Sensus communis aestheticus and the project of emancipation: The Utopian frame of the avant-gardes.

The conceptual basis which would be later developed by the artistic avant-gardes was settled by German Romantic and Idealist thought, whose utopian dimension could be easily recognized in The oldest systemprogram of German Idealism (1796), a text which provided Idealist thought with the claim of a new rationality or a mythology of reason in Hegel, an intellectual intuition in Schelling and the Humanity in Schiller. Although this emancipation project developed later by the avant-garde has lost its credibility for us, we still have to investigate to what extent today’s art can maintain a social function. This article point out certain idealist concepts in light of a philosophy of art modeled along lines sketched out in Kant’s Critique of Judgement and that have contributed to the history of the “advanced” art.