Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb (1714–62)

2. Aesthetic implications

A number of points in Baumgarten’s aesthetics bear on later developments in aesthetics. He focused on the affective side of perception. Sensate representations are ‘marked degrees of pleasure or pain’ (1735: 47). Stronger impressions are more poetic because their impressions are extensively clearer (1735: 27). On the other hand, Baumgarten distinguished aesthetic effects quantitatively, not qualitatively. It is not that feelings of pleasure are intrinsically valuable, but that more effects contribute to a greater perfection of the discourse. The closest that Baumgarten came to a qualitative aesthetic is in his discussion of ‘the wonderful’, which he characterized as an intuitive grasp of the inconceivable that is not present in perception (1735: 53). He was obviously trying to account for the sense of awe or wonder that is one of the classical marks of the sublime, yet he still explained it in essentially quantitative terms. The wonderful is an intuition of something that is not present. Hence it is an added element in the aesthetic. It depends on a mixture of the unfamiliar and the familiar, and since it cannot be traced to sense impressions, gives a scope to the imagination it would not otherwise have. However, it provides little justification for promoting feeling directly to prominence. Baumgarten is at the opposite extreme from Friedrich Schleiermacher in his regard for intuitive feeling.

Baumgarten also gave scope to the imagination in a way that reveals a contrast with later exaltations of imagination as the aesthetic faculty. The imagination is productive of fictions. But fictions are categorized in terms of possible worlds. True fictions are possible in this world. The imagination may go beyond what is actually perceived to what may very well be the case. When a painter poses figures to construct a tableau, his painting is a fiction, but a possible representation of an actual event. There could be such an event, and for all we know, this is how it may have looked. Fictions per se, however, are impossible in this world. They may be divided into those which are impossible in all worlds, called utopian fictions, and those which are impossible in this world but possible in some world, called heterocosmic fictions. There are no centaurs, and such combinations are biologically impossible. But they are nevertheless possible in some world, whereas a round square is not possible at all. Since utopian fictions cannot be represented, they cannot be aesthetically significant. But heterocosmic fictions can be represented, and in fact art depends on such fictions for its greater extensive clarity and determinateness. Baumgarten arrived at an implicit defence of fictions quite different from the earlier Aristotelian and subsequent Romantic defences, which are based on the positive emotional effects of the imagination. For Baumgarten, fictions and the imagination are needed because they extend the aesthetic beyond the reach of mere sense, without converting it into rational concepts.

Baumgarten thus remained firmly within the rationalist camp. The aesthetic is clearly a lower faculty: ‘Therefore things known are to be known by the superior faculty as the object of logic; things perceived [are to be known by the inferior faculty as the object] of the science of perception, or aesthetic’ (1735: 78). But Baumgarten expanded the scope of knowledge in interesting ways. He expected the aesthetic to be a science with its own logic, and in the final, fragmentary ‘Kollegium über die Ästhetik’, he acknowledged that sensate knowledge is the foundation of clarity and that the aesthetic must come to the aid of logic. The aesthetic is limited by its sensate representations and the imagination must be restricted in order to avoid licence, but within these limits the aesthetic is a legitimate source of a kind of knowledge. The standard remains rational distinctness, but while it is possible to mix distinct, conceptual elements with confused, perceptual elements in complex representations, the aesthetic is independent of the distinct conceptual forms. When conceptual forms dominate, one loses the aesthetic effects. The aesthetic may still be a lower form, but it is legitimate within its own realm, and Baumgarten came close to acknowledging that the aesthetic could be a clearer and more effective form of knowledge than a priori rational concepts for all but the most accomplished metaphysicians.