In the previous three chapters I have dealt with various aspects of Enlightenment aesthetics by focusing on the recipient or beholder. I have argued that we can point to specific religious practices of contemplation that would lay the ground for the Enlightenment claim that aesthetic contemplation is an essential aspect of human nature. Then I have traced those discourses that would situate the human ability for taking a disinterested interest and perceive beauty with regard to teleological approaches to natural phenomena. In this last chapter I shall shift my focus from considerations of reception to considerations of production, from the beholder to the artist, and study the Enlightenment transformation of the traditional discourse on genius. As we shall see, the Enlightenment discourse on genius makes the artist the figure of radical innovation and utter independence from both tradition and acquired cultural knowledge as well as from external sources of spiritual or religious inspiration. Thus, ultimately, the genius becomes a superhuman figure that usurps the position of nature or the creator—in brief: a figure that is its own progenitor.
The concept of genius has a long history that goes all the way back to classical antiquity. During the eighteenth century, however, it acquires a new profile. Instead of madness, melancholy, or divine inspiration, which at other times are considered relevant aspects of genius, for the Enlightenment understanding of genius it is the capacity for originality, the capacity for radical innovation that becomes its crucial feature. Since this cannot be taught, it is considered a rare gift of nature. The products of original genius will challenge all existent norms and expectations and ultimately set new standards. In that sense the Enlightenment concept of genius entertains a fascinating relationship to a model of historical progress, on the one hand, and to the forces of change in nature, on the other hand.
The Enlightenment concept of original genius does not rely on the older concept of nature as a created finished order of nonman-made beings and phenomena, but exclusively on the then emerging model of nature as a changing, generative, even creative force. More specifically within this context, as I will show, it is the model of natural growth exhibited by the individual living organism that plays a very important role for modeling the formative force and creativity of the genius. But, beyond that, there is also the concept of nature, as opposed to culture, as a critical resource for overcoming the deformations of one’s contemporaneous civilization that plays an important role. Thus, as we shall see, at a more abstract level, genius becomes a figure that is productively distanced, or alienated, from current cultural norms and expectations, an untimely figure.
In what follows I will approach the Enlightenment discourse on original genius first by providing an overview of three influential models. Each one approaches the tension between the natural gift of genius, which is opposed to the teachable arts that generally define human culture, on the one hand, and historical progress and the individual artist’s relationship to contemporaneous cultural norms, on the other hand, differently. I shall begin with a discussion of Edward Young’s essay on original genius from 1759, which is still committed to a model of cumulative progress. By contrast, the second model, for which I have chosen to focus on Herder’s essay on Shakespeare from 1773, works with a radically historicist approach to change. In contrast to both the cumulative and the historicist paradigm, the third example of the genius as radical innovator, for which I will rely on Goethe’s Winckelmann essay from 1805, makes being out of sync with one’s times the condition of genuine innovation.
I shall conclude this part with a close reading of one of the key programmatic texts promoting the new model of original genius, Goethe’s early pamphlet On German Architecture. A close reading of this text will add yet another aspect to our understanding of the Enlightenment discourse on original genius. For, especially in its performative dimension, this text engages with the spiritual, religious aspect of genius as Goethe stages his text as the record of a pilgrimage and models the aesthetic experience of coming to terms with the facade of the Strasbourg Cathedral as the product of a contemplative practice.