Eugenio Coseriu: El problema del arte – Presentación y edición de un texto

Among the manuscripts and notes in the Coseriu Archive at the University of Tübingen, there are several ones dating probably from the first years of Coseriu’s activity in Montevideo in the 1950s that treat the “Problem of Art”, the philosophical issue of what art really is in its essence. Coseriu gave several talks on that subject, and in the archive we can find a series of notes that seem to have been the base for public presentations. We will present one of the most coherent ones in a transcription and with some comments. It can be said that El problema del arte is not only a coherent text on the essence of art but that it is also related to Coseriu’s thought in general: the problem of art is presented as a philosophical problem (what is art really?), it is discussed rejecting existing explanations and taking individual intuition as a starting point for explicit analysis and it is related to basic human universals we can also find in Coseriu’s theory of language such as the principle of creativity. This makes the text relevant not only for the history of aesthetics but also for the general conception Coseriu offers of different human activities.