ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the autonomy of art is a nineteenth-century idea, not an eighteenth-century one. The eighteenth-century conception of art can be called heteronomous, though that is anachronistic. Kant first used the term autonomy in an aesthetic context, but he did so to characterize aesthetic judgment, not the status of art: for him, aesthetic autonomy means that individual subjects must make their judgments of taste on the basis of their own experience; it does not imply that the creation or experience of art is exempt from moral constraints. For Kant, nothing in human life is so exempt. Other contemporaries of Kant discussed in this chapter include Moses Mendelssohn and James Beattie. From the eighteenth century to the end of German idealism, conceptions of art were always heteronomous.
