In her study The Author, Art, and the Market Martha Woodmansee isolates two key concepts of eighteenth-century aesthetics: disinterested interest and original genius. The concern of Woodmansee’s study consists not in elucidating Kant’s aesthetics, nor in writing the history of these concepts as a dialogue between theoreticians and philosophers, but rather in providing an altogether different, until then entirely neglected, rather mundane context to illuminate their sudden emergence: changes in the German-language book market in the second half of the eighteenth century, the sudden rise of general literacy together with a surge of entertainment literature in the vernacular, primarily comical stories, exotic travel narratives, and gothic fiction replacing the predominance of religious devotional literature of the first half of the century.
Woodmansee explains the rise of the concept of disinterested interest as a reaction of ambitious but financially unsuccessful writers to losing out on the market against the writers of popular entertainment fiction. In this light, Karl Philipp Moritz’s concept of the work of art as a self-sufficient, autonomous entity that would not entertain its reader or beholder but instead demand an attitude of disinterested interest becomes a defensive stance of a writer who cannot profitably sell his own products.1 Similarly, Woodmansee situates the rise of the concept of original genius in the context of the utter absence of the protection of intellectual property: writers were at best given an honorarium; publishers and booksellers obtained the profit; however, they too were plagued by the prevalence of unauthorized reprints. Not until Johann Gottlieb Fichte provided a way of distinguishing between three aspects of a literary work—1.) the physical object of the book, which could be sold; 2.) the ideas, which would already be part of common property; and 3.) the specific form, which would retain the work’s individualizing features, derived from the specific character of its author—was there a way of demanding an author’s copyright: The author would own the words in their unique articulation and should be granted legal protection for this kind of intellectual property by way of copyright. The concept of original genius as it became popular especially in Germany in the reception of Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition then needs to be seen as providing the model for this connection between the quasi-organic individuality of the work of art and the unique individuality of its maker. The eighteenth-century concept of original genius would not only provide a rationale for legally protecting an author’s copyright but it would furthermore motivate a set of new procedures for reading and interpreting a work, namely those hermeneutic procedures that would read the text by fully engaging with animating and reconstructing the individualizing totality of the artifact.2
Part 1, “The Birth of Aesthetics, the Ends of Teleology, and the Rise of the Genius,” undertakes a comparable project to that of Martha Woodmansee in that it also privileges “disinterested interest” and “original genius” as crucial innovations of eighteenth-century aesthetics. Like Woodmansee, I am also interested in drawing attention to and examining until now neglected discursive contexts that have been crucial to the fate of these two concepts. First I shall study religious practices of contemplation as providing the background for the emergence of a new kind of disinterested aesthetic contemplation, but I will also look at the philosophical trajectory of conceptualizing this ability for aesthetic contemplation. Moreover, I shall show that the discourse of philosophy alone does not suffice to understand the trajectory of these concepts. Another discursive context, a teleological discourse about the order of nature, needs to be taken into account in order to come to a fuller understanding of the trajectory of these concepts. Thus I shall trace two aspects of a teleological understanding of nature in their relationship to the emergence of eighteenth-century aesthetics: I will show how the functional understanding of an animal’s appetitive and instinctual behavior crucially informs the conceptualization of “disinterested interest” as a feature that sets apart the human animal from all other animals. Already here we can see the decisive break with the moral authority of nature in asserting the human animal’s instinctual weakness as the feature that allows for self-directed behavior that is not automatically self-interested. And then there is the teleological understanding of change in nature, which greatly informs the eighteenth-century concept of original genius as a radical innovator that produces unique individuals. Whereas Woodmansee’s contextualization of “disinterested interest” and “original genius” reduces these concepts to their ideological function in the context of important changes in the print and publishing market of the eighteenth century, the contextualizations I will unfold in the following chapters will show their role in the shaping of a secular humanist Enlightenment.