ABSTRACT
The recent revival of interest in Classicism is by no means restricted to the 'New Classicism' in architecture that Charles Jencks and Paolo Portoghesi have called for as a new postmodern renaissance of the abiding presence of the past. In Goethe's own terms, aesthetic knowledge arises when, however fleetingly, our sense-impressions are coordinated with our conceptual thought, rather than subordinated to purposive thinking as is the common case. The wider significance of Weimar Classicism has been accurately identified by Paul de Man in his Rhetoric of Romanticism: the Schillerian aesthetic categories, whether we know it or not, are still the taken-for-granted premises of our own pedagogical, historical, and political ideologies. The hierarchy of formalisation that is implicit in Coleridge is made quite explicit by Goethe: analysis is to move up, and down, the scale of 'aesthetic, rhetorical, grammatical'. Paul de Man is correct in saying that 'the aesthetic is, by definition, a seductive notion that appeals to the pleasure principle'.
