German Aesthetics: Fundamental Concepts from Baumgarten to Adorno eds. by J. D. Mininger and Jason Michael Peck (review)

Aesthetics continues to haunt us beyond its many pronounced deaths and short-lived returns. The essays collected in this volume not only attest to the vibrancy of contemporary scholarship on aesthetics but also suggest why a critical engagement with aesthetics—and the uniquely influential German aesthetic tradition in particular—remains indispensable: from the opening entry on "Imagination" to the final entry on "Committed Art," these essays demonstrate that the concepts and controversies originating in German aesthetics have decisively shaped the terminology and basic schemata that govern the modern study of literature and art. In memory of their late teacher Jochen Schulte-Sasse, editors J. D. Mininger and Jason Michael Peck offer Anglophone readers a "reference tool" that provides "accessible entry points" to key concepts of this tradition (2). Experts on German aesthetics from various fields—predominantly in literary studies but including philosophy and musicology—have contributed 28 essays of typically 8–10 printed pages. Contributions are arranged by period, with essays focusing on eighteenth-century concerns preceding those that foreground nineteenth and then twentieth-century questions.

That German aesthetics remains widely if diffusely influential makes the editors' ambition to provide an accessible reference work at once extraordinarily important and extraordinarily challenging. The project requires determining precisely which concepts are fundamental to that tradition—a challenge all the more daunting considering the volume's modest length of just under 250 pages. The task is perhaps easiest in the case of the first set of entries focusing on eighteenth-century concerns, which can rely on an internally coherent tradition and a corresponding continuity of terminological and substantive questions. These opening essays succeed in providing succinct historical and systematic expositions of classical concepts. David Martyn's authoritative entry on the "Sublime" is exemplary in this regard and deserves to become staple reading in courses covering the subject. Paul Guyer gives a concise overview of changing conceptions of "Beauty" in German aesthetics while challenging the common view that Kant was a formalist in aesthetic matters, arguing that moral significance was ultimately a key component of beauty for Kant. Michel Chaouli's entry on "Irony" pulls off the feat of combining miniatures on the great ironists Socrates and Schlegel with a synopsis of systematic aspects of the phenomenon without sacrificing accessibility or writerly verve. One surprising omission in this context is the lack of an entry on "Taste" (although Vivasvan Soni's essay on "Judgment" covers some of the relevant terrain).

Beyond the core concepts of classical aesthetics, the boundaries of the tradition are less clearly defined, and are indeed defined differently by different contributors. Reflecting the various disciplinary affiliations of authors and the complex reception history of German aesthetics in North America, the entries in this volume exhibit the diverse (though not necessarily mutually exclusive) assumptions associated with the deceptively simple term "aesthetics." As a consequence, the volume at times reads like an arena in which different interpretations concerning the scope, meaning, and stakes of the tradition confront each other. Authors affiliated with traditional philosophy departments, such as Paul Guyer, tend to equate aesthetics with all philosophical reflection on art and beauty, even when such reflection predates Alexander Baumgarten's coinage of the term in the eighteenth century. Other contributors more narrowly understand aesthetics as an eighteenth-century development concerned with theorizing sensory or reflective judgement. This view can then invite questions regarding the relevance of aesthetics for modern art forms, as discussed, for instance, in Johannes von Moltke's informative essay on aesthetics and classical film theory. Yet others are influenced by Heidegger's and post-Heideggerian theory's suspicion of aesthetics as a flawed "metaphysical" conception of art that must ultimately be overcome (such as Kenneth Haynes on "Nothingness" or Silke-Maria Weineck on "God is Dead"). Finally, a good number of contributions see German aesthetics as a speculative intellectual project that laid the groundwork for and culminated in modern "theory...