Shortly after the middle of the eighteenth century a number of
thinkers from the German-speaking lands began to create a paradigm
drawn from their impressions of a distant historical reality,
ancient Athens; added to it a new mode of thought, modern
dialectics; and at times even paid homage to the ancient Greek
deity Dionysos, to materialize their longing for an ideal. The
influence of these forces came to permeate modern German
consciousness, deifying the concept and activity of art, reviving
the Platonic (and Sanskrit) vision of the cosmos as play and
aesthetic creation, and projecting a way of life and labor that
would honor not the commodity but the aesthetic product. With
rigorous commitment to primary sources and an unflagging critical
engagement with the ideas and concrete situations they raise, Josef
Chytry provides a comprehensive and extensive study of this central
motif in German thought from Winckelmann to Marcuse. Chytry takes
"aesthetic state" to signify the concentrated modern intellectual
movement to revitalize the radical Hellenic tradition of the polis
as the site of a beautiful or good life. The movement begins with
the classicism of Winckelmann, Wiemar aesthetic humanism (Wieland,
Herder, Goethe), and Schiller's formal theory of the aesthetic
state and continues through the idealism of the Swabian
dialecticians Holderlin, Hegel, and Schelling and the realism of
Marx, Wagner, and Nietzsche. It culminates in the postrealism of
Heiddegger, Marcuse, and the aesthetic modernist artist Walter
Spies, who initiated a dialogue with the non-Western "theatre
state" of the isle of Bali. Josef Chytry concludes that the future
speculation on the ideal of an aesthetic state must come to terms
with the postrealist themes of ontological anarchy, aesthetic
ethos, and theatre state. In a bold effort to stimulate such
speculation, Chytry indicates how proponents of the aesthetic state
might join forces with Rawlsian political theory to promote further
the organon of persuasion that, in his view, serves as the common
fount for the ancient, dialectical, and contractarian quests for
the polis. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program,
which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek
out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach,
and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived
makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again
using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally
published in 1989.
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