Contemporary discourse on the arts is dominated by a suspicious orientation that seeks in various ways to conceive the "aesthetic" as an epiphenomenon of some underlying reality or force. This suspicious stance is in danger of foreclosing prematurely the possibility that art's most important cultural role in post-Enlightenment modernity might be to continue to make available and vital those experiential and imaginative dimensions of our lives that lie beyond the purview of scientific or conceptual discourses. I argue that the suspicious stance toward art can be traced ultimately to a severely impoverished understanding of the philosophical underpinnings of art in modernity. Since suspicious critics tend to approach art with certain a priori assumptions about what the aesthetic mystifies or occludes, they strategically pick out isolated doctrines from the German aesthetic tradition in support of these a priori assumptions. This dissertation, by contrast, seeks to give the German aesthetic tradition from Kant to Hegel a full hearing: key figures in this tradition not only anticipate modernist claims about art's spiritual powers as well as recent suspicious approaches to the aesthetic but also provide the conceptual resources for cutting across contemporary debates about aesthetic agency. My philosophical narrative culminates in Hegel's rich notion of the "after of art," which designates the internal dialectical mechanism by which certain forms of art are able not only to reflect on their own limitations but to "point through" themselves in order to project existential and epistemic possibilities that lie beyond the aesthetic domain. From a Hegelian perspective, instead of reducing the artwork to an epiphenomenon of underlying forces, we can conceive the artwork as a dialectical force in its own right.
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