Jens Schneider

The emergence of public opinion is often (and especially since Habermas’ Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit [1962]) dated to the 18th century and thus interpreted as a phenomenon of the Enlightenment. Following more recent historical research, however, this article shows that there was already an awareness and aesthetic reflection of opinion and the public sphere in the 16th and 17th centuries. In a first step, the article reconstructs the historical semantics and sociological conditionality of opinion in the early modern period, while in a second step it analyses the dramatic shaping of opinion in the works of Gryphius, Haugwitz and Gottsched.

In contrast to the essay On the Cause of the Pleasure we derive from Tragic Objects, which was still focused on the notion of effect poetics, the essay On the Art of Tragedy develops the concept of effect aesthetics, that is, appeals to the emotional household of the spectator and focuses on the specifically theatrical means necessary to achieve this emotional effect.At the centre of the treatise stands a theory of compassion, that reveals the “anthropological turn” in intellectual discourses of the eighteenth century. The moment of redemption and grace in On the Art of Tragedy acknowledges the Baroque tradition, but also refers to Kantian aesthetics and points ahead to modern aesthetic, such as Schopenhauer and Adorno.