Abstract
The name of Karl Heinrich Heydenreich (1764-1801), a former professor of philosophy at the University of Leipzig, is mentioned in the final part of Ernst Stöckmann's book Anthropologische Ästhetik: Philosophie, Psychologie und ästhetische Theorie der Emotionen im Diskurs der Aufklärung (2009) among other authors, whose works in Stöckmann's view represent a tendency of the late 18th century German aesthetics towards a "science of feeling" centred around the empirical study of sense perception and emotion, and programmatically op posed to Immanuel Kant's transcendental account of aesthetics. This characteristic, however, applies only partially to Heydenreich's aesthetic thought.
Although his most comprehensive book on the subject, System der Aesthetik (1790) shared some basic assumptions with the empirical discourse of anthropological aesthetics, especially the focus on "ästhetische Empfindungen" (aesthetic sensations/feelings), he was at the same time a passionate adherent of Kant's transcendental philosophy and attempted to incorporate the issue of aesthetic appreciation of art and nature into its conceptual framework. This even shortly before Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft had been published.
My analysis of Heydenreich's key aesthetic concept of "Empfindsamkeit" (sensibility) will reveal how much this endeavour depended above all on Kant's ethical concept of the a priori derived feeling of respect as well as on Kant's overall conception of reason as a faculty endowed with its own essential interests.