Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb (1714–62)

3. Tensions within Baumgarten’s system

The value that Baumgarten assigned to the aesthetic produced some tensions within his system. His ideal was knowledge, and the goal of knowledge is to build a science. So Baumgarten set out to create a science of the sensate. But he also recognized that the rational, conceptual distinctness which he took to characterize knowledge is antithetical to the confused, indistinct, sensible impressions and images on which the aesthetic depends. So the more scientific aesthetics becomes, the more it is in danger of ceasing to be aesthetic. The incompatibility of the rational and aesthetic realms (1735: 42) exposes the inconsistency between Baumgarten’s goal of pure knowledge and his defence of sensate discourse. The classical way to resolve this inconsistency was to leave the aesthetic behind as one progressed up the ladder of consciousness. Baumgarten continued to adhere to that classical model in which aesthetics is the product of a lower faculty and is limited to a helping role, but he also separated and gave independence to sensate representations, which suggests that there are simply two different forms of knowledge.

Two themes in Baumgarten’s work illustrate how the tension between reason and sensibility arose and how he tried, unsuccessfully, to resolve them. First, Baumgarten’s appeals to sensation are essentially quantitative. Consider an instance of sensate discourse. It will be more or less aesthetic depending on its extensive clarity, determinateness and specificity. All of these characteristics are consistent with, and in fact require, confused or indistinct representations, since the discourse would cease to be sensate if it became distinct. The standard of judgment is aesthetic perfection. The aim of the aesthetic is the perfection of sensitive cognition as such; that is also what is meant by beauty (1750: 14). Baumgarten was led to this quantitative standard because it was consistent with his rational epistemology, which was based on completeness. (Quantity in this sense is not inconsistent with simplicity as long as the quantitative impressions are united by a single theme or object.) But while his aesthetics is based on sensibility, it is not based on feeling. So while Baumgarten recognized the close connection between sensate impressions and pleasure or pain, he had no way of incorporating those qualitative impressions into his epistemological scheme.

A second theme in Baumgarten’s aesthetics is the requirement for thematic unity and order. The basis for order is the connection of impressions and images (1735: 62ff). The operative principle of connection is sufficient reason, and connections are themselves part of the observable order of indistinct representations. So despite his defence of the sensible realm, Baumgarten was still the disciple of Leibniz in holding that what gave order to sense data was a principle of reason which on Baumgarten’s system was external to the data itself. He could forge a unity only by appealing to connections recognized by the mind but present between the sensate impressions. In spite of his desire to found a new science of aesthetics, Baumgarten could only appeal to a priori principles and try to find them reflected in his new aesthetic realm. He thus failed to resolve the tension between his rationalist epistemology and the new realm of science he had defined.