Výuka dobrého vkusu jako státní zájem II: Závěr rané pražské univerzitní estetiky ve středoevropských souvislostech 1805–1848 by Tomáš Hlobil (review)

The Teaching of Good Taste As a State Interest II: The Conclusion of Early Prague University Aesthetics in its Central European Contexts, 1805–1848, is the second in a two-book study of the aesthetics taught at Prague University from the establishment of the first chair of esthetics (1763) up to the revolutionary year of 1848. The topic had previously received some attention from literary historians working on German-and Czech-language literature in Bohemia, both of which took direction and inspiration from these professors and their instruction. Tomáš Hlobil aims to reexamine the conclusions of that work and integrate it into the larger history of aesthetics. That larger history has mostly ignored such areas, he argues, because of its tendency to focus teleologically on the development of great aesthetic ideas (and so mostly looks at Kant and his followers in this period) and because most of the sources for university instruction in aesthetics are not published but archival. The Prague chair of aesthetics provides a good window onto what was going on in Austrian universities more broadly—there is a larger archival source base for Prague than even for Vienna—and for a comparison with the also-understudied instruction in other German universities, which Hlobil touches on briefly.

Prague was the forerunner for instruction in aesthetics in Austrian universities: Carl Heinrich Seibt requested the establishment of the first chair in Prague by Empress Maria Theresa, which led later to the institutionalization of aesthetics at other Austrian universities (253). In the period covered by this volume, aesthetics instruction was governed by two state plans, the Philosophischer Studienplan of 1805 and the Neuer Lehrplan der philosophischen Studien of 1824, both of which made aesthetics an elective subject in the third and final year of study at the Philosophical Faculty, in preparation for study at the higher faculties (Law, Medicine, and Theology). Its practical justification was the rounding out of the education of taste, based on classical models, and to teach students the rules by which to properly evaluate and judge literary works in particular, using contemporary German-language examples (20).

The first part of this volume examines university archival documents recording course offerings and instruction in aesthetics for six Austrian universities and lycea (Vienna, Prague, Lvov, Graz, Innsbruck, and Olomouc) in comparison with the universities in Freiburg, Würzburg, Halle, and Leipzig. While such documents tell far from the whole story, as the second part makes clear in the case of Prague, they clarify the broader outlines significantly. The universities in Protestant lands (Halle and Leipzig), while they never established professorships in aesthetics, offered significantly more instruction in the subject, with multiple instructors in competition and a wider variety of approaches. And while the German universities in Catholic lands outside of Austria also established chairs in aesthetics, it was conceived as a subject belonging to philosophy, rather than the history of the fine arts, and thus was closer in many ways to the Protestant universities—sharing as well the severe drop in course offerings and enrollments following university reforms in the 1830s. The Austrian chairs in aesthetics were an isolated phenomenon, which made instruction in aesthetics institutionally more stable than it was elsewhere, with continued regular instruction right up to the revolutionary year of 1848; but the imperial plans also institutionalized its limited status, narrow conception, and lack of creative competition.

The opportunity for creative freedom and variety within that institutional structure is in many ways the subject of the second part of the volume, which examines more closely the aesthetic ideas and lectures of three of the significant occupants of the chair in aesthetics in Prague. Josef Georg Meinert held the professorial chair from 1805 to 1811, Johann Heinrich Dambeck from 1812 to...