The German aesthetic tradition

Abstract

Hammermeister, Kai. German Aesthetic Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 259pp. $22.00 paperback. Among many reasons to write an academic book, desire to provide a service is probably least frequent. However, Kai Hammermeister obviously felt very strongly about rendering history of German aesthetic theory from Baumgarten and Kant to Heidegger and Adorno accessible to a wider audience-whatever cost. And there is inevitably a price to be paid for writing this kind of book, which moves briskly and without fear of strong opinions through some of most complicated philosophical works of past two centuries. Under characteristically bold and blunt title German Aesthetic Tradition, Hammermeister delivers in just over two hundred pages the straight dope on leading contenders for forbidding philosophical difficulty: Fichte, Schelling, and, of course, Hegel, that famed fortress of impenetrable German prose. Unflinchingly, however, Hammermeister renders them all entirely comprehensible. Even undergraduates should have no difficulty following his expositions. Nor should one dismiss this pedagogical quality as reductive popularization. Hammermeister's book is quite an accomplishment. His highly economical presentation never fails to touch on virtually all important issues in any given author. To be sure, one can quibble-Karl Philip Moritz seems to gets short-changed; Holderlin deserves his own chapter-but all in all, Hammermeister has succeeded in producing a perfectly coherent narrative of development of aesthetic theory from 18th-century to present. Indeed, what makes this book so eminently readable are not only succinct summaries of individual authors but their integration into an overarching three-part movement. Baumgarten, Kant, Schiller, and Schellingare subsumed under The Age of Paradigms, followed by Challenging Paradigms in writings of Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. book concludes with a section entitled Renewing Paradigms, as Hammermeister argues that positions of Cassirer, Lukacs, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Adorno basically reinvent (aesthetic) wheel. Thus he claims, for example, that Adorno's and Heidegger's anti-idealist rhetoric conceals their strong allegiance-not, as one might expect, to Hegel, but rather to Schelling; like him they are said to accord art exalted and exclusive privilege of providing access to a truth unavailable to theoretical or philosophical discourses. Beyond incredibly useful service of introducing uninitiated to arcana of German aesthetics-there really is nothing comparable out there-it is this claim that post-Nietzschean theories of art not only recycle older aesthetic tradition but follow essentially very same trajectory that had led from Kant to Hegel in first place, that makes this volume original, provocative, and enormously problematic. …

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 108 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.