and contributed substantially to the debate.

Keywords: Karl Philipp Moritz, aesthetic theory, psychological case histories, autobiography, pedagogy, perfection as process

KARL PHILIPP MORITZ'S publications range from pedagogical and stylistic tracts to prose, drama, and poetry, from travelogues to classical scholarship, from aesthetic theory to psychological and therapeutic case studies. While Moritz's interest in these various topics changed over the course of his life, he did not compartmentalize them, and it can be argued that each informed the other.1 However, rather than postulating a resulting consensus or consistency, what follows will highlight a series of dichotomies in Moritz’s work; what seem like contradictions in fact illustrate the complexity and interdisciplinarity of his thought.

I will principally refer to the novel Anton Reiser, as Moritz's most successful work of literature; to the journal Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde (Journal of Empirical Psychology), as his pathbreaking editing venture in the emerging area of empirical psychology and to which he also contributed as an author; and to his aesthetic writings, as the most directly influential of his works on a range of illustrious contemporaries representing both Weimar classicism and Romanticism.