Hanslick´s Aesthetic Ideas: A Comprehensive Study

The project aims at a critical analysis of the diversified intellectual background of Hanslick`s aesthetics whose generic factors are made accessible in a comprehensive manner. Hanslick`s method of selectively integrating different philosophical discourses is examined as well as his partially heterogeneous philosophical sources are identified. This approach achieves a solid contextual fundament concerning the currently disparate Hanslick- scholarship. A first intellectual-historical segment examines various philosophical discourses around 1850, whose respective relevance for Hanslick`s aesthetic reasoning were treated separately up to this point. Given that Hanslick`s treatise isn`t indebted to one single philosophical movement the proposed project dissects the various sources of his theoretical assumptions and scientific methods in a broad fashion. Besides prominent philosophers like Kant, Hegel, Herbart, Schopenhauer or Vischer several lesser known people are integrated in the discursive formation (Gutt, Hand, Michaelis, Nägeli, Weisse ...). A second historical segment analyzes the overall educational-po-litical background of Hanslicks aesthetics which were concluded in intimate contact with the Austrian Ministry of Education whose empirical-formalistic outlook shaped some of his major doctrines. Besides Hanslicks links to central figures of Thun`s Education Reform the generic as-pects concerning his aesthetic foundation are explored. Next to his theoretical assumptions the project is examining various methodological factors like his juridical education or the empirical scientific outlook of the Hapsburg Empire. Thus the project integrates the older intellectual-historical approach and newer trends towards a broader contextualization and simultaneously demonstrates how more accurate information on the generic context of Hanslick`s aesthetic ideas can also shed light on the intellectual foundations of his major treatise. The challenge is to understand the complex interplay of philosophical orientations, specific aesthetic traditions, political and institutional factors, and personal relations and to show how this manifold interplay shaped Hanslick`s aesthetics that didn`t mature in post- 1848 Vienna by historical accident. It is only before this heterogeneous background that one can hope to grasp the specific peculiarity of an aesthetic approach that otherwise defies the proper determination of its intellectual coordinates and was devised in the complex tension of philosophical, aesthetical, political, scientific and juridical discourses.

The project investigates the different intellectual contexts of Eduard Hanslicks aesthetic classic Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (VMS, 1854). Soon after its publication, a discussion on the philosophical origins of VMS started that produced a surprising range of suggestions from sometimes opposing schools. To this day, however, the philosophical foundations of Hanslicks treatise remain unclear. Instead of attempting to identify a consistent, homogeneuos basis of VMS, our approach focused on central discourses employed in the text that are also capable of integrating contradicting philosophical tendencies (Kant, Hegel, Vischer vs. Herbart, Zimmermann, Bolzano). Apart from these aesthetic-philosophical discourses, special attention was also given to the cultural and political contexts of VMS (Hanslicks post at the Ministry of Education and his role in the Thun-Exner reform). It is only before this background of various heterogeneuos discourses and the way they are entwined with each other and with the cultural and political foundations of the text, that Hanslicks main theoretical concerns can be fully understood. The project also produced a new commented English translation of VMS (Lee Rothfarb, Christoph Landerer) that will be published by Oxford University Press in spring 2018. The project team currently also prepares a monograph on the topic (Böhlau Verlag). Two follow-up projects (OeNB 17508, FWF 30554) investigate the topic on the basis of an expanded and elaborated methodological approach that focuses of the dynamic aspects of the text (its genesis as well as the variants in the different editions).