ABSTRACT
To account for the enigma of the variety of forms of art is the task of aesthetics. This variety is a historical given; the task is to interpret its meaning. Deeper critical reflection, however, shows that all these different explanations actually correspond to different logical objects. Even as the logical objects of the various natural sciences are created by the methods of these sciences, the objects of the various Geisteswissenschaften, too, emerge only in and through their methods, points of view, perspectives, or however else these subjective-functional correlates of the changing objects may be called. Georg Lukacs' book moves in the right direction: it is an attempt at interpreting aesthetic phenomena, particularly the novel, from a higher point of view, that of the philosophy of history. By its intrinsic methods, aesthetics, or more specifically poetics, has worked out the main forms of art—tragedy, the epic, the novel, etc.—and the history of style has described their intrinsic development.
