STRUGGLING FOR THE EMPEROR’S BLESSING: FRANZ FICKER’S AESTHETICS TEXTBOOKS

This essay endeavours to cover and clarify the extraordinarily long and complicated approval process – unparalleled in the history of European aesthetics – of the first Austrian court-approved university textbook of aesthetics of local provenance, Franz Ficker’s Aesthetik (1830). The detailed account of the negotiations preceding the approval is followed by general conclusions concerning the nature of Austrian aesthetics, the operation of Austrian universities, and Austrian university policy in the period preceding the March 1848 revolution.

matter, referring to its 'misguided expert assessment' . From these pieces of information it is reasonable to deduce that the impetus for writing the assessment came from the Emperor's advisory body, which was allowed to act independently of the usual official procedures and to which all bodies of the state administration were subordinated. 10 We do not know who exactly provided the impetus to review the matter. Judging from Mittrowsky's reaction, it is fair to assume that the supreme authority of the state requested the elaboration of the assessment from the Studienrevisionskommission. Who this committee selected to make the assessment is unclear from the documents. The assessment continues to be called the 'anonymous review' (anonyme Recension).
The anonymous reviewer, in eleven pages, provides a lengthy commentary on the content of Ficker's Aesthetik. He divides his criticisms, inconsistently, into three groups. In the first group he criticizes the unsystematic character of Ficker's presentation. He contrasts Ficker's stated aim, to build his whole account on a single idea (Idee), as the fundamental principle that runs through the whole work, 11 with its heterogeneous content, of which the reviewer provides a thorough outline. He sees a particularly unsuitable approach in the introduction to the book. Ficker, according to him, has made an indefensible mistake by beginning his account with an explanation of the term aesthetics, 'instead of demonstrating the original interest of the human spirit in truth, goodness, and beauty as the sole basis of philosophy in general and of ethics and philokalia in particular' . The fact that Ficker did not place these Urideen at the head of his interpretation, but instead discusses them only in the general part of his textbook, has had the effect, according to the reviewer, that 'a subjective view' has taken 'the place belonging only to the Objective or the Absolute' . The reviewer considers this mistake utterly unacceptable because he is convinced that only beauty itself as an absolute entity is the basis of the scholarly character of aesthetics. The result of this first attack was the conclusion that 'the whole conception [of the book] is misguided because it lacks a logical arrangement and ordering of the concepts from the highest principle' . The reviewer did not even hesitate to write about the 'misguided system both in the basis and in the execution' .
The second group of criticisms was aimed against the eclectic nature of Ficker's book. The reviewer remarked that apart from the misguided system 'one can hardly find anything in the whole work which would be the author's own, and where it does seem to be his own, uncertainty and wavering are immediately evident' . He calls the book an interpretation 'composed of nothing but individual fragments' . Its backbone, he alleges, comprises parts taken word for word from Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Eschenburg, Aloys Schreiber, and Jean Paul. Consequently, the reviewer calls Ficker's Aesthetik 'a quite ordinary compilation, without insight and seriousness, which can quite justifiably be called plagiarism because it does not cite sources everywhere and remains completely silent about the main source' . He believes that the main source is the 1824 edition of the Brockhaus encyclopaedia. 12 This edition was not, according to the reviewer, so well known that the word-for-word lifting of its interpretations would have been obvious to others. To support his claim, he compares the entries, including references, for ' Grazie' , 'Schön' , 'Naiv' , 'Witz' , 'Komisch' , and 'Humor' , with the relevant passages in Aesthetik. After carrying out his comparison, the anonymous reviewer hoped that others would believe 'that each page of Ficker's textbook truly does contain the borrowed passages and that this can be demonstrated right to the end of the book' . 13 He describes Aesthetik as a work composed by combining entries from the Brockhaus encyclopaedia with word-for-word borrowed passages from other textbooks. 'In this way, a mosaic-like work has been created, ' he summarizes in his devastating condemnation, 'of which hardly more than the paragraph numbers belong to [Ficker]; a work, which has no value other than that of a quite ordinary compilation, a work without a systematic plan, full of extraneous ingredients in form and essence, in which it makes no difference whether the lecture begins with the end or the introduction. ' The third group of criticisms attacks Ficker's way of working with the sources.
Ficker, according to the reviewer, was unable to distinguish between various schools of aesthetics and different stages of aesthetic thinking. He combines incompatible theses and principles. He does not understand the difference between the use of a work and its copying out, resulting in an inconsistent patchwork (Flickwerk). This approach cannot be defended even by Ficker's admission (in the preface) that he has taken what he considered to be the excellent parts of other authors' works. 14 According to the reviewer he would have done better if he had kept to only one source -the Brockhaus encyclopaedia, whose entries on aesthetics were by Amadeus Wendt, Professor of Philosophy at Göttingen. He would have thus made a more cohesive work than the one he has presented. Even the division into paragraphs has not The reviewer means the Allgemeine deutsche Real-Encyclopädie für die gebildeten Stände, 10 vols., 6th ed. (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1824). 13 In the passages mentioned by the reviewer, Ficker truly has copied word for word. The copied passages are actually very short and are placed in different contexts. 14 Ficker, Aesthetik, v. helped the comprehensibility or clarity of the account. Nowhere in Aesthetik, he remarks, does the reviewer find any trace of the author's talent and certainly not of genius. He considers the bibliographies to be wanting and the length of the work excessive.
The three principal objections to the book (that it was insufficiently systematic, failed to acknowledge word-for-word quotations to be the work of others' , and inadequately treated the sources) compelled the reviewer to doubt, in a flurry of rhetorical questions, the usefulness and reasonableness of a decision to declare Ficker's Aesthetik to be the aesthetics textbook at Austrian universities.
The book, which, the reviewer argued, in no respect advances research on aesthetics and is but a mere compilation, cannot be forced upon other teachers and thereby limit their independent research spirit, for it would be an 'oppressive monopoly over free communication' . In this connection, he did not hesitate to suggest that the author and the publisher had been guided by the aim of making a profit. And behind the request to have the book declared the textbook, the reviewer sees the bookseller's craving for increased sales and profits, promising a higher fee for the author, with little concern for contributing to scholarship. Everything that he has enumerated is, he argues, even worse with regard to the needs of the State, since Ficker in his book has failed to sufficiently discuss the central topic -namely, the relationship between art and religion, the infinite spirit and the finite spirit of art, that is, God as the originator of the beautiful and the sublime in nature and in man as an artist. He describes his own criticism of Ficker's book as moderate. Aesthetics is, he writes, a highly complicated field, which someone without a brilliant inquiring mind cannot properly work in. As the last link in the chain of philosophy, aesthetics requires combining knowledge of the whole of philosophy with practical knowledge, which is a rare quality. It is, the reviewer claims, only detrimental to aesthetics when its development is hampered by attempts like Ficker's, 'and that is why the presented book, Aesthetik, can never become a standard textbook ' . 15 The anonymous reviewer's negative assessment of the book clearly encumbered the hitherto smooth approval process. Whereas the collecting of assessments from nine institutions and the submission of a proposal to the Emperor took less than five months, almost a year went by from the proposal of the Court Chancellery to the time of the Emperor's decision. Francis I eventually sided with the reviewer. On 10 July 1831 he decided that Ficker's Aesthetik demonstrably suffered from a number of shortcomings and did not meet the requirements to qualify as the textbook. Consequently, he turned down to achieve a systematic whole is visible throughout' . Ficker's aesthetics does not belong to any school of philosophy; it is eclectic; it does not claim to be original; instead, it has, in a mere 570 pages, gathered together what is valuable in German aesthetics. Knoll therefore calls it a 'rich harvest of thought-provoking opinions and ideas, a correct capstone of superior philosophical education' . Despite his praise for the volume, Knoll makes eight recommendations for a revised, second edition to increase its usefulness. In particular he elaborates in great detail his suggestion to establish a general principle on which to base the account of theories of individual kinds of art. He recommends that Ficker should always organize these accounts so that they first discuss the inorganic, the rigid, the unarticulated, and the material, and only afterwards the organic, the mobile, the articulated, and the spiritual.
The Studienhofkommission received assessments from professors outside Vienna soon after it had made its request. The rapid initial course of the second round, however, was slowed down at the Vienna Faculty of Arts.
The interim vice director there, Knees, clearly ignored the request of the Studienrevisionskommission, and it was thus forgotten. The process was not revived until almost two years after a formal notice from the Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Carl von Heintl. On 3 May 1833, Heintl requested an assessment from Johann Peithner von Lichtenfels, Professor of Philosophy, in the belief that he had been the author of the review in the first round of the process. Lichtenfels accepted the task, but pointed out that he had not written the original review.
After searching in the records, the vice directorate ascertained that it had been written by Titze, but was unable to find either his or Knees's subsequent assessment. Consequently, the vice directorate requested Titze, on 10 August 1833, to write a new assessment in which he would take into account the reservations of the anonymous review and justify his earlier standpoint. Titze completed the assessment on 25 August. The Studienrevisionskommission collected the assessments of all the addressed institutions and sent them to the Studienhofkommission on 15 January 1834.
Of the seven reviews that were written up, only three have survived until today -namely, the statement of the vice directorate of grammar schools and the assessments of Lichtenfels and Titze. The vice director, Meinrad Lichtensteiner, who was a Benedictine priest of the Schottenstift (Scottish Abbey) in Vienna, emphasized that the work fully complied with the current regulations for textbooks. That is why he found Ficker's Aesthetik 'useful' and 'suitable' , at least until a better textbook were submitted, which had so far not happened. Not until the very end of his assessment, does he include remarks in which he takes issue with the anonymous review. In keeping with his usual approach, however, he did Struggling for the Emperor's Blessing: Franz Ficker's Aesthetics Textbooks not react to most of the conclusions, attacking instead the overall starting point.
The reviewer, in his opinion, has not asked whether Ficker's textbook was in keeping with the regulations for textbooks, but instead whether it could not be acknowledged to be a 'standard textbook' , which would monopolistically take over the teaching of aesthetics at Austrian universities. The assessments of the vice directorate, however, did not take this tack. Ficker, after all, published the lectures only because no newer textbook on aesthetics had been set and because it was forbidden to dictate the material to students. To call his textbook 'useful' , however, did not exclude the possibility that other textbooks might also have been useful. This description means only that no better aesthetics textbook had been submitted to the Studienhofkommission. The standpoint taken by the vice directorate of grammar schools was not undermined by the reviewer's references to Ficker's alleged plagiarism, because, even if 'perhaps really' the same passages occurred in Aesthetik as in the Brockhaus encyclopaedia, one could only deduce from this that the encyclopaedia had also borrowed from reputable authors. This was, after all, according to Lichtensteiner, how 'every didactic writer' must work if he wants to acquaint the reader with the leading authorities in the field. To call Ficker's book as a whole a work of plagiarism of the aesthetics entries in the Brockhaus encyclopaedia because of a few borrowed passages was, he felt, exaggerated and unfair. After all, the logical rule is 'Qui nimium probat, nihil probat' (He who proves too much proves nothing). With this Latin saying, Lichtensteiner ended his assessment.
Unlike the assessment of the vice directorate of grammar schools, two assessments by professors at the Vienna Faculty of Arts (both of whom were Ficker's colleagues), Lichtenfels and Titze, which were intended for the vice directorate of this faculty, concentrated in particular on the reproaches in the anonymous review with regard to the content of Ficker's Aesthetik. Lichtenfels, a professor of philosophy, in the introduction to his twelve-page assessment, dated 9 May 1833, remarked on his own lack of qualifications in aesthetics, 17 and noted that one could therefore not expect him to write a 'straightforward assessment of a new account of this largely still quite young and incomplete academic discipline' . His aim in the assessment was, he states, more modestnamely, to evaluate the criticisms of the anonymous reviewer and indirectly to criticize Ficker's book. The core of the assessment comprises eight points, each beginning with a quotation from the anonymous review and followed by In the Austrian university system, the teaching of aesthetics was from the very beginning separate from philosophy. Professors of philosophy simply did not teach aesthetics. See Hlobil, Geschmacksbildung im Nationalinteresse, 19-68; Geschmacksbildung im Nationalinteresse II, 21-68. Lichtenfels's negative judgement. The longest is the seventh point, concerning the accusation that Ficker was a plagiarist. Lichtenfels dismisses the accusation outright. Ficker, after all, expressly stated that he made no claim to originality and was only endeavouring to give a clear and comprehensible demonstration.
And he achieved this aim. If Ficker had cited all the sources that he had drawn on, his work would have been considerably longer than it already was.
The reviewer himself, however, faults the book for its great length. Lichtenfels does not deny that Ficker has taken the mentioned passages from Brockhaus, but this fact cannot justify anyone's claim that the aesthetics entries in the encyclopaedia had been his main source. Ficker used them only marginally to explain terms that he had himself defined elsewhere in his own words.
Though he does not demonstrate that Ficker took passages from other textbooks, the reviewer does suggest it. After going through the reservations, Lichtenfels took a standpoint on the reviewer's overall conclusion -namely, that Ficker's book should never become a 'standard textbook' . Lichtenfels rejected the view that this textbook could prevent other lecturers from having their own ideas. If that were true, he argued, no textbook should be published, because all fields are developing and none is complete. Aesthetics, moreover, seemed to him to be a field going through great changes in connection with great works, a field in which much had to be left to the subjective opinions of the individual teachers. Even if Ficker's book were unsuitable as the textbook, it should at least be allowed to be used by its author. The book is correct, thorough, and systematic. It testifies to Ficker's being highly knowledgeable about his field. Its quality in no way deserves the reviewer's insulting accusation that Ficker's motivations for wanting it to be declared a textbook were profit-seeking. At the end of the assessment, he therefore condemns the disdainful tone of the review.
Titze, a professor of world history, also put together an assessment, eleven pages long and dated 25 August 1833. In its wide-ranging introduction, he recapitulates the circumstances accompanying the writing and fate of the first assessment, including the positive standpoint. He then moves on to a new assessment, which was made easier by Lichtenfels's criticism of the anonymous review. He could now more easily reiterate his original support. He divides his assessment into two parts. In the first, he rebuts the anonymous reproaches; in the second, he praises the strong points of Ficker's book. Titze calls the reviewer an aesthetician who ignores all his colleagues. This inappropriate tendency, intensified by the fact that in this case he has become the chief arbiter, has, Titze argues, led him to accuse Ficker of plagiarism, which Titze finds off the mark. In his opinion, the reviewer has an utterly mistaken notion about what a textbook Struggling for the Emperor's Blessing: Franz Ficker's Aesthetics Textbooks should be. The essence of a textbook, he argues, does not, after all, consist in its originality. Textbooks should be judged not according to where their authors have borrowed individual words or passages, but according to their overall plan and organization, the sequence of their parts and of their ideas. Titze is particularly unhappy that the reviewer has torn to shreds Ficker's account of beauty. Paragraphs 8 to 20 seem to Titze to be so dense that they do not allow for any excerpting. The reviewer has therefore been forced to criticize by means of referring to the Brockhaus encyclopaedia. To call Ficker, on the basis of that, a mere compiler, is, according to Titze, repugnant and unfair. Ficker may, according to him, have truly borrowed many opinions, but he always did so with spirit and restraint. He has importantly revised the borrowed passages and improved them. Titze even considers Ficker's way of handling the sources to be so exemplary that it fortifies virtue. Borrowing is, moreover, also manifested by Brockhaus. Titze, in addition, considers it unsuitable to reproach Ficker with being insufficiently systematic. This reproach demonstrates that the reviewer either has not understood what a scholarly textbook is or has been blindly led by an unwholesome jealousy. The reviewer's approach is not only 'biased' and 'incorrect'; it is also insulting. The reviewer's sole aim is to prevent Ficker's book from becoming the set textbook. His book does not, argues Titze, bind anyone. On the contrary, it is thought-provoking because it is a good combination of all the research conducted so far. After his criticism of the anonymous review, Titze commences his own three-page ode to Ficker's Aesthetik. The book, according to him, is characterized by its well-considered overall plan, effective organization, and apposite presentation of the parts.
Ficker teaches correct judgements and the appreciation of beauty and art, not only to students, but also to practising artists. He avoids eccentricity, flights of fancy, and the frequent detrimental features of contemporary aesthetics theories. The basis of his account, and its chief merit, is its 'prudent eclecticism' , which enables him to achieve the 'correct sober standpoint of the real philosophy of art' . Ficker's book is distinguished by a genuinely scholarly organization of the whole and the parts, the skilful borrowing of ideas of other thinkers, and its wealth of new conclusions. It is enhanced by a superb, clear, and comprehensible style, distinct and precise instructions, as well as lively, illustrative, and true examples. All of these assets are, moreover, preserved without violating virtuousness. In conclusion, Titze expresses the wish that In his account of legend, Ficker did not employ Herder's views on this genre.
The greatest criticisms expressed in the 'Bemerkungen' concern Ficker's discussion of epic poetry. Here, Ficker was called upon to consider more systematically, the literature on aesthetics differently. His account of the history of aesthetics should be clearly built genetically, starting from the changing influence of philosophy on aesthetics. The list of works should be arranged into primary and secondary sources. The accounts of the four main kinds of poetry and also of the plastic arts, music, and rhetoric deserve to be expanded by historical surveys about their origin, flourishing, and decline in various periods and in various nations. The book, moreover, would considerably gain if its overall conception were organized by moving from the material to the spiritual, from the inorganic to the organic, and from the imperfect to the more perfect. All the accounts about poetry which are located in the appendices need to be broken up into paragraphs; the idyll has to be moved to epic poems, and, lastly, the epigram, the riddle, and the charade have to be moved to didactic verse. The account of poetry has to be more systematic and include historical surveys of the four main kinds of verse.
As a whole, the 'Bemerkungen' demonstrate that the Studienhofkommission in the second round of the approval process sought to be considerably more critical than in the first. This is supported by the fact that it took into account most of the reproaches made in the assessments. By this critical approach, the 'Bemerkungen' resemble the anonymous review. But, unlike it, their whole conception reflects an obvious endeavour to provide Ficker with clear guidelines for how to revise the book as painlessly as possible so that he could again apply to have it declared as the textbook, which is why the 'Bemerkungen' do not have the belligerent, disparaging, or even contemptuous tone of the anonymous review. In other words, the 'Bemerkungen' try to come to terms with the condemnation of the anonymous review and to encourage the Emperor to change his mind about the work, without it being necessary to write a completely new textbook. writing Aesthetik; in the second, he responded to the suggestions that the Studienhofkommission made for changes to the book; and in the third, he requested permission to write a second, revised edition. Ficker, in the first part, described his motivation when he began writing the book. He had tried, he explained, to provide a complete theory of aesthetics which would discuss all the kinds of art according to their importance. Despite his efforts to achieve completeness, this theory did not get stuck in the sphere of speculation; rather, it acquired the greatest possible practicality. In order to achieve this, he sought to familiarize the reader with what is general, using examples of works of art, as well as historical and literary evidence. To demonstrate that he had achieved this aim, he referred to the positive reception of the book in domestic and foreign reviews. Of them, he emphasized in particular the review in the Literatur-Blatt (published in Stuttgart and Tübingen), quoting considerably from it. 25 After defending his aim, Ficker admitted that he had also made mistakes. He was now trying studiously to eliminate these mistakes and continuously improve the work. He demonstrated his unflagging will to improve his own work by referring to the second edition of his own textbook, an introduction to classical literature, which he had also made much better than the first edition. 26 He promised to apply himself with the same determination to improve Aesthetik. But, according to him, even the existing edition could easily stand comparison with any other textbook on the subject. That is why he hoped to be granted an opportunity to put together a second edition in which he would take into account all the criticism or at least explain why he could not take them into account.
After an explanatory introduction, Ficker began to comment on the particular suggestions for the improvement of Aesthetik. From the standpoint of the approval process, the most important suggestions are those concerning the work's compilatory nature and those that demand that the accounts of the history of the various kinds of art be expanded and call for the implementation of a general principle in the account of the development of the theories of the individual kinds of art. Ficker notes that the reference to the compilatory nature is important and he explains how he made this mistake. He had, he admits, compiled the book on the basis of his notes in which he did not always state his sources. Since then, however, he had again read all the sources and indicated each borrowed passage. At the same time, he again pointed out that right in the introduction he had emphasized that he made no claim to originality and that he had not declared all his sources. He intended to satisfy the suggestions that he expand the account with surveys about the origin, flourishing, and decline of the individual kinds of art. But he pointed out that there was a danger of the book becoming considerably longer and yet he had already been reproached for having written one so long. He fervently agreed that he should build his account on the principle of moving from the material to the spiritual, and to this proposal he immediately added the individual ideas about how he was going to proceed in his account of the plastic arts. He would begin with the least spiritual artarchitecture -and continue with sculpture and painting. In the third, and final, part of his commentary, Ficker expressed the conviction that Aesthetik could be improved in a new edition. 27 If his work were, he remarked, granted the opportunity to become the textbook, that would certainly help to improve it. Improvement was made all the more necessary by the fact that the art which it is concerned with was developing quickly, and that made it difficult to write a textbook if it were not going to be published again. If a new edition of Aesthetik were approved, however, Ficker promised that it would be much better and that he would expand it.
Before writing his assessment, Lichtenfels received not only the 'Bemerkungen' of the Studienhofkommission, but also Ficker's statement. He divided his assessment for the vice directorate of the Faculty of Arts, of 22 December 1834, into two parts. In the first, he reacts to the two documents; in the second, he makes his own suggestions and remarks. In the first, Lichtenfels expresses his great appreciation for the 'Bemerkungen' , and supports Ficker's objections, to which he adds his own arguments. Lichtenfels describes the 'Bemerkungen' as 'an indirect rebuttal of an earlier anonymous review' , because Ficker was called upon to work even more with foreign sources. In the second part of the assessment, Lichtenfels, in six points, critically comments on the key theses of Ficker's theory.
First of all, he considers Ficker's decision to differentiate between the ideas of the beautiful, the true, and the good, by arguing that the first relates to the faculty of feeling, the second to the faculty of knowledge, and the third to the faculty of endeavour. Even though he disregards the slightly contradictory hypothetical nature of those three psychological faculties, Lichtenfels considers it untenable to separate truth and good from feeling. After all, he states, we regularly talk about moral or religious feelings. He believes it right that an idea and a feeling were understood as different expressions of reason -the first being objective and the second subjective -, while both expressions together related to the good, the beautiful, and the true. This approach makes it possible to speak not only about moral, aesthetic, and religious feelings, but also about moral, aesthetic, and religious ideas. The difference between the good, the beautiful, and the true consists in the fact that the good is the aim of the will or the ability of freedom, the beautiful the aim of the imagination or the artistic faculty, and the truth the aim of the intellect or the cognitive faculty. As part of the second point, Lichtenfels notes that if we could only feel and behold (anschauen) the beautiful, but not think it, as Ficker states, then any effort to create a theory of beauty and art would be futile. As his third point, he reproaches Ficker with not having explained which of the three presented conceptions of aesthetics he prefers. 28 In his fourth point, he rejects Ficker's description of logic, ethics, and aesthetics as separate from the metaphysics of the true, the good, and the beautiful, as parts of philosophy. The reason is that an investigation into thinking, wanting, and feeling, separate from the true, the good, and the beautiful, is not logic, ethics, and aesthetics, but psychology. Though philosophical ethics is the metaphysics of the good and aesthetics is the metaphysics of the beautiful, logic is no longer the metaphysics of the true, because it is merely a formal discipline. The metaphysics of the true is, according to Lichtenfels, the philosophy of religion. If aesthetics were not the metaphysics of the beautiful, it could not even be part of philosophy. In point five, Lichtenfels returns to Ficker's view that the beautiful can only be felt and beheld. Such a conclusion would, according to him, be denied by Ficker himself, since for him the aim of aesthetics is to explain philosophically the idea of the beautiful as the essence of art. Such an aim undermines the belief that the beautiful cannot be thought. In the last of his six points, Lichtenfels rejects Ficker's broad conception of the beautiful, which also includes the sublime, the charming, and the comic, because the definitions of these terms lack a generic correspondence residing in the beautiful. Their correspondence with the beautiful is also opposed by linguistic practice. In conclusion, Lichtenfels expresses his belief that Ficker will himself notice these and similar illogicalities and rectify them.  28 Ficker distinguished between aesthetics in the narrower sense of 'the theory of the essence of the beautiful' (die Lehre von dem Wesen des Schönen) and aesthetics in the wider sense (adding to beauty the question of the artistic genius and the fine arts), and in the widest sense adding art criticism to the previous subjects. Ficker,Aesthetik,4. Similarly, the second reviewer from the ranks of Ficker's colleagues in the Faculty of Arts at Vienna, Titze, had at his disposal both the 'Bemerkungen' and Ficker's commentary. In his third assessment, addressed to the vice director of the Faculty of Arts, and sent on 31 May 1835, Titze offers only a concise review of Aesthetik. He notes the correspondence between his own views and the 'Bemerkungen' . According to both documents, the book in its existing form is already suitable for the instruction of aesthetics. If Ficker, with the help of the 'Bemerkungen' , could improve it, as he promised to do, it would be even more suitable. He recommends that Aesthetik be declared the textbook, that the existing edition be quickly sold, and that the author produce the revised, second edition as soon as possible.
The vice directorate of the Faculty of Arts at Vienna gathered together the statements of Ficker, Lichtenfels, and Titze, to which it then added its own of 15 August 1835. In it, the vice director notes that if there exists a need for a textbook in any field, it is fair to assume that the teachers who are able to do so will write one even without being called upon by the authorities. General calls make sense only when no textbook exists. If it does exist, the shorter route to achieve the suitable textbook is by revising the existing one. In that case, this approach offers itself all the more in that the Studienhofkommission looked upon The set of all the assessments was sent by the Studienrevisionskommission to the Studienhofkommission on 18 May 1836. The whole matter was then discussed ten days later. It added to the existing assessments, moreover, the earlier prepared assessments of the non-Vienna professors Müller and Knoll. After carefully considering all the opinions that had been requested and also the reviews in periodicals, the Studienhofkommission concluded that Ficker's work had, in its original form, already met the 'most essential requirements' placed on textbooks. Moreover, the book could be easily improved by taking into account the remarks that had been made. The author's willingness to meet these demands was evident from how he had worked with his earlier books, which he was always seeking to improve in later editions. Franz was able to depict the beautiful as well as other types of plastic art could.
Concerning the length of the work, he had reproached the author for making the first edition too long, and now the second was even longer. The upshot of the assessment was the 'fervent desire' that Ficker combine the two presented books into one, considerably shorten the account, and make it more systematic.
Despite that radical proposal, Knoll expressed in his conclusion the eulogizing opinion that since the times of Johann Georg Sulzer's dictionary, 32 later enlarged by Christian Friedrich von Blankenburg, 33 'no similar work on aesthetics has been published which is as long, of such value, and so universal as this double work of our highly esteemed author' .
Müller's and Knoll's assessments were sent, on 21 October 1837, to the presidium of the Studienhofkommission. The commission subsequently elaborated its own statement. Regarding Aesthetik, it supported its original suggestion that the first edition become a textbook. The second version, revised and expanded, had, thanks to the author's industry, become even more perfect, useful, and effective, and therefore was even more suited to be the aesthetics textbook. If the Emperor commanded that the second version be set as the textbook, the commission would call, moreover, upon Ficker to have printed in larger typeface in the second edition the parts he considered necessary to know and in smaller typeface the parts that elaborate and explain. This step would, according to the commission, further increase the 'effectiveness of this substantial work' both for students and for teachers. The commission also found Ficker's book on the history of the fine arts suitable. The book was, it stated, evidence of the author's thorough knowledge of the subject, his refined taste, his refined critical faculty, and his ardour for true beauty. It could therefore serve as the textbook for students who desired a deeper knowledge of aesthetics, the beautiful, and art.
The Studienhofkommission sent all the assessments to the Court Chancellery, which in turn, on 25 November 1837, sent a proposal to Emperor Ferdinand I, in which it recommended that the second version of Ficker's Aesthetik should be declared the textbook. In its proposal it roughly summarized the whole fate of the book, including the standpoints of the decisive assessments. Nor did it fail to mention Müller's suggestion that Ficker make an excerpt from the first edition and Knoll's suggestion that the two works be combined in one and be made more concise and systematic. These radical proposals for further revisions, however, were only outlined by the Court Chancellery, without commentary, so that in the context of the whole document they did not seem negative. The conciliatory tone in which the two proposals were presented gives the impression that the Chancellery did not intend to allow some of the assessments to lead to doubts or disputes like those that the anonymous review had provoked regarding the first edition.
Ferdinand I granted the proposal signed by Count Mittrowsky. On 9 January 1838 Ferdinand declared that the revised version of Ficker's Aesthetik would be the textbook of aesthetics at German universities. In his decision, he included the order that in the edition prepared for printing the author should proceed according to the instructions of the Studienhofkommission, that is, that he use two sizes of type in order to make it easy to distinguish between fundamental and less important parts of the account. 34 The decree does not mention the second book, Geschichtlicher Überblick der gesammten schönen Kunst. during which dozens of assessments of the two versions of the book were made, thus provides more general insight both into aesthetics as taught at Austrian universities and into the operation of those universities and their policies.
The first round of the approval process reveals that the standard procedure leading to the declaration of a work as a textbook took place in two streams.
The first stream comprised a statement by the authorities, the second by academic experts. In the authorities' stream, the declaration that a work should be set as a textbook was made at a total of eleven institutions: eight authorities of the school administration at various levels (the vice directorates of the four faculties of Vienna University, the vice directorate of grammar schools, the inspectorate of German schools, the Studienrevisionskommission, and the Studienhofkommission), as well as the Court Chancellery, the supreme state authority, and, ultimately, the Emperor. Against the high number of official statements stood a single expert assessment by a professor of the Faculty of Arts at Vienna. It was, moreover, not written by an aesthetician but by an historian.
The choice of an historian was the result of the fact that Vienna University performed the role of the institutional guarantor of expert opinion on all Austrian textbooks for subjects taught at the Faculty of Arts. Aesthetics was a subject that was taught by only one lecturer at a time. Ficker, who was being assessed, was the only aesthetician at Vienna University, and therefore the aesthetics textbook had to be assessed by a professor of a related subject. The archive records do not reveal why one of the vice directors of the Faculty of Arts chose an historian and another a philosopher.
A fundamental role in the whole approval process was played by the anonymous review requested by the Emperor, because it introduced into the process a neglected aspect of the subject -namely, that Ficker's book was first reviewed by an aesthetician. Considering how widespread in the current literature the ideas were which are declared in the review (the idea of beauty as a necessary starting point of aesthetics and the close connection between beauty and God) as were too its methodological approaches (the emphasis on systematicity and respect for ideological differences amongst the analysed aesthetic theories), it is impossible to be sure who the anonymous reviewer was who set in motion the following rounds of bureaucratic proceedings. Nor can it be determined whether he was an aesthetician in Austria or outside the country.
Indeed, it cannot be excluded that the anonymous reviewer was one of the later reviewers selected after the writing of the anonymous review -namely, Knoll, Müller, or Lichtenfels. If that were the case, the reviewer would find himself in an unpleasant situation because he would be forced to react to his own review without being permitted to reveal that he was the author. In that respect, Müller were, in addition, newly joined by a professor of religious studies. From the second round of the approval process it is therefore possible in the expert stream to differentiate between two kinds of academic assessment -one written by aestheticians and another by non-aestheticians, professors of an affiliated subject.
A brief look at the reviewers demonstrates that in the standard part of the approval process the assessments by bureaucrats dominated over those by experts. The request for a single expert assessment, by an historian of world history no less, allows us to state that when it came to textbooks by Vienna professors teaching courses for which there was only one instructor in each, the experts were completely sidelined in the standard part of the process.
The huge increase in expert statements, beginning with the second round of the process, was brought about only by the expert argument of the anonymous Struggling for the Emperor's Blessing: Franz Ficker's Aesthetics Textbooks review and the Emperor's justification stemming from it, which explained why he rejected the proposal to declare the work the aesthetics textbook. In all the rounds of the process ultimately fifteen expert statements (including Ficker's) were produced. They subsequently formed the core also of the official standpoints. Despite the growing importance of expert reviews, the authorities, What the official and expert assessments most strikingly share is their having to consider the accusations of Ficker's being eclectic, a mere compiler, and a plagiarist. All the expert reviewers reacted to the accusation made in the anonymous review. Three fundamental topics recur in all their reactions: Ficker's statement in the preface to the first edition, that his book makes no claim to originality; the suggestion either to cite the authors in passages that are quoted word for word or to paraphrase them, together with the praise that he had done so in the second version; and the thoughts about Ficker's eclecticism, compilation, and plagiarism in particular. The last of the three topics is the most important, because the opinions about the eclectic nature of Ficker's book reflect the Austrian idea of the desired character of textbooks and, more widely, of scholarship and an ethical approach to it.
None of the reviewers condemned the eclecticism, compilation, and plagiarism, which the anonymous reviewer had pointed to. On the contrary, the Austrian professors closed ranks against the reviewer. Titze and Lichtenfels stated that those accusations were inconclusive or unproved and Titze argued that textbooks could not be written without those three features. Knoll, among others, even found Ficker's approach to be inspirational, in that it enables one to cover everything of importance, regardless of origin. This approach, Titze argued, is the only starting point on the way to a true philosophy of art. Eclecticism, based on a selection of the best of various systems and theories, was placed by the professors in opposition to a one-sided adherence to a single system or theory. For Knoll and Titze, it was even a value sui generis, not only of textbooks but also of the much-desired scholarliness. In this respect, the accepted recommendation that Ficker cite the works that he drew upon and the carrying out of the recommendation in the second version of Aesthetik appears as an incidental sop to the Emperor's request, derived from the anonymous review that the scholars considered misguided. The widespread respect for Ficker's approach, which is clear also in the officials' assessments, suggests that compilation, eclecticism, and plagiarism were seen as acceptable and usual in Austrian textbooks in the Vormärz period.
Concerning Ficker's and, more widely, Austrian Vormärz aesthetics (since Aesthetik became the official textbook used throughout the state) as a legitimate field of study at university and what it was supposed to consist of (and to avoid), it is clear from the official and expert assessments that it was not to limit itself only to literature, but was also to cover the whole range of aesthetic phenomena from the beautiful, the sublime, the comic, the sentimental (das Rührende) all the way to the charming (das Reizende), as well as the theories of all the main kinds of art. Regarding the way in which one should discuss these topics, two tendencies emerge from the assessments.
The first sought to separate Ficker's (and Austrian) aesthetics from the supreme achievements of German idealism. The separation took place at two levels.
The first consisted of the general requirements placed on aesthetics.
Ficker's and, more widely, Austrian aesthetics repeatedly called for practicality and sober avoidance of speculation, framed by the conviction that aesthetics, by awakening a sense of beauty and art, contributes to the fortifying of morality, Humanität, and Christianity. All the reviewers of Ficker's book were repeatedly urging that this aim be achieved. The second level consists in the attitudes towards German aestheticians. The Studienhofkommission took a critical approach towards Kant in particular. It expressly recommended to Ficker that he state how Kant had failed in his attempt to derive beauty from the four categories: quality, quantity, modality, and relation. By contrast, it repeatedly recommended that he include in his interpretation the views of Kant's sworn opponent, Herder, who had become the Studienhofkommission's most recommended aesthetician. The two other authorities recommended by the Austrian reviewers were either non-idealists or were, to be more precise, pre-Kantian German aestheticians -Baumgarten and Sulzer.
The Studienhofkommission also wanted to see pre-Kantian thinkers included in the theories of the plastic arts -Winckelmann and Ramdohr. It highlighted as model textbooks works by two professors working exclusively at south-German universities, Schreiber (Heidelberg) and Nüsslein (Bamberg). Typically, the committee (like Ficker) did not mention anything about the most influential Besides the efforts to develop Ficker's (and, more broadly, Austrian) aesthetics separately from German idealism, a second tendency is also evident in the assessments originating in both streams of the approval process -namely, a marked tendency to deduction and systematicity understood as the basis of objectivity and being scholarly, and not only in aesthetics. Titze, Knoll, and Müller, like the anonymous reviewer, believed that deriving aesthetics from a single principle (most often from the idea of beauty as an absolute and spiritual entity) was identical with scholarliness. And Knoll's call for Ficker to base his account of the development of the theories of the individual kinds of art on a unified principle -namely, moving from the inorganic to the organic or from the material to the spiritual -was widely met with understanding and full support both in the official stream of the approval process (by the Studienhofkommission and the vice directorate of the Faculty of Arts) and in the expert stream. Ficker aligned himself closely with that principle. Despite the invoked practicality and opposition to speculative German idealism, Ficker's aesthetics and aesthetics generally in Vormärz Austria thus became highly speculative and in their own way idealistic.
With regard to the stimulating nature of the reflections on the content of aesthetics, Lichtenfels's observations stand out among all the collected opinions.
As a professor of philosophy, in keeping with Austrian university convention, Lichtenfels never lectured on aesthetics, 39 yet his knowledge of the subject, though he stated that he had few qualifications in the field, is evinced by his textbooks on theoretical philosophy. 40 It was his thorough familiarity with the whole of philosophy, including aesthetics, which allowed him, when judging Ficker's Aesthetik, repeatedly to raise fundamental questions into which he projected his own topics, chiefly the question of feeling and the relationship between philosophy and psychology. These topics remained isolated; no other assessment -even those of the aestheticians Müller and Knoll -developed them or followed on from them. The central topics linking everything together remained eclecticism, compilation, and plagiarism, which he also commented on.  10-11, 171-72, 178-79, 189-90, and 211; Grundlinien der philosophischen Propädeutik, vol. 2, Grundlinien der Psychologie (Vienna: Heubner, 1834), 46-57; Lehrbuch der allgemeinen Metaphysik und der Metaphysik der Religion (Vienna: Heubner, 1843), 1-2, 19-20, 51. Apart from conceptual views, numerous other specific proposals appeared in the assessments. What is especially important in this respect is the repeated suggestion to deepen and broaden the historiographical parts of Aesthetik. When we consider that Ficker added to his second edition overviews of the history of selected kinds of art and that he even elaborated a separate textbook on the history of all the fine arts, that is, architecture, sculpture, painting, engraving on wood and woodblock printing, copper engraving, lithography, gardening, music, poetry, rhetoric, and acting, another feature of his aesthetics and, more broadly, of Austrian aesthetics as a whole becomes evident -namely, the close connection between aesthetics and art. Aesthetics was to serve not only students of the faculties of arts, but also practising artists, to help them to acquire the skills required to judge works of art. The Austrian university chairs of aesthetics of the Vormärz period therefore fostered and developed not only philosophical aesthetics, invoking the Austrian ideal of aesthetics as more than just a practical field buttressing virtuousness and Christianity, but also as an incubator of the theories and histories of the arts, which still lacked their own departments in the Monarchy.  [1st ed., pp. 5-8; 2nd ed., pp. 6-9.] The purpose of aesthetics cannot be anything other than to explain philosophically the idea of the Beautiful, the essence of art and its various forms, that is, to search for the ultimate reasons for the Beautiful in the human mind, to demonstrate the connection between art and the highest endeavours of man and methodically to develop various arts forms, and thereby to awaken and enliven the sense for art, but not to confer the artistic sense and the creative spirit on anyone. Aesthetics does not presume to want to create geniuses; aesthetics assumes that an artistic sense and creative talent are essential prerequisites for every artist, and that at least the existence of an artistic sense is an absolutely essential prerequisite for everyone who judges it. The aesthetician can furnish the artist with the highest principle and the laws derived from it, which will show him art in the dignity that provides respect; the aesthetician can also convey to him the rules that relate to the arrangement and composition of the parts into a definite whole and relate to its tone and colour; but he cannot ever teach the artist how to invent this whole and the aesthetician must even leave it up to the artist to apply those rules.

Translated by Derek and Marzia Paton
[…] It is in this way that the aesthetician furnishes the art critics with the norm (the standard), by which they measure art. But the use of that measure remains up to the critic himself. […] (1) Only by means of aesthetics do the artist and the art critic learn to do their work in a philosophical spirit, learn to investigate the conditions of the aesthetic Aesthetic culture therefore definitely provides a countable profit by giving moderation and subtlety to the whole appearance of the young man ennobled by the arts, the moderation and subtlety which cannot be acquired by any booklearning or study of languages and they, in connection with the purity of morals, convey the outer graciousness of man.
(3) Aesthetics supports and strengthens the study of works of art by allowing us to look more deeply into the fabric and beauty of the most excellent works of the human spirit and it thus has the effect that their highest nature also addresses our nature more inwardly and more vitally. of art is a beauty born of the spirit. And the more the spirit stands above nature and its works, the higher does the beauty of art stand above the beauty of nature.
By means of art the supersensible world moves from the mind to reality, to existence.
The higher world has now appeared as the immediately corporeal, truly material, and sensible world. Art celebrates its triumph over reality by the fact that it is also able  The work of art must be […] independent, without relations, a self-contained whole, which does not behave as a means to an end, but carries its centre and purpose in itself. It is a world existing for itself, dealing only with the new existence created by the artist. In the production of the work the artist does not seek anything but the satisfaction of the irresistible urges of his nature. § CXLIV [ § CXLIII] [1st ed., pp. 131-32; 2nd ed., p. 143.] Art is therefore not here for the sake of its usefulness. Usefulness can be demanded of art only in an age that considers the invention of the spinning wheel to be more important than the discovery of a new world system or the creation of the Iliad, an age that declares economic inventions the greatest inventions of the human spirit. Art is not here in order to flatter our senses or delight [ergötzen] them. Such a requirement can be placed on art only by an age for which it is the supreme enjoyment [Genuß]. But art is not here directly to teach us morality either; nor is it here to support the opposite of that.
[…] The gaze of art is aimed upwards, far from the normal course of things. The aim of art is to look at what is highest, and to vividly represent the highest in the perfect form of the world.
Aesthetics; or, A Theory of the Beautiful and of Art in Its Full Scope And who uses art for a purpose inhibits its free, unbounded flight. The hand of art cannot be guided; it is governed only by its own spirit. [The more faithfully art obeys its own laws of beauty, the more surely it also supports the nobleness of mankind, for what else should we call moral than when we prefer the spiritual in human nature over the sensual [Sinnliche], than when the divine slumbering in this nature is awakened, developed, and put into action by the force of the idea, so that it triumphs over the demands of the mundane? Art becomes a mediator between reason and sensuality [Sinnlichkeit], between urges and duties as a conciliator of these elements, which are in such a bitter struggle with, and in resistance to, each other.] § CXLV [ § CXLIV] [1st ed., pp. 132-33; 2nd ed., pp. 144-45.] The morality of the artist therefore consists not in the moral tendencies of his products, but in the chaste, undefiled sense by which he accepts and creates.
A mind affected by a higher spirit can never create works that encourage the sensual nature of man. For nothing that is not sacred can stem from the sacred. And it is a sacred blessing that the artist accepts from above.
An aesthetic product that encourages the appetites ceases to be an aesthetic product. Beauty vanishes with the veil of the graces. How can the violation of any shame raise aesthetic interest and earn the applause of the virgin nymphs?
[Simply the fact that art by itself elevates the whole man, that it draws him out of the petty limitations of his everyday life, that it strengthens him for the noble forgetting of himself in the vulgarity that surrounds him, perhaps steels him in his worthy decision to ward off this vulgarity, to bind it with the law of his inner nobleness.
In this way, art, like everything great, also has a moral effect.] Because art becomes art by its ideal orientation, it has a great character of inner truth. And possible dark sides will, upon examination of the whole, give way to the harmony of the painting; the total impression is always ethical; vice is averse to true beauty.
[If art shows a fall, a decline, depravity, or destruction, then the divineness of the punishment, atonement, and elevation come out with the force of their representation and, in the force of their representation, automatically. The vulgarity, that is, the evil that announces itself as a crude fall from the heavenly, because of base, sensual lust, without a need for the better or an inkling of it, can be of no artistic interest to us: we can tolerate evil only under the film of an idea, of an impulse that is independent, consistent, and spiritual. Where humorous poetry mocks human perversities, one must bear in mind the borderline between harmless folly and the morally reprehensible in such a way that the wantonness of our waggish mood may spill over into unencumbered risibility, but behind the mocking of the morally But as a true artist receives and creates his work with his pure, undesecrated sense, so must the viewer also approach the work of art with a pure, chaste sense. One who does not bring with himself this sense will find indecency everywhere, not only in art. It is neither art nor the work of art which is immoral; rather it is only people who are immoral and moral. [It is only into such a soul, which has already been inoculated with the poison of life, that a dangerous drop from the painter's brush, from the sculptor's chisel, from the poet's word can perhaps also penetrate.
Impartiality serves an innocent nature like the magic chalice that, according to the old sagas, destroys all lethal poisons.] Does a work, for example, the renowned faun in the Dresden antiquities collection or even the noble Apollo Belvedere, deserve rebuking because it contains a pleasing physical form created as perfectly and as pleasantly as possible, and is the rebuke warranted if it is against the man of sensual enjoyment [der sinnliche Genußmensch] who is charmed [entzückt] by it?
Art demands to be enjoyed [genossen] morally too, and simply in this way does it further morality. The Hellene, with his sense for art (and yet, alas, not a model of morality beyond the enjoyment of art [Kunstgenuß]), saw publicly naked shapes of statues and did not consider them immoral. Would he not have considered the many leaps and the figures of our men and women ballet dancers to be frivolous?

Translated by Derek Paton and Tomáš Hlobil
Aesthetics; or, A Theory of the Beautiful and of Art in Its Full Scope