Fichte’s Substantial Contribution in German Aesthetics

Abstract: In aesthetics / philosophy of art, Fichte did not produce works as great as Kant’s Critique of Judgment or Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics. As a result, it was long believed that he had no share in the aesthetics of German idealism. Nevertheless, there are a few works left by him in which the necessary materials for designing and developing an innovative art philosophy can be identified. In this article, we argue that Fichte takes at least two basic steps in the field of aesthetics: 1) by transferring the weight of the discussion from aesthetics to the philosophy of artistic creation, he makes, as it were, a Copernican revolution in the field of aesthetics and therefore transforms the aesthetics of taste into a philosophy of art based on the creative spirit; 2) raises the status of aesthetics (in fact, the aesthetic sense) to the level of “condition of the possibility of philosophy”.