ABSTRACT
One of the chief contributions of that tradition to aesthetic theory is the link in idealist epistemology between aesthetic experience and the free expression of human subjectivity. The philosophy of Immanuel Kant bequeaths to its idealist successors a high doctrine of both aesthetic experience and aesthetic judgement, which influences not only German philosophy but the cultural ideal of German intellectual life from around 1780 until at least 1830. Kant's dual emphasis on the autonomy of aesthetic experience and its relevance to people's understanding of experience as a whole is sustained, in a different form, in post-Kantian German idealism and its aftermath in nineteenth-century German philosophical aesthetics. G. W. F. Hegel therefore insists that aesthetic communication can never fully do justice to the kind of reflectivity by which modern experience is defined. Hegel's thesis of the inadequacy of realism to represent modernity is therefore inseparable from his focus on romanticism and the Bildungsroman.
