Born at Ludwigsburg as the son of a clergyman, Vischer was educated at Tübinger Stift, and began life in his father's profession. He became Privatdozent in aesthetics and German literature at his old university in 1835, was advanced to extraordinary professor two years later, and was appointed to full professor in 1844. Due to his outspoken inaugural address he was suspended for two years by the Württemberg government. In this enforced leisure he wrote the first two volumes of his Aesthetik, oder Wissenschaft des Schönen (1846), the fourth and last volume of which did not appear till 1857.

Vischer threw himself heartily into the great German political movement of 1848 - 49, and shared the disappointment of patriotic democrats at its failure. In 1855 he became professor at Zürich. In 1866, his fame being now established, he was invited back to Germany with a professorship at Tübingen combined with a post at the Polytechnikum of Stuttgart. He died at Gmunden on 14 September 1887.

Vischer was not an original thinker, and his monumental Aesthetik, in spite of industry and learning, has not the higher qualities of success. He attempts the hopeless task of explaining art by the Hegelian dialectic. Starting with the definition of beauty as "the idea in the form of limited appearance," he goes on to develop the various elements of art (the beautiful, sublime and comic), and the various forms of art (plastic art, music and poetry) by means of the Hegelian antitheses -- form and content, objective and subjective, inner conflict and reconciliation. The shape of the work also is Hegelian, consisting of short highly technical paragraphs containing the main argument, followed by detailed explanations printed in different type.

Still, Vischer had a thorough knowledge of every branch of art (except music). Much valuable material is buried in his volumes.

In later life Vischer moved considerably away from Hegelianism, and adopted the conceptions of sensuous completeness and cosmic harmony as criteria of beauty; but he never found time to rewrite his great book. His own work as a literary artist is of high quality; vigorous, imaginative and thoughtful without academic technicality.