ABSTRACT
The Greeks were deeply interested in the questions of aesthetics, and their philosophers discussed them in a variety of contexts-moral, political and metaphysical. Nevertheless aesthetics, conceived as a systematic branch of philosophy, is an invention of the eighteenth century. It owes its life to Shaftesbury, its name to Baumgarten, its subject-matter to Burke and Batteux, and its intellectual eminence to Kant. Its irruption into the terrain of philosophy is one of the most remarkable episodes in the history of ideas. In Schiller’s Letters on Aesthetic Education, the newly discovered faculty of aesthetic judgment is given the sacred task that was once laid on the shoulders of religion-the task of preparing man for his life as a moral being. In Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics art is presented as the successor to religion, an all-embracing form of consciousness in which the truth of the world, at a certain point of spiritual development, is most perfectly distilled. Art, and the study of art, form the highest point to which man’s self-understanding may attain, before emancipating itself from the sensuous, and passing over into the sphere of abstract concepts, philosophical reflection, and natural science-the world of Wissenschaft.
