The need for university reform. The educational commission’s description of the problems in Swedish higher education 1745-1751.

During the so called age of liberty in Sweden (1721-1772), demands were promptly made for concrete applications of the rather elusive idea of 'utility'. One grand expression of these claims was the educational commission appointed in 1745 to investigate whether and in which ways the Swedish educational system, including the universities, should be reformed. Previous studies have primarily focused on analyzing the commission’s reform proposal; its content, potential consequences and the response it received from Uppsala University in particular. The relationship between the commission and the universities has, moreover, almost exclusively been considered as a struggle for influence over Sweden’s higher education. This article focuses instead on the ideas of the commission regarding the need for university reform. The article aims to suggest alternative approaches for subsequent studies, however I wish to also indicate the contours of a more nuanced understanding of the intentions of the commission. The article takes as an analytical starting point the assessment made by the commission that Swedish universities failed in reaching their legitimate goal: to educate students for positions in government offices. As this failure was considered harmful for the country it was believed to be in the state’s interest to regulate the influx of students into higher education as well as the knowledge and qualifications these students should have acquired upon graduation. Previous studies have considered the commission almost exclusively as a manifestation of the principle that universities should contribute to the economic utility or welfare of the country. This article brings to the fore that while the economy was indeed important, additional attention should be given to broader political interests of the commission.

It has often been claimed that German universities were in a state of crisis at the close of the 18^th century. Allegedly, professors only taught what could be found in books. Their thinking had hardened into convention and orthodoxy and their teaching had turned into a mechanical and pedantic routine. This description is to some extent accurate. The bored student who slept through lectures was something of a topos in university policy discourse at the time. That said, the question remains why teaching methods in the universities suddenly were thought to be obsolete. The means of instruction hadn’t changed much since the Middle Ages. In most cases, the professor read aloud from his manuscript; students listened, kept quite, and took notes. How does one account for the fact that this method of instruction was commonly considered expendable at the end of the 18^th century?

In this article I argue that the crisis in German higher education was triggered partly by the rapid growth of the contemporary book trade. Thanks to the printing press, critics asserted, students could henceforth acquire knowledge by their own efforts, and would no longer have to gather in lecture halls in order to listen to professors, who, each term, read their compendia to new audiences. Some suggested that one should abolish universities altogether. Others instead wanted to improve the methods of instruction so that the universities would once again become indispensable. My focus here is on how this topic was discussed among pedagogues, writers and members of the learned estate up until the founding of the University of Berlin in 1810.

This paper provides an introduction to the problem of aesthetics in Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s oeuvre. Considering his aesthetic writing as a problem-historical process rather than as a comprehensive aesthetic theory or as an unsystematic collection of theoretical judgements, I would like to suggest a new way of analysing Goethe’s conception of the aesthetic. Although he never presented a program, he continuously addressed the same set of questions: What is representation? How is nature transformed into art? How do we represent images with words? What are the limits of the work? These questions, which all pertain to issues of representation, are never given a definite answer but remain open throughout Goethe’s work. In this paper I highlight four areas in which these questions are investigated: 1) the ambivalent interpretation of the concept of mimesis; 2) the problem of symbolic representation; 3) descriptions of works of art; 4) the arabesque and other forms of non-significant representations. Goethe’s discussion of these problems suggests that a classical, representational episteme coexists and, at the same time, is at odds with a modern, organic episteme.

In this article on the critique of face painting during the 18^th and early 19^th century, I argue that face painting was a part of the visualization of gendered social order. I conceive the critique and the growing emphasis on women’s natural ability to please men as a consequence of the growth of sociability. A main point is that the explicit critique of face painting was based on its implicit acceptance, as long as it was contained within younger women of the middling sorts, as well as within the dominant ideal of beauty, the petrarcan tradition of red and white.

I also claim that the ideal of the natural within the critique wasn’t very natural at all, which came from a reluctance to accept real naturalness, represented socially by the peasant classes and esthetically by disease and early aging. Face painting stood in a complex relation with a double physiognomy which explained two different truths: the widespread conception that the face was the window of the soul, and the likewise widespread idea that the hierarchic order of society was legible in the faces and appearances of its different members. Within the ideal of natural beauty face painting thus became a tool for disciplining young women. The new, more heterogenic social life created possibilities for women to take on public roles, which lead to an increased will to discipline them and emphasize their subordinate and complementary position through a strengthened rhetoric of natural beauty.

Hegel's analysis of architecture is located at a critical juncture in the history of philosophical reflection on the arts. On the one hand it appears to be wholly backward-looking, especially in locating architecture in the realm of the symbolical art-forms, whose essential contribution to the development of spirit occurred before the Greek moment. This is further underwritten by the limited scope of Hegel's narrative, which takes us no further than the Gothic cathedral. On the other hand, Hegel's analysis, when read carefully, displays a singular attention to the materiality of architecture, and the way in which it forms a spatial grounding for the other arts. In this way it prefigures many of the theoretical moves that would be made in the 19^th century, after the downfall of Vitruvianism, and which would eventually usher in the development of a new theoretical vocabulary, above all in the nascent discourse of "tectonics.".