K. P. Moritz's case poetics: aesthetic autonomy reconsidered.

Karl Philipp Moritz was born in poverty in Lower Saxony in 1756, his early life marked by his suffering from illness, social inequalities, the emotional neglect of his parents, and, as readers of his autobiographical novel Anton Reiser will know, from sheer hunger.1 Despite these circumstances, Moritz later made a living as a teacher, journalist, and editor of several papers, and in 1789 he received a professorship in fine arts at the Royal Prussian Academy of Arts and Mechanical Sciences in Berlin without ever regarding himself as a fully-fledged member of the establishment.2 Although Moritz tackled many disciplines and professions during his short lifetime (he died of pulmonary consumption in 1793), two main strands in Moritz scholarship exist that rarely intersect.3 Scholars have tended to focus on Moritz in relation either to the history of psychiatry or to aesthetics, working either on his Magazine for Empirical Psychology, arguably the first European psychiatric magazine,4 or on his theory of beauty, crediting Moritz’s On the Creative Imitation of Beauty with the inauguration of aesthetic autonomy in the context of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment.5 It is as if, Janus-like, Moritz’s works looked two ways: unbiased observations and the extensive collection of facts in the pursuit of empirical sciences on the one side and, on the other, intellectual beauty, non-purposiveness, and artistic form. Historians of medicine, for instance, testify to the accuracy of Moritz’s descriptions of neuropsychiatric syndromes. They emphasize that the cases in Moritz’s Magazine for Empirical Psychology are written with such acuity that they permit “reliable diagnoses ... e.g. of aphasia and agraphia, ... portrayed with clear detail and ... usually free of any theoretical speculation.”6 Scholars within this research strand tend to reaffirm Moritz’s empiricism in the Magazine, his anti-theoretical editorial policy, and his prioritization of