Publication Details

Abstract

On the occasion of the centenary of the death of Karol Kuzmány, an outstanding national and public personality, poet and thinker in the Slovak national revival, the author presents an analytical insinght into his philosophico-aesthetical views. In the introductory section she follows Kuzmány’s philosophical attitudes, pointing to the affinity with philosophical tradition at home and in particular with German classical philosophy which Kuzmány adopted during his studies in Germany, similarly as did Kollár before, and Štúr after him. Kant, Herder, Fichte, but expecially J. F. Fries became a source of crystallization for Kuzmány’s ideolog attitude, as a result of which the latter is, to a large extent, eclectic and theoretically little original. In the spirit of Fries, Kuzmány too, lays stress on the ethical and humanistic function of philosophy and trom an „anthropological“ position, stresses the need for attention to the unity and wholeness of the interior spiritual life of man. He 6ees an important and harmonizing moment of this spiritual life in its emotional aspect and aesthetic-emotive disposition. In a narrower sense, this view was responsible for Kuzmány’s orientation to investigate the nature of feeling as a perceptive ability and of art as a means of grasping those essential aspects of reality which are achieved in the form of beauty. These problems are dealt with in Kuzmány’s theoretical work O kráse (On Beauty), from 1836, by which Kuzmány became the pioneer of aesthetics as an individual theoretical science in the spirit of Baumgarten’s conception of aestheticism. An analysis of Kuzmány’s aesthetical views, his conception of beauty and laws of creation of beauty, by art, are dealt with in a further section of the study. The author endeavours at the same time not only to present their theoretical evaluation, but also to confront them with the classical and romantic artistic theories between which Kuzmány oscillates.