Goethe’s programmatic Storm and Stress pamphlet, “On German Architecture,” both in view of its systematic argument about the nature of original genius and in view of how the argument is actually staged as the first-person narrator’s pilgrimage to the grave of the architect of the Strasbourg Cathedral, brings us back to my initial proposition from the beginning of part 1, namely the claim that the two key concepts of an eighteenth-century discourse on aesthetics, disinterested interest and original genius, emerged against the background of specific religious practices and a changing concept of nature. In Goethe’s pamphlet the beholder of the facade of the Strasbourg Cathedral experiences a theophany as he engages in a set of intense contemplative exercises, yet the spirit that speaks to him is not that of a divinity but rather that of the creative genius of the cathedral’s architect. The encounter is challenging, uplifting, and edifying, but it is also marked as a highly selective one available only to very few.
This aspect of exclusivity, however, is not the case with regard to the kind of aesthetic experience I traced in the first chapter, where I looked at the religious practices that encouraged a specific contemplative approach to nature and the everyday world. Johann Arndt’s spiritual exercises trained his readers’ attention on apparently innocuous everyday phenomena and taught them to isolate these and focus on the activity of contemplation. They thus provided the background for the cultivation and appreciation of the activity of beholding a complex totality, which appeared to have a particular design or purpose that, however, could not easily or immediately be deciphered and understood. Especially in regard to the history of the illustrations of True Christianity, this activity of contemplation did not have to be necessarily tied to a set of larger religious goals but could just as well be practiced on its own. Beyond its initial devotional context, this practice could become a purely secular engagement with the discovery of beauty as an appreciation of a purposiveness without purpose. And yet there is no immediate connection between the well-known and presumably widely spread practices of contemplation in the wake of Johann Arndt’s True Christianity and Immanuel Kant’s central claim that aesthetic judgment expresses the capacity for taking a disinterested interest. Although it is well known that Kant’s childhood was deeply affected by his mother’s Pietism, my argument is not of a biographical nature, nor am I primarily concerned with the more specialized questions of Kant scholarship. Instead, I have argued that there has been, on the one hand, a broadly established cultural practice, going back to Arndt’s popularity, that provided the practical, empirical base for a radically new conceptualization of aesthetic experience. On the other hand, and this has been the focus of the second and third chapters, I have studied the positing of a specifically human and humanizing capacity of taking a disinterested interest, which eventually could be matched to those cultural practices of contemplation.
In chapter 2 I traced the various contexts that favored philosophical attention to the capacity for contemplation as the capacity for taking a disinterested interest. This isolation of the human capacity for taking a disinterested interest appears already in Shaftesbury’s writings. Right from the start, this concern with isolating the faculty of contemplation as a specific humanizing trait, a feature that would indicate man’s potential for goodness and moral insight, though associated with spiritual exercises, is also immediately in potential opposition to religious authority and the claims of orthodoxy and revealed religion. As we have seen, Shaftesbury immediately points out that religious orthodoxy would be offended by the belief in human goodness. Beyond the philosophical discourse in the wake of Shaftesbury’s moral philosophy, it actually took the naturalist concern with animal instinct and animals’ responses to the sensory/perceptual data obtained from their environments to develop the implications of the relative weakness of instinctual drives in humans and argue that the human capacity for contemplation makes up for what otherwise would be a severe handicap. I showed how the concept of “disinterested interest” migrates from Shaftesbury’s philosophical anthropology to the domain of naturalist observation and speculation, where the human ability to take a disinterested interest is discussed in contrast and analogy to the concept of animal instinct. In this context it was curious to note how the French Enlightenment could not engage with the concept of instinct to the extent that it was ideologically offended by what appeared to go against basic empiricist beliefs. Instinct too closely resembled the vehemently rejected concept of innate ideas.
Apart from the secularization of religious practices of contemplation I have also investigated the uses and fates of teleological approaches to the study of nature and its consequences for the conceptualization of the human being. In that context Enlightenment aesthetics emerges as a rich terrain of secularization, in which teleological arguments and figures of thought play an important and complex role. I have shown how it was within the framework of a teleological approach to nature that Samuel Reimarus developed his complex account of innate perceptual and behavioral patterns against the predominant empiricist rejection of “innate ideas.” It was Reimarus’s account of how humans are different from animals, in that they have much less of an instinctually predetermined relationship to their environment, that allowed for a neo-humanist concept of human nature, in which humans are charged with having to actively construct their world through the work of culture. To a certain extent the teleological approach to nature furthered functionalist models of natural phenomena. And yet some Enlightenment thinkers were also keenly aware that any form of teleological thought could easily be mobilized for religious or other ideological purposes, invoking the moral authority of nature. Thus, in chapter 3, I have shown how both Lessing and Goethe, two very different critics, are keenly aware of this nexus as they also actively intervene and reject the practice of some physicotheologians to read in nature’s purposiveness an expression of the intelligent design of a creator. In fact, one might argue that both authors make a point of disaggregating the appreciation of beauty in nature from an argument for intelligent design. The implication, of course, is to assert the autonomy of the aesthetic realm not only from the religious but also from the moral sphere.
In the final chapter, where I switched my focus from a concern with aesthetic experience and contemplation to the capacity for innovation and the production of art, we could observe the very conscious reversal of the relationship between art and nature in the attempt to theorize innovation and the production of utter novelty. In two accounts of original genius, in the image of Young’s vegetable genius as well as in Herder’s reference to the unity and totality of the organism, we could trace a programmatic reference to the generative forces of nature as the model for radical innovation. And yet we could also see how a certain break both with nature and natural processes as well as with history was just as important for the genius to produce something radically new. This latter aspect already became apparent both in Young’s appeal to awaken the “stranger within” and in Goethe’s much later portrait of Winckelmann’s genius as being grounded in Winckelmann’s pagan nature, his affinity to the spirit of classical antiquity, an ethos that was entirely out of sync with his time and historical context.
What we could see in this account of the ability to appreciate beauty, as well as in the account of radical innovation and original genius, was the development of what were to become key concepts for aesthetic theory in the eighteenth century, which stand entirely apart from more traditional discourse about art appreciation and production. They are radically severed from the contexts of poetic, stylistic, and rhetorical rules, expertise, connoisseurship, etc. Taste becomes almost as inborn as the creative potential and power that makes an artist a genius. The various theories contributing to these novel concepts all relied more or less on certain religious practices, on the one hand, and certain concepts of nature as a meaningful order and totality, on the other hand. The result is a powerful anomaly: art produced by and appreciated by an isolated individual. The production of art could not be taught, nor did it depend on any specific skills. The reception and appreciation of art was not a matter of social distinction but rather an issue of furthering and expressing one’s general human capacity. If there were procedures associated with the understanding and appreciation of the work of art, they were to approach the organic unity and individuality of the artwork through an empathetic attempt at reconstructing and reanimating its internal coherence produced by the creative genius of the artist, as we could see both in Herder’s Shakespeare essay and in Goethe’s essay on Erwin von Steinbach. To a large extent, then, aesthetic experience and the engagement with art becomes a highly individualized and individualizing practice, which might be transcended but also reaffirmed by an encounter with an alterity, an encounter that can no longer remain a religious prerogative.