In March 2026, a three-day workshop was held at the Centre for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin, bringing together researchers from the University of Chicago and the BUA. It was funded under the Flexible Funds scheme and organised by Prof. Dr Matthias Haase (University of Chicago) and Prof. Dr Jutta Müller Tamm (FU).

The event was attended by a core group of 20 participants from Chicago and Berlin (as well as Potsdam and Leipzig). The workshop marks the start of a series of three meetings in which – taking classical German thought as a starting point – key contemporary issues will be addressed: Social Forms of Freedom and Technological Forms of Agency will follow in June/July 2026.

The discussions centred on the question of how the aesthetic and morphological concepts of the early 19th century – particularly those of Kant, Hegel and Goethe – relate to current debates on form theory and aesthetics, in which forms are treated not merely as structures of art or literature, but as general principles or patterns of order that operate equally in social, political and cultural spheres. Against this backdrop, various questions and issues were addressed: the temporality of form, the relationship between ethical and aesthetic judgement, the function of criticism (not least in the context of recent technological developments such as AI/LLMs), the relationship between practical knowledge and aesthetics, and form as a world-organising principle in relation to the perception of form. There was also discussion of the extent to which the models of freedom developed historically around 1800 in the field of aesthetics can be made productive for current concepts of freedom. This simultaneously built a bridge to the follow-up event, which will be dedicated to Social Forms of Freedom.