Art

Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus, vol. 6 (2009), Karl Ameriks and Jürgen Stolzenberg, eds., 2009

The Jena romantics are both artists and philosophers, but it is not always clear just what the relation between art and theory is. I start by trying to articulate this relation, focusing in particular on the differences between the romantics and Hegel. I argue that the romantics do not view art as sublated by philosophical theory, but rather as intensified by it. For the romantics therefore aesthetic form is more than the presentation of essentially philosophical propositions in an attractive way: instead, artistic style does real (philosophical) work. In romantic literature, for instance, language is set to work presenting its own unpresentable condition (what Jean-François Lyotard calls the postmodern sublime) in a way that can only be effected within the literary work; accordingly, the literariness of the work is not a mere ornament to a philosophical theses, but actually comprises the thesis.

2010

In this essay I will present some approaches to knowledge and poetics by the early German romantic philosophers. My main purpose is not a historical reconstruction of early romantic philosophy, but to point out its continuity with present thought. The essay will demonstrate that the romantic ideas concerning reality and artistic creation are still a constitutive part of western thought and a condition of our everyday experience of life and art, even if we are not aware of it. I will use two concepts as a guiding thread: the concept of reality and the concept of imitation.

2013

Aesthetica Preprint, 2021

This paper analyzes a decisive moment in the German aesthetics of the nineteenth century, that is, the passage from a view that considered poetry (i.e. literature) the most perfect art within the system of the individual arts to one in which music is the art par excellence. On the one hand, we find the philosophical perspectives of the first half of the nineteenth century (Hegel, Solger, Schelling). On the other hand are the views that, beginning with Schopenhauer, dominate the second half of the century with Nietzsche and Wagner. The aim of this paper is to show the meaning of this historical-philosophical moment in order to produce an interpretation that concerns both the theoretical consideration of art and the general philosophical approach of these authors. I intend to read this transition as one of the initial moments of the upheavals that affected art in the twentieth century, which some recent interpreters have read, in Hegelian terms, as the "end of art".

"Beyond Aesthetic Theory: Consolations of Art and Poetry in Romantic Criticism" aims to illustrate how German Romantic critics confronted the political, philosophical, and moral challenges at the dawn of modernity and the enduring relevance of their responses for our times. The concept of time and the problem of its representation beyond metaphysical systems was a major preoccupation of both Romanticism and modernity. During the turbulent political and moral crises in the wake of the French Revolution, the early German Romantics (Frühromantiker) Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, and Friedrich Schleiermacher, who collaborated on the short-lived journal, Athenäum (1798-1800), the major theoretical organ of German Romanticism, presented one of the earliest skeptical responses to the possibility of a first principle of philosophy. Human mortality generates the experience of being in time, of its passage, of loss and grief that cannot be cast in philosophical terms and do not belong to representation, thus precluding their reflection at the level of form. Ultimately, the burden of representing the unrepresentable, a burden that in Friedrich Schlegel's view, emerges from the imperfections of philosophy, falls on art. At the very limit of representational certainties, art and poetry intimate the unsayable and negotiate the irreducible spaces between concept and representation. The Athenäum represents a novel mode of critical communication in employing the fragment as a philosophical form that extends into the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Walter Benjamin. It has also paved the way to Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutics and to poststructuralism by way of Nietzsche.