Abstract

Victor Cousin dominated French philosophy for over thirty years from 1815. Manns tracks the progress of his aesthetic theory as far as the first winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1901, René Sully-Proudhomme. The common thread is a family of positions Manns calls "expressionism," to the effect that beauty in physical objects is to be understood as the outer sign of some inner perfection: its origins he finds in Reid on taste. But what in Reid was a cautious attempt to link the pleasure we take in beauty to perfection of character in agents, and especially, in the case of nature, to the more or less evident ingenuity of the Creator's handiwork, becomes in Cousin a metaphysically conjectural claim about the ideal attributes of "the absolute." Manns works hard, without much textual help but with plausible results, to identify the sources of Cousin's thought in Reid, rather than in, say, Hegel, by discussing how his epistemology and metaphysics parallel Reid's common-sense account of perception and the principles of reason.