Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics

By: Bernstein, J. M.

Book Overview

This 2002 volume brings together major works by German thinkers, writing just prior to and after Kant, who were enormously influential in this crucial period of aesthetics. These texts include the first translation into English of Schiller's Kallias Letters and Moritz's On the Artistic Imitation of the Beautiful, together with translations of some of H?lderlin's most important theoretical writings and works by Hamann, Lessing, Novalis and Schlegel. In a philosophical introduction J. M. Bernstein traces the development of aesthetics from its still rationalist and mimetic construction in Lessing, through the optimistic construal of art and/or beauty as the appearance of human freedom in the work of Schiller, to H?lderlin's darker vision of art as the memory of a lost unity, and the variations of that theme - of an impossible striving after the lost ideal - which are found in the work of Schlegel and Novalis.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521001110
• ISBN13: 9780521001113
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 356 Pages
• Weight: 1.23 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Excellent Translation

This book is a collection of essential texts concerning the bridge between Neo-Classicism and, reaching its zenith, Romanticism in German Aesthetic thought. Today, I believe these texts are one of the most important in the history of ideas, because it is the first time thinkers have questioned their ethical place in society, and under what conditions the Good is, in fact, a representation of the Beautiful. This is not only a reaction to Immanuel Kant's two books, Critique of Practical Reason and Judgment, but is also a reformation of the battle to weaken Reason in the face of the rising development of technology. The first half, Neo-Classicism, are essays by Hamann, Lessing, and Moritz. They are excellent essays that deal with reviving themes put forth by Greek Mythology, Virgil, and Homer. The last half, the romantics, Schiller, Holderlin, Novalis, and Shlegel, rethink Neo-Classicism and puts them under a new aesthetic light, which not only believe in the classical concept of perfection and beauty, but how it relates to ethics, where at its ultimate peak, all man strives to become "a work of art." The essays may be very technical prima facie, but through reading other texts, such as Frederick Beiser's The Romantic Imperative, you understand the central concerns of the German romantics, and how these concepts are useful today.