ABSTRACT
Germaine de Staël’s On Germany introduced German philosophy to French and English audiences in the first decades of the nineteenth century and hailed Kant’s philosophy as offering a new synthesis of nature and spirit, feeling and reason. This chapter explores the apparent conflict between Staël’s own aesthetic attitudes, as developed in On Literature, which treats taste as an expression of a historical, national, and cultural moment, and the apparently conflicting account of aesthetic autonomy developed in Kant’s Critique of Judgement. It asks how Staël was led to endorse views which apparently conflicted so markedly with hers and argues that she understood Kant to be offering a philosophical resolution to issues which had been exercising her in works she had written after the failure of the French Revolution, which expressed her belief in cultural progress, despite their apparent commitment to cultural relativity. It concludes with the observation that, in spite of her own explicit endorsement of Kant’s views in On Germany, the outlook of On Literature implicitly undoes the imagined aesthetic autonomy of the Critique of Judgement.
