Review of David Aram Kaiser: Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism (original) (raw)

2005, Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature (STTCL)

David Kaiser's ambitious study analyzes how Post-Enlightenment theoreticians have approached the complex relationship between aesthetics and politics. Kaiser's motivations for writing this book stem from his frustration with the "extreme apolitical aestheticism of de Manian deconstruction" (8) but also his belief that new historicism has overlooked the political as an important category for Romantic thinkers. Kaiser makes it clear that he is "committed to retaining the concept of individual agency" (8-9) and that he is in agreement with Habermas inasmuch as "he appears to be the only major contemporary theorist who seeks to make a case for reforming rather than rejecting the central elements of the liberal tradition of subjectivity" (9). Kaiser focuses his study on the German and English traditions, though his sole representative for German Romanticism is someone who, in mainstream German scholarship, is not considered a Romantic; namely Friedrich Schiller. The study would have benefited from the inclusion of more representative German Romantic thinkers, such as the Schlegel brothers or Novalis. The first chapter introduces key concepts applied throughout the study. By summarizing several thinkers (Max Weber, Adorno, Habermas), Kaiser describes the post-Enlightenment definition of modernity and subjectivity. Although modernity began "with the goal of emancipating the individual subject," the "material processes of modernization, as they are institutionalized in modern economic, political, and scientific structures" (16) end up destroying the same structures necessary to sustain the individual subject. Romantic thinkers responded to this predicament by trying to fuse ideas about aesthetics with Enlightenment notions concerning the formation of the state based upon the autonomy of the subject. Kaiser introduces his final main concept, the symbol, in Chapter Two and invokes a dialectic that views it as simultaneously illustrating and embodying "the true." Kaiser outlines its importance in Coleridge's thinking and discusses the theological background of the symbol. He also discusses what he views as a distortion among some twentieth-century thinkers, such as Adorno and Benjamin, who constructed a political theory around the notion of the symbol as a model for totalitarianism. Chapter Three is an analysis of Schiller's Letters on Aesthetic Education and focuses on Schiller's estimation that aesthetic work harmonizes man's dual nature. For Schiller the sphere of aesthetics is one of freedom because it is here that the individual can reconcile the material world and the moral law. Kaiser's reading of Schiller is narrow in that he does not grant Schiller's theory any inherent validity beyond that it "provides an important framework through which we can understand and assess Habermas's theories of the public sphere and communicative action" (41). For Kaiser, Schil-ler seems to be worthy of consideration only because he helps elucidate Habermas. There is hardly any historical context in the chapter beyond aligning Schiller, perhaps too eagerly, with Kant. Nevertheless, Kaiser clearly draws out how Schiller can be understood as negotiating Enlightenment universalist values and Post-Enlightenment notions of cultural nationalism. Chapters Four through Six provide analyses of the art-state dialectic in the works of Coleridge, Arnold, and Ruskin. Although the focus is still quite specific, Kaiser does a better job here of sketching in the complex historical discourses from which these ideas emerged. The Coleridge chapter focuses on a late prose text that deals with issues concerning the desired role religion, as represented by the Church, should play in the State. Kaiser focuses on Coleridge's concept of Clerisy as central to the idea of aesthetic statism because the clerisy represents for Coleridge "an