In Praise of Nonsense

Shells, leafwork, picture frames, hummingbirds, wallpaper decorations, hems of clothing—such are the examples Kant''s Critique of Judgment offers for a "free" and purely aesthetic beauty. Menninghaus''s book demonstrates that all these examples refer to a widely unknown debate on the arabesque and that Kant, in displacing it, addresses genuinely "modern" phenomena. The early Romantic poetics and l...