Front matter
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MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS
ANDREW BOWIE
Contents
Preface to the second edition page vii Introduction 1 Aesthetics and modernity 1 Aesthetics and ‘postmodernity’ 8 Modern philosophy and the emergence of aesthetic theory: Kant 16 Self-consciousness, knowledge and freedom 16 The unity of the subject 19 The unification of nature 24 The purpose of beauty 32 The limits of beauty 41 German Idealism and early German Romanticism 49 Thinking the infinite 49 A ‘new mythology’ 55 Early Romantic ‘new mythology’ 63 Reflections on the subject: Fichte, Hölderlin and Novalis 69 Self and Other 69 Fichte 70 Holderlin 82 Novalis 88 Schelling: art as the ‘organ of philosophy’ 102 Nature and philosophy 102 The development of consciousness 108 Intuition and concept 113 The ‘organ of philosophy’ 117 Mythology, art and modernity 124 Mythology, language and being 127 Hegel: the beginning of aesthetic theory and the end of art 140 Which Hegel? 140 Self-recognition 147 Music and the Idea 152 Language, consciousness and being 160 The Idea as sensuous appearance 166 The prose of the modern world 175
Philosophy and art after Hegel 178 vi
6 Schleiermacher: art and interpretation Linguistic turns The ‘art of disagreement’
Preface To The Second Edition
I began writing the original version of this book some fifteen years ago. This new version retains the basic structure of the first edition, but contains hardly a single sentence which is the same as in that edition. I have in fact totally rewritten the book, extending the scope and detail of the arguments, taking in issues which have become philosophically alive in the interim, and incorporating the results of more recent historical research. The main change of focus of the book is in relation to the development in America of sophisticated work in pragmatism and neo-Hegelianism, which draws both on the traditions investigated in this book and on resources from recent analytical philosophy. Though I obviously would say this, I do think any reader of the first edition would profit considerably from reading (and, preferably, buying!) the new edition. The previous edition was generally well received by the reviewers, but one or two rightly commented on its stylistic failings. Writing for an English-speaking audience about the German philosophical tradition is never going to be easy, and I do not claim to have produced a work of grace and elegance, but the new version will, I hope, find more favour for the way it is written than the old version. It will also hopefully find favour because it now says much more effectively what I was striving to say in the first edition.
The new presentation, clarification, and refinement of my ideas, and my revised accounts of the thinkers have greatly benefited from talking to: Alison Ainley, Karl Ameriks, Jay Bernstein, Arnfinn Bo-Rygg, Susan Bowles, Rüdiger Bubner, Tony Cascardi, Maire Davies, Peter Dews, Manfred Frank, Roger Frie, Neil Gascoigne, Steve Giles, Kristin Gjesdal, Lydia Goehr, Stephen Hinton, Robert Holub, Stephen Houlgate, Nick Jardine, Peter Osborne, Robert Pippin, Richard Potter, Stephen Prickett, Jonathan Rée, Kiernan Ryan, Martin Swales, Robert Vilain, Nick Walker, among many others. Invitations to talk at many British universities, and at the universities of Berkeley, Copenhagen, Cornell, Drew, Oslo, Stanford, Stockholm, and Turku, and the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer School on German Romanticism at Colorado State, offered invaluable opportunities to try out my ideas on new audiences. An Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship and British Academy research leave some time ago now still form the basis of much of my work. During the time of writing I have moved from the Philosophy Department at Anglia Polytechnic University in Cambridge, whose students persuaded me by their acuity and enthusiasm that it was possible and worthwhile to communicate this difficult tradition to them, to Royal Holloway, University of London, where I hope my attempts to spread the word about German philosophy in a welcoming and supportive German department will meet with success. There are signs that the long-term decline of German studies might be partly arrested if a Romantic combination of different literary, cultural, historical and philosophical viii Preface to the second edition approaches became the norm. Those parts of the subject that wish to resist the instrumentalisation of modern languages that results from most Western governments’ perception of universities as merely training places for the workforce must surely take this route. Germany is, after all — even though the contemporary state of the humanities would not suggest it — the main source of nearly all the major recent theoretical directions in the humanities.
As always I would like to thank my parents, who are invariably hugely supportive, and Liz Bradbury, who is my sternest and most amusing critic and indispensable companion.
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