Gadamer on the Romantic/modern conception of aesthetics:

The shift in the ontological definition of the aesthetic toward the concept of aesthetic appearance has its theoretical basis in the fact that the domination of the scientific model of epistemology leads to discrediting all the possibilities of knowing that lie outside this new methodology [“fiction”!].

Let us recall that in the well-known quotation from which we started, Helmholtz knew no better way to characterize the quality that distinguishes work in the human sciences from that in the natural sciences than by describing it as “artistic.” Corresponding positively to this theoretical relationship is what we may call “aesthetic consciousness.” It is given with the “standpoint of art,” which Schiller first founded. For just as the art of “beautiful appearance” is opposed to reality, so aesthetic consciousness includes an alienation from reality — it is a form of the “alienated spirit,” which is how Hegel understood culture (Bildung). The ability to adopt an aesthetic stance is part of cultured (gebildete) consciousness. For in aesthetic consciousness we find the features that distinguish cultured consciousness: rising to the universal, distancing from the particularity of immediate acceptance or rejection, respecting what does not correspond to one’s own expectation or preference.

We have discussed above the meaning of the concept of taste in this context. However, the unity of an ideal of taste that distinguishes a society and bonds its members together differs from that which constitutes the figure of aesthetic culture. Taste still obeys a criterion of content. What is considered valid in a society, its ruling taste, receives its stamp from the commonalities of social life. Such a society chooses and knows what belongs to it and what does not. Even its artistic interests are not arbitrary or in principle universal, but what artists create and what the society values belong together in the unity of a style of life and an ideal of taste.

In contrast, the idea of aesthetic cultivation — as we derived it from Schiller — consists precisely in precluding any criterion of content and in dissociating the work of art from its world. One expression of this dissociation is that the domain to which the aesthetically cultivated consciousness lays claim is expanded to become universal. Everything to which it ascribes “quality” belongs to it. It no longer chooses, because it is itself nothing, nor does it seek to be anything, on which choice could be based. Through reflection, aesthetic consciousness has passed beyond any determining and determinate taste, and itself represents a total lack of determinacy. It no longer admits that the work of art and its world belong to each other, but on the contrary, aesthetic consciousness is the experiencing (erlebende) center from which everything considered art is measured.

What we call a work of art and experience (erleben) aesthetically depends on a process of abstraction. By disregarding everything in which a work is rooted (its original context of life, and the religious or secular function that gave it significance), it becomes visible as the “pure work of art.” In performing this abstraction, aesthetic consciousness performs a task that is positive in itself. It shows what a pure work of art is, and allows it to exist in its own right. I call this “aesthetic differentiation.”

Whereas a definite taste differentiates — i.e., selects and rejects — on the basis of some content, aesthetic differentiation is an abstraction that selects only on the basis of aesthetic quality as such. It is performed in the self-consciousness of “aesthetic experiences.” Aesthetic experience (Erlebnis) is directed towards what is supposed to be the work proper — what it ignores are the extra-aesthetic elements that cling to it, such as purpose, function, the significance of its content. These elements may be significant enough inasmuch as they situate the work in its world and thus determine the whole meaningfulness that it originally possessed. But as art the work must be distinguished from all that. It practically defines aesthetic consciousness to say that it differentiates what is aesthetically intended from everything that is outside the aesthetic sphere. It abstracts from all the conditions of a work’s accessibility. Thus this is a specifically aesthetic kind of differentiation. It distinguishes the aesthetic quality of a work from all the elements of content that induce us to take up a moral or religious stance towards it, and presents it solely by itself in its aesthetic being.