Johann Heinrich Dambeck’s Prague University Lectures on Aesthetics: An Unknown Chapter in the History of Anthropological Aesthetics

Tomáš Hlobil

doi:10.33134/eeja.111

Abstract

This article presents a summary of the main views in Dambeck’s lectures on aesthetics on the basis of all known sources and compares the views thus obtained with views developed in German aesthetics in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, with the aim of finding their chief source and reintegrating them both into German aesthetics and, more narrowly, into the aesthetics taught at Prague University. Johann Heinrich Dambeck constructed his lecture series on the plan of Zschokke’s textbook Ideen zur psychologischen Aesthetik (1793) which has never been taken into account in any other research on his lectures. The close link between Dambeck’s lectures and this textbook compels us to revise the current understanding of the nature of their ideas. Dambeck has so far been most often unproblematically presented as an adherent and disseminator of Kant’s and Schiller’s ideas about aesthetics in the Bohemian Lands. The key textbook on which he bases his university lecture series is, however, intentionally un-Kantian. Zschokke’s Ideen is part of the psychological-anthropological stream of Late-Enlightenment German aesthetics.

Highlights

Zschokke and Dambeck have structured their Introductions differently from one another
This article presents a summary of the main views in Dambeck’s lectures on aesthetics on the basis of all known sources and compares the views obtained with views developed in German aesthetics in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, with the aim of finding their chief source and reintegrating them both into German aesthetics and, more narrowly, into the aesthetics taught at Prague University
Johann Heinrich Dambeck constructed his lecture series on the plan of Zschokke’s textbook Ideen zur psychologischen Aesthetik (1793) which has never been taken into account in any other research on his lectures

Summary

TOMÁŠ HLOBIL

This article presents a summary of the main views in Dambeck’s lectures on aesthetics on the basis of all known sources and compares the views obtained with views developed in German aesthetics in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, with the aim of finding their chief source and reintegrating them both into German aesthetics and, more narrowly, into the aesthetics taught at Prague University. I The lectures in aesthetics given by Johann Heinrich Dambeck (1774–1820) at Prague University from 1812 to 1820 still await their proper assessment. Despite this gap in our knowledge, one encounters numerous scholarly attempts to describe and explain the overall nature of these lectures. Most German literary historians of Bohemian origin generally considered Dambeck’s aesthetics to be built on the ideals of the Humanität of Johann Wolfgang Goethe and, in particular, This article was made possible thanks to the generous support of the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic for the project ‘Aesthetics at the University of Prague in the Context of Central Europe in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century’, no.

Tomáš Hlobil

Introduction

PRIMARY SOURCES

SECONDARY SOURCES