Aesthetics of Presence: Philosophical and Practical Reconsiderations

The core idea of Willmar Sauter's book is that we might be able to get a better idea of what constitutes profound experiences of presence and beauty if we take our starting point from the early theories on philosophical aesthetics from the last half of the eighteenth century.In particular, Sauter offers perspectives from Baumgarten, Rousseau, Mendelsohn, Lessing, and Schiller as relevant for his aesthetic reconsiderations.The proposition is that these early theories of aesthetics have a greater understanding and sensibility to the part of the beholder in the aesthetic experience, than the established canon from the turn of the nineteenth century from German idealism and early romanticism and forwards.Kant and Hegel are mentioned as the main culprits who turn aesthetics away from the beholder and towards the aesthetic object, and with Hegel towards art in particular.Therefore, Sauter argues, the earlier theories (including Schiller who was greatly inspired by Kant) retain a broader contemporary relevance because they had not yet restricted the field of aesthetics to the experience of art.In that regard, they are arguably more adequate to capture the aesthetics of a broad range of cultural phenomena -from hiking in the Sápmi area, to participating in a city festival, to discovering the beauty of an archaeological finding, to attending a theatre performance or pondering complex media phenomena.Sauter demonstrates a connection between the eighteenth-century connoisseurship of great spirits such as Mendelsohn and Goethe and the contemporary broad pursuit for memorable experiences of presence and beauty by the educated middle class.The book is well structured, starting with the introduction of two examples in a short prologue before moving on to a rich and interesting account of the favoured eighteenth-century aesthetic