Ästhetische Autonomie zwischen Ethik und Ästhetik
Authors: Dröscher-Teille Mandy 
Published: March 2024

Literary texts deal with ethically highly relevant topics such as violence, the climate crisis or animal welfare, they deal with historical and political events and discuss developments in medicine, etc. If one follows the current social debate about autonomy, which is being conducted particularly in the art discourse, then such texts would be considered post-autonomous insofar as they supposedly overcome the historical principle of aesthetic autonomy and link their autonomy directly to the aesthetic treatment of social issues. But where is the line between social responsibility and aesthetic autonomy?

In the following, instead of autonomy and post-autonomy as binarism, an attempt is made to start from perspective structures in literary texts that make the relative degree of autonomy determinable by describing them as aesthetic and/or ethical. With recourse to the classical concept of autonomy (Moritz, Schiller) and Kant’s deontological ethics, autonomy is developed as a relative category and transferred into a concept of perspectival autonomy. In the 18th century, aesthetic autonomy, also insofar as it is based on sensualist premises and thus places emphasis on sensory perception, cannot be separated from the constitution of the human being as an individual. If equal weight is given to the aesthetic and the ethical side when analyzing literary texts, perspective structures can be observed in literary texts that are to be made fruitful in the following as perspectives of autonomy for the discourse on the limits and possibilities of literature. The focus here is neither on the relationship between content (socially heteronomous) on the one hand and (aesthetically autonomous) form on the other, nor on the levels of production, object and reception, but rather on a conceptualization of autonomy from the end of the 18th century to the current debates on the (post-)autonomy of art between ethics and aesthetics.

If an ethical perspective of aesthetic autonomy is sought, this does not call into question the fact that, firstly, literature is always connected to the ›world‹ and, secondly, this connection is also possible without concrete content specifications, because, thirdly, literature has a ›poetic function‹ (Jakobson) to which moral or political intentions are subordinate. However, since external and self-references, i. e. text-external influences and text-internal poetics, cannot always be easily and clearly distinguished and distilled in isolation from each other in a text, a scaling approach is proposed here in relation to the autonomy postulate in order to locate texts between autonomy and heteronomy. The analysis of gradations, degrees or weightings of autonomy replaces their close connection to aesthetics in favor of an ethical and/or aesthetic perspective of a literary text.

This is intended to counter both a narrow understanding of aesthetic autonomy (which is neither consistent with the meaning of the word autonomy as self-legislation nor with the founding theses of the 18th century) and a broad understanding. Aesthetic autonomy is neither to be equated with purity, isolation and freedom from purpose (narrow understanding = normative criteria that strongly restrict aesthetic autonomy in terms of definition) nor does it consist in the aesthetic ›translation‹ of social discourses on the level of form that is fundamentally given in literary texts (broad understanding = the only criterion is literariness, so that aesthetic autonomy would be attributed to all literary-poetic texts regardless of content). The fundamental reference of a text to the world is distinguished in the approach pursued here from an ethical perspective, which includes an effect of literature beyond a reference to the world. This effect is not intended to be normative, but is part of the aesthetic self-legislation of a text. It is aimed at knowledge, change and development or, in the words of the aesthetics of Moritz and Schiller: at ›inner education‹.

Following a localization of autonomy between the suspicion of ideology and the postulate of post-autonomy, which refers to some selected positions of research, the various definitions of aesthetic autonomy are first weighed against each other in order to then establish a connection to life science and ethics. The reflections on the constitution of aesthetic autonomy under ethical auspices finally lead to an attempt to develop a scale of the outlined perspectival autonomy on which literary texts can be approximately located.

The analytical examination of (historical) concepts of aesthetic autonomy is relevant insofar as, on the one hand, existing classifications and weightings can be questioned and, on the other hand, it can be examined which understanding of aesthetic autonomy should be introduced into the current discourse on the tasks and social significance of literature. If it becomes clear that aesthetic autonomy is a construction that has been constituted from very different discourse-dependent attempts at definition, then it is possible to choose the appropriate concept for analyzing and describing texts from the variety of terms. To do this, however, it is necessary 1) to de-ideologize or demystify aesthetic autonomy, i. e. neither to elevate it to a pedestal nor to discredit it with ivory tower metaphors, and 2) to break open its supposedly narrow framework with absolute claims and either/or definitions. Contemporary aesthetics does not need autonomy as a fighting concept, a confession or to form fronts, but as a (meta-)category between and/or above the discourses.