Disinterested Love: Ethics and Aesthetics in Karl Philipp Moritz's "Versuch einer Vereinigung aller schönen Künste und Wissenschaften unter dem Begriff des in sich selbst Vollendeten"

Aesthetic autonomy remains one of the most persuasive and prolific ideas in the reception of German neoclassicism. A quick glance at the vast amount of research on the subject reveals that it is, in fact, one of the defining traits, or perhaps the defining trait, of this particular movement in the history of art and literature. General surveys of the period, often also referred to as Weimar classicism or the Age of Goethe,¹ as well as "close readings" of works by individual writers, such as Goethe, Schiller, and Humboldt,² single out aesthetic autonomy as the "Kernstück der Weimarer Klassik" (core of Weimar classicism).³ Wilhelm Voßkamp claims that "kein anderes Konzept wird heute als so epochenspezifisch für die Weimarer Klassik angesehen als das der ästhetischen Autonomie" (no other concept is perceived as more characteristic for the epoch of Weimar classicism than aesthetic autonomy).⁴ Gerhard Sauder goes further and names autonomy as the "Norm der Weimarer Klassik" (the norm of Weimar classicism).⁵ And that is just scratching the surface. While many of the most notorious themes of the so-called "Klassik-Legende," a phrase coined by Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand in their influential 1971 anthology,⁶ have not stood the test of time, aesthetic autonomy remains a persuasive and attractive idea to many a scholar. As a result, in a recent attempt to once again settle the score with this oppressive legend, Klaus L. Berghahn defines aesthetic autonomy as the very foundation of classical-Romantic aesthetics.⁷

A key figure in the history of aesthetic autonomy is Karl Philipp Moritz (1756–1793), who, though sometimes overlooked,⁸ was a prime mover of Weimar classicism.⁹ His essay "Versuch einer Vereinigung aller schönen Künste und Wissenschaften unter dem Begriff des in sich selbst Vollendeten" (1785) is the first of many texts that posterity has declared to be the origin of modern aesthetic autonomy—his crowning achievement being the 1788 booklet Über die bildenden Nachahmung des Schönen, which Goethe quoted enthusiastically.¹⁰ Thus, the essay supposedly paved the way for Immanuel Kant's subsequent transcendentalization of aesthetics and the Romantics' liberation of art and of the artist. "This essay," Paul Guyer claims, "can be regarded as a true ancestor of the later conception of the autonomy of art."¹¹ Dorothea von Mücke argues that "Moritz attributes to the aesthetic object a privileged status within the order of representations in terms of its intransitivity or autonomy," that is, as a "necessary illusion" that "reorganizes man's faculties."¹² More recently, Elliott Schreiber has widened the scope of the argument significantly, stating that "Moritz's concept of the inner purposiveness of the artwork provides a model for understanding the autonomy of modern value spheres in general" which include institutions of art, mythology, education, and politics, among other things.¹³

However, as Thomas P. Saine already noted in the early seventies, critics have been too focused on Moritz's conception of beauty as something complete in itself, a tendency that brings his aesthetics "zu sehr in die Nähe einer Theorie des 'l'art pour l'art'" (too close to the theory of "l'art pour l'art").¹⁴ In his writings, especially in "Über den Begriff des in sich selbst Vollendeten," I argue that Moritz expresses a reluctance to dissociate the work of art from its extra-aesthetic context—or, in short, from life. As the following pages will show, Moritz's analysis of the self-contained and complete work of art and man's disinterested attitude toward it point to a profound interdependence between subject and object, an interdependence that is essentially ethical. Moritz's emphasis on the interdependence between art and life, which reintegrates the world of art with ethics, essentially "heteronomizes" the foundation of aesthetics. As a result, the rise of German neoclassicism in the 1780s and 1790s should be construed not as an attempt to articulate a theory of the autonomous, self-sufficient, and independent...