14The Reception of the Enquiry in the German-Language Area in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century: August Gottlieb Meißner and Johann Gottfried Herder
1
The reception of Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful in the German-language area has been discussed in scholarly literature for almost 200 years.1 If we were to generalize from the results of the research conducted so far, the reception of Burke’s Enquiry in the German-language area in the second half of the eighteenth century would emerge as a discontinuous process with four distinct peaks. The first peak represents Lessing’s and Mendelssohn’s treatment of the Enquiry in the late 1750s and early 1760s; the second, lasting from the middle of the 1760s to the beginning of the 1770s, refers mainly to Herder’s interest in Burke’s aesthetics; the third is the critical reception of Burke in Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgment, 1790); and the fourth marks the polemical position expressed in German post-Kantian philosophy, particularly in its idealist branch. This last phase crosses over into the first half of the nineteenth century. Although research to date has been important in helping to shed light on the dissemination of Burke’s Enquiry in the German-language area, a comprehensive treatment of this reception as a process distinguished not only by changes over time but also by regional variations remains lacking. Based on the lectures on aesthetics given by August Gottlieb Meißner (1753–1807) at Prague University in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,2 the first part of this chapter seeks to illuminate the regional aspect alongside that of time.3
The first phase of the reception of the Enquiry (and here one can safely omit Burke’s name, for clearly none of the decisive actors knew the author of this anonymously published treatise) relates to the English original and took place in Leipzig and Berlin immediately after its publication in London in 1757. The roles of the two German cities during this phase of reception differed considerably. Although Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81) first informed his friends Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86) and Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811) of the existence of the Enquiry in letters sent from Leipzig in 1757,4 and although it was in Leipzig that a key text of the first phase of its reception – Mendelssohn’s review – was published, this Saxon town cannot reasonably be described as more than a mere mediator. The fact that the journal in which Mendelssohn’s long review appeared in 1758, Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste (Library of the schöne Wissenschaften and the Liberal Arts), was published in Leipzig by Johann Gottfried Dyck (1750–1815) was largely a coincidence (Mendelssohn 1977, 216–36). After Nicolai failed to find a publisher in Berlin who would support his project for a new German review journal for fine arts and belles-lettres, Lessing, who was residing in Leipzig at the time, convinced Dyck. Until the fifth volume (1759), the journal was in fact mostly edited in Berlin by Nicolai and Mendelssohn and, moreover, the most important contributions were written there. The great intellectual ferment that the Enquiry awakened in Lessing and Mendelssohn culminated in works by the Jewish scholar relating directly to Burke or expressing his own theory of feelings (Mendelssohn 1932, 237–67), and also in Lessing’s continuously postponed and ultimately unfulfilled intention to translate the Enquiry (Lessing 1997, 448–52). This first phase of reception, which ends in the early 1760s,5 was intellectually a matter of Berlin primarily, not Leipzig.6
The second phase of interest in the Enquiry was principally in the northern maritime centres of German culture, particularly Königsberg, Riga, Hamburg and Copenhagen. Such interest was sparked by Johann Georg Hamann’s review of Kant’s early, pre-critical writing Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, 1764), published in the Königsbergsche Gelehrte und Politische Zeitungen (Königsberg Scholarly and Political News) on April 30, 1764 (Hamann 1952, 289–92). It was thus thanks to Hamann (1730–88),7 who owned an original copy of the Enquiry (Hamann 1953, 77)8 without knowing who the author was and who summarized Burke’s theory in his review,9 that a professor of philosophy at Königsberg in East Prussia, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804),10 and his pupil Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) became acquainted with Burke’s views on the sublime and the beautiful. Northern German interest in the Enquiry, the author of which was identified only thanks to the French translation of 1765,11 lasted longer, continuing for more than twenty-five years, with two clear peaks. The cause of both peaks was interest in the Enquiry in the late 1760s and early 1770s, evidence of which is found in both the published and unpublished works of several scholars: the review of the Enquiry written by the Copenhagen-based Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg (1737–1823), published in the Hamburgische Neue Zeitungen (The New Hamburg News) on 13 February 1769 (Gerstenberg, 1904, 156–61); Herder’s excerpts from this review (Herder 1892, 108–10); Herder’s unpublished ‘Viertes Wäldchen’ (The Fourth Grove) on which he worked between 1769 and 1772 (Herder 1993, 349–50); and, lastly, his correspondence with Hamann, Kant, Johann Friedrich Hartknoch (1740–89) and Christian Heinrich Boie (1744–1806) between 1768 and 1772.12 One of the main themes of the North German essays was a repeated call for the translation of Burke’s Enquiry because, the authors argued, it was not yet sufficiently known to the German public. Herder even took concrete steps in this direction when he urged the Riga theologian Johann Jakob Harder (1734–75) to translate the Enquiry. He himself intended to add commentary and notes to the translation. The whole project was ultimately abandoned in 1769 when the Riga publisher Hartknoch asked the Leipzig editor of the journal Neue Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste (New Library of the schöne Wissenschaften and the Liberal Arts), Christian Felix Weiße (1726–1804), to find a suitable translator for Burke’s book (Herder, 1846b, 140n. 41). This ended up being Christian Garve (1742–98) whose translation was published anonymously by Hartknoch in Riga in 1773, constituting the first peak of North German interest in Burke’s Enquiry.13
The second peak is linked to Kant’s Critique of Judgment.14 The fact that Kant defined the distinctiveness of his own transcendental conception of aesthetic judgement against the backdrop of Burke’s views must be understood as the logical extension of the previous development of Burke’s reception in northern centres of German culture in which not only Hamann but also Herder criticized Kant’s early discussion of aesthetics with the help of Burke’s sensualist arguments. Unlike the Riga translation, which represents the peak of interest in Burke’s Enquiry in ‘material’ terms (it was simply the text, without scholarly commentary or footnotes), Kant’s inclusion of Burke in the Critique of Judgment as a typical example of the empirical theory of the sublime and the beautiful – which he himself had rejected – forms its apex in intellectual terms. Both peaks, however, are interconnected because only Garve’s translation allowed Kant to become acquainted with the full scope of Burke’s views and to quote them in the first place.15
The intense reception of the Critique of Judgment in German aesthetics from about 1800 onwards meant that the polemic with the British author became part of idealist interpretations for the next few decades (Strube 1980, 24–26). At the same time, Burke’s views, as is clear from Herder’s Kalligone (1800), continued to be used even by Kant’s opponents, and particularly in the controversy surrounding his attempt to exclude the sensuous dimension of aesthetic judgement (Herder 1998, 863–64).16 An upshot of this development was that concern with Burke’s Enquiry no longer developed chiefly in narrowly defined regions but spread wherever philosophical idealism in aesthetics was cultivated or became a matter of contention.17 As a consequence, the reception or, more precisely, the dissemination of Burke’s Enquiry in the German-language area entered a new phase, crossing over into the first half of the nineteenth century.18
Outlining the three centres,19 and the three corresponding phases, of the German reception of Burke’s Enquiry in the second half of the eighteenth century – the spread from Berlin and north Germany to the wider German cultural sphere – begs the question of which centre should be connected with Meißner’s remarks on Burke’s ideas as expressed in his Prague lectures on aesthetics.
Meißner, one of the most popular German writers of his day, was appointed Ordinarius of Aesthetics and Classical Literature at Prague University by the Habsburg Emperor Joseph II in 1785. He was the first Protestant to be employed at the Faculty of Philosophy since the Thirty Years’ War, and left Prague for Fulda at the end of 1804 after two decades of service. In his regular annual lectures on aesthetics, as is evident from notes made by students who attended them,20 Meißner repeatedly included excerpts from the Enquiry and praised it. He commented on Burke in passages on taste (Jungmann 1794, 3:4), the beautiful (Jungmann 1794, 5:11–23), and the sublime (Jungmann 1794, 4:30). Meiβner weakened Burke’s thesis qualifying the sublime with terror and fear. In keeping with the German non-Kantian aesthetic tradition, he qualified the coming of the terror sublime (das Schrecklich-Erhabene) with awareness of one’s own security, indeed, he even pointed to cases that do not inspire terror, but do arouse the sublime (for example, in the Bible, ‘Let there be light: and there was light’; Genesis 1.3). The longest passage on the Enquiry is in the explanation of the ‘feeling of the beautiful’ (Empfindung des Schönen). Here, replicating the plan of Part III of the Enquiry, Meißner first presents Burke’s reservations about three traditional theories identifying beauty with proportion, fitness and perfection. In this connection, he concentrates – in accordance with the overall character of the lectures – on the fact that the criticized theories do not sufficiently consider the bond between beauty and feelings. Using Burke’s ideas, Meißner stressed two passions: the passion directed at the reproduction of the species (he himself most often talks about Geschlechtsempfindung) and the passion for self-preservation (Selbsterhaltung). Meißner presented the first passion as the source of the beautiful, and the second as the source of the sublime. Beautiful objects engender love in us whereas the sublime evokes admiration. (Burke, however, connected the sublime with terror and pain.) He repeated Burke’s enumeration of the properties evoking the beautiful, and included among them ‘smallness’, ‘smoothness’, ‘gradual variation’ and ‘delicacy’. He summarized Burke’s views on virtue. Those virtues in which tender feelings (sanfte Empfindungen) related to the sex drive hold sway are also beautiful. Similarly, in his definition of kinds of beauty in relation to the individual senses, he advocated Burke’s views based on previous conclusions. It is no surprise therefore that Meißner appreciated Burke above all other British aestheticians. Jungmann made a note that Burke, according to Meiβner, had ‘come the furthest’ (kam am weitesten) in inquiring into the beautiful, though even he had not completely exhausted this key concept of aesthetics.
Although Meißner for the most part only paraphrased Burke’s views on the sublime and the beautiful, his lectures are important because they supplement what we already know about the dissemination of Burke’s Enquiry in the German-language area in the last third of the eighteenth century. Meißner’s remarks shift the focus of investigation from the Protestant north of Germany, the exclusive concern of previous research, to the Roman Catholic south, and specifically to Prague, the capital of Bohemia, then part of the Habsburg monarchy.
In trying to determine who awakened Meißner’s interest in the Enquiry and his knowledge of it, a consideration of the regional dynamics of Burke’s reception history becomes crucial. Meißner, after all, was a student at Leipzig from 1774 to 1776, that is to say, immediately after Garve’s translation had been published in 1773. This makes it necessary to question whether, in the late 1760s and early 1770s, Leipzig too was not an important centre for the mediation and dissemination of Burke’s aesthetics.
In the second half of the eighteenth century Leipzig was of course the centre of the German book trade and an important centre of higher learning. The local publishing houses played a decisive role in the dissemination of British literature, both scholarly literature and belles-lettres,21 as did the Faculty of Philosophy at Leipzig with its continued interest in literature written in English, including essays on aesthetics.22 The dissemination of British culture was also considerably furthered by the most important Leipzig journal on the arts, Neue Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste, edited by Christian Felix Weiße as of 1765;23 this series became the German bastion of sensualist aesthetics, acquainting its German readers with British ideas.24
Little is known, however, about the actual circumstances surrounding the translation of Burke’s Enquiry. The only source of information concerning the work of translating is in the correspondence between Hartknoch and Herder.25 Garve was a professor of philosophy at Leipzig (a position he held from 1768 to 1772) when the publisher Hartknoch invited him to undertake the translation, through Weiße. Garve was researching English literature intensively, particularly between 1767 and 1778 (Van Dusen 1970),26 and a consequence of his interest was a number of translations, including works concerned with aesthetics and other areas of philosophy (Viviani 1974). Before completing Burke’s Enquiry, Garve helped to revise a translation of Home’s Elements of Criticism, originally done by Johann Nikolaus Meinhard (1727–67); this revision was carried out in collaboration with his Leipzig friend Johann Jakob Engel (1741–1802).27
In Garve’s published correspondence with the Leipzig cleric Georg Joachim Zollikofer (1730–88) (Garve 1999a) and Christian Felix Weiße (Garve 1999b), conducted between 1772 and 1774, there is surprisingly no mention at all of his work on the anonymously published translation. Considering the work-related nature of his exchange with the Leipzig editor Weiße, in which Garve repeatedly asks him to find more translation work for him and negotiates the editing of the translations, fees, numbers of copies and their distribution, one would be justified in taking the silence to mean that the whole translation process, including the editing, must have been completed before he left Leipzig for Breslau in Silesia in October 1772. The letters also make apparent how much Garve, now in Breslau, missed the intellectual climate of Leipzig, especially the meetings with such friends as the professor of medicine and philosophy Ernst Platner (1744–1818) and also Weiße, Zollikofer and Engel. The fact that Engel almost never wrote to Garve was a frequent source of complaint, which Garve gave vent to in letters to other friends (Garve 1999a, 46–47, 126–27, 139). Garve’s close ties with Engel, and the probable completion of the translation of the Enquiry while still in Leipzig, are important evidence that Engel was likely to have acquainted himself thoroughly with the contents of Burke’s essay once Garve had translated it. Considering their close contact and previous collaborative revision of Home’s Elements, it is difficult to imagine that Garve and Engel would not have discussed Burke at all.
The role of Leipzig in the dissemination of Burke’s Enquiry was not limited solely to Garve’s translation. It was in Weiße’s Neue Bibliothek that the longest, most detailed review of the translation appeared in 1774 (Anon. 1774b). In it, the anonymous author first regrets that he had been unaware of the large excerpt of Burke’s Enquiry published in Mendelssohn’s 1758 review, which appeared in the third volume of the previous issue of Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste. If he had known of this earlier review, he claims, he would never have agreed to write his own. The strictly informative nature of Mendelssohn’s contribution compelled the reviewer to rewrite the text, considerably shortening the excerpt and focusing on the changes that Burke had made in later editions, particularly in the introduction dealing with the question of taste. It was precisely this last matter that the reviewer took issue with. Nor was he satisfied with Burke’s absolute separation of the sublime and the beautiful; Burke’s idea that the sublime was ultimately based on terror seemed particularly untenable to him because encounters with supreme kinds of the sublime elevate the human soul rather than bring it down. In his conclusion, the reviewer divulges the name of the translator, Garve, and expresses regret that, owing to health problems, the former Leipzig professor had been unable to add notes to his outstanding translation, as had originally been intended.
The attention that the Leipzig Neue Bibliothek pays to Garve’s translation of the Enquiry stands in contrast to the other review journals of the day. Reviews of Burke in German translation were on the whole scarce. One, signed ‘h’, possibly referring to Heinrich Philipp Conrad Henke,28 appeared in Gottlob Benedict von Schirach’s (1743–1804) Magazin der deutschen Critik (A Magazine of German criticism), published in Halle (H 1773). Another, by an anonymous reviewer, appeared in the Jenaische Zeitungen von Gelehrten Sachen (Jena News about Learned Matters) on 29 April 1774 (Anon. 1774a) and was subsequently republished in the Erlangische gelehrte Anmerkungen und Nachrichten (Erlangen Scholarly Commentary and News) on 9 July (Anon. 1774d). A third review appeared in the Russische Bibliothek, zur Kenntnis des gegenwärtigen Zustandes der Literatur in Rußland (Russian Library, for Knowledge of the Current State of Literature in Russia), edited by Hartwich Ludwig Christian Bacmeister (1730–1806) in Riga (Anon. 1774c). In this regard, the role of Berlin is particularly revealing: whereas in the late 1750s and early 1760s it was Mendelssohn, Lessing and Nicolai, all figures connected with Berlin, who repeatedly dealt with Burke’s Enquiry, now only marginal attention was paid to Garve’s translation in the Prussian capital. This becomes most evident when one considers the amount of space devoted to it in the most prestigious Berlin review journal: Nicolai’s Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek (Universal German library). Garve’s translation was not even noted in its regular issues. Only in the summarizing supplement of 1777 was the translation ever mentioned: namely by a certain Müller, a contributor from Cassel who signed his piece ‘Rz’.29 It is typical of this brief sort of mention that the author pays more attention to Burke’s current political activities and speeches about American independence than to a discussion of aesthetics, for which he reserved only two sentences.30 He expresses his conviction ‘that the thoughts of such a good orator must be of interest to everyone. This, apropos fine translation therefore needs no further recommendation’ (Rz 1777).31
If we take all these elements into consideration – Garve’s translation, its subsequent review in the Neue Bibliothek and the general Anglophilia in Leipzig – we can confidently call this Saxon town one of the main German-language centres disseminating knowledge of Burke’s Enquiry, especially in the first half of the 1770s. If we accept that it was the decisive intermediary in the diffusion of the Enquiry into southern German Roman Catholic areas (Prague in particular, as is shown by Meißner’s example) Leipzig becomes all the more important in the dissemination of Burke’s aesthetics.
No documentary information is available about how Meißner became acquainted with the Enquiry; it is quite likely, however, that as an enthusiastic student of belles-lettres and fine arts in Leipzig he obtained a copy of Garve’s translation, which had been published just before his arrival in Leipzig in 1774.32 In addition, his interest in Burke’s book could have been piqued by his Leipzig patron, the anthropologist Ernst Platner (Fürst 1894, 5, 39) whose university lectures on aesthetics mention Garve’s German translation. Indeed, Platner makes particular reference to Burke’s ‘Introduction on Taste’ and also takes issue with his theory of the sublime.33 Meißner came into close contact with another friend of Garve’s: Weiße. In his autobiography, Weiße later calls Meißner one of the core contributors to the Neue Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste (Weiße and Frisch 1806, 82).34 Moreover, Meißner’s closest friend in Leipzig was Johann Jakob Engel, who had helped Garve to translate Home’s Elements of Criticism and was probably also familiar with the translation of the Enquiry. It was, as Rudolf Fürst points out, his conversations with this later popular Enlightenment thinker which inspired Meißner to study literature and art, which in turn led to his literary career (Fürst 1894, 7).35 It seems more than likely that Burke’s name would have come up in discussions amongst these men. Meißner’s friends and acquaintances in Leipzig seem to have been behind his lasting interest in Burke’s Enquiry, which was later projected in his Prague lectures.36
Even though Meißner discussed Burke’s views on aesthetics without great originality, the fact that he introduced them to his students in Prague in some detail is nonetheless significant. Prague University was noticeably less liberal and less open to alien ideas than German universities in the Protestant regions and countries to the north. Indeed, to include Burke’s ideas in a lecture was daring, since it was at variance with a decree by Joseph II which ordered the teaching of aesthetics at all universities in the Habsburg monarchy to be done solely on the basis of the textbook by Johann Joachim Eschenburg (1743–1820): Entwurf einer Theorie und Literatur der schönen Wissenschaften. Zur Grundlage bey Vorlesungen (An Outline of the Theory of and Literature on the schöne Wissenschaften: A Basis for Lectures, 1783). Although Burke’s Enquiry is listed in the bibliographies of this textbook (Eschenburg 1783, 22, 25, 29), it is disregarded elsewhere.37 Meißner eventually had to come to terms with the negative attitude towards Burke as an author writing about the French Revolution: the topic was unacceptable in any form in Austria and meant that the censor at Vienna designated his works undesirable.38 The fact that Meißner included British authors,39 particularly Burke, in his Prague lectures on aesthetics despite the decree of the court at Vienna, and even after the outbreak of the French Revolution, testifies to his extraordinarily strong interest in Burke’s Enquiry. It was the anthropological-psychological orientation of Meißner’s aesthetics, adopted during his studies at Leipzig, which inspired in him a lasting interest in British aesthetics. It was this interest which distinguished his lectures from those of his predecessor, Carl Heinrich Seibt (1735–1806), who based his on French thinkers like Charles Batteux (1713–80) and Charles Rollin (1661–1741). Meißner’s leaning towards Burke was so striking and lasting that in 1805 even his pupil and eventual successor to the Chair of Aesthetics at Prague, Joseph Georg Meinert (1773–1844), felt the need to present his own conception of the beautiful in contrast to Burke’s theory – by then nearly fifty years old – as part of his application to succeed Meißner.40
2
Having outlined the early dissemination, translation and reviews of the Enquiry in the German-language area, it is now time to consider the reception of the ideas it contains. The extensive literature covering the German approach to the Enquiry tends to concentrate on individual responses while disregarding the wider German reception over long periods. Two short works by Werner Strube are almost the only exceptions (Strube 1980; 1998a).41 In the introduction to a 1980 German translation of the Enquiry, Strube (1980, 24–26) points out that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German aestheticians (Lessing, Herder, Vischer, Zimmermann and Carrière) praised the individual observations contained in the Enquiry, yet rejected its overall system. Moreover, most of them (for example, Herder) rejected Burke’s thorough separation of the beautiful and the sublime because they upheld the traditional conviction that the sublime was a supreme kind of beauty. Kant is a notable exception but, unlike Burke, he transferred the dichotomy of beauty and the sublime to a completely new context in the Critique of Judgment (1790), where he accounted for it transcendentally rather than empirically. Later idealists, such as Schelling and Solger, tried to reconcile the beautiful and the sublime but, according to Strube, nineteenth-century German aestheticians ended up treating the Enquiry not only as ‘a classic text of empiricist-sensualist aesthetics, but also as a classic case of a bit of Anglo-Saxon philosophy rudely condemned by speculative German metaphysics’ (Strube 1980, 26).42 In the introduction, and also some twenty years later in ‘Edmund Burke’, his entry for a dictionary of aesthetics and philosophy of art, Strube gave the same general description of the German reaction to Burke’s essay. ‘In its empiricist-sensualist precision and in its dichotomous structure,’ he states, ‘Burke’s aesthetics is superbly suited to serve later German aestheticians as a contrasting backdrop to their own aesthetic theories’ (Strube 1998a, 156).43
Strube’s description of the German treatment of the Enquiry as a ‘contrasting backdrop’ is fitting. However, the absence of a sufficient number of relevant sources and complex interpretations (a consequence of the format of the publications in which Strube’s discussions featured) suggests that one should exercise caution and wonder whether Strube has not oversimplified the German reception. Using Johann Gottfried Herder as an example,44 the following part of this chapter will tackle this matter.
Herder returned to the Enquiry continuously for more than thirty years. The earliest mentions appear in letters and excerpts from the late 1760s. From the perspective of the reception of Burke’s ideas, the most important of his letters is the one he addressed to Kant in November 1768. In it, he confesses to regarding Kant and Burke as two original thinkers who have taken different paths in their search for an answer to the problem of beauty and the sublime, although their opinions ultimately intersect (Herder 1977a, 22). Undertaking a comparison of Kant and Burke was not, however, Herder’s idea. The impulse for that was provided by Johann Georg Hamann, a colleague who shared similar ideas to him, and used the Enquiry to criticize the aesthetic views of the early, pre-Critique Kant. In his review of Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (1764), Hamann attacks Kant using two of Burke’s conclusions: one, the conviction that feelings of beauty and the sublime cannot be separated from the properties of objects (Kant understood them primarily subjectively) (Kant 1979, 19); the other, the conviction that these feelings rest on a physiological basis, that is, on different reactions of nerves and different physical manifestations. (Kant had not yet paid attention to this area in the Beobachtungen, although he would in the Critique of Judgment) (Hamann 1952, 289–92).45 This has been aptly noted by Piero Giordanetti: ‘It is not Hamann’s aim to draw Kant’s attention to some source, but rather to juxtapose Kant’s conclusions on beauty and the sublime with Burke’s conclusions and to present those as an addition to Kant’s analysis, which neglected the area of physical senses.’46 It is symptomatic that Herder did not hesitate to call Hamann’s review a ‘model of a criticism that is as gentle as it is penetrating’.47
In the late 1760s, Herder wrote out excerpts in German of selected parts of the English original of the Enquiry. To these he added his own concise commentary in which, rather than criticize Burke’s conclusions, he expands their horizons by adding his own questions, thereby bringing them closer to a strikingly broad conception of his own aesthetics (Ehrhardt and Arnold 2004, 131). In addition to the excerpts, in 1769 Herder discussed Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg’s review of the Enquiry, which was published in the Hamburgische Neue Zeitung (Herder 1892, 108–10). In sum, it is fair to say that reading the Enquiry was at that time part of Herder’s profound interest in European sensualist and empiricist philosophy (Ehrhardt 2007, 415–16). In this respect, Burke’s essay made Herder even more convinced about the sensorial physiological basis of aesthetics, and also formed the background for his more precise understanding of the nature of Kant’s aesthetic views and, indirectly, his own.
Herder’s partiality for the ideas expressed in the Enquiry come even more to the fore in his works from the 1770s. He first devoted himself to the Enquiry in ‘Viertes Wäldchen’ (written between 1769 and 1772; published posthumously in 1846),48 in the section about hearing (Herder 1878, 101–09, 2: § 6–8). He refers to Burke’s theory linking the feeling of beauty and the sublime to the relaxing (erschlaffen) and tensing (anstrengen) of the nerves when he considers how human nerves work on encountering a pleasant tone. He recalls the importance of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and particularly Moses Mendelssohn for the early dissemination of the Enquiry in Germany. And he summarizes the main German reservations about the Enquiry: doubts about the correctness of linking feelings of the sublime with the self-preservation instinct and the feeling of beauty with the social instinct as well as the qualitates occultas of Burke’s concepts and his questionable philosophical system. Despite these shortcomings, Herder still believes that the Enquiry makes a fundamental contribution, given the key discoveries (Entdeckungen) it draws from experience, which generally concern feeling (Gefühl). Following an impassioned metaphorical celebration of the principle of the relaxing and tensing of the nerves, Herder can only bitterly regret that Burke was unable to transfer his general discovery to more specific applications, that is, to describe more subtle feelings in detail, particularly those connected to individual kinds of art. He expects German aestheticians to achieve this desirable aim (Herder 1878, 103–04).
The way Herder dealt with the objections raised in ‘Viertes Wäldchen’ is apposite testimony to the nature of his assessment of the Enquiry. He divides the objections into two groups. The first is evoked in a litany based on the repetition of the verb ‘to let’ (lassen):
I shall let him [Burke] pair his two feelings with the instincts of self-feeling (Selbstgefühl) and social inclinations; I shall let his terms retain their qualitates occultas, which admittedly cannot be justified from any truly intellectual standpoint; I shall let him keep everything that is a system.49
The way Herder used the verb lassen suggests that he wanted to keep his distance from the objections he summarizes. This suggestion is given further support when, immediately after the litany, and with unusually impassioned figurativeness, he enthusiastically emphasizes Burke’s discovery about the nerves and feelings. In the context of the passage as a whole, therefore, the previous objections appear to be those of Herder’s predecessors, probably Lessing and Mendelssohn, rather than Herder himself.50 He finds these objections unimportant as they are unable to cast doubt on the indisputable contribution made by the Enquiry. Herder includes his own reservations only after eulogizing Burke’s discovery. This second group of reservations fulfils another function: respectfully, Herder limits himself to pointing out areas that Burke has not yet considered and where it would, in his view, be desirable to develop his theory of the tensing and the relaxing of the nerves.
Herder deals with Burke and the Enquiry similarly in his later works from the 1770s. In the first printed version of the essay Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele (On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul, 1778) he presents this ‘excellent (vortrefflich) author’ as the discoverer of the law (Gesetz) that governs the activity of the human nerves: ‘The nerve more subtly demonstrates’, states Herder, ‘what has been said generally there about the fibres of stimulation; the nerve contracts or expands depending on the object that comes to it.’ This law is valid also for the mind’s feelings of beauty and the sublime, because ‘every feeling of the sublime […] is linked to a retreat into oneself, with self-feeling, and every feeling of beauty is linked to coming out of oneself, with sympathy and imparting’.51 In another version of the essay from 1775, given this discovery, Herder does not even hesitate to talk expressly about Burke as the ‘author of an outstanding, truly Newtonian system for the causes of beauty and the sublime’.52
This straightforward endorsement of Burke’s principle of the tensing and the relaxing of the nerves as the basis for the human feeling of beauty and the sublime, accompanied by the conviction that this theory corresponds to Newton’s laws of natural philosophy, encapsulates Herder’s attitude to the Enquiry even at the end of his life, as has recently been demonstrated by Gundula Ehrhardt (2007, 419–23). In his reflections on the sublime in the third part of his Kalligone (1800), Herder first repeats his conviction that Burke based beauty and the sublime on two tendencies of the human soul which are ‘almost similar to the two basic forces of the universe according to Newton’, that is, the laws of attraction (Anziehung) and repulsion (Zurückstoßung).53 With the help of the passions of love and self-preservation, ‘[with the help of] these two forces, the moral universe gravitates and is preserved just as [occurs] in the physical universe by means of Newton’s two similar forces’.54 Consequently, Herder does not hesitate to call the Enquiry a ‘noble system’ (edles System) which Burke has demonstrated with abundant examples (Herder 1880, 229–30). He recommends everyone to read the book.
In his introduction extolling Burke, Herder also prepares a suitable starting point for a subsequent attack on Kant’s transcendental theory of the sublime. This attack is carried out at many levels; here, we are only interested in the arguments Herder uses to criticize the way Kant settles scores with the Enquiry in the Critique of Judgment, convinced that psychological and empiricist approaches do not permit general conclusions to be drawn.55 Herder confronts Kant’s rejection of the Enquiry with a cluster of rhetorical questions: on the one hand, he attacks Kant’s transcendental method and its a priori reasons, and, on the other, he defends Burke’s aesthetic views and, indirectly, his own. Of key importance are the last two rhetorical questions which again summarize Herder’s firm conviction that Burke has constructed an aesthetic system which is not only correct – that is, based on knowledge of the functioning of the feelings and the senses (in general, based on knowledge of the soul), but also sufficiently transcendental and, moreover, transcendental in the only acceptable way: it takes the feelings and the senses into account. Herder asks:
Could there ultimately exist a purer transcendence of abstract ideas, concepts and feelings than their reduction to the two just-named fundamental forces, since this transcendence concerns not only abstract ideas but also concepts and feelings? These forces create the world; why should they not create our minds as well?56
The fact that Herder closely related his simultaneous celebration of the Enquiry and attack on the Critique of Judgment to Hamann’s earlier model critique of Kant’s Beobachtungen (1880, 230–31) is apposite and symbolic. It concludes Herder’s thirty-year endorsement of Burke’s physiological principle, explaining both the activity of the nerves when feeling beauty and the sublime (Herder 1880, 240–41) and his equally long-lasting scepticism about Kant’s aesthetic opinions. Herder’s endorsement of Hamann’s review enables one to see the views in the Kalligone as the second empiricist attack on Kant’s aesthetics with the help of the Enquiry. After Hamann had pointed out the shortcomings of Kant’s Beobachtungen from the pre-Critique years with the help of Burke’s Enquiry, Herder used the same work to refute Kant’s transcendental theory of the sublime in the Critique of Judgment.
If we look at Herder’s lifelong engagement with the Enquiry, it is clear that Strube’s description of it as a ‘contrasting backdrop’ captures Herder’s attitude to Burke only in part and, moreover, not in the way Strube suggests. Herder follows on from Hamann’s earlier method, and critically contrasts Burke’s empiricist-sensualist views with Kant’s transcendental views in general, and his views on the sublime in particular, in order to show that the latter are incorrect. Such a method is offered by the Critique of Judgment itself, for it intentionally uses the Enquiry as a backdrop against which to present a more vivid explanation of the new transcendental theory. Even though he did not agree with all Burke’s ideas (for example, the separation of beauty and the sublime), Herder did not develop his own views in contrast to Burke’s; nor did he use Burke’s views to make his own ideas more precise. In using Burke’s discovery of the guiding principle of nerve activity, interpreted by way of an analogy with Newton’s laws of cosmology, Herder confirmed and enriched part of his own, much broader, theory, which propagated a sensorial, physiological basis for aesthetics.57 As Ehrhardt aptly puts it, Herder
thought highly of […] the Enquiry surely not just because of one individual observation or the other […], but because here the accumulated experiences, perceptions and observations allow the conclusion about the analogy between the cosmic system and the neuromuscular system.58
3
The Enquiry did not merely serve as a ‘contrasting backdrop’ in Germany, as is demonstrated by the example of Herder. The history of the reception of Burke’s Enquiry and its ideas in the German-language area remains to be written. This history will have to respect the fact that the most stormy and intensive stage of its German reception, which ended almost simultaneously with the publishing of the Kalligone (1800), was in no way uniform. The approach to the Enquiry at that time was largely predetermined by the philosophical foundations of individual aestheticians. In that respect, there are distinct differences between Lessing’s and Mendelssohn’s still in connection with the Wolffian philosophy developed attitudes, Hamann’s and Herder’s empiricist-sensualist approach, Meißner’s anthropological-psychological approach and Kant’s, and later idealists’, transcendental approach. These fundamentally different approaches need to be described precisely at each point in their development. Such description is made difficult by the fact that the individual aestheticians themselves did not take a single approach to the Enquiry; rather, as has been demonstrated by recent scholarship, certain of Burke’s ideas (not only his observations) might be accepted while others were rejected.59 These differences also need to be taken into account.
Scholars face a range of research tasks including, to put it simply, the post-Kantian reception of the Enquiry which continued uninterrupted into the nineteenth century: these challenges are different from those facing scholars examining the reception of the Enquiry in the eighteenth century. Throughout the second stage of the German reception, Burke’s views gradually ceased to function as a true starting point for lively disputes in aesthetics, and became part of historical surveys and, eventually, the history of aesthetics itself. Within post-Kantian aesthetics, the advent of the historicizing approach to the Enquiry was considerably facilitated and intensified by the prevalence of idealist philosophical currents; from the beginning, proponents of these currents saw their own work as surmounting the shortcomings of earlier aesthetic thought, and philosophy in general, including the ideas of the British empiricists and sensualists. This approach meant that they ascribed a precisely determined, definitive place to Burke in the development of European aesthetics.60 The description of the process, including when and how the ‘living’ text gradually became a historical document, and how this document was interpreted, seems to me to be a fundamental topic for research into the second stage of the German reception of the Enquiry. The boundary between both approaches is not, however, distinct, because historians of aesthetics have often slipped into outright criticism of Burke’s views. Unlike the first stage, this stage in the reception has yet to be researched in any real detail.61 When examining both stages, moreover, scholars will need to consider a wider range of German texts because many more eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers writing in German expressed their views on Burke’s Enquiry than have so far been systematically considered by contemporary scholars.62
Notes
1This chapter was written with the generous support of the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic (grant no. P409/11/2083). The author thanks Derek Paton who has translated the whole text including the quotations.
See Wendt (1819); Braune (1917, 4–15); Boulton (1958, cxx–cxxvii); Strube (1980, 24–26; 1998a); Kuehn (2001).
2On Meißner, see Kraus (1888); Fürst (1894); Hock (1899); Foltin (1977); Jannidis (1994); Košenina (2003).
3Emphasis on local particularity does not exclude the existence of mutual relations between the individual centres, such as those between the Riga publisher Hartknoch and the Leipzig authors Weiße and Garve. An earlier version of this part of my chapter appeared in the Estetika Journal.
4Lessing remarked on Burke’s Enquiry for the first time in a letter to Nicolai dated 2 November 1757. Lessing’s, Mendelssohn’s and Nicolai’s discussions concerning Burke have been summarized by Fritz Bamberger (1932) and Eva Engel (1977, lxxiii–lxxv).
5In 1768 Lessing stated that he had not yet completely given up on the translation (Lessing 1997, 1045).
6Lessing sojourned in Berlin from May 1758 to 7 November 1760 (Engel 1977, lxxiv).
7Although North German authors had an opportunity to acquaint themselves with the Enquiry even before Hamann’s review thanks to Mendelssohn, there is no direct evidence that this occurred. See Giordanetti (1999) and Herder (1993, 349; 1998, 864).
8See Herder’s letter of 1768 to Hamann (Herder 1977a, 113–17). For English works in Hamann’s library, see Fabian (1994, 32, 53–54, 67); Imendörffer (1938).
9It was only in a letter of 22 November 1768 that Herder, who had worked with the French translation (1765) which first stated the author’s name, told Hamann that the Enquiry was Burke’s work. The first English edition to bear Burke’s name was published in 1796. In the meantime, some had assumed the author to be David Hume; others, Henry Home, Lord Kames. See Mendelssohn (1977, 467); Herder (1846a, 420); Hamann (1956, 432); Unger (1925, 671); Herder (2001, 73).
10Contrary to the views of earlier editors and commentators who claimed that Kant knew Burke’s Enquiry before writing his early treatise on the sublime and the beautiful thanks to Mendelssohn’s review (Boulton 1958, cxxi; Kuehn 2001, vii), the present view (Giordanetti 1999) is that he became acquainted with it only after reading Hamann’s review: only in the manuscript notes to the Beobachtungen is there a clear effort on the part of Kant to take Burke’s positions into consideration (Kant 1991). See also Braune (1917, 13); Engel (1977, lxxxi); Herder (1998, 1224).
11Recherches philosophiques sur l’origine des idées que nous avons du Beau & du Sublime, précédées d’une dissertation sur le gout, Traduites de l’Anglois de M. Burke, Par l’Abbé Des François (1765), 2 vols, London [i.e. Paris?]: et se vend à Paris, chez Hochereau 1765. Herder knew the French translation (Herder 1977a, 115, 119–120).
12See Herder (1977a, 115, 119–20, 147; 1977b, 146; 1988, 75, 148, 151).
13In addition to the letters of 22 November 1768 to Hamann, and the letter of late February 1772 to Hartknoch, see the letter of 25 September 1770 from Johann Jakob Harder to the Halle professor Christian Adolf Klotz (1738–71) for more concerning Herder’s plans for Burke’s Enquiry (Hagen 1773, 56–59).
14Burke’s rejection of a theory of the beautiful based on unity in diversity is echoed in other North German authors; see Tetens (1777, 206).
15See the Burke quotation in Garve’s translation in Kant, Kritik der Urtheilskraft, §29 (Kant 1913, 277–78). The importance of the Enquiry in the 1780s and 1790s was increased not only by the German translation but also by the fact that it soon began to be mentioned regularly in textbooks and encyclopaedias on aesthetics. See Eschenburg (1783, 22); Eberhard (1790, 53).
16There will be further discussion of this later in the chapter.
17For example, Herder in Weimar and Schiller in Jena were both concerned with Burke’s Enquiry.
18See Strube (1998a).
19Interest in Burke’s essay was not confined to these three centres. See Merck (1776) and La Roche (1997, 128).
20Meißner himself never published his lectures on aesthetics. The most complete extant notes from his lectures were made in 1794/1795 by the student Josef Jungmann (1773–1847), later one of the most important scholars of the Czech National Revival; see Jungmann (1794). For more on the manuscript, see Hlobil (2012).
21See Fabian (1994, 20–21); Price and Price (1955); Inbar (1980); Spieckermann (1992).
22On the teaching of English language and literature and other fields of culture at universities in the German-language area, including Leipzig, see Schröder (1969).
23The original Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste was published between 1757 and 1765 and then in 1767; its successor, the Neue Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste, was published between 1765 and 1806.
24See Klingenberg (2001); Rek (2001); Fabian (1994, 44–45); Wilkie (1953; 1955–56); Peitsch (1992).
25See, in particular, E. G. Herder (1846b, 140); Herder (1977b, 146); Düntzer and Herder (1861, 26, 39–40). For information concerning Hartknoch’s letters, I am indebted to Dr Günter Arnold.
26See also Oz-Salzberger (1995, 192); Pottle (1953, 123).
27See Home (1772). We learn of Engel’s and Garve’s revision from the later edition by Georg Schaz (1790, xiii).
28See Systematischer Index zu deutschsprachigen Rezensionszeitschriften des 18. Jahrhunderts (http://adw.sub.uni-goettingen.de/idrz/pages/sub/LiteraturSet/List.jsf). I am indebted to Thomas Habel for bringing this to my attention.
29For the names behind the initials of the reviewers in the journal Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek, see Parthey (1973).
30The brevity with which the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek dealt with the German translation of Burke’s Enquiry cannot be justified even by Nicolai’s stated intention when starting up his journal: ‘Schriften von minderer Wichtigkeit, und Uebersetzungen wird man nur kürzlich anzeigen, doch mit Beyfügung eines kurzen Urtheils, über den Werth derselben.’ [Works of lesser importance and translations will only be briefly annotated with, however, the addition of a short judgement about the worth of the actual work] (Nicolai 1765, i).
31Rz (1777): ‘daβ eines so groβen Redners Gedanken über eine solche Materie jedermann interessiren müssen. Diese übrigens gute Uebersetzung bedarf also keiner weitern Empfehlung.’
32Meißner probably never met Garve personally because he arrived in Leipzig only after Garve’s departure for Breslau.
33Anon. (1777–78, on Burke 100, 141–42). Platner emphasized the importance of Burke’s Enquiry for Kant and Mendelssohn. I thank Professor Alexander Košenina (Leibniz Universität, Hannover) for lending me a copy of the manuscript.
34This collaboration is supposed to have peaked while Meißner was a student (1773–76). Fürst cast doubt on Meißner’s role in Weiße’s Neue Bibliothek. Based on the claim by Jakob Minor, he suggested that Meißner only contributed to the periodical during his sojourn in Leipzig (Fürst 1894, 7–8, 322; Minor 1880, 312).
35Meißner and Engel remained in close contact even after Engel left Leipzig for Berlin in 1776; see Košenina and Sangmeister (2002).
36Indeed Meißner’s interest in British culture increased so much during his Leipzig sojourn that he himself began to translate from the English, as is demonstrated by his adaptation of Hume’s History of England: Geschichte Englands, nach Hume von A. G. Meißner (1777 and 1780), 2 vols, Leipzig: Dyk.
37For the influence that Joseph II’s reforms had on aesthetics at Prague University and for the way Meißner used Eschenburg’s textbook in his lectures, see Hlobil (2012).
38See Braune (1917, 5–6).
39Meißner’s Prague lectures discussed not only Burke but also Young, Blair, Gerard, Hogarth, Shaftesbury, Hurd, Ossian and, in particular, Home. See Hlobil (2006).
40For Meinert’s own conception of the beautiful, in contrast to Burke’s, see Lemberg (1932, 95n. 74).
41Other works offering an overview of the German reception of the Enquiry are also concise but, unlike Strube’s attempts, limited to the early reception by Mendelssohn, Lessing, Herder and Kant; see Braune (1917, 6–15); Boulton (1958, cxx–cxxvii); Kuehn (2001).
42‘So ist Burkes Ästhetik nicht nur ein klassischer Text der empiristisch-sensualistischen Ästhetik, sondern auch ein klassischer Fall eines von Seiten der spekulativen deutschen Metaphysik rüde gerügten Stückes angelsächsischer Philosophie’ (Strube 1980, 26). Later, Strube (1998a) extends the reception to the twentieth century and identifies three phases. The first includes the eighteenth-century German response, typical of which was the adoption by Mendelssohn and Lessing of some of Burke’s particular observations alongside the rejection of his system as a whole. Strube again called Kant’s attitude exceptional as it pushed for a division of the beautiful and the sublime which was carried out transcendentally, not empirically. The second phase comprises the responses of German idealist aestheticians (for example, A. W. Schlegel and Vischer) who rejected not only Burke’s system but also his individual observations. According to the idealists, Burke had confused the merely pretty (niedlich) with the beautiful, and narrowed the concept of the sublime to the sublime that inspires terror, without acknowledging the sublime that elevates and expands the soul. Strube includes in the third phase the attitude of the empiricist-psychological aestheticians of the late nineteenth century and the phenomenologically oriented aestheticians of the early twentieth century. These aestheticians, namely Fechner and Volkelt, criticized Burke’s inability to capture the diversity of aesthetic qualities.
43‘In ihrer empiristisch-sensualistischen Prägnanz und ihrer dichotomischen Struktur ist Burkes Ästhetik hervorragend geeignet, späteren Ästhetikern als Kontrastfolie für deren eigene ästhetische Theorie zu dienen’ (Strube1998a, 156). See also Strube (1980, 24–25): ‘Die Wirkung von Burkes Ӓsthetik ist nicht so sehr die des “Einflusses” als vielmehr die der Stimulation: An Burke entzünden sich viele [deutsche] Ӓsthetiker; und sie ziehen seine Ӓsthetik heran, um vor ihr als einer Kontrastfolie die eigene Position klarer zu konturieren. Gerade in ihrer Einfachheit und Prӓgnanz bietet sich Burkes Ӓsthetik für Kontrastierungen an.’ [The effect of Burke’s aesthetics is more an impetus than an influence: many German aestheticians have been inspired by Burke; they draw on his aesthetics as a contrasting backdrop against which to show the contours of their own positions all the more clearly. It is in its simplicity and precision that Burke’s aesthetics offers itself for contrast.]
44Strube bases himself on ‘Viertes Wäldchen’, in which Herder notes with regard to Burke: ‘ich lasse ihm alles, was System ist’ [I shall let him keep him everything that is a system] (Strube 1980, 25).
45The review was originally published in Königsbergsche Gelehrte und Politische Zeitungen on 30 April 1764.
46‘Hamanns Ziel ist es nicht, auf eine Quelle Kant aufmerksam zu machen, sondern die Kantischen Ausführungen zum Thema des Schönen und Erhabenen mit denjenigen Burkes zu konfrontieren, und die letzeren als Ergӓnzung der die Region der körperlichen Empfindung vernachlӓssigenden Analyse Kants vorzulegen’ (Giordanetti 1999, 300).
47‘Muster einer eben so schonenden als tiefsehenden Kritik’ (Herder 1880, 230–31).
48See Parret (2012).
49‘Ich laße ihm die Paarung seiner beiden Gefühle mit den Trieben des Selbstgefühls und der gesellschaftlichen Neigungen: ich laße ihm seine qualitates occultas von Begriffen, die sich aus einem intellektuellern Gesichtspunkte freilich nicht mehr rektificiren lassen: ich laße ihm alles, was System ist’ (Herder 1878, 103–04). ‘Self-feeling’ is a form of self-awareness which is not rationally known, but only felt.
50See Lessing (1997, 448–52); Mendelssohn (1977, 216–36, and 1932, 235–67). Of the more recent literature, see Strube (1995; 1998b); Hlobil (2000); Vierle (2004, 160–65); Pollok (2006, xxxvii–xlii); Furniss (2009); Koller (2011).
51‘Der Nerve beweiset feiner, was dort von den Fibern des Reizes allgemein gesagt wurde, er ziehet sich zusammen oder tritt hervor nach Art des Gegenstandes, der zu ihm gelanget […] jedes Gefühl des Erhabnen [sei] mit einem Zurücktritt auf sich, mit Selbstgefühl, und jede Empfindung des Schönen mit Hinwallen aus sich, mit Mitgefühl und Mitteilung verbunden’ (Herder 1994, 346–47).
52‘Verfasser des vortrefflichen, wahrhaftig Newtonischen Systems über die Ursachen des Schönen und Erhabnen’ (Herder 1987, 601).
53‘Fast ähnlich den beiden Grundkräften des Universums nach Newton’ (Herder 1880, 229–30).
54Herder (1880, 229–30): ‘dieser zwei Kräfte gravitirt und erhält sich das moralische Weltall, wie das physische durch jene zwei ähnliche Kräfte Newtons.’
55On Burke and Kant, see Candrea (1894); Strube (1982); Tschurenev (1992); Huhn (2004); Vandenabeele (2012).
56‘Gäbe es endlich, da es hier nicht sowohl abstrakte Ideen als Begriffe und Gefühle betrifft, eine reinere Transcendenz als die Reduktion ihrer aller auf die eben genannte zwei Grundkräfte? Sie constituiren die Welt; warum sollten sie nicht auch unser Gemüth constituiren?’ (Herder 1880, 230).
57The range of Herder’s aesthetics is clearly broader than Burke’s, and includes cosmological and moral perspectives (Ehrhardt and Arnold 2004, 134–35). For discussion of the numerous works on Herder’s aesthetics, see in particular Irmscher (1987).
58Herder (2007, 420–21): ‘schӓtzt […] die Enquiry doch nicht etwa dieser oder jener Einzelbeobachtung wegen […], sondern weil die hier versammelten Erfahrungen, Wahrhnehmungen und Beobachtungen eben jenen Analogieschluss zwischen kosmischen und neuromuskulӓrem System erlauben.’
59Mendelssohn, despite hesitation about Burke’s methods and conclusions, incorporated links between the sublime, terror and pain into his own explanation of pleasant fear (angenehmes Grauen), and began to explain this kind of pleasantness through its relation to self-feeling (Selbstgefühl). See Zelle (1987, 342–58).
60Schiller’s assessment of Burke, in a letter to Gottfried Körner of 25 January 1793, tells us a great deal: ‘Es ist interessant zu bemerken, daß meine Theorie eine vierte mögliche Form ist, das Schöne zu erklären. Entweder man erklärt es objectiv, oder subjectiv; und zwar entweder sinnlich subjectiv (wie Burke u.a.), oder subjectiv rational (wie Kant), oder rational objectiv (wie Baumgarten, Mendelssohn und die ganze Schaar der Vollkommenheitsmänner), oder endlich sinnlich objectiv […]. Der Burkianer hat gegen den Wolfianer vollkommen recht, daß er die Unmittelbarkeit des Schönen, seine Unabhängigkeit von Begriffen behauptet; aber er hat unrecht gegen den Kantianer, daß er es in die bloße Affectibilität der Sinnlichkeit setzt.’ [It is interesting to note that my theory is a fourth possible way to explain the beautiful. It can be explained either objectively or subjectively – that is, sensuously subjective (like Burke et al), subjectively rational (like Kant), or rationally objective (like Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, and the whole crowd of men acknowledging the principle of perfection) or, lastly, sensuously objectively […]. In comparison with the Wolffian, the Burkean is absolutely right when he defends the immediacy of the beautiful and its independence from the concepts; but compared to the Kantian he is not right when he includes the beautiful in the mere ability of the senses to be affected] (Schiller 1893, 237–38). See also Barone (2004).
61I know of no work that thoroughly considers the German reception of Burke’s Enquiry in the nineteenth century.
62In addition to Strube’s references, see Eberhard (1972, 242); Müller (1967, 96–99); Bouterwek (1824, 64–66); Zeising (1855, 18); Dilthey (1924, 257–58, 261, 272); Külpe (1921, 36–38); Dessoir (1923, 146–49).