Karl Philipp Moritz
Karl Philipp Moritz ( born September 15, 1756 in Hameln, † June 26, 1793 in Berlin) was a versatile writer of the Sturm und Drang, the Berlin Enlightenment and Weimar Classicism, which was also the early Romantic impulses. He had an eventful life and was Hutmacherlehrling, actor, tutor, teacher, editor, writer, late reconnaissance, philosopher and art theorist.
Life
Moritz grew up in poverty, characterized by quietism and pietism conditions. His father was a military musician. A Hutmacherlehre in Braunschweig he broke off due to unbearable treatment. His confirmation priest discovered his talent and enabled him with the help of a benefactor from 1771 to attend high school in Hanover. After several futile attempts to become an actor - in 1776 he had still enrolled as a student of theology in Erfurt - Moritz was the site of a Informators at Potsdamer military orphanage in 1778 a teacher at Berlinischen high school to the Grey Abbey, where he became in 1784 a secondary school teacher. Since 1779 Masons, Moritz had contact with the leading Berlin Enlightenment.
Friendships he used to Goethe, who saw him as a younger brother, Moses Mendelssohn and Asmus Jakob Carstens. Goethe and Moritz had got to know in November 1786 in Rome and appreciate. On his return to Berlin in late 1788 Moritz made therefore station in Weimar, where he had the opportunity to teach the Duke Carl August in English. Whereupon this is started to ensure that the poet in 1789 received a professorship of the theory of the fine arts at the Royal Academy of Arts in Berlin. Among his students, among others, Ludwig Tieck, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Alexander von Humboldt. He was a great admirer of Jean Paul. 1791 Moritz was admitted to the Prussian Academy of Sciences and appointed Prussian Privy Councillor. On August 5, 1792, he married the 15 -year-old Christiane Friederike Matzdorff. In December already made the divorce on grounds of infidelity of the wife, in May 1793, the remarriage. Moritz died shortly thereafter at a pulmonary edema, the result of a disease, from which he suffered since his youth.
In addition to the novels of Anton Reiser and Andrew Hartknopf the Enlightenment also wrote a series of theoretical writings on aesthetics, such as About the visual imitation of the beautiful. The magazine was founded in 1783 by him to empirical psychology as a reading book for learned and unlearned can be seen as an early psychological journal.
Individual works
Anton Reiser ( in 4 parts )
The novel depicts the life of Anton Reiser and his quest to become an actor.
In addition, the work provides a description and commentary of growth and failure of the main character Anton Reiser dar. The novel is one of the first psychological novels in German language.
Aesthetic writings
Among the aesthetic writings include the essay attempt at a union of all the fine arts and sciences under the term in itself perfected, which appeared as an open letter to Moses Mendelssohn in the Berlinischen monthly from March to 1785, resulting in Rome Manifesto About the visual imitation of the Fine, as well as the essays can be described what extent art and preconceptions to a theory of ornaments. With its aesthetic writings Moritz is the founder of the Weimar autonomy aesthetic.
About the visual imitation of beauty
Moritz is the third part of the " fine imitation of beauty " his idea of natural development before. It can be described as a teleological process of perfection of matter. In a " ladder of organizational forms " first rises the " unorganized substance" to the plants up, these self to the animals and eventually in humans. This process now runs not "voluntarily", any lower form of life organization is transferred to the next higher by resolved into their individual form, are transformed in nature but in the parent organization.
This process of natural development is the " energy " based on the forms of destruction. It is also present in man and manifests itself in him in two ways: firstly, as an educational force, on the other hand as sensation strength. The energy always seeks out the whole and is therefore endeavor to include subordinate organizational forms in itself or destroy equal forms of organization.
When people hear the " process of finishing " only in physical terms. He must beautify the reality outside itself constitute again and reach the real beauty, the aim of the natural and human history through his mind.
The artistic production process is considered the natural evolution analogy. In a productive artist to education and sensory force to unite the greatest harmony. Him, the creative genius, facing the dilettante. The distinction between genius and dilettante is a central consideration in the art of Weimar Classicism: In dilettantes formation force is too weak. He can - conveyed by the sensory force - maximum enjoy art and Moritz warns against himself as an amateur to try it to create art. Because of dabbling saw the work of art is primarily an object of enjoyment and only those who ( to create art in order to then enjoy it can ) that self-interest off turn off, can really enjoy the beautiful. Otherwise, " it is only the passion of the beauty as a Perfect, which is beyond his reach. "
The genius, however, is able to sense the beauty of nature and then imitate it and thus to create the beauty of art. Even the artistic process is characterized by and is based on destruction. The artist achieved the beauty of art only by destruction, which manifests itself concretely as dissolution of reality. He destroys the reality of experience and transfers it transformed into the appearance of his work. Thus, the nature of reality is manifested in the appearance, in the illusion of art that is a reflection of the real beauty.
Also, the artist must the destruction in his education work pay, in the form that he must renounce any pleasure in his creative activity, but is increasingly driven simultaneously to the educational activity. Moritz establishes the autonomy of art by always looking at the whole energy that creates the beauty of art as an 'after-image of the great whole of nature ". As such, afterimage, which is caused by the destruction and regeneration of experienced reality, has not art back to the artist and the reality in which they arose and therefore, while an inner expediency, but also needs further " no relations to any anything except to have. "
Works
- Blunt or the guest. In the two versions of 1780 & 1781, as well as a compilation of both versions. Full text.
- Contributions to the philosophy of life from the diary of a Freimäurers, 1780
- Journal of empirical psychology as a reading book for learned and unlearned. 1783-1793
- Travel of a German in England in 1782. Fulltext, 1783
- Ideal of a polishing paper. Full Text (1784 )
- Anton Reiser, Vol 1, Berlin, in 1785. Digitized and full text in German Text Archive
- Vol 2 Berlin, 1786. Digitized and full text in German Text Archive
- Vol 3, Berlin, 1786. Digitized and full text in German Text Archive
- Vol 4, Berlin, 1790. Digitized and full text in German Text Archive