Jenny Bernstein

In “The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art,” Arthur Danto argues that there were two stages to the platonic critique of the arts: ephemeralization and takeover. Danto's philosophy of art sought a rescue by detaching art from the philosophy of art in a manner that would give back to the arts the very dangerousness that so alarmed Plato in the first instance. This chapter draws Danto's theory into conversation with Stanley Cavell's and T.W. Adorno's philosophies of modernism. Ugliness or terribleness is constitutive of how these artworks mean to sustain the acts of visual attention they invite. Art can only fail to demonstrate the authority of art's own forms and modes of claiming because being mere art is the historical mechanism of art's continuing disenfranchisement, which explains why one school of the intractable avant‐garde sought the immediate re‐unification of art with everyday practice in order to end art.

This 2002 volume brings together major works by German thinkers, writing just prior to and after Kant, who were enormously influential in this crucial period of aesthetics. These texts include the first translation into English of Schiller's Kallias Letters and Moritz's On the Artistic Imitation of the Beautiful, together with translations of some of Hölderlin's most important theoretical writings and works by Hamann, Lessing, Novalis and Schlegel. In a philosophical introduction J. M. Bernstein traces the development of aesthetics from its still rationalist and mimetic construction in Lessing, through the optimistic construal of art and/or beauty as the appearance of human freedom in the work of Schiller, to Hölderlin's darker vision of art as the memory of a lost unity, and the variations of that theme - of an impossible striving after the lost ideal - which are found in the work of Schlegel and Novalis.

"American Antinomianisms from Anne Hutchinson to Pragmatism" examines the epistemological and stylistic dimensions of antinomianism. The Antinomian Controversy began as a dispute about whether or not sanctification was proof of justification . Though the terms over which the colonists were arguing had social and theological connotations, the crisis itself was epistemological: it was focused on how we know we are saved and how we can prove we know we are saved. In the first part of my study, I demonstrate how Hutchinson exposed the weaknesses of the magistrates' and ministers' logic and brought them uncomfortably close to having to acknowledge that they were placing their faith in human knowledge and language. The label antinomian is not, I argue, completely inaccurate as a descriptive term since Hutchinson's obedience to God unsettled Puritan epistemology and its attempts to fix knowledge through systems of logic and language. ;In the following chapters, I place antinomianism in the broader context of American literary and philosophical discourse. Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Charles Sanders Peirce, and William James theorized the ideas Hutchinson was struggling to articulate before she was banished and excommunicated. Edwards recognized that living life in obedience to the divine mind meant living with the awareness that no epistemological system or single act of perception could grant the human mind a permanent grasp of the "precise and stable...idea in God's mind." Emerson and Thoreau composed antinomian manuals for thinking which reflect their conviction that obedience to the higher laws of existence necessitates submitting to the ongoing process of creation and dissolution and resisting our tendency to rest in past acts. The pragmatic method was born out of Peirce's and James' understanding that the laws we are able to perceive are not eternal verities in which we can rest but are only approximations of greater truths that are in the process of becoming. These five thinkers developed even more radical ways of resisting the tendency to privilege law, or that which is fixed and settled