ABSTRACT

The adoption of the term Genie is an attempt by Heydenreich to refine the theory of expression he had articulated in System. In that work he had described artistic production as the presentation or expression of a feeling within the artist, but reserved most of his detailed exposition for an account of aesthetic reception on the part of the viewer. The central problematic of Heydenreich's Genie is the status of concepts within the form of agency peculiar to artistic creation. The occurrence of pure geometrical figures in nature is taken by Kant to be paradigmatic of the activity of human reason on physical material. In his system, geometry is the science whereby reason studies the properties of the manifold of space a priori. The distinction between artistic and natural beauty in Kant is, in effect, an elaboration of his discussion of doing (facere) versus working in general (agere), but applied only to objects judged to be beautiful.