Herbatian formalism in Bohemia

Abstract

From a bird’s eye view, the history of 19th century aesthetics can be cast in terms of strife between two mutually opposed philosophical camps. On the one hand, the champions of a content-oriented understanding of beauty as the sensory manifestation of the idea (the followers of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel) and, on the other hand, the formalists (inspired by Johann Friedrich Herbart) who conceived of beauty as a purely relational category devoid of any content. My paper focuses on the robust development of the formal school at Prague University after 1850 exemplified by the theories of Robert Zimmermann (1824-1898), Josef Durdík (1837-1902), and Otakar Hostinský (1847-1910). It concludes with posing the question whether the structuralist aesthetics advanced in mid-1930s by the Prague Linguistic Circle was not, in fact, an echo of the indigenous Herbartian formalism.