Abstract
I want to end this study by briefly considering Sigmund Freud’s conceptions of aesthetic consciousness and contemplative power, specifically as those are expressed in his 1930 work Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, which was published in English in the same year as Civilization and Its Discontents. Freud may lie in a very different tradition of thought from the trans-cultural preoccupation with idleness and aesthetic consciousness this study has reconstructed. But the nineteenth-century British debates over these categories in fact anticipate and foreshadow the psychoanalytic interpretation of aesthetic thought that Freud develops – and that is thrust upon British intellectual life – early in the twentieth century.
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