Sublimity and Theatricality: Romantic "Pre-Postmodernism" in Schiller and Coleridge

Abstract

In a crusty response to the fashionable new concept called aesthetics, Friedrich Schlegel wrote in 1798: One of two things is usually lacking in the so-called Philosophy of Art: either philosophy or art.' Ironically, Schlegel's facetious demand that aesthetics encompass both discursive and imaginative endeavor has acquired prescriptive status for criticism today, at a time when it appears that one can no more do philosophy without taking into accout the premises of than one can practice or consider without, at least to some extent, doing philosophy. Art exists today, or it takes its place in the artworld, as Arthur Danto writes, only if it is constituted as art by philosophical theory.2 Philosophy is done today, as thinkers ranging from Derrida to Hacking have recognized, only by acknowledging its own foundation in the arts. Even science, notes Paul Feyerabend,3 has acknowledged its aesthetic ground. Thus physicists speak of the big bang, of quarks and black holes, cognizant of the figurative nature of their language. occurring across the disciplines has prompted Virgil Nemoianu, in a recent essay subtitled The Growth of Aesthetic Power,4 to propose what he calls neo-aestheticism as the only approach to interdisciplinary study sufficiently flexible and open to be able to accommodate its seemingly irreconcilable diversity. Distinct from the aestheticism char-