Go hither and look: Aesthetics, history and the exemplary in late eighteenth-century philosophy (Johann Winckelmann, Immanuel Kant, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Johann Gottfried Herder)

By the end of the eighteenth century philosophy had generally accepted aesthetics and history as legitimate spheres of inquiry and in both cases, though perhaps more definitively in the case of aesthetics, had established them as philosophical sub-disciplines. My research is focused on this point of transition and concerns the complex influence that aesthetic and historical questions had on the discipline of philosophy. I argue that the role of the example is of particular importance here. Be it in the form of a beautiful object or an historical event, the example, which is neither a concept nor a precept, is attributed a normative status. It is this normative dimension of the example which lies at the heart of philosophy's engagement with aesthetics and history insofar as it is a critical, though little discussed, component of judgments of taste. I argue that the example (in German Bei-spiel, that which "plays-beside", and in Greek para-deigma, that which "shows-beside") manifests a complex relationship to itself insofar as that which is exemplary represents both the form of a rule, i.e., that which is to be complied with, and an instance of adherence to that rule, ie., that which has already thoroughly complied. This dual aspect of the example is not only referenced by Kant in both his writings on aesthetics and history, but surfaces repeatedly in eighteenth-century theories of artistic beauty, taste and education where it is supplemented by the concept of imitation which is invoked as the principle means of achieving beauty in art. Here too there is a deeply related and somewhat ambiguous relationship at work, as illustrated in Johann Winckelmann's seemingly contradictory statement, "The only way for us to become great, or, if this be possible, inimitable [unnachahmlich], is to imitate the ancients [die Nachahmung der Alten]." I argue that both of these terms---example and imitation---touch upon the same philosophical problem, the problem of reconciling the singularity of discrete presentations with the universality of an ideal form or rule. The inexorably empirical aspect of both aesthetics and historiography, i.e., their engagement with irreducibly singular objects or events, draws this problem to the surface. My project sets out to describe the scope of this problem as in appears in selected texts on philosophical aesthetics and art history during the latter half of the eighteenth century, specifically in the writings of Winckelmann, Goethe, Herder, Kant and Hegel.