Narrating Community After Kant

A new exploration of community and classical German aesthetics. Within the German tradition, the great promise of beauty is to link particular experiences within a conception of the whole. But this aesthetic promise has long been viewed as an aesthetic ideology, even, by some, as a blueprint for fascism. Karin Schutjer challenges these familiar critical views by showing that classical German aesthettics gave shape to complex visions of social solidarity. Turning to pivotal philosophical and literary works from the late eighteenth century, she shows how the hopes and fears surrounding the French Revolution stimulated an imaginative rethinking of individual and collective identity-one which can inform modern thinking about the possibilities and limits of community. Schutjer examines how the dualism of Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement held promise for community by suggesting a whole originating in individual life and an individual life originating in the whole. She then explores how this paradoxical structure develops into complex narratives of community in Schiller's On Aesthetic Education, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Holderlin's, Empedokles, and shows how t