Autonomy, ontology and the ideal :music theory and philosophical aesthetics in early Nineteenth Century German thought

Abstract

This thesis falls into two distinct parts. The first gives an account of the economic and social factors which contributed to the emergence of the new post- Cartesian world order in early nineteenth-century Germany and attempts to ground the German response to the French theories of mimesis in this broader context. The second, larger, part engages in an analysis of the philosophical aesthetics of the critic and writer Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, and the Idealists Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, paying particular attention to the notions of musical closure embedded in the their usage or intimation of the terms autonomy, ontology and the ideal. To this end, this thesis attempts to analyse the relationship between the organic structures of early nineteenth-century Naturphilosophie and aesthetic approaches to music from that same period.