Poetry as a Way of Life: Aesthetics and Askesis in the German Eighteenth Century

Gabriel Trop. Poetry as a Way of Life: Aesthetics and Askesis in the German Eighteenth Century. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2015. 388 pages.

Poetry as a Way of Life approaches the discipline and practice of aesthetics in eighteenth-century German discourse from a refreshingly original perspective: the aesthetic exercise or askesis. Rather than analyzing the literary work of art in terms of either its "essence" or its formal qualities, Gabriel Trop asks, what happens when we think of art as a way of life, as setting into motion an aesthetic exercise, a "process by which a sensually-oriented activity in the world attempts to form, influence, perturb, or otherwise generate patterns of thought, perception, and action" (9). Analyzed from this vantage, art becomes instrumental in constructing new conceptions of selfhood, new methods of thinking, and new ways of being. Trop builds here on Pierre Hadot's analy- sis of the philosophy of classical antiquity as developing regimes of spiritual exercises: mental workouts, as it were, for training the self. The aesthetic exercise in particular is a way of reading literary works, of setting the mind into motion; accordingly, the goal of criticism is to restore to artworks their ability to attract and exercise the mind. (While Trop is interested primarily in poetry, he notes that askesis pertains to other forms of art as well.) In a bold critical move, Trop explicitly casts his own study as an aesthetic exercise, eschewing both logical and chronological order as he traces a trajectory from the notoriously difficult later hymns of Hölderlin through the experimental early Romantic poiesis of Novalis to the pure immanence of Anacreontic and rococo poetry, toward increasing "lightness, joy and play" (19).

In a real sense, it flies in the face of the study's goals to retrace this trajectory: each individual reader most confront Trop's rigorous, incisive analyses of individual canonical texts, and allow his own prose to attract one's mind, to set one's mind into motion, to engage one with new modes of thought. In broad strokes, the contours of his argument are as follows. The aesthetic exercise is a notion firmly grounded in eighteenth-century thought, articulated foundationally in the writings of Alexander Baumgarten. In particular, the...