Coruscations of Romantic Aesthetics in Johann Joseph Görres

Abstract

The aesthetics of Johann Joseph Görres, a German thinker who was part of the Romantic movement in his youth, is expressed in striking poetic images – coruscations – that reveal his aesthetic views. They are manifested especially clearly in his subjective hermeneutics of artistic works of his favorite authors: Jean Paul in literature and Philipp Otto Runge in painting. Görres is convinced that artworks contain more spirituality than the artist has intended. He sees art as hieroglyphic and symbolic. Görres imagines artistic-aesthetic space as a system of oppositions of ideas and phenomena of the external world, which are sublated at a higher level by the artistic ideal, which synthesizes opposite principles. The arts that are based on an idea are called “productive”, or those that produce something new, and the arts that are based on natural phenomena are called “eductive”, or those that educe their works from already existing objects. A pro­ductive artist creates on the basis of his imagination, and an eductive one by means of transforming natural images. A higher “ideal” principle of creativity is based on the play of productive and eductive principles. Under another aspect Görres divides the arts into rhetorical and plastic, which in their turn also gravi­tate either to productive or eductive types, being united in their push toward the artistic ideal. The artistic ideal is aimed at the “highest humanity” and is identical with beauty. Under yet another aspect Görres sees the arts as “present­ing” the external world and as “forming” the inner world of the human being. The German thinker sees aesthetics as a science that is expressed by artistic means.