The High Tide of Idealism

Paul Guyer

doi:10.1017/CBO9781107110342.020

3 - The High Tide of Idealism

Schopenhauer, Hegel, and Schleiermacher

from Part One - German Aesthetics in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2015

Paul Guyer

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Paul Guyer: Affiliation:
Brown University, Rhode Island

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Summary

We have just seen that while Schelling’s cognitivist approach to aesthetics excluded any place for the free play of the imagination and had little room for the emotional impact of art, and at least some of those within his penumbra, such as Emerson, retained his cognitivist approach, at least some others among the wide range of thinkers and poets to whom Schelling’s influence was communicated by Coleridge, including Wordsworth, Shelley, and Mill, gradually found ways to combine emotion with truth in their conceptions of aesthetic experience. Now we return to the next two leading philosophers of German Idealism − Arthur Schopenhauer, almost as precocious as Schelling, and Hegel, older but slower to publish − and see that for all their differences they both accepted a strictly cognitivist approach to aesthetics and were as hostile as Kant himself had been to the emotional impact of art. In the final section of this chapter, we will see that one of their contemporaries in Berlin, the theologian Schleiermacher, took a less reductive approach to aesthetics, but his course on the subject did not have an immediate effect on the field. Instead, Hegel’s aesthetics would dominate the subject in Germany for at least three decades following his death in 1830, while after that Schopenhauer’s approach would influence not only the further development of aesthetics itself but a wide range of creative artists across Europe.

Type: Chapter
Information: A History of Modern Aesthetics , pp. 106 - 152

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107110342.020 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2014

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