Robert L. Wicks puts the aesthetic theories of thinkers from the Enlightenment to contemporary times into a narrative that begins with Enlightenment reason as embodied in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and then explains why and how succeeding generations of philosophers were led to question the value of reason. The catalyst for this development, according to his narrative, was the Reign of Terror. Reacting to the bloody consequences of the attempt by French revolutionaries to enthrone reason, philosophers began to question whether realising reason should be a social objective, and indeed whether reason should be regarded as a supreme value.

This questioning of reason continued into the twentieth century when the target became scientific rationality and its contribution to projects of social engineering – exemplified by fascist manipulation of public opinion. It culminates in the refusal of Jacques Derrida to be bound by any interpretation, however apparently well-justified by reason.

Wicks thus divides his survey into those thinkers who were favourable to reason and who enlisted art in its service and those who questioned it in one way or another – either by doubting its efficacy, its value, its authority, or its ability to bring about agreement. Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Schiller were rationalists and moralists who attempted to bring together reason, beauty, art, and morality in their philosophies. Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Freud questioned the supremacy or value of reason. Benjamin, Adorno, and Heidegger were critics of instrumental rationality and the dominance of scientific rationality, and looked to art to subvert its effects. Gadamer recognised that the rational agreement sought by Enlightenment thinkers was unachievable but thought that understanding could be brought about through the fusion of world views. On the other hand, Foucault and Derrida questioned the very idea of rational agreement.

Wicks himself comes down on the side of those who, like Gadamer, have not given up the attempt to link art, reason, and morality. Philosophical and historical developments may have undermined Enlightenment confidence in reason, but not, he thinks, the possibility of mutual respect and understand-ing or the promotion by art of values like trust.

To present the history of the last two centuries of Western thought as the erosion of ideals of reason – the gradual fallout of the Reign of Terror – is an oversimplication. It ignores the fact that reason can exist in many forms and is a hard thing to abandon altogether. For Enlightenment thinkers, reason had both the power of bringing into question orthodoxies and traditions and the ability to justify universal moral and political ideals. The possibility of doing the latter has been brought into question – by philosophy and by differences of opinion that are found in every society. However, the first idea of what reason can accomplish has never lost its influence on European culture and its inheritors. Almost all of the thinkers discussed by Wick are engaged in the Enlightenment project of questioning orthodoxy. The history of aesthetic thought could also be written as a history of the ways that philosophers have enlisted art in the service of liberation from oppression, suppression, convention, limitation, or exclusion.

The questioning of reason and its implications for aesthetic theory is the main theme of Wicks’s book, but other preoccupations of European aesthetics make an appearance: whether art has a purpose and what form of art best achieves it; the relation between art and beauty; art as an expression of subjectivity and an anecdote to scientific rationality; the idea of the artist as a creative genius. Adding to a rich and complex mix are his accounts of surrealist appropriation of Freudian themes, Benjamin’s views about mechanical reproduction of works of art, Adorno’s complaints about jazz, Barthes’s description of photographers as the agents of death, Deleuze’s approach to cinema, and the contributions of Heidegger and Derrida to a controversy over the interpretation of Van Gogh’s painting, A Pair of Shoes (1886).

An underlying theme, raised but never systematically discussed, is the relationship between philosophy and art. Readers interested in art will be struck by the top-down, abstract approach of most of the philosophers to their subject matter. Some, like Schiller, were themselves artists; some, like Nietzsche, had a deep appreciation of art; but most of the philosophers discussed by Wicks were interested mainly in making art serve the purpose of their theories and rarely directed their attention to particular works of art or to the views of art critics. Whether artists have ever paid much attention to the aesthetic views of philosophers is doubtful.

Nevertheless, the aesthetic theories of philosophers affect the way we think about art, and Wicks does a good service by putting their views into the context of their philosophies. He does a better job for some than for others. The views of Kant, the arch-Enlightenment rationalist, and of Hegel, whose idealism addressed problems inherent in Kant’s philosophy, are presented in some detail. Non-philosophers may not understand all the philosophical complexities that Wicks describes but they will get a good sense from these chapters of how these philosophers’ views about aesthetics were motivated by their philosophies.

Other philosophers are treated in a much more cursory way. After a rich and insightful presentation of nineteenth-century philosophers, the quality of Wicks’s discussion deteriorates as we move through the twentieth century. The later chapters, in particular, are only tenuously connected with the theme of the book, and many of them read as if they were composed as independent pieces. It is unclear why Wicks chose to present the views of some philosophers rather than others. Why Barthes or Deleuze? Why not Sartre?

Wicks seems more interested in telling us how Foucault misinterpreted Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656) than in explaining his philosophical position. Derrida is presented by way of his attempt to defend Heidegger’s interpretation of A Pair of Shoes and Deleuze as a philosopher of the cinema. Because we get comparatively little information about the philosophy of these thinkers, their views on aesthetic issues seem unmotivated, even slightly mad. It is odd that Wicks says so little about structuralism and how it influenced mid- and late-twentieth-century philosophers like Foucault and Derrida, especially their views on interpretation.

Despite its faults, this book is rewarding. It contains much more about philosophy than about art, and readers have to be prepared for the difficulties that this entails. But if they are willing to make the effort, they will learn a lot about the ways that important thinkers in the European tradition conceptualised art and how their thought was influenced by events that changed the course of history.