Das Wahre, Schöne, Gute: Aufstieg, Fall und Fortbestehen einer Trias

Das Wahre, Schone, Gute, the good is the guiding star in the cultural sky from the end of the 18th century until beyond the end of the 19th century. The triad emerged in the early 18th century, initiated by the reception of Platonic philosophy, the debate about good taste, and the expansion of philosophy to include the science of aesthetics. While Kant and Schiller explored with critical consciousness the connection and difference between the true, the beautiful, and the good, in the 19th century the triad stood as a ubiquitous formula for the 'higher,' the bourgeois religion of education and art. Its use in Goethe's 'Epilogue to Schiller's Bell' consecrated it with both names. This ignited an ideology-critical and aesthetic polemic. Fontane saw in this triad only a re-course of money. For the European avant-garde since the mid-19th century, it was the expression of a banausic misappropriation of art. The fall of the triad began. Its invocation was frowned upon. But its silent persistence went hand in hand with this, as evidenced by art and literary criticism and the debates about, for example, Adorno's sentence according to which writing a poem after Auschwitz was barbaric, or the "case of Ezra". The question is still whether and how aesthetic claims are connected with moral and truth claims in the experience of art.