Beethoven & Freedom

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel K L Chua
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Self ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
The Core ◽  
Relevant Today ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Core Value ◽  
The Aesthetic

Beethoven’s music is often associated with freedom. Chua explores the nature of this relationship through an investigation of the philosophical context of Beethoven’s reception and hermeneutic readings of key works. Freedom is arguably the core value of modernity since late eighteenth-century; Beethoven’s music engages with its aspirations and dilemmas, providing a sonic ‘lens’ that enables us to focus on the aesthetic, philosophical, and theological ramifications of its claims of progress and autonomy and the formation of the self and its values. Taking his bearings from Adorno’s fragmentary reflections on Beethoven, Chua charts a journey from the heroic freedom associated with the Eroica Symphony to a freedom of vulnerability that opens itself to ‘otherness’. Chua’s analysis of the music demonstrates how various forms of freedom are embodied in the way time and space are manipulated in Beethoven’s works, providing an experience of a concept that Kant had famously declared inaccessible to sense. Beethoven’s music, then, does not simply mirror freedom; it is a philosophical and poetic engagement with the idea that is as relevant today as it was in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

Sensitive limit

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mechthild Fend
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Human Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Art ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Definition Of

This chapter focuses on the significance of skin in neoclassical art and aesthetics. The most distinctive features of neoclassicism - an emphasis on the contour and a preference for more finished surfaces - are understood as elements crucial for the visual formation and understanding of the human body, its surface and borderlines. The culture of neoclassicism, extending well beyond the realm of art and art discourse, was generally characterised by a heightened concern with the shaping of the body and the safeguarding of its boundaries. Skin as the body's physical demarcation, was increasingly perceived not merely as an envelope and organ, but as the boundary of the self. The chapter considers the new attention to skin and contour in late eighteenth-century French art discourse, in particular in Watelet's and Levesque's Dictionnaire des beaux-arts. It equally looks at the discussion of membranes and the definition of skin as ‘sensitive limit‘ in the works of anatomist Xavier Bichat and analyses a set of portraits by Jacques-Louis David painted in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

The Time of the Trap Door

Killing Times ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 54-86
Author(s):  
David Wills
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Trap Door ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This chapter offers an examination of the refining of the instant of execution that takes place with the introduction of trap door gallows in the seventeenth century and, more spectacularly and explicitly, in the late eighteenth century with the French Revolution and the guillotine. The death penalty is thereby distinguished from torture and a post-Enlightenment conception of punishment is introduced, lasting to the present. But the guillotine is bloody, and that underscores a complex visuality of the death penalty that also obtains during the same time period, playing out across diverse genres such as the execution sermon, political and scientific discourses relating to the guillotine, Supreme Court descriptions of crimes, and practices of an entity such as the Islamic State. What develops concurrent with the guillotine—yet remains constant through all those examples--is a form of realist photographic visuality.

The Closing of the Constitution

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (03) ◽  
pp. 861-866
Author(s):  
Kevin Arlyck
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Text Structure ◽  
American Constitution ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Federalist Papers ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

Anyone who picks up a recent volume of the United States Reports or a prominent legal journal will be sure to find judges and lawyers debating, in agonizing detail, the meaning of a particular word or phrase in the Constitution. Marshaling late-eighteenth century dictionaries and legal treatises, records of debates from the drafting and ratifying conventions, and well-thumbed copies of the Federalist Papers, modern constitutional interlocutors will scrutinize text, structure, and history to discern an inherent logic. Above all, although disputants will endlessly contest what a particular provision means, they largely agree on what the Constitution itself is: as Jonathan Gienapp puts it in The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era, “an artifact circumscribed in time and space,” the “fixed Constitution” that we have been collectively dissecting since the late 1780s (10).

The Idea of the Aesthetic

2020 ◽  
pp. 11-22
Author(s):  
Michael Bell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Moral Sentiment ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic

Lawrence spoke readily of art and its relation to life but was suspicious of the word ‘aesthetic’, which had been inflected by the aestheticism of the preceding generation. It is nonetheless a necessary term which his thought and practice help to clarify. The idea of the aesthetic has been controversial since its emergence in the late eighteenth century partly in response to the movement of moral sentiment and the fashion of sensibility. Rather than simply reject the excesses of sensibility, the aesthetic condition sought to transmute the quality of the emotion, turning feeling into impersonal understanding. But the cultural war over the value of feeling continued into the modernist generation who sometimes identified as ‘classical’ or ‘romantic’ in their view of emotion. Lawrence mocked such ‘classiosity’ as fear of feeling. This chapter compares him with his major contemporaries and suggests his significance within a broader history of thinking on the aesthetic.

War without contact: Berenhorst, Bülow, and the avoidance of violence as the core paradigm of military science

2020 ◽  
pp. 096834451988272
Author(s):  
Arthur Kuhle
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Dynamic System ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
Physical Contact ◽  
The Core ◽  
Military Science ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Theory Of War

Georg Heinrich von Berenhorst and Dietrich von Bülow were perhaps the most inspirational war theorists of the late eighteenth century. Following Berenhorst, Bülow developed a theory that interpreted war as a dynamic system without physical contact, prompting Carl von Clausewitz to write a crushing critique that up to the present day obfuscates Bülow’s ideas. However, Clausewitz’s critique is based on a fundamental misconception, which illustrates how this decisive swerve in war theory continues to be neglected. This article demonstrates how Berenhorst and Bülow strived for introducing Newtonian standards to human behaviour for a pacifist theory of war.

Civilizing the Savage: Johann Georg Sulzer and the ‘Aesthetic Force’ of Music

2002 ◽  
Vol 127 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Riley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Negative Attitude ◽  
Considerable Influence ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Philosophical Background ◽  
The Aesthetic

Johann Georg Sulzer's Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–4) exerted considerable influence on late eighteenth-century German musical writers. But for many modern commentators, it typifies the negative attitude to instrumental music characteristic of much Enlightenment rationalism. A reassessment of Sulzer, taking account of his philosophical background in Leibniz, Wolff and Baumgarten, shows that in fact he considered music the first of the fine arts. The arts have an ethical, civilizing role; but while most can affect only people who are already partly civilized, music possesses a special ‘aesthetic force’ which energizes the minds of cognitively passive people or ‘savages’.

Passion and Fashion in Joanna Baillie's “Introductory Discourse”

PMLA ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 112 (2) ◽  
pp. 198-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Henderson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Consumer Goods ◽  
The Public ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Joanna Baillie ◽  
Public World ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Character Types

In the preface to her first volume of plays, the Romantic playwright Joanna Baillie claims that one is naturally driven to classify persons into character types, and she argues that this classification should be based on the passions individuals express rather than the fashions they wear. Despite this anticonsumerist stance, however, Baillie's project is shaped by the logic of late-eighteenth-century consumerism: Baillie conceives of passions as items susceptible to inventory, display, and sale. Her interest in establishing a human taxonomy grounded in ostensibly natural and subtle discriminations of character allies her works with other popular consumer goods of the period, from clothing fashions to studies of physiognomy. Moreover, like the aesthetic of the picturesque, Baillie's aesthetic encodes a peculiarly consumerist form of desire, a desire that can never be satisfied because it aims at acquisition rather than possession. In Baillie, the feelings and desires on which modern subjectivity is founded do not spring from deep within but are formed by, and find their meaning in, the public world of the marketplace.

scholarly journals Johann Georg Zimmermann’s Therapeutics of Solitude in the German Enlightenment

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-278
Author(s):  
Andreas Rydberg
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Self ◽  
Passive State ◽  
Rural Life ◽  
German Enlightenment ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
State Of Rest ◽  
Unique Individual

Abstract This essay charts the German eighteenth-century physician and writer Johann Georg Zimmermann’s monumental work on solitude. The essay draws on but also challenges recent historiography on two counts. First, it situates Zimmermann’s discourse on solitude in the context of the early modern cultura animi tradition, in which philosophy provided a cure for a soul perceived as diseased and perturbed by passion and desire. Placed in this context, solitude comes into view not primarily as a passive state of rest and tranquillity connected to the rural life, but as active, therapeutic and exercise-oriented work on the self. Second, it argues that Zimmermann also shaped his discourse in relation to the increasingly radical late eighteenth-century exploration of subjectivity and selfhood, an exploration that reflects the emergence of the modern conception of the unique individual and autonomous self.

Learning Conservatism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Jones
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Leisure Time ◽  
English Literature ◽  
General Level ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
New Students

The construction of Burke as the ‘founder of conservatism’ was also a product of developments in education. The increasing study of Burke arose out of several converging movements: in publishing and technology; in philosophical thought; in the increasing disposable income and leisure time of greater portions of the population; and in education movements for men and women at all levels. The popularity of topics such as the French Revolution, Romanticism, and late eighteenth-century history meant that Burke became a feature of lectures and examinations. At university, Burke was of particular interest to philosophical Idealists, English literature professors and students, and a generation of historians who taught increasingly modern courses. By analysing how Burke was studied at this much more popular, general level it is possible to pinpoint how Burke’s ‘conservative’ political thought was taught to swathes of new students—it took more than gentlemanly erudition to establish a scholarly orthodoxy.

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