Hammermeister, Kai. The German Aesthetic Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 259pp. $22.00 paperback. Among the many reasons to write an academic book, the desire to provide a service is probably the least frequent. However, Kai Hammermeister obviously felt very strongly about rendering the history of German aesthetic theory from Baumgarten and Kant to Heidegger and Adorno accessible to a wider audience-whatever the cost. And there is inevitably a price to be paid for writing this kind of book, which moves briskly and without fear of strong opinions through some of the most complicated philosophical works of the past two centuries. Under the characteristically bold and blunt title The German Aesthetic Tradition, Hammermeister delivers in just over two hundred pages "the straight dope" on the leading contenders for forbidding philosophical difficulty: Fichte, Schelling, and, of course, Hegel, that famed fortress of impenetrable German prose. Unflinchingly, however, Hammermeister renders them all entirely comprehensible. Even undergraduates should have no difficulty following his expositions. Nor should one dismiss this pedagogical quality as reductive popularization. Hammermeister's book is quite an accomplishment. His highly economical presentation never fails to touch on virtually all the important issues in any given author. To be sure, one can quibble-Karl Philip Moritz seems to gets short-changed; Holderlin deserves his own chapter-but all in all, Hammermeister has succeeded in producing a perfectly coherent narrative of the development of aesthetic theory from the 18th-century to the present. Indeed, what makes this book so eminently readable are not only the succinct summaries of individual authors but their integration into an overarching three-part movement. Baumgarten, Kant, Schiller, and Schellingare subsumed under "The Age of Paradigms," followed by "Challenging the Paradigms" in the writings of Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. The book concludes with a section entitled "Renewing the Paradigms," as Hammermeister argues that the positions of Cassirer, Lukacs, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Adorno basically reinvent the (aesthetic) wheel. Thus he claims, for example, that Adorno's and Heidegger's anti-idealist rhetoric conceals their strong allegiance-not, as one might expect, to Hegel, but rather to Schelling; like him they are said to accord art the exalted and exclusive privilege of providing access to a truth unavailable to theoretical or philosophical discourses. Beyond the incredibly useful service of introducing the uninitiated to the arcana of German aesthetics-there really is nothing comparable out there-it is this claim that post-Nietzschean theories of art not only recycle the older aesthetic tradition but follow essentially the very same trajectory that had led from Kant to Hegel in the first place, that makes this volume original, provocative, and enormously problematic. …

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The German Aesthetic Tradition

Heidegger presciently diagnosed the current crisis in higher education. Contemporary theorists like Bill Readings extend and update Heidegger's critique, documenting the increasing instrumentalization, professionalization, vocationalization, corporatization, and technologization of the modern university, the dissolution of its unifying and guiding ideals, and, consequently, the growing hyper-specialization and ruinous fragmentation of its departments. Unlike Heidegger, however, these critics do not recognize such disturbing trends as interlocking symptoms of an underlying ontological problem and so they provide no positive vision for the future of higher education. By understanding our educational crisis 'ontohistorically', Heidegger is able to develop an alternative, ontological conception of education which he hopes will help bring about a renaissance of the university. In a provocative reading of Plato's famous 'allegory of the cave', Heidegger excavates and appropriates the original Western educationa...

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Heidegger on Ontological Education, or: How We Become What We Are

That Martin Heidegger supported National Socialism has long been common knowledge. Yet the relation between his philosophy and political commitments remains contentious and recently has erupted into a vociferous debate. Boldly refuting arguments that the philosopher's political stance was accidental or adopted under coercion, Rockmore argues that Heidegger's philosophical thought and his Nazism are inseparably intertwined, that he turned to National Socialism on the basis of his philosophy, and that his later evolution is largely determined by his continuing concern with Nazism. After developing a framework that outlines the interrelation of Nazism and Heidegger's philosophy, Rockmore analyzes the famous rectoral address the philosopher delivered in 1933 upon becoming rector of the University of Freiburg. In that speech, Heidegger sought to ground politics in philosophy. Rockmore examines the inseparable relation of politics and philosophy in Heidegger's "Being and Time", "Contributions to Philosophy" (written from 1936 to 1938) and the interpretations of Holderin, Nietzsche and technology. In his conclusion Rockmore considers the ongoing discussion of Heidegger's thought and Nazism in France. Combining extensive documentation of the Heidegger controversy with philosophical historical analysis, this book raises profound questions about the social and political responsibility of philosophy.

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On Heidegger's Nazism and Philosophy

This article examines Hegel's use of the distinction between ‘artist’ (Kunstler) and ‘artisan’ (Werkmeister) in light of recent discussion about the ‘end’ of art and the distinction betweeen art and craft that, as some have argued, has been central to the concept of the fine arts since the eighteenth century. Hegel does employ an important distinction between artist and artisan, but he does so within a larger account of the continuum of forms of human making that can take into consideration the importance of the artisan's work as well as the artist's. Hegel's account involves two distinctive features not always at issue in the artist/artisan distinction: the stress on the social changes required for new forms of art to emerge and an embrace of the human being as the essentially retrospective and interpretive animal in whom the decisive intersection of content and form finally makes art what it is.

Artisans, Artists and Hegel's History of Art

HEIDEGGER AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM Introduction It is unfortunate but in retrospect undeniable that Heidegger's brief but very public tenure as the first Nazi Rector of Freiburg University in 1933–1934 helped cast an early sheen of intellectual legitimacy over the brutal regime that, less than a decade later, earned everlasting historical infamy for Auschwitz and the other horrors of the Shoah. The question for many of us, then, is this: How do we come to terms with the fact that the man who was probably the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century threw the considerable weight of his thought behind what was certainly its most execrable political movement? This profoundly troubling juxtaposition has haunted intellectuals for seventy years, generating a secondary literature of singular immensity. Although the debates carried on in this literature are multifaceted and complex, an historical examination of this “Heidegger controversy” shows that it has long had the character of a trial, both before it actually became one and after Heidegger himself was no longer alive to stand trial. An “accuse or excuse” dichotomy still structures the field of competing interpretations, obliging scholars to take sides, as though with either the prosecution or the defense. Unfortunately, this adversarial logic increasingly dominates the public sphere in the West, its common spectacle of talking heads talking past one another working to obscure the fact that in complex matters the truth is usually located between the opposing extremes, and so is unfit for the polemical purposes of demagogues on either side.

Heidegger and the Politics of the University

The Self-Assertion of the German University: Address, Delivered on the Solemn Assumption of the Rectorate of the University Freiburg the Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts

Karsten Harries

Papers

The Self-Assertion of the German University: Address, Delivered on the Solemn Assumption of the Rectorate of the University Freiburg the Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts

Hegel on the Future of Art