| abstract | The discipline of aesthetics that was founded upon his term had for Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten
(1714-1762) largely been an aisthetics, as recent reconsiderations of Baumgarten’s presentation of
aesthetics have shown: a theory of aistheta, of things perceived (phenomena) and of sensate
thinking. Before the rise of transcendental philosophy and philosophical systems, Baumgarten
highlighted the epistemological challenges of singular phenomena – of that which appears to the
senses and does so as ‘individual object’ (individuo) (Baumgarten 2007, 538), always exceeding or
escaping our understanding of it by abstraction and conceptualization. A distinct idea of an object
can be achieved by the enumeration of its attributes, or its logical truth be found by subsuming its
particularity under general categories, but this comes at the cost of a loss, as Baumgarten notes in
the first volume of the Aesthetica, in the section entitled The absolute aesthetic striving for truth,
which discusses the difference between logical and what Baumgarten calls aestheticological truth
: ‘I believe indeed that it should be completely evident to philosophers that all the
specific formal perfection contained in cognition and logical truth had to be bought dearly by a
great and significant loss of material perfection. For what else is abstraction than a loss?
The example Baumgarten gives is that of the loss of material substance when carving a marble ball
from an irregular marble block. One pays for the beautiful round shape of the ball, its ‘higher value’
, by loosing a significant amount of material. This mutual dependence of the logical
transparency of noeta and the obscure intransparency of aistheta – exemplified in the marble block
turning marble ball – comes to bear on all levels of Baumgarten’s sketch of aesthetics. Logical
clarity comes about only by a decline in material richness or at the cost of dissecting the complex,
multidimensional, rich impression of the whole. Aware and appreciative of this complexity as
another dimension of cognition (cf. Baumgarten 1983, 15; §530), only at the expense of which
logical clarity and conceptual distinctness can be achieved, Baumgarten lists, in the prolegomena of
the Aesthetica, as one of the tasks of aesthetics to ‘enhance the perfection of cognition beyond the
limits of the distinctly cognizable’ (idem, 13). Aesthetics was to improve what he calls ‘beautiful
thinking’ (idem, 11) as a way to cognize and know phenomena, as a way to arrive at an
aestheticological truth that differs from ‘that abstract truth about the most general things’ (idem,
455). This was to be one of the four aspects of his new discipline, which §1 of the prolegomena lists
as follows: AESTHETICS (as theory of the liberal arts, as gnoseology of the lower faculties, as the
art of beautiful thinking, and as the art of thinking analogous to reason) is the science of sensate
cognition. |
