Feeling in Enlightenment Aesthetics

Feeling in Enlightenment Aesthetics JEFFREYBARNOUW Aesthetics, in the broad and loose sense of theory about art or natural beauty, may have existed since Plato, but it was not conceived as a discipline or field in its own right until the eighteenth century. Earlier anticipations of this sort of inquiry were in fact carried on within the framework of very different disciplines, ranging from theology to theo­ ries of certain technai (arts or crafts), including poetics and rhetoric. It is arguable that aesthetics —as a distinctive mode of inquiry —emerged only in the Enlightenment. In examining the role of feeling in the aesthetics of the Enlightenment, we shall consider a crucial factor defining and setting apart that charac­ teristic eighteenth-century mode of inquiry. Indeed, because of the emphasis on feeling, aesthetics was closely allied with, if not a constitu­ ent part of, psychology in a way that also distinguishes it from the later development of aesthetics. Moreover, if we look closely, we see that what many of the main writers on aesthetics in the eighteenth century meant by the term, and intended in their efforts, was something quite different from what we now understand by it. If aesthetics at its early stages referred at all to appreciating works of art or the beauty of nature, this was not the core of its concern but only a secondary non-essential appli­ cation. What it was really about, I shall argue, was the analysis, nurture 323 324 / BARNOUW and refinement of feeling, as a principal element of knowledge and of motivation or character. After an introduction which outlines the contours of this now largely forgotten sense of aesthetic, tracing it in writings of the philosopher who coined the term in the eighteenth century (A. G. Baumgarten) and one of the last philosophers to use it in something like the original sense in the twentieth (Santayana), there will be a section treating anticipations of aesthetics in the conception of sentiment adumbrated by Pascal and the Chevalier de Mere, followed by separate sections discussing the role assumed by feeling in the works of the Abbe Dubos, Hume, and J. G. Sulzer. These three writers are representative of Enlightenment aesthetics in France, Great Britain (Scotland) and Germany (Switzerland), but this essay makes no claim to “cover” the topic announced in the title. Other aspects of its full range will be touched on in the notes and in remarks inserted between the third and fourth sections, on the idea of aesthetic judgment as a “sense” akin to sight or hearing. I. Aesthetics as Concerned with Feeling The term was coined by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in the closing remarks of his 1735 dissertation to designate a would-be discipline that would do for sensuous thought what logic does for rational thinking. The choice of the term was based on the Greek aistheta, things sensed (or sensuously imagined, as Baumgarten adds) as opposed to noeta or things known.1 Aesthetics, defined as the science of sensuous cognition, was meant to study and to help perfect a kind of knowing distinct and quite different from the demonstrative knowledge that was the epistemological ideal of rationalist philosophy. Baumgarten begins the first part of his Aesthetica (1750) with a manyfaceted definition conveying the scope of the undertaking: “Aesthetics, as the theory of the liberal arts, lower-level epistemology [gnoseologia inferior], the art of thinking finely [literally, beautifully, ars pulchre cogitandi], and the art of the analogy of reason [i.e., the associative or natural-sign-based capacity of empirical inference common to man and higher animals], is the science of sensuous cognition.”2 I consider Baumgarten’s project in some detail in another context, showing its dependence on Leibniz’s more interesting and persuasive conception of sensation as confused representation.3 The only element I want to bring out here is the original idea of aesthetics as the discipline of aisthesis, Greek for sensation in the sense both of external sense percep­ tion and of inner sense or feeling. This meaning of the term is central for Feeling in Enlightenment Aesthetics / 325 later thinkers influenced by Leibniz, above all Schiller, and through him, the founder of American pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce

Aesthetics · Art · Beauty · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Everyday Aesthetics · Feeling · Literature · Poetics · Poetry · Rhetoric · The arts · Visual arts · Historical and Literary Studies · Philosophy

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