Universitätspublikationen
Refine
Document Type
- Article (1)
- Conference Proceeding (1)
Language
- English (2) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- yes (2)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (2)
Keywords
- art criticism (2) (remove)
Institute
Stanley Cavell is one of very few philosophers who systematically reflect on the impact and influence of autobiographical detail, experience, and preferences on their philosophical work. The aim of this essay is to show how Cavell’s use of autobiographical exploration is rooted in his early aesthetic theory, in particular his view of the similarities between philosophy and aesthetic criticism. Cavell argues that criticism starts by exploiting and incorporating a subjective vantage point, eventually bringing the reader to test the significance of a work on herself. In his ‘Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy’, Cavell states exactly this form of appeal to the ‘We’ of author and reader as the basic move of his own version of ‘ordinary language philosophy’. It is because of the connections Cavell sees between criticism and philosophy that his aesthetic diagnosis harks back on his overall critical style of thinking.
This paper traces the development of National Socialist cultural and legal policy towards the arts. It examines the role of censure in this development starting with Hitler's first attempts at power in the Weimar republic. It then looks more closely into aspects of the development of new policies in and after 1933 and their implementation in institutions of the totalitarian state. As the paper shows, policies were carried out within a legal framework that included parliament and constitutional law but they were often also accompanied by aggressive political actions. Racial and nationalistic ideologies were at the heart of the National Socialist discourse about culture. This discourse quickly established modernity as its principal enemy and saw modernist culture (in the broad sense of the word), and especially art criticism, as being under Jewish domination. True German Kultur was set against this; Hitler himself promoted German art both through exhibitions and through policies which included the removal of un-German art and the exclusion of writers and artists who did not conform the cultural ideal. As Jewish artists and intellectuals in modernist culture posed the greatest threat to the establishment of a new German culture, Nazi policies towards the arts embarked on a process of censure, exclusion and annihilation. The purpose of these policies was nothing less than the elimination of all modernist (Jewish and ‘degenerate’) culture and any memory of it.