France

General works

Introduction

Unlike the Germans, the French, in the second half of the nineteenth century, were not the direct heirs of a weighty and systematic philosophic tradition. The great French tradition of the eighteenth century had become subsumed into established intellectual history, and there existed no bond between philosophy and the art of romanticism such as existed in Germany. Nevertheless, the recurrence of certain themes in French authors reveals the presence of a continuing national habit of thought. These later Frenchmen may have differed from the encyclopaedists in their attitude to language and poetry, but the investigation of the connection between music and language or, more precisely, music and poetry still remains central to their preoccupations. Apart from that, there was no pattern to which they felt obliged to conform, and indeed a sense of being independent of philosophical systems eventually led them to regard aesthetics as a self-contained discipline, closely related to history and sociology and completely divorced from metaphysics. Positivism undoubtedly contributed to this autonomy of aesthetics and helped to found a method of aesthetic analysis. Auguste Comte, the father of positivism, never addressed himself specifically to aesthetics, but Hippolyte Taine (1828–93), one of the most influential thinkers of the positivist persuasion, did devote much attention to the philosophy of art.