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Central to modernity is the idea that certain perceptual experiences are worth having for their own sake, even if they do not directly serve any moral, political or cognitive aims. Aesthetics emerged in the eighteenth century as a theory of such experiences, and among them especially of the beautiful and the sublime. It soon became increasingly concerned with questions regarding the significance of art as a privileged realm of human production and experience. In the German-language intellectual lineage that begins with Kant, aesthetics moved from the margins of theoretical attention to its very center, where it could engage with some of the most pressing dilemmas of modernity. We read excerpts from relevant theoretical texts (Kant, Schiller, the early Romantics, Hegel) as well as texts that perform model cases of aesthetic reflection in relation to concrete works of art (Lessing, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Adorno).