This is even more the case as regards Aesthetic than as
regards philosophy in general.
France was the prey of Condillac's sensualism, and therefore incapable
of duly appreciating the spiritual activity of art. We hardly get a
glimpse of Winckelmann's transcendental spiritualism in Quatremere de
Quincy, and the frigid academics of Victor Cousin were easily surpassed
by Theodore Jouffroy, though he too failed of isolating the aesthetic
fact. French Romanticism defined literature as "the expression of
society," admired under German influence the grotesque and the
characteristic, declared the independence of art in the formula of "art
for art's sake," but did not succeed in surpassing philosophically the
old doctrine of the "imitation of nature." F. Schlegel and Solger indeed
were largely responsible for the Romantic movement in France--Schlegel
with his belief in the characteristic or _interesting_ as the principle
of modern art, which led him to admire the cruel and the ugly; Solger
with his dialectic arrangement, whereby the finite or terrestrial
element is absorbed and annihilated in the divine and thus becomes the
tragic, or _vice versa_, and the result is the comic. Rosenkranz
published in Koenigsberg an Aesthetic of the Ugly, and the works of
Vischer and Zeising abound in subtleties relating to the Idea and to its
expression in the beautiful and sublime.
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