Going Places with Aesthetics
Discoveries and an Outline
Looking back at my old blog (Going Places with Aesthetics) and now at where I want to go with Aesthetics, I see an aesthetic pathway from the “brute” action-at-a-distance simplicity of Isaac Newton’s picture of the world, through Wolffian struggles with Leibnitzian anti-brute logic, to Pietism and to Baumgarten’s invention of Aesthetics in 1730 and on to Kant and Early Romanticism and Schelling’s struggles with Winkelmann’s schematic views of lost perfection, the suppression of Rococo, the advent of Modernism and Nihilism, the destruction and systematic plunder of the Holy Roman Empire, the explosive, productive growth of the Sciences, the construction of oppressive Historicism and its Modernist mutually evil twin (ie Modernism) all the way through Neo-Kantianism to Heidegger’s brilliant elucidation of Kant in Metaphysical terms…I can see I have a lot to explain.
BUT, I’ve decided to put off doing an Aesthetics Substack publication until things cool off a bit on the world stage – just a few half-dozen months or so hopefully – meanwhile, my first single-topic Substack publication will be a sci-fi fantasy about dealing with oppressive regimes. Pure sci-fi fantasy, mind you – don’t do any of the fantastic seeming recommendations put forward therein at home unless you really are an extremely skilled witch who used to work for the Old Kingdom.
BUT, once the Aesthetics publication starts, here are a few of the things I will try to explicate at least in schematic, aesthetic terms:
1) After Kant (at least for Kant, Kantians and Neo-Kantians), metaphysics became a matter of our concern with the constructive nature of constructive experience. ((Before Kant, and presumably for all non-Kantians ever after) metaphysics was all that Baumgarten describes in his guide to Metaphysics called Metaphysics (ie the book that Kant used for the classes he taught in Metaphysics)).
2) Kant was to some extent forced into the “Copernican” turn of Metaphysics by the weird demands of Leibnitzian logic which insisted on complete “sufficient reason” from the beginning of all things and at all levels of causality in a mechanistic (but weirdly enough more or less non-Newtonian, non-Brute) universe and invoked “preexisting harmony” to patch up problems with causality and guarantee that the world as we saw it was “the best of all possible worlds.”
3) I guess (now going into this retrospectively) it might be wise at some point to go into what Newton actually did in formulating his “brute” version of reality. If you read Newton’s original work it is a strange, but enlightening experience. However, for most of the Enlightenment, Newton was seen in mechanistic, Leibnitzian (or Wolffian) terms that “rationalized” (or de-brutalized in modes that are extremely puzzling in twenty-first-century terms) Newton’s work to make it fit with early “Enlightened” demands for “Sufficient reason”, “pre-established harmony” and the notion that we live in “the best of all possible worlds.” On the other hand if you try to read Leibnitz (particularly his mathematical mechanics – now available, yikes! from manuscripts in copious quantities), you are in for quite a shock because, to be as polite as possible, most of his anti-Newtonian formulations are weirdly complex and nonsensical in twenty-first-century terms.
4) Any non-harmonious version of sufficient reason and our experience was thought (before Kant) to lead to skepticism and nihilism, not to mention the possibility that ours was not necessarily the best of all possible worlds which for some reason was really disturbing in the eighteenth century.
5) Moreover, in terms of the vagaries of Aesthetics, and as part of what came to be Early Romanticism, Kant also took a wider view of the implications of possibilities such as the imperfection and non-harmonious nature of the world we experience. This is in fact the basis of Aesthetics as I will be pursuing it and an important aspect of Early Romanticism, which is to say, looking at the mind’s view of its own experience of some region of experience as a whole.
6) Early Romanticism – more work on that and what happened to it. Schelling is a good indicator of the vagaries of Early Romanticism and what happened to it. His problems with Jacobi and Hegel and his own schemes should be helpful with this. We will see.
7) Which sort of brings me to explicating Winkelmann’s impact on the mutual evil twinship of Historicism and Modernism especially in terms of Hegel’s Aesthetics
8) Modernism and Historicism emerge as the Bad Guys in my aesthetic journey while Early Romanticism emerges (I hope) as an indication of what the Good Guys would have looked like had there been any on hand as Early Romanticism lost its own trail.
9) Well when did that happen? Chronology is crucial in following any aesthetic trail. We will look more closely at that, but for now (we may suppose), Early Romanticism seems to have occurred somewhere between 1787 when Karl Leonhardt Reinholt began teaching at Jena and 1804 when Hoelderlin began to lose his mind and Schlegel started his private lectures to would-be medievalist art collectors in Cologne.
10) After that you get more standard forms of Middle and Late Romanticism with all the usual Romantics – Caspar David Friedrich, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Mary Shelley and so on, but even that was all over by 1830
11) This time around, I will try to deal more with other things in the pivotal period around 1800 such as Coleridge, Ingres, Napoleon and Madame de Stael.
12) I will also try to be more explicit about the variable impacts of archaeological work from the Dilettanti’s visit to Palmyra to the excavation of Greek vases in Etruria and on to the discovery of the Severe Style, most of which doesn’t shift the Historicist aesthetic canon until the 1870s when a crisis or two get underway.
13) The old blog made it to the 1870s and the beginning of the end of Modernism as Historicism entered its first crisis or two, and I hope to get there this time as well.