(b Koblenz, Jan 25, 1776; d Munich, Jan 29, 1848). German writer, philosopher and teacher. As a youth he was a radical, seeking to reconcile liberal French Revolutionary ideas with his Rhenish nationalist impulses. From 1797 he was active in the Koblenz Patriotic Club, which promoted the idea of an independent ‘Cis-Rhenish Republic’ under French protection, but after a visit to Paris in 1799 as the representative of Koblenz, he became disillusioned with politics and took up teaching at his old school, the Koblenz Gymnasium. In his first book, Aphorismen über die Kunst (1802), Görres tried to create a rational framework by which all art and science could be described as a system of opposites. He postulated a philosophical system based on dualities: colour and line, harmony and melody, the sentimental and the naive. It was in the reconciling of these opposites that he saw the process by which art is created. Despite its immaturity, the Aphorismen marked the beginning of Görres’s appreciation of the art of the Middle Ages in preference to the ‘malaise of this present century’, and it heralded his growing disenchantment with the Enlightenment and his interest in Romanticism. This interest was reinforced when he was appointed to teach at Heidelberg University (...