Beyond Autonomy in Eighteenth-Century British and German Aesthetics

Abstract

The eighteenth century is a nuisance. At least to the historian bent on coming up with tenable general assertions, or, even worse, encompassing narratives. The richness of eighteenth-century thought is intimidating; its ambiguities are nothing less than baffling. No grand narrative is safe from them, especially the ones that treat the eighteenth century only as an overture of what came afterwards, while ignoring its transitional character, famously described by Koselleck’s term, ‘Sattelzeit’. The eighteenth century was, indeed, the formative period of many of our key concepts; this means, however, that these were still in the making, not yet congealed into their modern forms.1 Unsurprisingly, the eighteenth-century initiation of the discipline named aesthetica, and its antecedents in Europe, have come to be interlocked with the rise of modernity as well. The emergence of aesthetics has been interpreted as a symptom of the entrance of a new image of man, individuality, a modern conception of subjectivity, a new mode of experience, as well as a new ideology or the modern concept of (fine) art into European consciousness. And even though these narratives all situate aesthetics within heteronomous contexts—from physiology and psychology to morality and politics, from social and economic history to belief and religion—one narrative came out as victorious, which neglects the eighteenth-century interpenetration of various disciplines. It offers instead a teleological history of aesthetics which leads towards the concept of autonomy, aesthetic and/or artistic, as it takes shape, allegedly, in the aesthetics of Kant and then Romanticism. The new volume of the Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, entitled Beyond Autonomy in Eighteenth-Century British and German Aesthetics, joins the growing body of scholarship that re-examines the influential narratives of autonomy.