Beyond Aesthetic Theory: Consolations of Art and Poetry in Romantic Criticism

Abstract

“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.