Une science autrichienne de la forme: Robert Zimmermann (1824– 1898) by Carole Maigné (review)

Austrian Studies is alive and well in France, as specialists in Austrian literature have long known. But Carole Maigné, a professor of philosophy at the University of Lausanne, offers up a wonderful volume in intellectual history that fills out our picture of nineteenth- century intellectual life in Austria by presenting an exciting tradition of philosophy and aesthetics lying outside of the overly familiar German-Hegelian accounts that populate the Anglophone philosophy world. Robert Zimmermann (1824– 1898) may be familiar to some: after studying in Vienna and Prague, this Bohemian-Austrian worked at the University Observatory in Vienna starting in 1847, then in Olmütz and Prague, and finally back in Vienna from 1861 until his retirement. (He also co-founded the Grillparzer-Gesellschaft in Vienna in 1890!)

A student of Bernhard Bolzano, Zimmermann inherited Bolzano’s papers and was supposed to finish his unfinished work on mathematics, but he turned instead to the philosophical grounding of disciplines. His most famous book, Philosophische Propädeutik (1852), was the textbook used by the Empire’s philosophy students, the heart of what many today call “Austrian philosophy.” More recently, another of his “textbooks” has received attention: his two-volume Geschichte der Aesthetik als Philosophischer Wissenschaft (Vol. 1, Erster, historisch-kritischer Theil (1858); Vol. 2, Zweiter, Systematischer Theil (1865)). Both these texts rose in the midst of the post-Kantian Philosophenstreit that pitted supporters of Hegel and Friedrich Theodor Vischer against those of Johann Friedrich Herbart—a debate relegated to the history of philosophy’s dustbin. Maigné’s Une science autrichienne de la forme, however, restores him both to art history and to philosophical aesthetics in a volume that reintroduces this important chapter in Kant reception.

Maigné’s introduction locates Zimmermann in Austria’s tradition of Herbartian philosophy and in a formalist tradition that threads a line between Kantianism and Hegelianism, respecting the logocentrism of Kant’s work but not the a priorism inherent in his work or in Hegel’s model of history. Maigné provides a useful short summary that situates his work on a map including Alois Riegl and the Vienna School of Art History, Wölfflin, the music critic Eduard Hanslick, and the philosophers Herbart and Bolzano, who were active in the early nineteenth century. Most critically, she starts by recapturing his aesthetics as a science of “how,” not one of “why” (“science du ‘comment?’ et non du ‘pourquoi?’” as it states on the back cover), tracing the most important waypoints in his project between his 1858 Geschichte der Ästhetik als philosophische Wissenschaft and his 1865 Allgemeine Ästhetik als Formwissenschaft.

The first chapter is dedicated to Zimmermann’s roots within the German and Austrian aesthetic traditions. Eduard von Hanslick, known today mainly as a music critic, figures here as the author of an important work on the aesthetics of music—he granted music cognitive communicative, not just affective, weight and tracks how it informs the listener who is listening to the intent of the composer through the lens of learned systems. That is, music, like other artforms, comprises a set of formal-semiotic systems configured by historical custom; it needs to be studied not only as affect or logic but also within cultural space. Maigné’s Zimmermann rejects abstract Hegelian history to embrace such a model of functional communication communities conditioned by historical experience (an approach that builds on Baumgarten’s aesthetics and Lessing’s poetics). This is, in other words, anything but Weimar Classicist poetics.

Zimmermann also stresses that understanding art is an act of judgment in historical-cultural space (thus reclaiming Kant’s third Critique), an assumption that highlights how human acts engage artworks as more than transcendent art forms. Within art history, this opens up the possibility of systematic classification of artworks in terms of historical eras and styles—what becomes known (to scholars like Walter Benjamin) as a Kunstwollen, an era’s drive to art, the way it “chooses” to...