Laure Cahen-Maurel

This article examines Hegel’s aesthetic judgment of the German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, which only first came to light in 1995 with the publication of the separate edition of the Ascheberg transcript of Hegel’s first lecture course on aesthetics, held at the University of Berlin in the winter semester of 1820/21. Firstly, before interpreting Hegel's criticism in more detail, I consider the current state of research on the relationship between Hegel and Caspar David Friedrich. It is striking to note how little resonance Hegel’s judgment has found in the secondary literature. Going beyond some of the more speculative results of earlier scholarship, I show that by consulting a number of overlooked original German sources and documents from the years 1820-1821 it is possible to precisely determine those paintings of Caspar David Friedrich that Hegel would have known about and even viewed in person at that time. By comparing Hegel’s criticism in the Ascheberg transcript with these particular paintings of Friedrich viewed by Hegel in Dresden, and by furthermore reading this criticism in the larger context of Hegel's considerations on style and the topic of mysteriousness in painting, I argue that a number of consequences can be drawn from the philosopher’s two key reproaches of severity and affectation that are significant for both Hegel scholarship and Caspar David Friedrich research.

Les Cahiers philosophiques de Strasbourg 52 contains an Introduction and 9 new research articles in French & English on Friedrich Schiller's philosophy in relation to German Idealism. All fully available online on Open-Edition and as free e-book. Edited and introduced by Henny Blomme, Laure Cahen-Maurel, & David W. Wood. With contributions by Frederick C. Beiser, María del Rosario Acosta López, Cody Staton, Jeremy D. Hovda, Laure Cahen-Maurel, Quentin Landenne, Katia Hay, Louis Carré, and Charlotte Morel. SOMMAIRE / CONTENTS Introduction: Friedrich Schiller, a German Idealist? (Henny Blomme, Laure Cahen-Maurel & David W. Wood) 1. Frederick C. Beiser. Schiller’s Humanism 2. María del Rosario Acosta López. Une dimension esthétique de la critique : la temporalité du beau dans les lettres de Schiller Sur l’éducation esthétique 3. Cody Staton. In Search of Play: Schiller’s Drive Theory as a Turn Away from Kant 4. Jeremy D. Hovda. Bildung between Kant and Schiller 5. Laure Cahen-Maurel. Fichte avec Schiller : La querelle des Heures à la lumière de Grâce et Dignité 6. Quentin Landenne. La Bildung chez Schiller et Fichte, entre esthétique et politique 7. Katia Hay. On the Tragic-Sublime and Tragic Freedom: Thinking with Schiller and Schelling 8. Louis Carré. Vicissitudes de l’État organique : Kant, Hegel, Schiller 9. Charlotte Morel. Conjoindre idéalisme et réalisme après Hegel : Les lectures de Schiller par Lotze et Lange Résumés / Abstracts

Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) is now regarded by many readers and scholars not simply as a poet, historian, or playwright, but as a genuine philosopher in his own right. The following research articles in French and English are devoted to understanding the relationship between Schiller’s philosophy and German idealism, especially some of the chief figures associated with the inception and extended development of this movement: Kant, Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Lotze. In the last twenty years in particular, ground-breaking edited collections have appeared on the content and legacy of Schiller’s thought. The present volume of articles, however, is one of the first to attempt a broader investigation of Schiller’s connection to German idealism, in which the contributions have above all been written by scholars of German idealism itself. The aim of this volume is to furnish foundational material for better answering the question: To what extent should Friedrich Schiller be considered a German idealist? Naturally, the response to this question depends on one’s conception of German idealism, a point discussed below. This introduction provides a brief overview of earlier scholarship on this topic and summarizes the findings of our contributors.

This article presents a new reading of Fichte’s aesthetics that differs from a primarily functionalist interpretation of the imagination and art. It demonstrates that the “hovering” (Schweben) of the creative imagination should be viewed as the first principle of Fichte’s aesthetics, in which the latter consists of a triad of the pleasant, the beautiful and the sublime. Moreover, it argues that in the text Ueber Geist und Buchstab in der Philosophie (1795/1800) Fichte created a real and original monogram of the hovering creative imagination, a monogram whose theoretical basis stems from Kant’s concept of the monogram in the 1st Critique as a “wavering sketch”. It contends that this overlooked but key artistic and practical example of a monogram opens up new perspectives for Fichtean aesthetics, further confirming that its first principle should be explicitly identified with the theory of the hovering imagination in the Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre of 1794/95.