Early Modern Aesthetics 1783482133, 9781783482139

Citation preview

Early Modern Aesthetics

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Global Aesthetic Research Series editor: Joseph J. Tanke, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Hawaii The Global Aesthetic Research series publishes cutting-edge research in the field of aesthetics. It contains books that explore the principles at work in our encounters with art and nature, that interrogate the foundations of artistic, literary and cultural criticism, and that articulate the theory of the discipline’s central concepts. Early Modern Aesthetics by J. Colin McQuillan Foucault on the Arts and Letters: Perspectives for the 21st Century Edited by Catherine M. Soussloff

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Early Modern Aesthetics

J. Colin McQuillan

London • New York

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd.is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright  2016 by J. Colin McQuillan All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-7834-8211-5 PB 978-1-7834-8212-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McQuillan, J. Colin. Early modern aesthetics / J. Colin McQuillan. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-78348-211-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-78348-212-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-78348-213-9 (electronic) 1. Aesthetics, European—17th century. 2. Aesthetics, Modern—17th century. 3. Aesthetics—History. I. Title. BH221.E852M37 2015 111⬘.8509409032—dc23 2015034330

 ⬁ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Preface

ix

Introduction

1

1. Ancients and Moderns A Second Renaissance Promoting Modernism Defending Antiquity Early Modernism Notes

17 18 22 27 32 35

2. The Fine Arts Five Major Arts National Traditions Systems of the Arts Philosophical Systems Notes

39 40 48 53 60 63

3. The Critique of Taste Varieties of Criticism Physiology and Psychology Society and History Genius and Taste, Critique and Science Notes

71 72 77 84 90 94

v

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4. Aesthetics A New Science Changing the Subject The Philosophy of Art The Embarrassed Etc. Notes

101 103 109 116 122 124

5. Early Modern Aesthetics Now Artistic Modernism The Latest Laocoo¨n Historicism and Naturalism Aesthetics Now Notes

135 135 138 143 148 152

Bibliography

157

Index

179

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Acknowledgments

This book has its origins in Atlanta, Georgia, at Emory University, during the academic year 2009–2010. I was finishing my dissertation in fall 2009, but I decided to audit the aesthetics seminar Rudolf Makkreel was teaching that semester. Rudi was my dissertation director, and it would be my last opportunity to take a course with him, so I jumped at the chance. The next semester I participated in a directed study on early modern aesthetics with Julia Haas and Ursula Goldenbaum. I first read several of the texts discussed in this book with Julia under Ursula’s guidance. The account of early modern aesthetics I present in this book began to take shape the following summer, when Joseph Tanke and I started editing The Bloomsbury Anthology of Aesthetics (2012). Joseph and I have known each other since 2003, when we were introduced by the librarians at the Bapst Art Library at Boston College. We have been friends ever since. In addition to thanking Rudi, Ursula, and Joseph for everything they have taught me, I would like to thank Janet Dizinno, dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at St. Mary’s University, and Megan Mustain, formerly the chair of the Philosophy Department and currently interim dean of the graduate school, for their efforts to support my research. The Edward and Linda Speed Faculty Development Grant they awarded me in summer 2013 made it possible for me to travel to Beijing to teach a graduate seminar with Joseph at Peking University. Our host at the Research Center for Aesthetics and Aesthetic Education, Peng Feng, opened my eyes to the wide world of contemporary art in China. During the same trip, I benefited from conversations with Pan vii

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Gongkai at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and Alex Gao at the Today Art Museum. I-wen Huang and Yung Ting Wan were great teachers, too. When I came back, I was determined to write the book on early modern aesthetics that had been bouncing around in my head. The reviewers for Rowman & Littlefield offered very helpful advice on the proposal. My editor, Sarah Campbell, made the text fit to print. Finally, I would like to thank my family, friends, and colleagues for their support. My parents, James and Eileen McQuillan, have encouraged me to think and write since I was very young. I am also grateful for my sister and brother-in-law, Lauren and Nathan Frank, who share our parents’ love of learning. Nate Holdren, Christina Nickel-Somers, and Tzuchien Tho remain good friends, even though we’ve been separated by geography for more than a decade now. Alex Cooper, Chris Edelman, Gina Helfrich, and Matthew McAndrew have been friends and interlocutors since graduate school. I am very lucky that Chris and I both wound up in the same city and that Gina is now in Austin. My friends in San Antonio and my colleagues at St. Mary’s have made living in Texas much less terrifying than I thought it would be. For this I would especially like to thank Andrew Brei, Steve Calogero, Eric Chelstrom, Erin Cusack, Rose Mary Gallegos, James Greenaway, Chip Hughes, Mahera Jeevanjee, Lorelle Lamascus, Nathalie Morasch, Aaron Moreno, Wayne Owens, Judith Norman, Ito Romo, Robert Skipper, and Alistair Welchman.

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Preface

One could read this book as an introduction to early modern aesthetics or an overview of philosophical discussions about beauty, art, literature, and criticism during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But I should warn readers unfamiliar with the subject matter that this book is neither a disinterested summary of contemporary views on early modern aesthetics nor a complete survey of everything philosophers thought or wrote about matters of taste during the early modern period. Introductions often summarize the views that are currently dominant in a field. One reason I have decided not to adopt this approach has to do with the content of much of the scholarly literature in the English language. My footnotes and bibliography show there are many excellent works on early modern aesthetics. I have learned a great deal from these works and relied upon them at many points in the pages that follow. Still, I am concerned that the scholarly literature overemphasizes the British tradition, especially figures like Hutcheson and Hume. I am also concerned that the literature tends to ignore French authors, with the possible exception of Rousseau, and German authors prior to Kant. I find the British tradition less impressive than other scholars, though I am fond of Addison, Shaftesbury, and Swift. I am convinced that French authors like Boileau, Dacier, Diderot, Du Bos, and Perrault should not be overlooked. And I am inclined to think Lessing and Mendelssohn are just as important as Kant, especially in discussions of art and aesthetics. As a result, my view of aesthetics in the early modern period differs from the one that dominates the field in significant ways. ix

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There are also methodological reasons I have avoided the approach other introductions take. I am afraid much of the scholarly literature lacks a clear understanding of what aesthetics was and was not during the early modern period. The anachronisms one finds in this literature have their advantages. They can make the past seem more familiar and more relatable than it otherwise would be. They can also illuminate aspects of historical works we would not have recognized if we had adopted a more historical perspective. Still, these anachronisms can mislead us into thinking the past was the same as the present. And that can make us overlook what is most interesting about the past: the ways it differs from the present. My primary concern in this book is to avoid these detrimental forms of anachronism; provide a more authentic account of the history of aesthetics than is found in much of the scholarly literature; and separate philosophical discussions of beauty, art, literature, and criticism during the early modern period from the part of philosophy that came to be called aesthetics, so each of these discussions can be given their due by philosophers. This book could also serve as an overview of aesthetics during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but some words of caution are appropriate here, too. One reason is that I have discussed many things that are not directly related to aesthetics, understood in the sense in which the term was used during the early modern period. It would be a much shorter book if I had not done so, but the discussions of philology, art, criticism, and taste that I have included provide important context for understanding early modern aesthetics. I thought it would be wrong to exclude them, because understanding what aesthetics was not is just as important as understanding what it was. I emphasize the difference between philological critique, reflections on the arts, the critique of taste, and aesthetics because I think this is the best way to understand aesthetics in the early modern period. Another reason I am not entirely comfortable characterizing this book as an overview concerns what I have excluded rather than what I have included. Necessity has led me to be selective about what I have chosen to discuss and the length at which I have discussed it. It is impossible to give a complete account of everything that was thought and written on a subject in any historical period, much less a period two centuries long, during which some of the most important philosophers in history published their most important works. Within the constraints

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of this relatively short book, I have tried to be as broad and inclusive as I could be, yet I am painfully aware that the breadth and inclusiveness I have achieved are very narrowly circumscribed. In this book I have discussed a number of figures and works that are not discussed in the scholarly literature, but the figures and works I discuss are still very homogenous. Almost all of them are white European men, so I am afraid I have not achieved the kind of inclusiveness that is necessary to do justice to history. Although I think these concerns should be taken seriously, there is still a sense in which this work can serve as an introduction to and overview of early modern aesthetics. It is an introduction because it introduces readers to figures, works, and ideas with which they might not be familiar; provides context that may be helpful for understanding them; and suggests further avenues the reader might explore. For art historians, literary critics, and other humanists, it can provide insight into the peculiar concerns that sometimes manifest themselves in philosophical aesthetics and related discussions during the early modern period. And it can provide philosophers with the historical context that is sometimes missing from discussions of early modern aesthetics in contemporary analytic and continental philosophy. I hope every reader will come away from this book with a sense that there are many interesting things to learn about aesthetics, philosophy, and the early modern period.

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Introduction

This introduction is meant to acquaint the reader with the period, the subject matter, and the structure of the book. The first section provides an overview of early modern philosophy, focusing on the relationship between philosophy, the scientific revolution, and the European Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The second notes the marginal status of aesthetics within contemporary academic philosophy and describes its emergence as a distinct part of philosophy during the eighteenth century. And the third contains an outline of subsequent chapters and a summary of their contents. The rest of the book explains, elaborates upon, and provides evidence for the claims advanced in these three sections. EARLY MODERN PHILOSOPHY The early modern period is defined differently in different disciplines. Art critics and literary historians sometimes use the phrase ‘‘early modern’’ to refer to the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, when painters began to embrace abstraction and writers experimented with new literary forms. Historians of philosophy tend to identify the early modern period with the scientific revolution and the European Enlightenment, which took place during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some historians take the early modern period to begin as early as the fifteenth century, but we need not concern ourselves too much about when modernity really began. This question probably cannot be answered definitively, because modernity is 1

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such a contested concept. Some parties want to claim the title of modernity for the political, philosophical, scientific, and religious movements they support, while others want to denounce modernity for undermining the values and traditions they hold dear. The definition of modernity each party employs reflects its interests, and the criteria we use to distinguish historical periods are never neutral.1 Instead of treating periods as if they were accurate representations of historical realities, we should admit that they are fictions we use to make generalizations about history and to classify different kinds of phenomena. Sometimes these fictions obscure more than they reveal, in which case they should be rejected. In other cases, they are useful heuristic devices that allow us to see something we would have otherwise overlooked. The periodization employed by the historians of philosophy is not perfect, but it is helpful in this respect.2 The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century is an important point of reference in the history of early modern philosophy, because philosophy and science were closely related at the time. Many early modern philosophers were scientists, and many early modern scientists were philosophers. It would be impossible to list all of the early modern philosopher-scientists, but notable examples are Galileo Galilei, Thomas Hobbes, Rene´ Descartes, Thomas Boyle, Isaac Newton, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The story of their achievements used to take the form of a triumphalist narrative praising modern philosophy and science for breaking the authority of scripture, refuting Ptolemaic astronomy and Aristotelian physics, rejecting the dogmatism of Scholastic metaphysics, and embracing reason and experience.3 In the second half of the twentieth century, interdisciplinary studies in the history and philosophy of science began to qualify the triumphalism of that narrative. Thomas Kuhn’s study of the rise of Copernican astronomy is an important example, because it showed the scientific revolution did not simply arise from the discovery of a new set of facts.4 Nor was the superiority of modern science immediately apparent to every reasonable and well-informed observer. In fact, the changes that took place in scientific knowledge and practice during the seventeenth century were influenced by a number of factors, including, in addition to new facts, theories, experimental procedures, technological developments, institutional structures, and social transformations.5 Historians of philosophy have started to recognize the significance of these factors, leading to

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broader recognition that early modern philosophers were men and women of their times. They have also started to develop more sophisticated interpretations of the philosophical positions early modern philosophers and scientists defended. I would like to suggest the latter is the result of the former to at least some extent. By placing early modern philosophy and science in their historical context, taking seriously major and minor works by major and minor figures, and reconstructing the debates in which early modern philosophers and scientists were engaged, the reasons that they made certain claims become clearer, and our understanding increases.6 Even when they have to do with matters with which most of us no longer concern ourselves—the nature of substance, the existence of innate ideas, the possibility of action at a distance, and so forth—understanding the context in which they were debated helps us distinguish which issues are contingent features of philosophical history and which problems are more fundamental to philosophy itself.7 Far from diminishing the achievements of early modern philosophers and scientists, contextualism has made our understanding of the period more accurate, more truthful, and more philosophical. Contextualism has also changed our understanding of the eighteenth century and the European Enlightenment. Champions of the Enlightenment used to appeal to the same kind of triumphalist narratives as the defenders of the scientific revolution. During the Enlightenment, they would say, arguments from rational self-interest challenged traditional conceptions of natural law, the power of the state was justified by social contract rather than divine right, the importance of human rights and individual liberties began to be recognized, the first principles of modern economics began to be formulated, and the exhaustion of the religious wars gave rise to a new era of toleration.8 Philosophers played an important role in promoting these ideas, but their history is more complicated than the triumphalists suggest. Rational self-interest was used to justify egoism, social contract theory propped up absolutist monarchies, the rights and dignity of slaves and indigenous peoples were denied by Europeans, labor was exploited as the Industrial Revolution got under way, and religious toleration was often extended only to members of other Christian denominations. Investigations of the dark side of the Enlightenment produced some very strident criticism during the twentieth century. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno even suggested the Enlightenment was responsible for the Holocaust in their

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book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/1947).9 Instead of following these critics to such implausible extremes, it is perhaps better to place the Enlightenment and its ideals in their historical context. While it is true that the Enlightenment was not as enlightened as it should have been, it is also the source of many of the values that are used to criticize it—modern conceptions of freedom and equality, impartiality and fairness, which are difficult to separate from the legacy of the Enlightenment. When we understand the context in which these values emerged, I am confident we can escape what Michel Foucault called ‘‘the simplistic and authoritarian alternative’’ of being for or against the enlightenment.’’10 This sketch of early modern philosophy is far from complete. I have not said anything about the differences between the rationalist and empiricist traditions and their implications for philosophical and scientific method; I have not mentioned the debates about syllogistic reasoning and the place of mathematics in philosophy; nor have I discussed the different conceptions of force and motion that philosophers and scientists employed. I have downplayed the debates about the nature of mind and body and the possibility of their interaction; I have ignored the scandalous rise of materialism, atomism, and skepticism; and I seem to have dismissed the insights early modern philosophers had about the role the passions play in morality and social life. Readers interested in these subjects will find I discuss several of them in later chapters of the book, though I am afraid I have not been able to give all of them the space and time they deserve. For subjects I have not been able to discuss in subsequent chapters, I can only recommend that interested readers consult one of the excellent introductions, guides, and companions to early modern philosophy that are now available.11 AESTHETICS In the twenty-first century aesthetics is a distinct but relatively marginal part of academic philosophy. A 2014 survey by Anna Christina Ribeiro, published in the blog Aesthetics for Birds, found there were only fourteen specialists in aesthetics in the top fifty philosophy departments in the United States.12 Of the 2,922 faculty positions in philosophy advertised on the website philjobs in 2013–2014, only 7 (0.2 percent) mentioned aesthetics; 3 listed aesthetics as a desired area of specialization,

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while 4 more listed aesthetics as a desired area of competence.13 And of the 3,226 respondents to a 2009 survey by philpapers, only 119 (3.6 percent) listed aesthetics as one of their areas of specialization.14 A mere 53 respondents (1.6 percent) listed aesthetics as their primary area of specialization.15 These numbers leave little doubt that aesthetics remains at the margins of contemporary academic philosophy. One might wonder why aesthetics is not considered a core area of academic philosophy, since the questions aesthetics asks go back to the very beginnings of the Western philosophical tradition.16 Ancient Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle wrote extensively about subjects that would now be considered part of aesthetics: the nature of beauty, the relation between the form and content of poetry and music, the standards of artistic imitation and representation, the principles of critical judgment, and so forth.17 The Stoic Chrysippus became famous as a logician, but he also wrote works on the best ways to read and write poetry. Plotinus, the Neoplatonist, speculated that ugliness was caused by the matter that encrusts the soul.18 And a few years before the Vandals sacked Rome, Augustine devoted his first book to the difference between absolute and relative beauty.19 During the Middle Ages, Christian theologians like Pseudo-Dionysius and Muslim philosophers like al-Farabi came to regard beauty as one of the names for the divine.20 Thomas Aquinas maintained that the beautiful and the good differed ‘‘logically’’ and ‘‘in aspect,’’ but were ultimately the same.21 Descartes, who is often regarded as the father of modern philosophy, wrote his first book on music. Hume listed criticism, along with logic, morals, and politics, as one of the four sciences containing ‘‘almost every thing, which it can any way import us to be acquainted with, or which can tend either to the improvement or ornament of the human mind.’’22 And Kant wrote about aesthetics in a work he considered the culmination and conclusion of his critical philosophy.23 How can a subject to which so many great philosophers have devoted so much attention be pushed to the margins of the discipline? Some would argue that aesthetics remains at the margins of the discipline because beauty is relative, and art is simply not as important as the subjects with which the core areas of contemporary academic philosophy are concerned. Common sense might endorse these arguments; indeed, they seem to come naturally to many students. But we should

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remember that disagreement about the nature of beauty—between individuals, across cultures, throughout history—does not actually prove beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Demonstrating that beauty really is relative turns out to be much more challenging than many of the critics of aesthetics suppose.24 Against the view that aesthetics is concerned with matters of incidental significance, it should be noted that a report by The European Fine Art Foundation (TEFAF) found the global art market recorded almost $66 billion in sales in 2013.25 Revenues from art sales in China have increased more than 900 percent in the last ten years.26 And as globalization and technological development make goods cheaper to produce and differences in quality become more marginal, aesthetic considerations have also become an important factor in business and economics—the success of Apple computers is a noteworthy example.27 Architects and urban planners have realized that good design increases the effectiveness of learning environments, the comfort of housing developments, and the safety of communities.28 These might seem like base concerns for philosophers who spend their time debating about the one, the true, and the good, yet the significance of the beautiful cannot be denied. Aesthetics matters in the real world. In order to understand the current state of aesthetics and the reasons it remains at the margins of academic philosophy, it is helpful to return to its beginnings and consider its history. The origins of aesthetics are actually more recent than many philosophers realize. Aesthetics did not become a distinct part of philosophy until the middle of the eighteenth century, when Alexander Baumgarten declared it to be ‘‘the science of sensible cognition’’ in his Reflections on Poetry (1735), Metaphysics (1739), and Aesthetics (1750/1758).29 Even after Baumgarten’s announcement, the status and the object of his new science remained very much in dispute. In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), Kant reproached Baumgarten for thinking he could bring ‘‘the critical estimation of the beautiful under principles of reason,’’ since ‘‘the putative rules or criteria are merely empirical as far as their sources are concerned, and can therefore never serve as a priori rules according to which our judgment of taste must be directed.’’30 During the 1820s Hegel began his Lectures on Aesthetics (1835) by noting that his title was not really appropriate for the subject matter he would discuss.31 Hegel argues that Baumgarten’s aesthetics is primarily concerned with sensation and feeling, while his lectures are devoted to the philosophy

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of fine art, which rises above sensation and feeling to express the idea of artistic beauty, which Hegel called ‘‘the ideal.’’ Kant and Hegel’s concerns about the status and object of Baumgarten’s aesthetics laid the groundwork for twentieth-century debates in which philosophers argued about whether aesthetics was concerned with certain kinds of feelings, attitudes, or experiences; whether works of art are really distinct kinds of objects and what their distinguishing features might be; and whether aesthetics can really be as rigorous as metaphysics, epistemology, logic, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of science.32 The recent emergence of aesthetics as a part of philosophy poses a difficult historiographical problem for a book on early modern aesthetics.33 How are we to understand discussions of subjects that are now considered part of aesthetics, but which took place before aesthetics became a part of philosophy? One could simply ignore the fact that aesthetics did not become a distinct part of philosophy until the eighteenth century and treat every discussion of any subject currently associated with aesthetics as if aesthetics already existed when that discussion took place. This was a standard way of dealing with the history of philosophy in the Anglo-American tradition in the twentieth century, but it has some rather obvious shortcomings.34 To suggest that Plato and Aristotle, Pseudo-Dionysius and Al-Farabi, Aquinas and Descartes were all engaged in the same kind of undertaking as contemporary academic philosophers, and to evaluate their works using the same standards we apply to our contemporaries, is inappropriate because it is anachronistic. There may be times when anachronisms are useful in philosophy, but that does not change the fact that they are false accounts of what philosophers from different historical periods thought, the positions they maintained, and how their arguments worked.35 Ignoring historical context is like ignoring the language philosophers use to make their arguments; unless you pay close attention to what they said, and take seriously the context in which they said it, you simply cannot understand what they meant. Ignoring historical context leads to serious errors for the same reasons ignoring language leads to misunderstanding.36 Another approach tries to avoid these errors by doing without a clear definition of aesthetics. Instead of making assumptions about what aesthetics is and imposing them on the past, this approach tries to let history be its guide.37 Those who adopt this approach acknowledge that

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Plato’s discussion of poetry and music in the Republic (ca. 380 BCE) is a part of his account of the education of the guardians of a luxurious city, rather than a contribution to aesthetic theory.38 They also admit Aquinas’s claim that goodness and beauty only differ logically is a metaphysical claim about the nature of the transcendentals and not a claim about the relationship between aesthetic and moral value as we understand it today.39 And they have to accept that Hume’s essay ‘‘Of the Standard of Tate’’ has no place in the history of aesthetics, because British philosophers did not recognize aesthetics as a part of philosophy during the eighteenth century.40 The shortcomings of this approach should already be apparent. If we suspend judgment about the nature of aesthetics, then we have no reason to treat ancient and medieval discussions of art and beauty as part of its history. We also have to exclude early modern debates about the merits of modern art, the relations between the fine arts, the standards of critical judgment, and the principles of good taste, since many of them took place outside of philosophy, or in different parts of philosophy, before aesthetics emerged as a distinct part of philosophy.41 History simply cannot lead us to the conclusion that these debates belong to the history of aesthetics if aesthetics did not exist when they took place. It seems that the most one could say without begging the question is that these debates took place shortly before or at about the same time as aesthetics became a part of philosophy and have some things in common with what came to be known as aesthetics. Few of those who adopt the second approach are satisfied with such modest claims, but they are the only ones consistent with this approach. A third approach avoids the anachronisms of the first approach and the limitations of the second approach by dealing with discussions of subjects currently associated with aesthetics in the historical contexts in which they appeared, whether or not they were recognized as a part of aesthetics at the time. Instead of demanding that history conform to our ways of thinking or abandoning any sense of what we are investigating, this approach challenges us to discover how the subjects we now associate with aesthetics were understood in different historical periods and let that guide our investigations. Historicists deny such an understanding is possible, because they hold that we cannot escape the historical moment in which we live and the limits it imposes upon our consciousness. Just as ancient Greek philosophers cannot be held responsible for

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their ignorance of modern physics, the historicist does not think we can understand the way philosophers thought in antiquity, in the Middle Ages, or in the early modern period, which is now more than three hundred years behind us. However, it is not clear that the past is really as unintelligible as the historicists make it seem. Instead of regarding the present as the boundary of the understanding and the past as another world in which up could be down, black could be white, and everything could be the opposite of what it seems, the third approach challenges us to use the evidence and the best methods available to us to understand the past as well as possible—just like real historians. The difficulties of this approach are real, since it requires us to understand different periods in the history of philosophy on their own terms. Yet there is no reason to think that is impossible. One could argue it has to be done, because it is the only way to do justice to history. In this book I have adopted the third approach. The title—Early Modern Aesthetics—is ironic, since aesthetics was not recognized as a distinct part of philosophy for most of the period covered by this book. Even after the term was introduced by Baumgarten, and philosophers like Kant and Hegel began to question the status and object of the new science he proposed, it was not at all clear that the subjects that are now associated with aesthetics all belonged to the same part of philosophy. The subjects associated with aesthetics today were gradually incorporated into academic philosophy over the course of the last two hundred years. And many of the philosophers concerned with those issues simply forgot there was a time when they did not belong to the same part of philosophy and may not have been a part of philosophy at all. My suspicion is that aesthetics is not unusual in this respect. Similar histories could be written about other parts of contemporary philosophy, whether they are core areas or lie at the margins of the discipline. Understanding philosophy requires us to understand those histories and the way they affect our understanding of the present.

OVERVIEW AND OUTLINE In the previous section I argued that the late emergence of aesthetics as a part of philosophy poses a serious problem for any history of early modern aesthetics. It is simply not clear that discussions of subjects

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now associated with aesthetics really belonged to philosophy or to the same part of philosophy during the early modern period. I have argued against treating these discussions as part of aesthetics avant la lettre because that leads to anachronism. I have also suggested we may not be able to determine what belongs to the history of philosophical aesthetics without a clear definition of the field. In order to avoid these difficulties, I have decided to present the subjects that would later be incorporated into aesthetics in the context in which they appeared in the early modern period. That means several of the following chapters will deal with what might be called the ‘‘prehistory’’ of aesthetics: the period before Baumgarten announced his new science of aesthetics and philosophers like Kant and Hegel began debating its status and object.42 Chapter 1 (‘‘Ancients and Moderns’’) should be regarded as a contribution to the prehistory of aesthetics. It shows how modern art and literature came to be distinguished from their ancient and medieval predecessors at the end of the seventeenth century. By considering the development of classical scholarship in the early modern period and the picture it painted of ancient art and literature, the reasons some poets and dramatists rejected ancient models and tried to surpass them during the seventeenth century, and the arguments the defenders of the ancients employed to establish their superiority over the moderns, we will see how similar debates about modern art and literature were to debates about the novelty of early modern science and philosophy. Philosophers, scientists, and poets appealed to the same values and employed the same kinds of arguments to distinguish themselves from their predecessors, confirming that a concern for ‘‘modernism’’ unites discussions of early modern philosophy, science, and art. The attempt to bring order to the arts by distinguishing and classifying the techniques artists used, the media in which they worked, and the effects they produced was the subject of important debates during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The first section of chapter 2 (‘‘The Fine Arts’’) surveys the literature on each of the five major arts— painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, and music—in order to show how intense interest in each of these arts was during the early modern period. Subsequent sections emphasize the attempts early modern philosophers made to establish systematic connections among the arts. Sometimes these connections were based on emerging conceptions of the different national traditions of France, England, and Germany and

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the differences among their climate, geography, and population. In other cases, philosophers appealed to rational principles in order to create philosophical systems of arts. Finally, there were those who sought to incorporate the arts into modern general philosophical systems and systems of the sciences, establishing connections that would help to order human knowledge and promote its progress in the arts, as well as in philosophy and science. Chapter 3 (‘‘The Critique of Taste’’) shows that the critique of taste emerged out of early modern philology and literary criticism as an attempt to formulate general principles for judgments of taste. For theological and moral reasons, some early modern philosophers maintained that we possess a special, inner sense that allows us to appreciate the beauty of God’s creation. Others tried to derive the principles of taste from a mechanistic account of human physiology. Still others believed the standards of taste could be derived from human psychology. They often based their account of taste on the faculty of imagination and the association of ideas. Finally, there were those who deferred to the social authority of those acknowledged to have good taste and the historical context of their judgments. Each tried to explain how legitimate distinctions between good and bad taste could be established, but they had to rely on different sciences and parts of philosophy for their principles, since aesthetics did not yet exist. Subsequent debates about whether the distinctions they proposed could be considered philosophical or scientific are addressed at the end of the chapter. We move from prehistory to history proper in chapter 4 (‘‘Aesthetics’’), beginning with Baumgarten’s announcement of his new science and its popularization by Georg Friedrich Meier. Although the name Baumgarten gave to his new science is still used by contemporary philosophers, this chapter shows how different his understanding of aesthetics is from contemporary conceptions of aesthetics. The first section of the chapter highlights those differences by reconstructing the outlines of Baumgarten’s aesthetics. Subsequent sections focus on the transformations of aesthetics through Kant’s and Hegel’s criticisms of Baumgarten. These criticisms are particularly interesting, because Kant and Hegel appropriated the name of Baumgarten’s new science, while rejecting the conception of aesthetics he defended. Kant and Hegel substituted their own approaches to aesthetic judgment and the philosophy of art for the one Baumgarten had proposed. The last section of the

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chapter shows that debates about the nature, status, and object of aesthetics continued throughout the twentieth century, when philosophers tried to determine whether aesthetics was concerned with special classes of objects, properties, experiences, attitudes, or institutions. The final chapter (‘‘Early Modern Aesthetics Now’’) returns to the subject matter of earlier chapters to argue that early modern questions about artistic modernism, the fine arts, the critique of taste, and aesthetics are still relevant today. The first section argues that the debate between ancients and moderns at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century can help us understand debates about modernism in philosophy and science, because they are all concerned with the same philosophical problem. The second section faces the challenge of new media and new art forms. It shows how philosophers and critics tried to extend the account of the relationship between the arts in Lessing’s Laocoo¨n to film and abstract painting in the twentieth century, continuing early modern discussions about the nature of art and the forms it can take, the limits that can be overcome through experimentation and innovation, and the aesthetic value of the results. The third section argues that early modern attempts to define the standards of taste are far from exhausted. They still define the terms of debates between historicists—who think taste is to be explained through society, culture, and history—and naturalists—who think taste can be better explained through evolutionary theory, perceptual psychology, and neuroscience. The last section reflects on the history of aesthetics and its place in contemporary philosophy. Although aesthetics remains marginal with respect to contemporary academic philosophy, its concerns are just as closely related to the core questions of philosophy and the sciences as they were during the early modern period. Whether or not other philosophers recognize the value of aesthetics, it remains an important part of philosophy and continues to explore the territory it claimed during the early modern period.

NOTES 1. For a discussion of the difficulty of establishing criteria for periodization, see Schapiro et al., ‘‘A Symposium on Periods,’’ 113–125.

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2. The imperfection of the periodization in the history of philosophy is especially troublesome for scholars of late medieval and Renaissance philosophy. On the exclusion of these periods from the memory of the history of philosophy, see Copenhaver and Schmidt, Renaissance Philosophy, 329–357. 3. William Whewell and Auguste Comte promoted this triumphalist view of the scientific revolution in the nineteenth century. It was championed by positivists in the twentieth century, but historians of science began to adopt a more nuanced view influenced by Pierre Duhem and Alexandre Koyre´ during the first half of the twentieth century. On the historiography of the scientific revolution, see Cohen, The Scientific Revolution, 1994. 4. See Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution, 1957. See also Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2012. 5. The sense in which I employ the term ‘‘contextualism’’ is similar to the one employed by Kuhn in ‘‘Concepts of Cause in the Development of Physics.’’ See Kuhn, The Essential Tension, 21–30. 6. This approach is described as ‘‘the new history of early modern philosophy’’ in Rutherford, The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Philosophy, 1–4. 7. Some would contend that all philosophical problems are timeless and necessary, while others would argue that they are historical and contingent. For a discussion of these two views, see Waugh and Ariew, ‘‘The Contingency of Philosophical Problems,’’ 91–114. 8. An example of this triumphalist narrative can be found in Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, 491–495. For a more nuanced (and accurate) view, see Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 1979. See also Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 2012. 9. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 137–170. For a critical reconstruction of Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument, see James Schmidt, ‘‘Genocide and the Limits of Enlightenment,’’ 81–102. 10. Foucault called the demand to take sides on the Enlightenment ‘‘the blackmail of the Enlightenment.’’ See Foucault, ‘‘What Is Enlightenment,’’ 51–52. 11. For an anthology of early modern texts, see Ariew and Watkins, Modern Philosophy, 2009. For a helpful guide, see Rutherford, The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Philosophy, 2006. See also Mercer and O’Neill, Early Modern Philosophy, 2005. See also Nadler, A Companion to Early Modern Philosophy, 2002. 12. Ribeiro, ‘‘Aesthetics’ Philosophical Importance,’’ 2014. On the marginal status of aesthetics, see also Devereaux, ‘‘The Philosophical Status of Aesthetics,’’ 1998; and Forsey, ‘‘The Disenchantment of Philosophical Aesthetics,’’ 581–597. Roger Seamon attributes the marginal status of aesthetics to its subject matter in Seamon, ‘‘For the Ghettoization of Aesthetics,’’ 2006. 13. Philjobs, 2013–2014 (http://philjobs.org/). See also Irvin, ‘‘Aesthetician Seeks Work,’’ 2007; and Nathan, ‘‘Department Seeks Aesthetician, 2007 on aesthetics and the academic job market.

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14. The PhilPapers Surveys, ‘‘Demographic Statistics,’’ 2009. 15. PhilPapers Surveys, ‘‘Demographic Statistics,’’ 2009. 16. There has been some debate about what constitutes the ‘‘core areas’’ of philosophy. Some philosophers have argued that the ‘‘core areas’’ include only metaphysics and epistemology, but in its guide for undergraduates, the American Philosophical Association lists logic, ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, and the history of philosophy as ‘‘traditional subfields’’ of philosophy, then suggests philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, subfields of ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of language, and others as ‘‘special fields’’ that ‘‘have grown from the traditional core areas.’’ See APA, ‘‘Philosophy: A Brief Guide for Undergraduates,’’ 1981. 17. See, for example, Plato, Republic, 376d–401d; Plato, Symposium, 210a– 212b; Aristotle, On Poetry and Style (Poetics), 1447a–1448b, 1460b–1461b. 18. Plotinus, The Essential Plotinus (Enneads, I.6,), 39. 19. Augustine, Confessions, IV.13. 20. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, 701c–708b. See also Al-Farabi, The Virtuous City, 85. 21. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I–II.27.1. 22. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, xv–xvi. 23. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 58 (V:170). 24. See, however, the defense of relativism in Margolis, ‘‘Robust Relativism,’’ 37–46. 25. Kazakina, ‘‘Art Market Nears Record with $66 Billion in Global Sales,’’ 2014. 26. Barboza, Bowley, and Cox, ‘‘A Culture of Bidding,’’ 2013. 27. The New York Times obituary of Steve Jobs notes that he ‘‘put much stock in the notion of taste’’ and regarded great products as ‘‘a triumph of taste.’’ See Markoff, ‘‘Steven P. Jobs, 1955–2011,’’ 2011. 28. See the report by the British Commission for Architecture & the Built Environment (CABE), ‘‘The Value of Good Design: How Buildings and Spaces Create Economic and Social Value,’’ 2002. 29. Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry, §§115–116. See also Baumgarten, A¨sthetik, Teil I, §1. 30. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A21. Kant revised the note from which these quotations are drawn in the second (B) edition of the first Critique, because he believed he had discovered the a priori principles necessary for a critique of aesthetic judgment. He articulates these principles in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. 31. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, I:1. 32. These debates have been used to frame many introductions to aesthetics. For a good example, see Stecker, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, 1–10. 33. For a survey of contemporary approaches to the history of aesthetics, which differ in important ways from the account I present here, see Guyer, ‘‘History of Modern Aesthetics,’’ 25–52.

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34. On this approach to the history of philosophy in the analytic tradition, see the very lucid discussion in Glock, What Is Analytic Philosophy?, 89–114. Perhaps the most important representative of this approach to aesthetics is Beardsley, Aesthetics, 1981. See also Beardsley, Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present, 1975. For an overview of Beardsley’s ahistorical approach to aesthetics, see also Wolterstorff, ‘‘Beardsley’s Approach,’’ 191–195. 35. Eric Schliesser has been one of the most vocal defenders of methodological anachronism in the history of philosophy. See his posts ‘‘On Rules for the History of Philosophy’’ and ‘‘Three Cheers for (Methodological) Anachronism!’’ 36. See, for example, Rorty et al., Philosophy in History, 10. Glock notes that ‘‘this point is well taken . . . by most analytic historians.’’ See Glock, What Is Analytic Philosophy?, 104. 37. This is the approach adopted by Paul Guyer in A History of Modern Aesthetics. I admire the combination of breadth and depth in Guyer’s History, but I do not think he has demonstrated that British, French, and German philosophers were all ‘‘practicing the same subject’’ in their discussions of art, criticism, and taste in the eighteenth century, prior to the introduction of the term ‘‘aesthetics.’’ See Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics, vol. 1, The Eighteenth Century, 3–5. 38. Plato, Republic, 52–79 (376d–404c). 39. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (I, Q5, A4), 39–41. 40. Hume, Essays (Of the Standard of Taste), 226–249. 41. Costelloe, The British Aesthetic Tradition, 2–3. 42. The term ‘‘prehistory’’ is borrowed from Koyre´, who used it to describe the steps leading up to the Copernican revolution. See Koyre´, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, ix.

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Ancients and Moderns

The works of early modern philosophers and scientists are full of criticisms of the ancients and their medieval interpreters. Bacon condemns ‘‘antiquities and citations of authors and authorities; also disputes, controversies, and dissenting opinions—in a word, philology’’ as irrelevant to the progress of science in his Outline of a Natural and Experimental History (1620).1 In his Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems (1632), Galileo denounces ‘‘the most reverent and most humble slaves of Aristotle’’ for their reliance on the authority of their ancient master.2 Descartes compares the works of ancient moral philosophers to ‘‘very proud and magnificent palaces built only on sand and mud’’ in his Discourse on Method (1637).3 Hobbes thought the introduction of ancient Greek philosophy into Christian theology led to so many contradictions and absurdities that the people revolted against the clergy during the Reformation.4 And Newton dismissed approaches to natural science derived from Aristotle, because he thought their jargon had nothing to contribute to philosophy.5 The list of these examples could go on indefinitely, though they should be taken with a grain of salt. Early modern philosophers and scientists were prone to misrepresenting the views of their predecessors and overstating the differences between the ancients and the moderns, because they had an interest in promoting the novelty of their own ideas.6 Criticism of ancient poetry and art tended to be more moderate than criticism of Aristotle and the Scholastics. Early modern critics of ancient poetry recognized that Homer sometimes ‘‘nods,’’ but they still respected his achievements and translated his works.7 Yet even their 17

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most balanced criticism also laid the foundation for critical comparison. The quarrel between the ancients and the moderns in the French academy began when Charles Perrault suggested modern science and art were more advanced than those of the ancients. Soon the battle of the books was raging in Britain over the relative merits of ancient poetry and modern scholarship. In this chapter I argue that these debates were just as much a part of the struggle for modernism as the revolutionary transformations that took place in science and philosophy. They are an important part of the prehistory of aesthetics, because they helped bring art and philosophy together in the early modern period.

A SECOND RENAISSANCE In the conclusion to his book The Crisis of the European Mind (1935), the intellectual historian Paul Hazard describes the early modern period as ‘‘a second Renaissance.’’8 Hazard is mistaken when he says it is ‘‘a Renaissance without a Rabelais, a Renaissance without a smile,’’ since the early modern period saw the publication of a number of witty and irreverent satires.9 Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Voltaire’s Candide (1759) are notable examples. Another work published during this period may be the most Rabelaisian novel since Gargantua and Pantagruel (ca. 1532–1564): Lawrence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759). But these are not the works Hazard has in mind when he calls the early modern period a second renaissance. Hazard is referring to the work of those ‘‘indefatigable and insatiable bookworms’’ who carried Renaissance traditions of textual criticism into the modern age.10 Their scholarship helped frame the debates about modernism in philosophy, science, and the arts. One side of early modern scholarship focused on the Bible. Spinoza advocated a naturalistic approach to scripture in his TheologicalPolitical Treatise (1670).11 At the beginning of his treatise, Spinoza proposes a psychological explanation for prophecy, arguing that prophecy is an expression of the imagination of the prophets, rather than special revelation or direct communication with God.12 Sometimes the prophets’ imaginations led them to say things that suggest God has a body, that he is present at one time but absent at another, or that he moves from place to place, yet Spinoza did not think these statements should

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be taken literally. They simply reflect the prophets’ ignorance of philosophy and science.13 When we understand God’s nature philosophically, we can no longer accept the anthropomorphic God they describe. Nor can we accept the possibility of miracles that violate the laws of nature. Since God is perfect, everything that comes from God is necessary, and necessity admits no exceptions. The miracles described in scripture are best understood as natural phenomena whose causes were unknown to the authors of the Bible, because they did not possess adequate scientific knowledge or the philosophical sophistication necessary to appreciate God’s perfection.14 Spinoza’s biblical criticism was continued by Richard Simon, who produced historical-critical studies of the Old and New Testaments at the end of the seventeenth century.15 Simon rejected Spinoza’s naturalism, but he was a capable philologist who was able to demonstrate the shortcomings of the biblical text—its erroneous chronologies, transpositions and variations, the corruptions that plague the manuscript tradition, and so forth. For this his books were burned, he was expelled from the religious order to which he belonged, and he was forced into exile in the Netherlands. A later translator, inspired by the rationalism of Christian Wolff, suffered similar persecution. When he published the Wertheim Bible (1735), Johann Lorenz Schmidt was denounced as a ‘‘philosophical mocker of religion’’ by Joachim Lange, the Pietist theologian who had had Wolff expelled from Prussia ten years earlier. Schmidt insisted the Old Testament should be read historically, as the work of ancient Hebrews.16 He translated the text accordingly, omitting references to Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and the Trinity. The theologians had the book banned, and Schmidt was imprisoned for more than a year.17 He eventually escaped to Hamburg, where his work inspired Hermann Samuel Reimarus to write his Apology, or Defense of the Rational Worshippers of God (ca. 1736–1768). Reimarus supported tolerance for deists, maintained that the truth of Christianity could only be demonstrated by reason, rejected miracles and revelation in favor of natural religion, and ruthlessly exposed the inconsistencies of scripture.18 His views would ignite another storm of controversy when fragments of his Apology were published by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in the 1770s. Although these debates command our attention, early modern scholarship was not restricted to the Bible. The humanist tradition of studying, editing, and translating works by classical authors continued

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unabated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some of this work was even done by early modern philosophers and scientists. In 1599, when he was only fifteen years old, Hugo Grotius published a commentary on Martianus Capella’s Satyricon; later he would publish an annotated edition of Lucan’s Pharsalia (1614). Thomas Hobbes translated Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War (1629) and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (1675). Samuel Clarke published his own translation of the Iliad (1729), which was followed by a posthumous edition of his translation of The Odyssey (1759). Other work was done by some of the most famous poets and dramatists of the age. Nicolas BoileauDespre´aux’s translation of Longinus’s On the Sublime, which appeared with his Horatian Art of Poetry in 1674, helped make the sublime one of the central concerns of early modern criticism.19 Before his death in 1700, John Dryden translated Ovid’s Epistles, Plutarch’s Lives, Juvenal’s Satires, Virgil’s Aeneid, Lucian’s Dialogues, Aesop’s Fables, and even parts of Lucretius’s scandalous On the Nature of Things. Alexander Pope’s translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey appeared between 1715 and 1720. In Germany, the study of classical art and architecture was advanced by Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (1755), Notes on the Architecture of the Ancients (1762), and his monumental History of Ancient Art (1765). Lessing responded with his Laocoo¨n (1766), an extended meditation on the misunderstandings to which Horace’s dictum ‘‘poetry resembles painting’’ (ut pictura poesis) had been subjected, which also demonstrated Lessing’s mastery of ancient literature and his discerning eye for visual art.20 Of course, most of the work of early modern scholarship was done by figures who are less well known to us today. In 1611 Daniel Heinsius published an edition of Aristotle’s Poetics whose appendix, On Plot in Tragedy (De tragoediae constituione), became one of the main sources of French neoclassicism.21 Heinsius’s work is discussed in Pierre Corneille’s Three Discourses on Dramatic Poetry (1660); Rene´ Rapin’s Reflections on Aristotle’s Poetics (1674); and the critical remarks to Andre´ Dacier’s French translation of the Poetics (1692), which boasted that it contained ‘‘the most exact rules for judging epic poems, works for the theatre, tragedy and comedy.’’22 Dacier’s wife, Anne Le Fe`vre Dacier, was an even more eminent scholar than her husband. Before publishing her prose translations of Homer’s Iliad (1699) and Odyssey

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(1708), Madame Dacier produced editions and translations of Sapphic and Anacreontic poetry; the comedies of Aristophanes, Plautus, and Terence; the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and the lives of Plutarch. When Antoine Houdar de la Motte, who did not know any Greek, produced his own version of the Iliad (1714) and claimed it was better suited to modern tastes than Dacier’s translation, the ‘‘Homeric War’’ began. Although it started as a disagreement about the merits of Homer’s poetry, the debate between Dacier and La Motte reignited the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns that had divided the French academy at the end of the seventeenth century, before expanding into a more general debate about the relationship among art, criticism, and society.23 The debate soon spread to Britain, but German scholars continued to study the classics in the ‘‘quiet and modest way’’ they had during the eighteenth century.24 It was not until the middle of the eighteenth century that scholars like Johann Matthias Gesner, Johann August Ernesti, Johann Jakob Reiske, and Christoph Gottlob Heyne began to publish the kinds of works that would make Germany famous for philology.25 In addition to the editions and translations they produced, early modern scholars thought deeply about how the ancients should be studied. Because ‘‘studies pass into manners’’ (abeunt studia in mores), Bacon advises students to be careful when reading the classics. In his essay ‘‘Of Studies,’’ he notes ‘‘some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.’’26 Professional philologists like Richard Bentley did not always share Bacon’s moral concerns. By noting linguistic and historical anachronisms, Bentley was able to reveal the Epistles of Phalaris to be a forgery, despite the fact that manuscripts of the letters can be dated back to Lucian’s time (ca. 125–180 CE) and a long tradition traces them back to the time of Pythagoras (ca. 570–495 BCE).27 Bentley’s works were marvels of scholarly erudition, but many worried his methods were impediments to the literary appreciation of the classics.28 In Italy, Giambattista Vico warned that introducing students to the classics through the techniques of ‘‘modern philosophical critique’’ would stifle their imagination.29 The account of the true Homer that Vico presents in his New Science (1725) is certainly imaginative, but it did not

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convince his contemporaries to abandon the methods of modern scholarship.30 Indeed, classical scholarship attained new heights of sophistication at the end of the eighteenth century through the work of Friedrich August Wolf. In his Prolegomena to Homer (1795), Wolf argued that the texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey were a patchwork of material invented at different times by various rhapsodes, which were only subsequently arranged in the form of epic poems.31 His claims were controversial, but Wolf’s knowledge of Greek history and his mastery of the texts was unmatched by his contemporaries. Soon he began drawing up plans for the ‘‘science of antiquity’’ (Altertumswissenschaft) that laid the foundation for the systematic investigation of almost every aspect of the classical world in the nineteenth century.

PROMOTING MODERNISM It is against the background of early modern scholarship that modernism began to assert itself in the seventeenth century. Although this section focuses on modernism in the arts, we should not forget that artistic modernism was closely related to the development of modern philosophy and science. Indeed, the champions of artistic modernism often treated the combined achievements of modern philosophy, science, and art as evidence of the superiority of the present over the past. The poem ‘‘The Century of Louis the Great’’ (1687) by Charles Perrault is one of the most explicit statements of artistic modernism from the seventeenth century. When he read his poem to the Acade´mie franc¸aise, Perrault had already written works praising modern painters and dramatists.32 But he began ‘‘The Century of Louis the Great’’ with a shocking admission: Perrault says he does not admire the venerable beauty of antiquity!33 He goes on to suggest that no one can read an entire dialogue of Plato; that Aristotle’s physics is no more reliable than Herodotus’s history; that modern poets and orators have surpassed Demosthenes and Cicero; that Homer is guilty of all kinds of excesses and deficiencies; and that the ancients demonstrated their poor taste by ignoring Menander, Virgil, and Ovid. Perrault then argues that the ancient painters are no better than students compared to Raphael and Charles LeBrun; that Franc¸ois Girardon’s sculpture Apollo and the

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Nymphs is vastly superior to the Laocoon, which is so poorly proportioned that it makes Laocoo¨n’s sons look like dwarfs; and that the music of Jean-Baptiste Lully is more natural and more touching than the cacophonous din the Greeks called music. Although these claims scandalized his contemporaries, Perrault did not think the reasons for the superiority of modern art were difficult to discern. The mature works of great artists were bound to be better than the works they produced as students, because they had more time to hone their skills and build upon earlier insights. France could boast of greater achievements under Louis XIV than Rome could claim during the rule of Caesar Augustus for the same reason: centuries had passed and modern artists had discovered the secrets of painting, sculpture, and music that were still mysteries to the ancients. Perrault applied the same reasoning to philosophy and science in his Parallel of the Ancients and Moderns (1688–1697) in order to make a general case for the superiority of the moderns over the ancients.34 Perrault’s poem ignited a firestorm of controversy in the French academy, but he was not without allies in the quarrel that ensued. Bernard le Bouvier de Fontenelle was one of those who sided with Perrault against the defenders of the ancients. His treatise Of Eclogues (1686) criticizes the pastoral poetry of Theocritus and Virgil, claiming they attribute too much ingenuity and gallantry to the shepherds who were the subjects of their poems, making country life seem more refined than it should appear.35 The moderns, he says, ‘‘have not often been guilty of making their shepherds so clownish.’’36 Fontenelle attached his A Digression on the Ancients and the Moderns as an appendix at the end of his treatise, because he knew his comments would elicit hostile responses. At the beginning of his Digression, he warns his critics not to hold up the ancients as the source of reason and good taste, because that would suggest that ‘‘Nature wore herself out in producing those great originals.’’37 Over the next few pages, he shows there can be no natural differences between the ancients and moderns, because they occupied the same regions and enjoyed the same climate. Eventually he declares ‘‘we are now all perfectly equal, ancients and moderns, Greeks, Romans, and Frenchmen,’’ but his egalitarianism is short-lived.38 Responding to those who claim the ancients discovered and perfected the arts and sciences, Fontenelle contends that it was not the intelligence of the ancients, but their errors, that laid the foundation for modern philosophy, science, and art. ‘‘We had first to try the ideas of Plato,

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the numbers of Pythagoras, and the qualities of Aristotle,’’ he writes, ‘‘only when these had been recognized as false were we driven to accept the correct theory.’’39 Homer’s poetry serves as a cautionary tale about the absurd lengths to which the ancients extended their poetic license, whose limits the moderns have finally recognized.40 In the end, Fontenelle even boasts ‘‘the best works of Sophocles, of Euripides, of Aristophanes will not stand up before Cinna, Horace, Ariane, Le Misanthrope, and many other tragedies and comedies of the great period.’’41 The superiority of these works is predicated on their willingness to challenge the authority of the ancients and correct their mistakes. Shortly after Fontenelle published his Digression, the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns crossed the British channel, where it became known as the battle of the books. The party lines in the British battle were, however, rather different than those of the French quarrel. The champion of modernism in Britain, William Wotton, was in fact a distinguished classicist. Born in 1666, he had read Homer and Virgil by the age of five and had mastered Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Syriac by the time he was eleven. At the age of twenty-one, Wotton became a member of the British Royal Society, where he began work on a biography of the society’s founder, the experimental philosopher Robert Boyle. His most famous work, Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694), draws upon his knowledge of the classics as well as his familiarity with modern science. Wotton’s Reflections proceeds systematically, comparing the morality and politics of the ancients and the moderns and their contributions to poetry, rhetoric, and grammar; architecture, sculpture, painting, and music; mathematics, logic, and metaphysics; natural philosophy, astronomy, and optics; anatomy, medicine, and surgery; zoology and botany; and a host of other subjects. The Reflections also ranges far beyond ancient Greece and Rome to consider the ancient wisdom of Egypt, Arabia, India, and China. Wotton eventually concludes that ‘‘the extent of knowledge is, at this time, vastly greater than it was in former ages.’’42 One of the reasons he cites for the growth of modern knowledge is the decline of the political authority of Rome, which inspired the kingdoms of Europe to compete for the glory of learning.43 While earlier generations tried to outdo one another in classical scholarship, Wotton argues that mathematics and physics have

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become ‘‘the darling studies of the learned men of Europe’’ in more recent times.44 One of the benefits of this development has been a decline in pedantry, ‘‘especially amongst the young men, who are taught in the universities to laugh at that frequent citation of scraps of Latin in common discourse, or upon arguments that do not require it; and that nauseous ostentation of reading, and scholarship in public companies, which was formerly so much in fashion.’’45 Wotton’s remarks about pedantry make it clear he thought very little of the manners and tastes of the defenders of the ancients, yet his judgment of ancient art is more charitable than either Perrault’s or Fontenelle’s. Wotton acknowledges that ‘‘former ages made greater orators and nobler poets than these later ages have done,’’ but he denies there is anything preventing the moderns from equaling or even exceeding their achievements.46 He thinks modern painters and sculptors like Poussin, Le Brun, and Bernini rank as highly as their ancient predecessors, proving ancient art is not insuperable, in principle or in fact.47 Richard Bentley became one of the standard bearers for British modernism when his Dissertation Upon the Epistles of Phalaris, Themistocles, Socrates, Euripides, and the Fables of Aesop appeared as an appendix to the second edition of Wotton’s Reflections in 1697. In his Dissertation, Bentley used his vast erudition to prove the Epistles of Phalaris were a forgery, much to the chagrin of William Temple, who had defended their authenticity in his Essay upon Ancient and Modern Learning. Bentley’s Dissertation also indicted the editors of a new edition of the Epistles of Phalaris, published at Oxford in 1695, for their ignorance of ancient languages, classical literature, and history.48 Writing in polemical English, rather than scholarly Latin, Bentley showed the educated public the defenders of the ancients were not competent to judge the merits of classical antiquity, because they could not recognize the Epistles of Phalaris as ‘‘a fardle of commonplaces, without any life or spirit.’’49 Bentley’s Dissertation also suggested the ancients had to be saved from their defenders by scholars trained in the historical-critical methods of the moderns, which is exactly what he tried to do in his edition of Horace, published in 1712. Shaftesbury called Bentley’s edition of Horace ‘‘the most elaborate monster the learned world ever saw produced,’’ because it included more than four hundred pages of notes proposing a wide variety of emendations to the texts and speculating

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freely about the order of their composition.50 A satirical edition, published in twenty-four volumes between 1712 and 1713, boasted that it included ‘‘a translation of Dr. Bentley’s notes, to which are added notes upon notes.’’51 Undaunted by this criticism, Bentley defended his emendations in the preface to his edition, arguing that the reasonable conjectures included in his emendations were more certain than many of the manuscripts his opponents would produce in support of alternate readings. His conclusion—‘‘Do not venerate the scribes alone, but dare to think for yourself’’ (Noli itaque Librarios sols venerari, sed per te sapere aude)—perfectly encapsulates the irony of early British modernism.52 Bentley quotes an ancient poet—‘‘dare to think for yourself’’ (sapere aude) comes from one of Horace’s epistles—to justify his rejection of ancient authority, while claiming for modern scholarship the authority to correct classical works of art.53 It would be wrong to suggest that Perrault, Fontenelle, Wotton, and Bentley all share the same vision of artistic modernism. Perrault thinks ancient art is inferior to modern art, because the secrets of music, painting, poetry, and sculpture have been discovered over the course of time, leading to progress in the arts. He assumes the ancients were ignorant about the best artistic techniques, in the same way they were unaware of discoveries of modern physics and astronomy. Fontenelle proposes a similar argument, except that he holds the ancients were actually mistaken about the principles of the arts. Just as modern physics and astronomy establish themselves by correcting the errors of Aristotelian natural philosophy and Ptolemaic astronomy, modern artists bring the arts to a higher degree of perfection by fixing the mistakes of ancient poets, painters, and sculptors.54 Wotton was suspicious of these kinds of arguments, because he was more sensitive to the complexities of history than either Perrault or Fontenelle.55 Wotton recognized that history does not follow the model of linear progress that Perrault describes. Nor are the arts always improved through conjecture and refutation, as Fontenelle suggests. Achievement in the arts depends on a number of factors—‘‘a thousand accidents,’’ Wotton writes, ‘‘not discoverable at a distance’’—that affect the tastes of a particular period, as well as the techniques available to artists at any given time.56 Instead of proclaiming the superiority of the ancients or the moderns, Wotton calls for the combination of the best of ancient and modern learning into a new form of scholarship. Bentley’s philology could be taken as an example of the

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combination of ancient and modern learning that Wotton proposes, but there can be no question about the modernity of Bentley’s methods. Bentley’s Dissertation made it very clear that modern editions could be better than ancient manuscripts. By rejecting the authority of ancient manuscripts and the traditions of their interpretation in his edition of Horace, Bentley also claimed for modern scholarship the right to emend classical works of art according to its own standards. Some critics (Pope) objected to Bentley’s emendations because they affected the literary quality of the works he edited, while others (Swift) saw them as an attack on the ancients by ‘‘a fierce champion for the moderns.’’57

DEFENDING ANTIQUITY By the end of the seventeenth century, many of the defenders of the ancients were willing to admit modern physics and astronomy were superior to those of antiquity, but they were less willing to concede the superiority of modern art. It is easy to characterize the critics of modernism as conservatives hostile to any change in the traditional canon, yet many of them were respected scholars, commentators, translators, and authors, who thought the moderns had underestimated their predecessors and overstated their own achievements. Their arguments are worth considering, because they help to clarify the differences between the ancients and moderns, as well as the standards by which they are to be evaluated. In France, the most famous defender of the ancients was Nicolas Boileau-Despre´aux. Long before the quarrel broke out in the academy, Boileau had established his reputation as an interpreter of the ancients through his translation of Longinus’s On the Sublime and his Horatian Art of Poetry, which were published together in 1674. In the preface to his translation of Longinus, Boileau praises the ancient rhetorician for writing about style in a manner appropriate to his subject matter. Unlike Aristotle, who presented the rules of eloquence as a series of dry precepts, Boileau thinks Longinus has given us a sublime treatise on the sublime.58 Boileau admits this might not be appreciated by modern poets, who ‘‘admire nothing but what they do not understand’’ and ‘‘do not suppose any author can have an elevated genius unless he flies entirely out of sight in his writings,’’ but he argues Longinus is worthy

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of study, precisely because he is able to combine the greatness of reason, learning, and eloquence with a simplicity and a dignity that are missing from modern literature.59 Instead of indulging their depravity and extravagance, Boileau thinks modern poets should return to the original sources of their art and learn to appreciate their perfections. These perfections are more explicitly described in Boileau’s Art of Poetry. Like the Horatian epistle upon which it is based, Boileau’s Art of Poetry offers poets practical guidance for those who wish to follow ‘‘the dangerous course of charming poetry.’’60 In the first canto, it urges poets to try to combine rhyme and reason, to describe objects worthy of their attention, to choose an appropriate style and vary their discourse, to think before they write, and to accept reasonable criticism. The second canto distinguishes the various poetic genres, including the eclogue, elegy, ode, sonnet, epigram, and satire, while the third canto explains the differences between tragedy and comedy. The fourth returns to the general prescriptions of the first canto, reminding poets not to be affected by flattery or jealousy, to attend to virtue and be willing to change what can be improved, and not to debase their art for money or fame. While these recommendations are characterized as rules and principles at various points in the poem, they are really no different than the rules contained in Horace’s Art of Poetry. They are prudent and pragmatic guidelines that can be applied differently in different cases. While they certainly admit of exceptions, there are also reasons why they are generally observed in the best poetry. The ancients knew, better than the moderns in Boileau’s opinion, that it would be reckless to proceed without acknowledging the rules that reason and good sense have prescribed for a given art.61 Anne Le Fe`vre Dacier was probably the most important defender of the ancients in France after Boileau. Her prose translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were published several years after the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns had died down, but her translations and the shocking claims of her preface reignited the conflict. While Boileau assured Perrault that they ‘‘do not have a different opinion concerning the esteem that our own nation and our own century may merit,’’ Dacier dared to assert that ‘‘I find those ancient times all the more beautiful in that they so little resemble our own.’’62 This opinion was, in its own way, as shocking as Perrault’s admission that he did not admire the venerable beauty of antiquity. Alexander Pope

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responded violently to the admiration Dacier expressed for the ancient world in the preface to his own translation of the Iliad, asking, ‘‘Who could be so prejudiced in their favor as to magnify the felicity of those ages, when a spirit of revenge and cruelty, joined with the practice of rapine and robbery, reigned through the world; when no mercy was shown, but for the sake of lucre, when the greatest princes of the world were put to the sword, and their wives and daughters made slaves and concubines?’’63 Such criticism did not lead Dacier to moderate her views. When Antoine Houdar de La Motte published an abridged and versified edition of the Iliad, based on Dacier’s translation, but preceded by an ode in which Homer’s shade urges the author to purge his work of all the faults that might offend modern sensibilities, Dacier responded with a six-hundred-page treatise on the causes of the decline of taste in modern times.64 She proceeds by way of commentary on the first twelve books of the Iliad, pointing out all of the mistakes and misunderstandings that plague La Motte’s edition. It is no understatement to say that, for Dacier, La Motte’s work came to represent all of the ways in which the modern age is inferior to classical antiquity, but it also reveals the sources of the ignorance, carelessness, and poor judgment of the moderns. Following Quintillian’s On the Causes of the Corruption of Eloquence (ca. 75), Dacier argues that poor education, ignorant teachers, and lazy students have corrupted modern taste.65 Yet it is ultimately because modern poets and rhetoricians do not devote themselves to the original sources of eloquence that modern taste has declined. By taking liberties with works they do not understand, the moderns compound their own errors, instead of attending to the perfections of the ancient originals.66 William Temple, the foremost defender of the ancients in Britain, did not have Boileau’s or Dacier’s reputation for scholarship. Temple regarded the ancients as many educated aristocrats did during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—as models of taste and manners. He was so incensed by the suggestion, in Fontenelle’s Digression, that ancient poetry was inferior to modern poetry, that he devoted much of his Essay on Ancient and Modern Learning (1690) to a genealogy of ancient learning, showing that the ancient Greeks must have derived their wisdom from India and China, where an agreeable climate, the character of the people, and the stability of government provided more favorable conditions for learning than anything found in Western

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Europe. Temple thought this proved the ancients possessed a better knowledge of the sources of mathematics, natural science, and ethics than any modern could hope to achieve.67 That their knowledge declined in succeeding generations is no less clear to Temple. He laments that the wisdom of the ancients was not preserved during the Middle Ages, when the clergy devoted themselves to religious service and the educated laity were committed to military service, and let the ancient learning sink into obscurity.68 And while he grants that ancient learning has been recovered to some degree in more recent times, he does not see any reason to think that modern learning has surpassed the wisdom of the ancients. Temple argues that neither Descartes nor Hobbes has surpassed any of the ancient philosophers, that no modern rhetorician can equal his ancient predecessors, that the ancient sciences of poetry and music have degenerated into rhyming and fiddling, that there are no modern painters or sculptors who rank alongside the inventors of their art, that ancient architecture and engineering were vastly superior to their modern counterparts, that the technological applications of modern natural science are inferior to those of ancient magic, and that Copernican astronomy and Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of blood are both derived from ancient sources.69 Temple almost admits the superiority of modern knowledge of navigation, but concludes that our knowledge of geography is still too incomplete to give the moderns any credit.70 In the end, he concludes that modern learning is inferior to that of the ancients, because of the religious and political conflicts that destabilized modern Europe, the decline in royal patronage, the love of wealth, and finally, what Temple calls ‘‘the scorn of Pedantry.’’71 The pedantry of modern scholarship is perhaps the greatest impediment to modern learning, because it makes the ancients look ridiculous and leads those who should admire the ancients to avoid and mock them, because the scholars who study them are so pathetic and ridiculous. Temple’s secretary, Jonathan Swift, continued his polemic against the pedantry of modern scholarship in his satires A Tale of a Tub (1704) and The Battle of the Books (1704). A Tale of a Tub contains ‘‘A Digression Concerning Critics,’’ in which Swift distinguishes among three kinds of critics. The first were ‘‘such persons as invented or drew up rules for themselves and the world, by observing which a careful reader might be able to pronounce upon the productions of the learned, form

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his taste to a true relish of the sublime and the admirable, and divide every beauty of matter or style from the corruption that apes it.’’72 The second were ‘‘the restorers of ancient learning from the worms, and graves, and dust of manuscripts.’’73 Swift laments that both of these kinds of critics have long since disappeared, leaving only the third kind of critic, which he calls ‘‘the true critic.’’ While the true critic presents himself as ‘‘a hero born, descending in a direct line from a celestial stem,’’ Swift considers him nothing more than ‘‘a discoverer and collector of writers’ faults.’’74 He complains that ‘‘whoever will examine the writings in all kinds wherewith this ancient sect hath honored the world shall immediately find from the whole thread and tenor of them that the ideas of the authors have been altogether conversant and taken up with the faults, and blemishes, and oversights, and mistakes of other writings, and let the subject treated on be whatever it will, their imaginations are so entirely possessed and replete with the defects of other pens, that the very quintessence of what is bad does of necessity distil into their own, by which means the whole appears to be nothing else but an abstract of the criticisms themselves have made.’’75 And though he acknowledges the ancient origins of this kind of criticism, Swift takes aim at its modern representatives, whom he accuses of being too quick to judge, too eager to flatter, and too concerned with minor errors to appreciate the beauty of the whole. The Battle of the Books is a kind of revenge fantasy against these critics, in which Swift stages a war between the ancients and moderns.76 Criticism, which Swift calls ‘‘a malignant deity,’’ fights on the side of the moderns, along with her husband, ignorance; her mother, pride; her sister, opinion; and her children, noise, impudence, dullness, vanity, positiveness, pedantry, and ill manners.77 In the end, however, the moderns are vanquished and their captains, Wotton and Bentley, are killed by Charles Boyle, the editor of the Epistles of Phalaris, whose authenticity Temple had defended in his Essay.78 The defenders of the ancients are noteworthy because of their expertise in ancient language, culture, and literature. Boileau and Dacier were well-respected translators and commentators, who may have been better able to appreciate the rhetoric and poetry of ancient Greece and Rome than Perrault and Fontenelle. Temple and Swift may not have had the scholarly credentials of Wotton or Bentley, but Swift’s satires reveal the depths of the gulf that separated modern critical scholarship from

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ancient literary genius in the early modern period.79 The idea that the ancients were paragons of manners and taste is dubious, as are the canons that are supposed to embody this idea, yet the suggestion that novelty and erudition are sufficient conditions for literary merit is no less questionable. With a wit as sharp as any critic’s pen, Swift reminds his readers that the literary and artistic achievements of antiquity are not to be trifled with. Even when they are burdened with the notes and comments that modern scholars appended to their texts, the brilliance of ancient literature and art continues to shine.

EARLY MODERNISM In the first section of this chapter, I reiterated Paul Hazard’s claim that the early modern period can be regarded as a second renaissance, because it continued the traditions of humanistic scholarship that emerged during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and developed new and better methods of authenticating, editing, and criticizing ancient texts. I stand by that claim, but it demands qualification. While the humanists of the Renaissance sought to return to the wisdom of the ancients, the knowledge of classical antiquity produced by modern scholarship was a distinctly modern achievement. Instead of trying to revive classical antiquity, early modern scholars realized that the ancients were very different from themselves. The humanists of the Renaissance might have seen the differences between antiquity and modernity as evidence of decline or decay, but many modern scholars saw their potential. Indeed, if one took modern philosophy and science as a model for understanding the differences between antiquity and modernity, it would not be difficult to see those differences as evidence of progress. By the time the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns began in the French academy, the authority of Aristotle had been under attack for more than a century by the likes of Bacon, Hobbes, and Descartes. Copernican astronomy was becoming a shining example of modern scientific progress, through the work of Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. And modern physics was making similar progress, thanks to the contributions of Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz. Given these developments, it should not be surprising that Perrault and Fontenelle saw modern art as

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just another way in which the moderns had surpassed the ancients. Their arguments in support of this view are facile, since there is no reason to think the passing of time inevitably reveals the secrets of the arts and corrects infelicities of taste and style. But they express a view typical of the early modern period and its attitude toward antiquity. Given the progress of philosophy and the sciences in the seventeenth century, it was almost inconceivable to Perrault and Fontenelle that the arts should not make similar progress. Others drew the opposite conclusion from the differences between antiquity and modernity. Temple’s criticisms of modernity and his idealization of antiquity reflect his aristocratic background. Aristocrats like Temple admired antiquity, not because they were deeply engaged in classical scholarship, but because the classics played an important role in the education they received. Appealing to the classics gave aristocratic tastes and manners an authority that was difficult to contest, at least for those less knowledgeable than Wotton and Bentley. Swift’s criticism of the moderns does not reflect the same aristocratic tradition, but it does promote a conception of classical literature that is opposed to the critical standards of modern scholarship. When he calls criticism ‘‘a malignant deity’’ in The Battle of the Books and mocks the critic as ‘‘a discoverer and collector of writers’ faults’’ in A Tale of a Tub, Swift rejects the vision of antiquity that modern scholarship presents. The ancients are for Swift models of literary achievement, rather than texts to be authenticated, corrected, and annotated. The translations of Boileau and Dacier do not reflect the same hostility between literature and scholarship as Swift’s satires, but Dacier was just as committed to the view that modernity was a corruption of ancient tastes and manners as Temple. Decades before Rousseau argued that the progress of the arts and sciences led to moral decline, Dacier was arguing that modernity represented a corruption of the tastes, manners, and education of antiquity. Much of the literature on the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns in France and the battle of the books in Britain focuses on the comparative judgments the parties made about the relative merits of antiquity and modernity. These are important, because they show how judgments about art and literature were made before judgments of taste and the principles of criticism were incorporated into philosophical aesthetics. Whenever the defenders of the ancients or the promoters of

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modernism appeal to the ‘‘venerable beauty’’ of antiquity or call the shepherds of ancient eclogues ‘‘clownish,’’ whenever they assert ‘‘the genius of this age’’ or dismiss modern criticism as ‘‘opinion’’ and ‘‘noise,’’ they are making proto- or quasi-aesthetic claims. Still, it would be wrong to mistake these claims for aesthetic judgments, since aesthetics is a distinct part of philosophy that emerged almost a century later and differs from other ways of thinking and writing about these subjects. If we are to do justice to the claims of the ancients and the moderns, we should respect the context in which they advanced their claims and the meaning they had at the time, even if that raises difficult questions about philosophy’s ability to incorporate, assimilate, and evaluate non- or extra-philosophical discourses. The more fundamental point underlying these comparative judgments, that there is a distinctly ‘‘modern’’ art that is different from that of the ancients, also deserves more attention than it has received from historians of philosophy. The idea that one could find a difference that marks the present and separates it from the past is an important part of early modern philosophy, science, and art. And it played an important part in connecting modern art and early modern philosophy, because early modern philosophers continued to address the debates between the ancients and the moderns throughout the eighteenth century, sometimes in the context of metaphysics and epistemology, sometimes in relation to ethics and politics, but often under the heading of taste and criticism. While these discussions are not properly ‘‘aesthetic,’’ they represent an earnest and modern attempt to comprehend the arts within philosophy. The more fundamental point underlying these comparative judgments, that there is a distinctly ‘‘modern’’ art that is different from that of the ancients, also deserves more attention than it has received from historians of philosophy. The idea that one could find a difference that marks the present and separates it from the past is an important part of early modern philosophy, science, and art. And it played an important part in connecting modern art and early modern philosophy, because early modern philosophers continued to address the debates between the ancients and the moderns throughout the eighteenth century, sometimes in the context of metaphysics and epistemology, sometimes in relation to ethics and politics, but often under the heading of taste and criticism. While these discussions are not properly ‘‘aesthetic,’’ they

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represent an earnest and modern attempt to comprehend the arts within philosophy.

NOTES 1. Bacon, The New Organon, 225. 2. Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 372. 3. Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, I:113–114. 4. Hobbes, Leviathan, 85 (I.12.59). 5. Newton, Philosophical Writings (Principia Mathematica), 43. 6. Roger Ariew’s Descartes among the Scholastics and Dennis Des Chene’s Physiologia are impressive recent studies highlighting the continuities among ancient, medieval, and early modern philosophy and science. See Ariew, Descartes among the Scholastics, 2011. See also Des Chene, Physiologia, 1996. 7. Early modern discussions of Homer’s shortcomings often cite lines 358– 360 of Horace’s Ars Poetica: Et idem indignor quandoque bonus domitat Homerus; uerum operi longo fas est obrepere somnum (‘‘I am also offended when great Homer falls asleep on us, but it is permitted for some drowsiness to creep into a long work’’). See Hardison and Golden, Horace for Students of Literature, 18. ‘‘Even Homer nods’’ is a loose English translation of these lines popularized by John Dryden and Alexander Pope. 8. Hazard, The Crisis of the European Mind, 443. 9. Hazard, The Crisis of the European Mind, 443. 10. Hazard, The Crisis of the European Mind, 443. 11. For a popular account of the controversy surrounding the TheologicalPolitical Treatise, see Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell, 2011. 12. Spinoza, Complete Works (Theological-Political Treatise), 399. 13. Spinoza, Complete Works (Theological-Political Treatise), 414. 14. Spinoza, Complete Works (Theological-Political Treatise), 456–457. 15. Simon published his studies in French in 1678 and 1689, but they were quickly translated into several languages. See Simon, A Critical History of the Old Testament, 1682. See also Simon, A Critical History of the Text of the New Testament, 1689. See also the rapturous chapter devoted to Simon in Hazard, The Crisis of the European Mind, 180–196. 16. Paul S. Spalding has noted that Schmidt was not entirely consistent in his application of this principle, as he often tried to rationalize the text and make its meaning clearer. See Spalding, Seize the Book, Jail the Author, 66–73. 17. Ursula Goldenbaum’s study of the debate over the Wertheim Bible is a marvel of historical-philosophical scholarship. See Goldenbaum, ‘‘Der Skandal der Wertheimer Bibel,’’ 175–508.

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18. See Lessing, Fragments from Reimarus, 1879. See also Reimarus, Fragments, 1970. See also Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, 2005. 19. See Martin, ‘‘The Prehistory of the Sublime in Early Modern France,’’ 77–101. 20. Hardison and Golden, Horace for Students of Literature, 18 (Ars Poetica, 361). 21. See Kern, The Influence of Heinsius and Vossius upon French Dramatic Theory, 1949. 22. Dacier, La Poetique D’Aristote, 1692. An English translation of Dacier’s notes is available as Aristotle’s Art of Poetry, Together with Mr. Dacier’s Notes Translated from the French (1705). 23. See Moore, ‘‘Homer Revisited,’’ 87–107. 24. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship, 167. 25. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship, 171–172. 26. Bacon, ‘‘Of Studies,’’ 439–440. See also Bacon, The Major Works (‘‘Advice to Fulke Greville on His Studies’’ and ‘‘Of Studies’’), 102–106, 439–440. 27. Haugen, Richard Bentley, 110–123. 28. See, for example, Pope, The Dunciad, 528 (IV:38). 29. Vico, On the Study Methods of Our Time, 42. 30. Vico, The New Science, 301–335. 31. Wolf, Prolegomena to Homer, 1989. While claims about the ‘‘patchwork’’ structure of the Homeric epics were relatively common during the eighteenth century, and even have ancient precedent, Wolf made his case convincing through the massive scholarly apparatus of his text, which synthesized a great detail of information into ‘‘a solid base of close-packed references and quotations.’’ See Grafton, Defenders of the Text (‘‘Prolegomena to Friedrich August Wolf’’), 214–243. 32. See Perrault, La Peinture: Poe¨me, 1668. See also Perrault, Critique de l’Ope´ra, 1674. 33. Perrault, Le sie`cle de Louis le Grand, 1687. An English translation of Perrault’s poem (which is unfortunately not very accurate) is available in Franc¸ois De Callie`res, Characters and Criticisms upon the Ancient and Modern Orators, 1714. 34. A selection from the second dialogue of Perrault’s Paralelle has been translated into English by Christopher Miller in Harrison et al., Art in Theory, 52–63. 35. Fontenelle, Of Pastorals, 339–347. 36. Fontenelle, Of Pastorals, 347. 37. Fontenelle, A Digression on the Ancients and the Moderns, 358. 38. Fontenelle’s claims about the equality of the Greeks, Romans, and French would have been controversial in the eighteenth century, when theories about the relationship among climate, geography, and national character were often debated. Hume tended to discount the influence of physical causes (air, food, climate) on national character, while Rousseau emphasized their role in his Political Economy and The Social Contract, even claiming that ‘‘freedom is not a fruit that grows in

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all climates.’’ See Hume, Essays (Of National Characters), 197–215. See also Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, 12, 74, 76, 100. 39. Fontenelle, Digression, 361. 40. Fontenelle, Digression, 367. 41. Fontenelle, Digression, 368 42. Wotton, Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning, 342. 43. Wotton, Reflections, 346. 44. Wotton, Reflections, 346–347. 45. Wotton, Reflections, 354. 46. Wotton, Reflections, 23–24, 39, 45. 47. Wotton, Reflections, 77. 48. Although the new edition of the Epistles of Phalaris was attributed to Charles Boyle, the nephew of Robert Boyle, there is evidence that the edition and Boyle’s responses to Bentley’s criticisms were actually prepared by Francis Atterbury and others at Christ Church, Oxford. See Levine, The Battle of the Books, 59–61. See also Haugen, Richard Bentley, 112–113. 49. Bentley, A Dissertation Upon the Epistles of Phalaris, 62. See also Levine, The Battle of the Books, 53. 50. Haugen, Richard Bentley, 132. 51. Monk, The Life of Richard Bentley, Master of Trinity College, 249–250. 52. Bentley, Q. Horatius Flaccus, 2 (Praefatio). 53. Bentley, Q. Horatius Flaccus, 241 (Ep. I.II.40). 54. Fontenelle’s claims about the errors of the ancients are not without irony, since he remained committed to Descartes’s vortex theory and rejected Newton’s account of gravity. See Fontenelle, The Panegyrick of Sir Isaac Newton, 60–67. 55. Wotton criticizes Perrault’s and Fontenelle’s arguments on historical grounds in Reflections, 47–48. 56. Wotton, Reflections, 48, 356. 57. Swift, The Battle of the Books, 108. 58. Boileau-Despre´aux, Longinus’ Treatise of the Sublime, 2. It might seem ironic that Boileau, one of the foremost representatives of French neoclassicism, would complain about the ‘‘dry precepts’’ of Aristotle and Quintillian, but this is largely because our understanding of neoclassicism has been shaped by three centuries of critical polemics. While the critics accused neoclassicism of being rigid and formulaic, its proponents thought it represented elegance, simplicity, and naturalness. See Bray, La Formation de la Doctrine Classique en France, 1966. 59. Boileau-Despre´aux, Longinus’ Treatise of the Sublime, 6. 60. Boileau-Despre´aux, Art of Poetry, 159 (C.I. 7–8). 61. On Boileau’s appeals to reason (raison) and good sense (bon sens), see Pocock, Boileau and the Nature of Neo-Classicism, 88. 62. Translations of these passages can be found in Norman, The Shock of the Ancient, 1, 15.

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63. Pope, The Iliad of Homer, 21. See also Levine, The Battle of the Books, 198–199. 64. De La Motte, L’Iliade, 175–180. 65. Dacier, Des Causes de la Corruption du Goust, 24. 66. Dacier, Home`re defendu, 4. See also Simonsuri, Homer’s Original Genius, 46–56. 67. Temple, An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning, 16. 68. Temple, An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning, 22–23. 69. Temple, An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning, 25–27. 70. Temple, An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning, 27–29. 71. Temple, An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning, 40. 72. Swift, A Tale of a Tub, 44. 73. Swift, A Tale of a Tub, 44. 74. Swift, A Tale of a Tub, 44. 75. Swift, A Tale of a Tub, 45. 76. Something similar had already been done in French. See de Callie`res, Histoire poetique de la guerre nouvellement declare´e entre les anciens et les modernes, 1688. The English translation of Callie`res’s Poetic History appeared in 1714, ten years after Swift published The Battle of the Books. 77. Swift, The Battle of the Books, 115. 78. Swift, The Battle of the Books, 124. 79. See Levine, ‘‘Ancients and Moderns Reconsidered,’’ 72–89. See also Grafton, Defenders of the Text, 27.

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Contemporary philosophers and scientists have become less interested in the idea that science constitutes ‘‘an exhaustive ordering of the world.’’1 Research in fields like physics, chemistry, and biology proceeds without a unified theory by focusing on ever more specialized topics. Something similar has happened in academic philosophy, where philosophers from different traditions address a variety of problems using a number of different methods, and only rarely concern themselves with work being done in other areas. Some critics have complained about this tendency toward increasingly specialized research, but many philosophers and scientists have embraced a kind of pluralism about methods and practices.2 Instead of seeing research as a small part of a greater whole, they regard each discipline, subdiscipline, and research specialization as a world unto itself.3 Each of these worlds produces an enormous amount of knowledge, even if it remains unclear what they have to do with the knowledge being produced in the other worlds that constitute the academic multiverse. Things were very different in the early modern period, not because there was any lack of diversity in philosophical and scientific concerns, methods, or practices, but because the construction and articulation of systems was a major concern for philosophers and scientists. Recall the image of the tree of philosophy in the Principles of Philosophy (1644), where Descartes says ‘‘the whole of philosophy is like a tree. . . . The roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches emerging from the trunk are all the other sciences, which may be reduced to three principal ones, namely, medicine, mechanics, and morals.’’4 Another 39

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famous example is the table of the sciences Hobbes includes in chapter IX of the Leviathan (1651) to explain the differences among philosophy, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, geography, engineering, architecture, navigation, meteorology, sciography, astrology, optics, music, ethics, poetry, rhetoric, logic, and politics.5 An even more ambitious system of the sciences is found in the Encylope´die of Diderot. At the end of D’Alembert’s Preliminary Discourse (1751), the author includes a ‘‘detailed explanation of the system of human knowledge’’ that traces ‘‘the general distribution of human knowledge’’ back to ‘‘history, which is related to memory; philosophy, which emanates from reason; and poetry, which arises from the imagination.’’6 D’Alembert’s system is so comprehensive that he even finds a place for knowledge of draping and hosiery in its divisions.7 In his classic article ‘‘The Modern System of the Arts’’ (1951–1952), Paul Oskar Kristeller shows that the same concern for system can be found in discussions of the arts in the early modern period. In this chapter we look at treatises on painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and poetry that were produced during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the national traditions in which they were situated; attempts by philosophers to construct a system of the arts or to place the arts in larger systems of science, philosophy, and human knowledge; and finally, the conception of the ‘‘fine’’ arts that emerged from these discussions. Even if this conception of the arts and the systems early modern philosophers constructed do not constitute the ‘‘exhaustive ordering of the world’’ they intended, they remain an important part of the prehistory of aesthetics, because they show how the arts were understood and how they were related to one another before aesthetics became a part of philosophy.

FIVE MAJOR ARTS In ‘‘The Modern System of the Arts,’’ Kristeller writes that ‘‘this system of the five major arts, which underlies all modern aesthetics and is so familiar to us all, is of comparatively recent origin and did not assume definite shape before the eighteenth century, although it has many ingredients which go back to classical, medieval and Renaissance

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thought.’’8 In this section I consider some of the works devoted to painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and poetry during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ignoring for the moment the systems into which these arts were incorporated in the eighteenth century and the place each of the arts occupied within that system. My survey is not (and cannot be!) exhaustive, but I hope it will illuminate some of the ways in which each of the five major arts were understood during the early modern period. Kristeller argues that painting and the other visual arts were less valued during antiquity and the Middle Ages than they were during the modern period, but that did not stop some early moderns from promoting ancient painting as a model for modern art.9 The Painting of the Ancients (1637) by Franciscus Junius is perhaps the best example of this approach. Roland Fre´art de Chambray’s An Idea of the Perfection of Painting (1662) is based on Junius’s work, but de Chambray adds studies of works by Raphael and Michelangelo, compensating for Junius’s neglect of modern Italian painting, which had been criticized by Rubens.10 Perrault defends the superiority of modern painting in the second dialogue of his Parallel of the Ancients and Moderns (1688), while Wotton reaches a more modest conclusion in his Reflections on Ancient and Modern Learning (1694), suggesting, ‘‘Poussin, Le Brun, and Bernini have made it evident by their performances in painting and statuary, that we have masters in both these arts, who have deserved a rank with those that flourished in the last Age, after they were again restored to these parts of the world.’’11 Charles Alphonse du Fresnoy’s Latin poem De Arte Graphica (1695) and Roger de Piles’s treatise The Art of Painting (1699), which appeared at the end of the seventeenth century, are less invested in the debate between the ancients and the moderns. Du Fresnoy’s poem, which is modeled on Horace’s Art of Poetry, has a pedagogical purpose. It is intended to educate and cultivate ‘‘pure genius, which is capable of choosing judiciously what is true; and of distinguishing between the beauties of nature, and that which is low and mean in her,’’ so that ‘‘this original genius, by long exercise and customs, may perfectly possess all the rules and secrets of that art.’’12 De Piles translated du Fresnoy’s poem into French, but his The Art of Painting is a more conventional treatise, explaining the subjects that are most appropriate for paintings, the principles of composition and design, as well as perspective, color, and a host of other

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subjects. The painter Charles LeBrun focuses on only one of these subjects, expression, in his Method to Learn to Design the Passions (published as Confe´rence sur l’expression ge´ne´rale et particulie`re, 1698). Le Brun’s method, based in large part on Descartes’s The Passions of the Soul, provides practical advice for painters about the best way to represent the subtle differences between closely related expressions, like the difference between esteem and veneration.13 In his Discourse on the Practice of Painting and Its Main Processes (1752), JeanBaptiste Oudry also focuses on the techniques the painter employs. In his Discourse, Oudry explains how to prepare canvases and arrange the colors on a palette, the best methods for underpainting and overpainting different kinds of subjects, and how to retouch completed works.14 Diderot takes the opposite perspective in his Notes on Painting (1765), writing from the point of view of the spectator and the critic. His comments on drawing, color, chiaroscuro, expression, composition, and taste are scattered and unsystematic, but they address nearly every concern of eighteenth-century painting: the imitation of nature and the artificiality of academic rules, the value of observation and the power of imagination, the difference between genius and technical mastery, the importance of perspective and harmony, the relation between painting and poetry, and the appeal to sentiment and the role of reason in judgments of taste. They are certainly more satisfying for a contemporary reader than the Discourses on Art (1769–1790) by Joshua Reynolds. Reynolds’s Discourses are ‘‘unabashedly didactic,’’ but they are important for their advocacy of the ‘‘grand style,’’ which Reynolds struggles to explain, but which distinguishes painting from other crafts and seeks a ‘‘great ideal of perfection.’’15 Considerably fewer works were published on sculpture than on painting during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Perhaps that is because the sculptures of classical antiquity and the Italian Renaissance were less accessible than the poetry or the paintings, yet it may also be a consequence of the way sculpture was understood at the time. During the Renaissance, sculpture was considered an art of design or composition, similar to painting.16 Debates raged about whether painting or sculpture was superior. Many based their judgment on the classical hierarchy of the senses, which privileged vision over touch. They declared painting first among the arts because it is primarily visual, while sculpture is essentially tactile.17 Following this line of reasoning,

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some early modern painters, like Rubens, thought it was necessary to understand the differences between sculpture and painting, so that when they imitated classical works their paintings would not ‘‘in the least smell of stone.’’18 Others, like de Piles, privileged painting over sculpture because painting made use of color, while classical sculpture was done in cold white marble.19 De Piles even criticized the nudes of Nicolas Poussin, the French painter, for being too sculptural. Poussin’s figures are, according to de Piles, ‘‘hard as marble’’ and too much like ‘‘painted stone.’’20 While it is now common knowledge that ancient Greek sculptures were painted, sometimes in vivid and surprising colors, the idea of painted sculptures was almost unthinkable to artists and critics during the early modern period. Johann Joachim Winckelmann describes a painted statue discovered at Herculaneum in 1760 in his History of Ancient Art (1765), but he considers the painting of sculpture to be a crude and primitive stage in the development of the arts.21 Winckelmann’s account of the development of the arts is remarkable, because he argues that art began with sculpture rather than drawing, painting, poetry, or music. Winckelmann contends that the arts arose when ancient people began making statues of their gods to worship, first in clay, then in wood and ivory, and finally in stone (marble) and metal (bronze, gold). He recounts the progress of the arts from the first attempts of the Egyptians; to the works of the Phoenicians, Persians, and Etruscans; to their perfection among the ancient Greeks and Romans.22 But he reserves his most effusive praise for the sculpture of the ancient Greeks, who achieved a ‘‘simplicity and grandeur’’ in the imitation of nature, the drawing of contours, and the expression of emotion that is unmatched by other peoples in different historical periods.23 Winckelmann’s account of the ‘‘simplicity and grandeur’’ of Greek sculpture was, however, challenged by Lessing in his Laocoo¨n (1766). Lessing maintains that Greek sculpture restricts the expression of emotion, not because of its ‘‘simplicity and grandeur,’’ but because it was solely concerned with ‘‘the imitation of beautiful bodies.’’24 This makes it difficult to sculpt a scene like the one in the Laocoo¨n, depicting the moment when a Trojan priest and his two sons are attacked by giant snakes. While a poet like Virgil can describe the suffering of Laocoo¨n in vivid terms, the sculptor has to limit expression for the sake of beauty.

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Classical works on architecture like Vitruvius’s On Architecture (ca. 27) and Renaissance treatises like Alberti’s On the Art of Building (1486) remained influential during the early modern period.25 Yet the baroque style, developed in Italy by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Francesco Borromini, and Pietro da Cortona, also became popular during this time. Palaces like the Palais du Luxembourg (Paris 1615–1620), Versaille (1624–1698), Schloss Ludwigsburg (Dresden, ca. 1704), Schloss Belvedere (Vienna, 1714–1723), Sansouci (Potsdam, 1745–1747), and the Winter Palace (St. Petersburg, 1754–1762) were meant to reflect the harmonies and proportions of classical architecture, but their monumental scale and decorative ornamentation were decidedly baroque. So too were the gardens that adorned these palaces. Drawing on Jacques Boyceau de la Baraudie`re’s Treatise on Gardening According to the Rules of Nature and Art (1636), Andre´ Le Noˆtre, the designer of the gardens at Versailles, laid out the gardens surrounding the palace according to artistic principles, so they would exhibit unity, harmony, and (especially) perspective.26 The result was a new approach to landscape architecture, the French garden, which remained popular throughout the seventeenth century.27 The eighteenth century saw the rise of the more naturalistic English garden. The spirit of this approach can probably be traced back to Henry Wotton’s Elements of Architecture (1624), which recommends ‘‘a certain contrariety between building and gardening.’’28 Wotton goes on to argue that while buildings should be regular, gardens should be irregular, ‘‘or at least cast into a very wild regularity.’’29 Even greater naturalism was promoted by the followers of William Gilpin, who praised the ‘‘picturesque beauty’’ of untouched natural landscapes in his A Dialogue of the Right Honorable the Lord Viscount Cobham (1748) and the series of books he called Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty (1782–1809).30 The move away from the baroque style in building and gardening was also influenced by the archaeological discoveries of the eighteenth century. Works like MarcAntoine Laugier’s Essay on Architecture (1753), Julien-David LeRoy’s The Ruins of the Most Beautiful Monuments of Ancient Greece (1758), James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s The Antiquities of Athens (1762), Winckelmann’s Notes on the Architecture of the Ancients (1762), and Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Observations on the Letter of Monsieur Mariette (1765) presented classical architecture as an achievement of unrivaled grandeur.31 As a result, the Greek revival at the end of the

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eighteenth century saw buildings that were more restrained than their baroque predecessors in their use of ornament, though certainly not in their monumental scale.32 Mathematical approaches to perspective played an important role in early modern painting, sculpture, and architecture, but mathematics also exerted considerable influence on music theory during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Descartes’s first work, the Compendium of Music (1618/1650) is in fact a work of applied mathematics. Following Giossefo Zarlino’s The Harmonic Institutions (1558), Descartes provides a mathematical account of musical intervals—the difference between pitches, their consonance and dissonance, and so forth.33 At the time he was unaware of the corpuscular theory of sound Isaac Beeckman had proposed, even though Descartes dedicated his Compendium to Beeckman and had been collaborating with him on various problems in mathematical physics. For Beeckman, the consonance found in musical melodies and harmonies is the effect of ‘‘globules’’ or ‘‘pulses’’ of sound emitted from vibrating strings.34 When these globules or pulses coincide, they produce consonance; when they do not, dissonance is the result. Marin Mersenne combined both mathematical and physical accounts of consonance in his Universal Harmony (1636), arguing that musical pitch is determined by the frequency of the vibration of a string. Like Descartes, who hoped to provide composers with practical advice about how to affect the passions of their audience, Mersenne thought his treatise would be useful for practicing musicians, who could consult his work for guidance on the design and tuning of musical instruments, as well as the principles of composition and performance.35 Jean-Philippe Rameau attempts a similar combination of music theory and practice in his Treatise on Harmony (1722). Today Rameau’s work is best remembered for its account of the ‘‘fundamental bass,’’ which became a central principle of French composition during the eighteenth century. According to Rameau and, later, d’Alembert, the fundamental bass is a way of representing the root tones of chords, from which all the major and minor harmonies can be derived.36 JeanJacques Rousseau appeals to Rameau’s account of the fundamental bass in his Dissertation on Modern Music (1736), but he promotes a very different approach to music in his Dictionary of Music (1768).37 In the period between the publication of the two works, Rousseau became a

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partisan of Italian music, which he presented as a pleasant and naturalistic alternative to the ‘‘learned harmonies’’ of French music, whose chief representative was Rameau.38 Rousseau then became embroiled in a public dispute with Rameau about the articles on music he had written for the Encyclopedie (1751–1772), published by Diderot and d’Alembert.39 The chief issue in this exchange was the relative priority of harmony (Rameau) or melody (Rousseau), though more fundamental issues were also involved. Rameau granted priority to harmony, because he thought music was a ‘‘physicomathematical science,’’ while Rousseau was primarily concerned with the ‘‘moral effects’’ of music and the way it affected the passions. Rousseau’s sentimentalism would have a profound effect on romantic music in the nineteenth century, though its influence was often exerted through his philosophical works and novels, rather than his writings on music. Renaissance traditions of classical scholarship continued throughout the early modern period, leading to numerous editions and translations of classical poetry, drama, and criticism. By the second half of the seventeenth century, a number of theoretical works based on Aristotle’s Poetics (ca. 335 BCE) and Horace’s Art of Poetry (ca. 19 BCE) had appeared. In his Three Discourses on Dramatic Poetry (1660), Pierre Corneille explains, first, the different parts of a tragedy and their moral uses; second, the best means of achieving catharsis; and third, the unities of action, time, and place. Corneille relies heavily on Aristotle’s Poetics in his discourses and uses Aristotelian principles to formulate several rules. However, it would be a mistake to assume Corneille is slavishly devoted to Aristotle. He acknowledges that his rule concerning the action of a tragedy—that the poet must show the most important actions in the plot, narrate less important actions, and make sure to connect them sequentially, so that later actions follow earlier ones—is ‘‘new and contrary to the usage of the ancients.’’40 He also criticizes Aristotle for being ‘‘a little too harsh’’ in his condemnation of the deus ex machina.41 Corneille does not recommend strict adherence to the traditional rule concerning the unity of time—that the action of a tragedy take place in a single day—and he denies there is any rule concerning the unity of place—he is willing to consider an entire city as a single place, so long as it can be represented in a way that is consistent with the principle of probability.42 Similar qualifications and emendations of Aristotle are found in Rene´ Rapin’s Reflections on Aristotle’s Poetics

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(1674) and in the remarks Andre´ Dacier included in his French translation of the Poetics (1692), proving there is a kind of artistic pragmatism at the heart of French neoclassical poetics. A similar spirit can be found in Johann Christoph Gottsched’s Critical Poetics for the Germans (1730). Although Gottsched was influenced by the rationalist philosophy of Christian Wolff and the formalism of French neoclassical drama, he begins the Critical Poetics with a translation of and commentary on Horace’s Art of Poetry, signaling to contemporary readers the pragmatic objectives of his work. The man who came to be known as the ‘‘literary dictator of Germany’’ sought to improve German literature by providing sound, practical advice for poets and dramatists. His critics, especially Johann Jakob Bodmer and Johann Jakob Breitinger, objected that Gottsched’s advice would limit the imaginations of poets and the representation of miraculous events on stage. Bodmer’s work, On the Miraculous in Poetry (1740), replaces Gottsched’s practical concern for order and probability with an enthusiasm for the improbable, the fantastic, and the supernatural. Bodmer’s fascination with the miraculous harkens back to the ‘‘Christian marvelous’’ and Milton’s evocative descriptions of heaven and hell, but it is also related to the sentimentalist criticism of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele.43 While neoclassical critics focused on the rules of different genres, Addison and Steele focused on the pleasures of the imagination, the effects of works of art on the passions, and their relation to manners and society.44 Similar concerns can be found in Lessing’s, Mendelssohn’s, and Nicolai’s correspondence on tragedy (1756–1757). Like Addison, the correspondence praises the poet’s ability to arouse the passions, especially feelings of compassion. Lessing even says ‘‘the purpose of tragedy is this: it should expand our capacity for feeling pity.’’45 However, he does not deny there are rules and principles governing the different poetic genres. Lessing, Mendelssohn, and Nicolai are actually closer to Gottsched and the rationalists than other sentimentalist critics, because they remained convinced there are reasons that poetry affects us the way it does. We can use those reasons to formulate some general poetic principles, but these principles are best understood as practical guidelines. They cannot restrict the imagination or creativity of a genius, because works of genius set the standards for artistic excellence, against which other works are measured. A poet may not know the rules

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of his art while he is writing, but if he is a genius, then Lessing says he carries ‘‘the proof of all rules within himself.’’46 Limiting discussion of the early modern arts to painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and poetry is certainly reductive. It would be worthwhile to consider arts, like rhetoric and dance, that do not belong to the ‘‘five major arts’’ Kristeller identifies. Arts like calligraphy and typography, fashion design, the culinary arts, and perfumery, which may seem even more distant from the five major arts than rhetoric and dance, are also inherently interesting. Yet the purpose of this section has been to survey some of the treatises on the arts that were produced during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, without regard for their relation to one another or to their systematic articulation. In what follows, we see how these relationships were established and how systems of the arts were constructed in the second half of the eighteenth century.

NATIONAL TRADITIONS A careful reader might notice that works on painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and poetry were discussed in (more or less) chronological order in the preceding section. That made sense, given the purpose of that section; however, it is not the only way the arts were understood during the early modern period. The emergence of European nationalism also had a dramatic effect on the arts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While they all looked back to Greco-Roman antiquity and the Italian Renaissance, some began to see the artistic and literary cultures of France, England, and Germany as distinct traditions with their own characteristics. The differences among the three national traditions were often attributed to the climate, geography, and population from which they emerged, but there were also political and economic factors involved.47 Because these factors helped to establish relationships among the arts during the early modern period, they are worth considering here.48 The French national tradition began to take shape in the second half of the seventeenth century. It would be difficult to deny the French Acade´mies played an important role in its development. Founded by Louis XIII and Louis XIV, the French Academy (Acade´mie franc¸aise, 1635), Academy of Painting and Sculpture (Acade´mie de peinture et de

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sculpture, 1648), Academy of Inscription and Literature (Acade´mie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, 1663), Academy of Music (Acade´mie de musique, 1669), and Academy of Architecture (Acade´mie d’architecture, 1671) centralized instruction in the arts and provided their members with a kind of institutionalized patronage. As a result, the paintings and sculptures, poems and novels, operas and ballets, palaces and gardens they produced were often dedicated to the glory of the king and the nation. Perrault’s The Century of Louis the Great is a good example. Perrault was a member of the Academy of Literature, and his poem was meant to praise the accomplishments of Louis XIV. This put the defenders of the ancients in a rather difficult position, because they had to refute Perrault’s claims about the superiority of modern art without denying the greatness of their king or diminishing the triumphs of his reign. Boileau, who was a member of the French Academy, objected strongly to Perrault’s poem, but he assured his opponent in their correspondence that they did not disagree ‘‘concerning the esteem that our own nation and our own century merit,’’ even though they were ‘‘differently of the same opinion.’’49 Anne Dacier, whose husband Andre´ was a member of the Academy of Literature, but who was not a member of the any of the academies herself, took the liberty of saying she found ‘‘these ancient times all the more beautiful in that they so little resemble our own.’’50 Her claim could have been interpreted politically, as criticism of the king, yet the king’s privilege appears on the title page of On the Causes of the Corruption of Taste, indicating the royal censors approved of Dacier’s work. Because the approval of the censors constituted what Robert Darnton calls ‘‘a royal endorsement of the book and an official invitation to read it,’’ censorship promoted the formation of official literary and artistic styles, which came to be identified with French culture.51 Royal sponsorship of the tragedies of Corneille and Racine, the comedies of Molie`re, and the music of Rameau had similar effects. The works of these artists were performed so regularly during the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century that they set the standard for works in each genre. There were French artists who rebelled against these standards in the eighteenth century, but even they did so in a way that remained dependent on the institutions associated with the king and the Acade´mies. Rousseau became one of the most outspoken critics of Rameau and French music during the 1750s, but the high point of his musical career was the performance of his opera

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The Village Soothsayer, first at the court of Louis XV (1752) and then at the The´aˆtre du Palais Royal (1753), which was managed by the Acade´mie de musique. The approval of the crown and the academy were difficult to resist, even for a republican citizen of Geneva like Rousseau. During the eighteenth century French critics tended to see their neighbors across the English Channel as crude and unsophisticated. In his Letters Concerning the English Nation (Lettres Philosophiques, 1734), Voltaire declared Shakespeare ‘‘a fecund genius, full of vigor, ranging from simple naturalness to the sublime, without the least glimmer of taste or the slightest knowledge of the rules.’’52 One explanation for the ‘‘tastelessness’’ and ‘‘irregularity’’ of English art is the absence of the kind of centralized and institutionalized patronage that existed in France. While he acknowledges the Royal Society of London was founded before the French academies, Voltaire criticizes the Royal Society for mixing ‘‘literature and physics,’’ instead of promoting each of the arts and sciences individually.53 He also notes that the Royal Society does not provide its members with pensions, stipends, and prizes the way the French Acade´mies do. ‘‘On the contrary,’’ he writes, ‘‘in London it costs money to belong to the Royal Society.’’54 The fact that the English government rejected Swift’s plan for an academy of the English language was, for Voltaire, the greatest impediment to the progress of the arts in England.55 Still, the lack of institutional support and the absence of royal patronage did not prevent a distinctive national style from emerging in England during the eighteenth century. The most important influences on this style were probably the coffeehouses that sprang up in London and publications like the Tatler (1709) and Spectator (1711–1712). The coffeehouses were important, because they provided a space for the public to gather and discuss matters of common interest.56 Literature and art were frequent topics of conversation in this space, as were politics and current events. Pamphlets and newspapers reflected the form and content of coffeehouse conversations, but they also sought to influence them. Some periodicals told readers what to think directly, while others used examples and criticism to promote the values they wanted the public to adopt.57 In The Spectator, for example, Addison and Steele created a cast of characters—Mr. Spectator and his friends—whose views represent the manners and tastes their authors considered appropriate for their age, nation, gender, and class. Mr. Spectator is, consequently, learned but practical, socially engaged

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but nonpartisan, moral but not prudish, and sentimental but not effusive.58 Marxist critics have noted that these characteristics represent the self-image of the rising English bourgeoisie.59 Instead of singing the praises of the king and the nation, the novels of Dafoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne; Addison’s criticism; and Hogarth’s paintings and prints mocked the fashions of the court and the institutions of aristocratic life. And they did so with a combination of humor and moral seriousness that has come to represent English art and literature in the early modern period. The German national tradition did not begin to develop until after the French and English traditions had already established themselves. As a result, many Germans saw the development of their own national tradition as a choice between the French and British models. Johann Christoph Gottsched is often seen as a promoter of the French model, while Johann Jakob Bodmer and Johann Jakob Breitinger are seen as advocates of the English model. There is some truth to this account of the debate between the two parties, but it is not entirely correct. Gottsched was not nearly as ‘‘French’’ as some of his critics make him out to be. Although there was in Berlin a Royal Prussian Academy of Arts (Die Ko¨nighlich-Preußische Akademie der Ku¨nste), founded by Frederick I in 1694 as the Academy of Painting, Pictures, and Architecture (Die Academie der Mahl-, Bild- und Baukunst), Gottsched was not a member.60 His authority came from the newspapers, journals, and anthologies he edited, and later, from his prestigious position as professor extraordinarius of poetry at Leipzig. Gottsched’s first newspaper— which promoted the education of women and the development of German literature—was called The Rational Tatlers (Die vernu¨nftigen Tadlerinnen, 1725–1726) in homage its English predecessor.61 His subsequent undertakings—The Rational Tatlers was followed by The Respectable Man (Der Biedermann, 1727–1729), which was followed by the critical journal Contributions to the Critical History of the German Language, Poetry, and Oratory (Beytra¨ge zur critischen Historie der deutschen Sprache, Poesie, und Beredsamkeit, 1732–1745), and a famous anthology of German drama called The German Theater (Deutsche Schaubu¨hne, 1740–1745)—cemented his authority in German literature and culture. Controversies about the nature and extent of his influence began with the publication of Gottsched’s Critical Poetics for the Germans (Critische Dichtkunst vor die Deutschen, 1729/1730).

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Critics like Bodmer and Breitinger objected that Gottsched followed Aristotle and Corneille too closely and placed too much emphasis on the structure of the plot in a tragedy. They contended that a carefully composed plot, proceeding from the beginning to the middle to the end, which observes the unities of time and place, was not sufficient to make a tragedy great. Shakespearean tragedies violate all of the Aristotelian rules, and much of Horace’s advice, and yet they are works of genius. Milton’s Paradise Lost is also a great work, even though it is full of supernatural characters and miraculous events, contrary to Aristotle’s warnings about the deus ex machina and his insistence that every narrative must respect the laws of probability. Taking Shakespeare’s irregularity and Milton’s supernaturalism as alternative to Gottsched’s neoclassicism, the followers of Bodmer and Breitinger began to promote the idea of the artist as an inexplicable natural genius rather than a disciplined craftsman. This led, at the end of the eighteenth century, to a literary movement known as Sturm und Drang—storm and stress— that set the stage for German romanticism in the nineteenth century. The epistolary form of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, 1774) may have been reminiscent of English novels like Richardson’s Pamela, but the extremity of Werther’s emotions and his self-image as a tortured genius were far removed from the bourgeois sensibilities of English literature. By the end of the eighteenth century, philosophers like Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottfried Herder were speculating about the origins of the relationship between nationality and art. In the fourth section of his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (‘‘On National Characters Insofar as They Rest Upon the Different Feeling of the Sublime and the Beautiful,’’ 1764), Kant notes, ‘‘The Italian genius has distinguished itself especially in music, painting, sculpture, and architecture’’ and ‘‘there is an equally fine taste for all of these fine arts in France, although here their beauty is less touching.’’62 He also appeals to national character to explain the difference between French and English tastes in poetry: ‘‘The taste with regard to poetic or rhetorical perfection runs more to the beautiful in France, in England more to the sublime. In France, fine jests, comedy, laughing satire, enamored dalliance, and the light and naturally flowing manner of writing are original; in England, by contrast, thoughts with deep content, tragedy, epic poetry, and in general the heavy gold of wit, which under the

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French hammer can be beaten into thin leaves of great surface-area.’’63 Kant’s comments about the German, Dutch, and Spanish character and tastes are less charitable. He suggests that German culture has only recently developed, that the Dutch obsession with order leaves little room for genius, and that the Spanish show little concern for art or science.64 At about the same time, Herder, who was Kant’s student, began reflecting on historical changes in the tastes of different nations, noting ‘‘the form of the earth, its surface, its condition, has changed’’ and ‘‘changed are the race, the manner of life, the manner of thought, the form of government, the taste of nations—just as families and individual human beings change.’’65 Later, he would transform these observations into a narrative account of the development of different nations and their achievements in the arts. According to Herder, ‘‘the roots of taste . . . lie deep in the nation’s need, in the character of its manners,’’ so that taste would develop as the nation made progress, and then decline when ‘‘they have come as far as they can, and nothing compels them to become anything else.’’66 However interesting these speculations might be, they would have profound and unfortunate effects on aesthetics and art history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when they became associated with more extreme forms of nationalism and racism. Heinrich Wo¨lfflin’s insistence that there was, in addition to the ‘‘personal style’’ of the artist, ‘‘the style of the school, the country, the race’’ in his Principles of Art History (Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 1915), was used by the Nazis to support their claim that degenerate races produced degenerate art.67 In light of these developments, it might be best to regard the national traditions as antiphilosophical systems of the arts, in which historical narratives supplant rational, philosophical reflection on the nature of the arts and their relation to one another.

SYSTEMS OF THE ARTS Some early modern philosophers resisted the tendency to explain the relation between the arts through national traditions, but did not accept the view that the arts are separate and unconnected. Instead, they sought to found systems of the arts on rational principles derived from philosophy and the sciences.

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One of the earliest of these efforts can be found in Addison’s essay ‘‘On the Pleasures of the Imagination,’’ first published in The Spectator in 1712. Unlike those who explained the arts through national traditions, Addison argues that the arts are related through the faculty of the imagination, which arises from the sense of sight, but which has the power to retain, alter, and compound the images of things present and absent.68 According to Addison, it is the sight of what is great, uncommon, and beautiful that most inspires the imagination, so an unbounded view, an agreeable surprise, and the sight of shapely and wellproportioned things are the source of a special kind of pleasure. Addison speculates about the causes of this pleasure, suggesting God might have created this pleasure to give us ‘‘greater occasion of admiring the goodness and wisdom of the first Contriver,’’ but his comments about the relationship between the pleasures of the imagination and the arts are more important for our purposes.69 Addison notes that while the wonders of nature inspire greater pleasures in the imagination than works of art, the latter can also inspire the imagination through the agreeableness of their objects and their resemblance to other objects.70 To drive home the point that the pleasures of the imagination are greater when works of art resemble nature, he praises Chinese gardens for concealing ‘‘the art by which they direct themselves’’ and criticizes European gardens for showing ‘‘the marks of the scissors upon every plant and bush.’’71 However, in a subsequent discussion of architecture, Addison argues that works of art can be great, uncommon, and beautiful, even when they do not resemble nature. He devotes most of the discussion to greatness, which may refer to ‘‘the bulk and body of the structure’’ or else ‘‘the manner in which it is built.’’72 The different kinds of greatness affect the pleasures of the imagination, for buildings of great size are majestic and imprint ‘‘an awfulness and reverence on the mind of the beholder, and strikes in with the natural greatness of soul.’’73 Buildings that are great in manner may, however, inspire even greater pleasure in the mind of the beholder than buildings that are great in size. ‘‘A small building,’’ Addison writes, ‘‘shall give the mind nobler ideas than one of twenty times the bulk, where the manner is ordinary or little.’’74 He adds a brief remark at the end of his discussion indicating that architecture may be beautiful in addition to being great, but Addison dwells more on the beauty of sculpture, painting, poetic description, and music in his discussion of the ‘‘secondary pleasures’’

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of the imagination.75 He regards the pleasures inspired by these arts as ‘‘secondary,’’ because they are derived from the resemblance between artistic representations and other objects. Statues are, Addison argues, most similar to the objects they represent, so the pleasures they inspire are most like the pleasure of the object itself. Paintings and poetic descriptions are less like the objects they represent, so the pleasures of resemblance are less vivid in those arts than in sculpture. Still, painting achieves a kind of resemblance through its colors, and the words employed in poetic descriptions resemble objects through their connection to the ideas that represent those objects.76 Music is the most abstract from the objects it represents, but Addison acknowledges that ‘‘there may be confused, imperfect notions . . . raised in the imagination by an artificial composition of notes; and we find that great masters in the art are able, sometimes, to set their hearers in the heat and hurry of a battle, to overcast their minds with melancholy scenes, and apprehensions of deaths and funerals, or to lull them into pleasing dreams of groves and elysiums,’’ even when the notes of the music least resemble the objects they represent.77 Because he attributes the pleasures of all the arts to ‘‘that action of the mind which compares the ideas arising from the original objects, with the ideas we receive from the statue, picture, description, or sound that represents them,’’ Addison’s account of the pleasures of the imagination can be regarded as a philosophical system of the arts, grounded in the psychological faculty of imagination. Like Addison, Jean-Baptiste Du Bos bases the system of the arts he presents in his Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting, and Music (1719) on psychological principles. Instead of focusing on the pleasures of the imagination, however, Du Bos appeals to the needs of the soul. Asserting that ‘‘the soul has its wants no less than the body,’’ he traces the pleasures of the arts to ‘‘one of the greatest wants of man,’’ which is ‘‘to have his mind incessantly occupied.’’78 ‘‘The heaviness which quickly attends the inactivity of the mind is,’’ Du Bos says, ‘‘a situation so very disagreeable to man, that he frequently chooses to expose himself to the most painful exercises, rather than be troubled with it.’’79 He goes on to argue that the pleasures of the senses are the least disagreeable ways of occupying the mind, since they involve less painful exertion than physical labor and are less likely to fatigue the mind than philosophical speculation. He finds the sensible pleasures of the arts more agreeable than other kinds of sensation, because the passions they

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excite are ‘‘sufficient to occupy us while we are actually affected by them, and incapable of giving us afterwards any real pain or affliction.’’80 Du Bos believes the artificial passions inspired by the arts are not as intense as the natural passions aroused by the impressions of the senses. They are a source of pleasure, because they resemble pleasurable things, but they are less likely to disturb us or cause us pain than those objects, because they make only ‘‘superficial’’ impressions on our senses.81 At one point, Du Bos even suggests the pleasures of the arts better suited to occupy the mind than other forms of sensation, because they affect only ‘‘the surface of our heart’’ and have no other consequences.82 Explaining our fondness for tragedy and gruesome paintings is a significant challenge for Du Bos, because one would expect an audience to find a tragedy more painful to watch than a comedy and a painting depicting the massacre of innocents more disturbing than a still life with fruit. Du Bos recognizes that the opposite is the case, acknowledging that ‘‘those whose chief amusements consist in dramatic poetry, talk more frequently, and with a greater warmth of the tragedies, than of the comedies they have seen represented’’ and also that ‘‘we are readier to excuse a mediocrity in the tragic than in the comic style, though the latter seems not to have the same command over our attention as the first.’’83 The reason we prefer tragedy to comedy, despite the pain and the discomfort tragedies make us feel, can be explained by the difference in their objects. While comedy depicts characters similar to ourselves and entertains us through their resemblance, tragedy presents us with crimes and misfortunes of great men, with whom we cannot identify and whose fate we could not even imagine sharing. Because the characters and events of a tragedy are so much greater than those of a comedy, however, Du Bos thinks ‘‘the terror and pity, which the picture of tragical events excites in our souls, engages us much more than all the laughter and contempt excited by the several incidents of comedies.’’84 The same principle can be applied to painting. Responding to the charge that painting shows the manner in which a subject is depicted to be more significant than the intrinsic greatness of the subject itself, Du Bos acknowledges that, in many cases, ‘‘it is not so much the object, as the artist’s abilities, that draws our curiosity.’’85 However, he also holds that a well-painted picture ‘‘does not engage our curiosity half so long as those, wherein the merit of the subject is joined with that of the execution,’’ proving it is the subject matter of the painting, and not just

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the way in which it is represented, that commands our attention.86 When he turns to music later in the Critical Reflections, Du Bos insists that ‘‘the first principles therefore of music are the same as those of poetry and painting,’’ since ‘‘music, like these two arts, is an imitation; and like these arts it must conform to the general rules with respect to the choice of the subject, the probability, and several other points.’’87 This confirms, for Du Bos, that ‘‘all the liberal arts . . . seem to have one common chain of agreement, and to be connected by a kind of mutual affinity,’’ because they are all grounded in the same psychological principles. Charles Batteux differs from Addison and Du Bos, because he does not appeal to psychological principles to explain the relation among painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, and music. In his The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle (1746) and A Course of the Belles Lettres (1765), Batteux focuses on the principles of the production of works of art, which he distinguishes from the principles that guide the critical judgment of works of art. In the author’s preface to A Course of the Belles Lettres, he notes, ‘‘We every day hear complaints of the great multitude of rules for production, the number of which equally confuse the author in his composition, and the lover of learning in his judgment.’’88 In response, Batteux tries to reduce these rules to a single principle, shortening the path to great literature and making it ‘‘more plain and simple.’’89 His formulation of this principle begins his account of the nature of the arts. According to Batteux, the arts are works of artifice. They constitute ‘‘a second order of elements, the creation of which nature had reserved for our own industry.’’90 Each of these creations has a separate end. The mechanical arts provide the necessities of life, while polite arts like music, poetry, painting, sculpture, and dance are sources of pleasure. Batteux notes that some arts, like rhetoric and architecture, combine beauty and utility, but he is more concerned to establish the difference in the way the mechanical arts and the polite arts relate to nature. He argues that the mechanical arts use nature as a resource, while the polite arts imitate nature. The use of nature satisfies human needs, but the purpose of imitation is ‘‘to transport those touches which are in nature, and to present them in objects to which they are not natural.’’91 Batteux insists that the imitations of the polite arts follow nature, which he calls ‘‘the prototype and model of the arts,’’ and

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also that the arts do not create their own rules, because ‘‘these are independent of their caprice and invariably traced in the grand sample of nature,’’ but he rejects the idea that they should imitate ‘‘simple nature.’’92 On the contrary, he argues, the arts should imitate ‘‘beautiful nature.’’93 Beautiful nature differs from simple nature, because it is ‘‘not the truth that does exist, but that truth which may exist: beautiful truth which is represented as if it really existed, and with all the perfections it can receive.’’94 One might wonder whether the imitation of an ideal truth that might exist but does not actually exist really counts as an imitation of nature, but Batteux grants the genius of the artist license to go beyond (actual) nature in order to imitate its (potential) beauty. And because the arts of painting, sculpture, poetry, music, and dance only differ in the way they imitate beautiful nature—painting imitates using colors, sculpture through shape, dance through motion, music by sound, and poetry in words—they all fall under the same general principle, which applies to all the polite arts: imitate beautiful nature.95 The other rules that are found in the arts are simply means to achieve this general end, so while they may be important for the medium in which the imitation of beautiful nature is to be achieved, they cannot be compared to the most general principle of all the arts, which provides the foundation for Batteux’s system. One last example of an early modern system of the arts can be found in Moses Mendelssohn’s essay ‘‘On the Main Principles of the Fine Arts and Sciences,’’ which was included in his Philosophical Writings (1761/1771). Although Mendelssohn insists he has ‘‘neither the intent nor the capability to erect an entire system’’ in his essay, he presents the outlines of a system as comprehensive as the ones proposed by Du Bos and Batteux.96 That outline shows Mendelssohn’s system encompasses the objective rules of artistic beauty as well as the subjective principles governing our experience of art. Mendelssohn’s system differs from those of his predecessors, because he makes the system of the arts the key to philosophical psychology. We understand the mind by understanding its response to art, rather than understanding art through the workings of the human mind. ‘‘Each rule of beauty is,’’ for Mendelssohn, ‘‘a psychological discovery.’’97 He even holds that ‘‘beauty is the self-empowered mistress of all our sentiments, the basis of all our natural drives, and the animating spirit which transforms speculative knowledge of the truth into sentiments and incites us to active decision.’’98

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Art is simply an attempt to imitate and multiply beauty in different senses using different media. In this respect, Mendelssohn is close to Batteux, though he rejects Batteux’s insistence that the arts must imitate beautiful nature. Because natural beauty produces the same psychological effects as artistic beauty, but does not produce those effects through imitation, Mendelssohn concludes that imitation is incidental to the arts.99 More important than imitation is beautiful expression, which Mendelssohn understands as ‘‘the visible imprints of the artist’s abilities.’’100 Genius is closely related to beautiful expression, because it requires ‘‘a perfection of all the powers of the soul as well as their harmonization for a single, final purpose.’’ When that harmony and purpose becomes manifest in a work of art, Mendelssohn thinks it is ‘‘far more pleasing to us than the signs of patience and practice.’’101 In some cases, beautiful expression even achieves a kind of perfection, though Mendelssohn insists this perfection must be sensible rather than intellectual in beautiful works of art.102 The claim that artistic beauty is a kind of sensible perfection is closely related to Baumgarten’s aesthetics and other arguments Mendelssohn makes in his Letters on Sentiments (1755), where he describes beauty as the ‘‘sensuous emulator’’ of reason, whose sensible perfections inspire the soul to seek the higher and greater perfections of the intellect.103 He continues to regard the perfections of the senses as inferior to those of the intellect in ‘‘On the Main Principles,’’ but Mendelssohn attends more to the different ways that sensible perfection can be achieved and the different forms it can take than he did in the Letters on Sentiments. This leads him to distinguish the fine arts (painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and dance) and the fine sciences (poetry and rhetoric). The fine arts use natural signs to achieve sensible perfection, which means they imitate objects, express the character and aims of the artist, and affect the passions of the audience or the spectator through the senses of hearing and sight.104 Because the passions are naturally related to the body and are moved when it is affected by sights or sounds, the fine arts have no need for the artificial signs employed by the fine sciences. Mendelssohn regards the language used by poetry and rhetoric as an artificial sign, because words do not resemble the objects to which they refer—for example, the word ‘‘table’’ does not resemble a table in any way—or possess any natural connection to the body or the senses—the word ‘‘joy’’ does not affect us in a way that naturally causes joy.105 Still, Mendelssohn thinks the

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artificial signs employed by the fine sciences can sensibly perfect and affect our emotions, so long as the poets and rhetoricians are able to deceive us and make us forget that what they are talking about is not really present and is not actually affecting us when they are speaking. Mendelssohn insists that ‘‘the worth of poetic images, similes, and descriptions, and even that of individual terms must be judged on the basis of this general maxim,’’ because they are all means of achieving sensible perfection through the use of artificial signs.106 Mendelssohn goes on to discuss the possibility of combining the fine arts and fine sciences at the end of his essay, considering the role inscriptions play in paintings and architecture as well as the combination of poetry, painting, and music in opera; however, it is the distinction between natural and artificial signs that is really central to Mendelssohn’s system of the arts. Natural and artificial signs are simply different means to achieve beauty, which is a kind of sensible perfection.107 And sensible perfection is for Mendelssohn a reflection of the higher perfections of the intellect, which can be found in nature or art, imitation or expression.

PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEMS In addition to the systems of the arts constructed by Addison, Du Bos, Batteux, and Mendelssohn, the arts found their way into many of the other systems that were constructed by philosophers and scientists during the early modern period. These systems were not ‘‘systems of the arts’’ like the one described by Kristeller. But they were systems, and they did not exclude the arts from the comprehensive order of philosophical and scientific knowledge they sought to produce. Among the philosophical systems that included the arts is Francis Bacon’s Outline of a Natural and Experimental History (1620). In order to determine ‘‘the first matter of philosophy and the stuff and material of true induction,’’ Bacon attempts to ‘‘find and build a store of things sufficiently large and varied to formulate true axioms’’ for his new natural history.108 Included in this store are histories of all the five major arts—painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and poetry—as well as histories of other arts and crafts—dance and pottery, woodworking and gardening, and so forth.109 The table of the sciences that Hobbes

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includes in chapter IX of Leviathan also includes several of the arts. He does not mention painting or sculpture, but does include architecture, music, and poetry in his table as parts of natural philosophy, because they are to be understood as the consequences of the figures of body, the consequences of sound, and the consequences of human speech, respectively.110 And though he does not discuss these subjects at any length, it is still noteworthy that Hobbes considered them natural sciences.111 Few of the other great philosophers of the seventeenth century paid much attention to the arts, but they played a more central role in the philosophical systems of the eighteenth century. In the ‘‘Advertisement’’ for his Treatise of Human Nature (1739/1740), Hume says he intended to devote one of the later books of his treatise to criticism. Poor sales eventually forced him to abandon this plan, but Hume still thinks it is important to tell his readers that his treatise, and the new science of human nature that it was supposed to expound, would not be complete until it had explained the relationship among criticism, the arts, and the standards of taste.112 The Encylope´die of Diderot (1751– 1772) gives the arts an even more prominent place than the systems of Bacon, Hobbes, or Hume, because Diderot and his collaborators did much more than gesture at the place of the arts in their system. After placing the arts under the faculty of the imagination in D’Alembert’s Preliminary Discourse, they actually include a number of entries on the arts, which are treated as the products of human ingenuity and industry applied to nature.113 The entries related to painting, sculpture, architecture, music, dance, and poetry are also extensive and detailed.114 That these entries are part of a larger philosophical system is evident from D’Alembert’s Preliminary Discourse, where he describes the Encyclope´die as an account of the order and connection of all human knowledge, along with the general principles that provide the arts and sciences with their foundation.115 In addition to the systems I have already mentioned, the place of the arts in the philosophical systems of Christian Wolff and Immanuel Kant deserves special attention. Recently, some scholars have claimed Wolff should be regarded as the true founder of the philosophy of art, because he ‘‘gave the greatest importance to the arts . . . and assigned them a central place in his system.’’116 It is true that Wolff considered the arts important and explained how they fit into his system; however, it is an

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exaggeration to say that he gave the arts ‘‘the greatest importance’’ or that their place in Wolff’s system is ‘‘central.’’ Wolff affirms that ‘‘a philosophy of law and of medicine and of each of the arts is also possible’’ in his Preliminary Discourse on Philosophy in General (1728), but his idea of a philosophy of art is simply an account of the reasons why the arts are the way they are.117 For an example, he turns to woodcutting, which he regards as the lowest of the manual arts. According to Wolff, the philosophy of the art of woodcutting would explain ‘‘why wood can be cut and why this can be done with a wedge or an axe.’’118 Since philosophical knowledge consists of ‘‘the knowledge of the reason of things which are or occur,’’ Wolff does not think knowing why wood can be cut with an axe is any less philosophical than the knowledge found in any of the other parts of philosophy.119 And though he calls for knowledge of the arts to be cultivated and used to improve philosophy, Wolff never devoted any major works to the subject.120 His followers—especially Gottsched, Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, and Lessing—probably deserve more credit than Wolff for enriching philosophy with their investigations of the arts. Kant considered his Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) to be the culmination and conclusion of his critical philosophy, so his discussion of the arts in that work may not be as marginal as Wolff’s call to cultivate the philosophy of art in his Preliminary Discourse.121 Yet Kant is careful to point out that the discussion of the arts that he proposes at the end of the ‘‘Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment’’ is merely provisional. He warns the reader not to judge his distinction among the arts of speech (rhetoric and poetry), the pictorial arts (painting, sculpture, and architecture), and the art of the play of sensations (music and the art of colors) as if it constituted ‘‘a deliberate theory,’’ because he admits it is ‘‘only one of the several experiments that still can and should be attempted’’ in the philosophy of art.122 Many scholars have pointed out that Kant’s distinctions are not terribly original, yet there are some noteworthy features of Kant’s account of the arts. It has the virtue of emphasizing the difference between the beautiful arts and other kinds of arts, which was absent from many of his predecessors. According to Kant, the beautiful arts require a special combination of imagination, understanding, spirit, and taste, which is not found in other arts and not necessary for the other arts to make progress. What is more, Kant thinks the beautiful arts express what he calls ‘‘aesthetic

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ideas.’’ Aesthetic ideas are intuitions for which ‘‘no concept can be fully adequate.’’123 In trying to express these ideas, Kant says, ‘‘the poet ventures to make sensible rational ideas of invisible beings, the kingdom of the blessed, the kingdom of hell, eternity, creation, etc., as well as to make that of which there are examples in experience, e.g., death, envy, and all sorts of vices, as well as love, fame, etc., sensible of the limits of experience, with a completeness that goes beyond anything of which there is an example in nature, by means of an imagination that emulates the precedent of reason in attaining to a maximum.’’124 What he is saying, in other words, is that the beautiful arts show us things beyond our understanding, through the creative powers of the artist’s imagination. Kant may not have been the first to suggest that the arts possess an incomprehensible and inexplicable ‘‘je ne sais quoi’’ (‘‘I don’t know what’’), but he went far beyond the precedent set by Bohours and Leibniz and made it a constituent feature of the beautiful arts.125 Later philosophers and scientists would struggle with the romantics who defended Kant’s view in order to make the arts comprehensible again.

NOTES 1. Michel Foucault argues that science aimed at an ‘‘exhaustive ordering of the world’’ during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In The Order of Things (1966), he argues that ‘‘the sciences always carry within themselves the project, however remote it may be, of an exhaustive ordering of the world; they are always directed, too, towards the discovery of simple elements and their progressive combination; and at their center they form a table on which knowledge is displayed in a system contemporary with itself.’’ See Foucault, The Order of Things, 74. 2. For a defense of pluralism in the philosophy of science, see Kellert et al., ‘‘The Pluralist Stance,’’ vii–xxix. 3. Thomas Kuhn compares different periods in the history of science to different and sometimes incommensurable worlds, but he does not endorse the stronger thesis that each science is a separate and incommensurable world. See Kuhn, ‘‘Possible Worlds in History of Science,’’ 58–89. Kuhn also gave the title The Plurality of Worlds to his final work, which was supposed to provide an evolutionary theory of scientific development. 4. Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, The Principles of Philosophy, 186. 5. Hobbes, Leviathan, 61. 6. D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, 143.

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7. D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, 144. 8. Kristeller, ‘‘The Modern System of the Arts, Part I,’’ 498. 9. Kristeller, ‘‘The Modern System of the Arts, Part I,’’ 503. 10. De Chambray, Ide´e de la Perfection de la Peinture, 23–134. See also Rubens, ‘‘Letter to Franciscus Junius,’’ 328 (AiT, 29). 11. Wotton, Reflections, 63–79. 12. Du Fresnoy, De Arte Graphica/The Art of Painting, 7. 13. On the relation between LeBrun’s Method and Descartes’s Passions, see Ross, ‘‘Painting the Passions,’’ 25–47. 14. Oudry, Discourse on the Practice of Painting and Its Main Processes, 4–25. 15. Reynolds, Discourses, 85 (Dis. III). I owe the undeniably apt description ‘‘unabashedly didactic’’ to Costelloe, The British Aesthetic Tradition, 82–83. 16. Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, I:9. 17. Farago, Leonardo da Vinci’s Paragone, 1992. 18. Rubens, De Imitatione Statuorum, 86–92 (AiT, 145). 19. Lichtenstein, The Blind Spot, 6. 20. Lichtenstein, The Blind Spot, 7. 21. Winckelmann, The History of Ancient Art, I:215. 22. Winckelmann, The History of Ancient Art, I:193. 23. Winckelmann, Reflection on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, 30. 24. Lessing, Laocoo¨n, 8. 25. See, for example, Claude Perrault’s French translation of Vitruvius (1673/ 1684) and the five editions of Alberti that were published during the eighteenth century (1726, 1739, 1782, 1784, and 1797). 26. The World of Andre´ Le Noˆtre by Theirry Mariage contains a very helpful account of the theoretical background of the French garden. See especially pages 47–92. 27. Reference to landscape architecture in this context is admittedly anachronistic, since the term was not used until the nineteenth century. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was more common to refer to ‘‘the art of gardening.’’ It is not entirely clear this art was considered part of architecture, though remarks by Wotton (n. 21) suggest it was in at least some cases. 28. Wotton, Elements of Architecture, 87. 29. Wotton, Elements of Architecture, 87. 30. In The British Aesthetic Tradition, Timothy Costelloe notes the irony of Gilpin’s conception of ‘‘picturesque beauty,’’ pointing out that Gilpin identifies picturesque beauty with artifice in painting, while also suggesting that natural scenes can be picturesque without artifice. See Costelloe, The British Aesthetic Tradition, 139–144. 31. Some of these authors favored Greek architecture (Laugier, Le Roy, Wickelmann), while others preferred the architecture of the Romans (Piranesi).

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32. See also the classicism of earlier works by Roland Fre´art de Chambray (A Parallel of the Ancient Architecture with the Modern, 1650/1707) and Claude Perrault (Ordonnance for the Five Kinds of Columns after the Method of the Ancients, 1683). 33. Stephen Gaukroger provides a helpful account of Descartes’s compendium and its relation to Zarlino in Descartes: An Intellectual Biography, 74–80. 34. Cohen, Quantifying Music, 115–161. 35. Mersenne, Harmonie Universelle, 1957. 36. Rameau, Treatise on Harmony, 5–19, 139–151. D’Alembert also explains the theory of the fundamental bass in his E´le´mens de musique (1752). See D’Alembert, Elements of Music, Theoretical and Practical, 1984. For an overview of Rameau’s music theory and D’Alembert’s lectures, see Christensen, Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment, 252–290. See also Coward, French Musical Thought 1600–1800, 97–98. 37. Rousseau, Collected Writings (Vol. 7: Dissertation on Modern Music), 55, 65. 38. Rousseau, Collected Writings (vol. 7: ‘‘Letter to Grimm on the Subject of the Remarks Added to His Letter on Omphale’’ and, ‘‘Letter on French Music’’), 121–132, 141–174. 39. Rameau, ‘‘Errors in Music in the Encyclopedia,’’ 222–259. 40. Corneille, Of the Three Unities of Action, Time, and Place, 119. 41. Corneille, Of the Three Unities of Action, Time, and Place, 122. For Aristotle’s criticism of the deus ex machine, see Aristotle, On Poetry and Style (Poetics), 31 (1454a–1454b). 42. Corneille, Of the Three Unities of Action, Time, and Place, 125–131. 43. The Christian marvelous is associated with Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (1580), an epic poem that incorporates mythical elements into a Christian narrative about the first crusade. Some critics consider it the model for John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), which serves as Bodmer’s primary example of the miraculous in poetry. On the role Milton played in the conflict between Gottsched and Bodmer, see Buchenau, The Founding of Aesthetics in the German Enlightenment, 105–108. 44. On the role the pleasures of the imagination play in Addison’s criticism, see Costelloe, The British Aesthetic Tradition, 37–41; and Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics, vol. 1, The Eighteenth Century, 64–67. On the role that emotion and manners play in Addison’s and Steele’s criticism, see Marshall, ‘‘Shaftesbury and Addison: Criticism and the Public Taste,’’ 633–657. 45. Lessing, Correspondence on Tragedy (Lessing to Nicolai, 1756), 14. 46. Lessing, Hamburg Dramaturgy, 254 (no. 96). 47. On the role climate; geography; political, social, and economic structure; as well as the spirit, customs, values, and ideas, play in explaining differences between peoples in the early modern period, see Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism, 127–189.

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48. Philosophers have not always been attentive to the influence nationalism has exerted on their understanding of the history of philosophy. Thomas Akehurst has produced an important historical study of the role British nationalism played in the development of analytic philosophy in the postwar period, but similar studies for other periods and subfields are rare. See Akehurst, The Cultural Politics of Analytic Philosophy, 2011. For one of the rare discussions of nationalism and aesthetics, see Shusterman, ‘‘Aesthetics between Nationalism and Internationalism,’’ 157–167. 49. Norman, The Shock of the Ancient, 15. 50. Norman, The Shock of the Ancient, 15. 51. Darnton, Censors at Work, 29. Censorship promoted an official, statesponsored literature, but it also gave rise to a black market in nonapproved literature, including pornography. See Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime, 1985; and Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, 1996. 52. Voltaire. Philosophical Letters, 85. 53. Voltaire, Philosophical Letters, 114. 54. Voltaire, Philosophical Letters, 114. 55. Voltaire, Philosophical Letters, 115–116. See also Swift, A Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining the English Tongue, 1712. 56. Many sociologists and political scientists regard the coffeehouses as the origins of the modern public sphere. See, for example, Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 32–33. 57. See The Tatler 1 (1709): ‘‘Now these gentlemen, for the most part, being men of strong zeal and weak intellects, it is both a charitable and necessary work to offer something, whereby such worthy and well-affected members of the commonwealth may be instructed, after their reading, what to think; which shall be the end and purpose of this my paper: wherein I shall from time to time report and consider all matters of what kind soever that shall occur to me, and publish such my advices and reflections every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday in the week for the convenience of the post.’’ 58. Addison and Steele describe Mr. Spectator and his friends in The Spectator 1–3 (1711). In The Spectator no. 1 (Thursday, March 11, 1711), they have Mr. Spectator describe himself as someone who has ‘‘made my self a Speculative Statesman, Soldier, Merchant, and Artizan, without ever medling with any Practical Part in Life. I am very well versed in the Theory of an Husband, or a Father, and can discern the Errors in the Œconomy, Business, and Diversion of others, better than those who are engaged in them; as Standers-by discover Blots, which are apt to escape those who are in the Game. I never espoused any Party with Violence, and am resolved to observe an exact Neutrality between the Whigs and Tories, unless I shall be forc’d to declare myself by the Hostilities of either side. In short, I have acted in all the parts of my Life as a Looker-on, which is the Character I intend to preserve in this Paper.’’

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59. Eagleton, The Function of Criticism, 29–43. 60. Gottsched was born in Ko¨nigsberg, East Prussia, but fled to Leipzig in 1724 to avoid compulsory military service. This might explain why he was never made a member of the Royal Prussian Academy of Arts, even after he became one of the most important figures in German literature in the 1730s. He was made a member of the Akademie gemeinnu¨tziger Wissenschaften zu Erfurt in 1754, but his influence had declined considerably by then. 61. There can be little doubt that Gottsched called his journal Die vernu¨nftigen Tadlerinnen because of Steele’s Tatler; however, the two titles have different meanings. The English ‘‘tattler’’ (someone who gossips) and German ‘‘Tadler’’ (critic or censor) have a common etymological root in the Middle Flemish ‘‘tatelen’’ (to stutter), but ‘‘Die Tadlerinnen’’ is the feminine plural form of der Tadler. A literal translation of Die vernu¨nftigen Tadlerinnen might be ‘‘The Rational Female Critics,’’ but I have used The Rational Tatlers because it preserves the etymological connection between Gottsched’s title and its English predecessor. 62. Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, 52 (II:244). 63. Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, 53 (II:244). 64. Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, 53 (II:244). 65. Herder, Philosophical Writings (On the Change of Taste), 255. 66. Herder, Selected Writings on Aesthetics (The Causes of Sunken Taste), 325–326. The first short quotation in this sentence is taken slightly out of context. In his essay, Herder writes, ‘‘[I]f the roots of taste did not lie deep in the nations need, in the character of its manners; if Louis evidently neither had nor could have a historian of his realm, such as Xenophon and Livy had been; if his theater could not be to the nation what the theater had been in Athens; if his Bourdaloue did not have to speak for or against him, like Demosthenes against Philip and for Athens; and if, as is likely, no Greek would have burst into tears at Bossuet’s sublime ‘Madame est morte! Madame est morte!’ then it is clear that the glittering taste of society and the court that ruled absolutely were soon bound to become corrupt.’’ Still, the proposition ‘‘the roots of taste lie deep in a nation’s need’’ is a good summary of Herder’s account of the relationship between art and national character as a whole. 67. Wo¨lfflin, Principles of Art History, 6. Although he published Principles of Art History before the rise of Hitler and the National Socialists, Wo¨lfflin can be regarded as a kind of fellow-traveler of the Nazis. He joined Alfred Rosenberg’s right-wing Combat League for German Culture in 1929 and supported Hitler’s cultural programs during the 1930s. See Petropoulos, The Faustian Bargain, 150. 68. Addison, The Spectator, No. 411. 69. Addison, The Spectator, no. 413. 70. Addison, The Spectator, no. 414. 71. Addison, The Spectator, no. 414 72. Addison, The Spectator, no. 415 73. Addison, The Spectator, no. 415.

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74. Addison, The Spectator, no. 415. 75. Addison, The Spectator, no. 416. 76. Addison, The Spectator, no. 416. It is significant that Addison adds ‘‘words, when well chosen, have so great a force in them, that a description often gives us more lively ideas than the sight of the things themselves,’’ because it suggests that the pleasures of the imagination may be greater than the pleasures of the senses. 77. Addison, The Spectator, no. 416. 78. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, I:5. 79. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, I:5. 80. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, I:21. 81. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, I:23. 82. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, I:24–25. 83. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, I:48. 84. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, I:51. 85. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, I:57. 86. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, I:57. 87. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, I:372. 88. Batteux, A Course of the Belles Lettres, I:i, 34–35. 89. Batteux, A Course of the Belles Lettres, I:i. 90. Batteux, A Course of the Belles Lettres, I:6. 91. Batteux, A Course of the Belles Lettres, I:11–13. 92. Batteux, A Course of the Belles Lettres, I:10–11, 16. 93. Batteux, A Course of the Belles Lettres, I:19. 94. Batteux, A Course of the Belles Lettres, I:19. 95. Batteux, A Course of the Belles Lettres, I:27. 96. Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings (Main Principles), 177. 97. Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings (Main Principles), 177. 98. Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings (Main Principles), 177–178. 99. Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings (Main Principles), 174. 100. Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings (Main Principles),174. 101. Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings (Main Principles), 175. 102. Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings (Main Principles), 72–173, 175. 103. Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings (On Sentiments), 23–24. 104. Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings (Main Principles), 177, 179. 105. The distinction between natural and arbitrary signs also plays an important role in Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem (1783), where he argues that the transition from writing that uses natural signs (hieroglyphics) to artificial signs (alphabetic script) is essential for overcoming idolatry, which Mendelssohn understands as the divinization of images, which is one of the dangers of the natural signs used by the fine arts. See Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, 104–115. See also the excellent discussion of this issue in Freudenthal, No Religion Without Idolatry, 2012. 106. Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings (Main Principles), 178.

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107. The distinction between natural and artificial signs also plays an important role in Lessing’s Laocoo¨n. See, for example, Lessing, Laocoo¨n, 43, 73, 101, 105. See also Wellbery, Lessing’s Laocoon, 2009. Lessing published his Laocoo¨n five years after the initial publication of Mendelssohn’s essay, and Mendelssohn discussed, read, and commented on drafts of Lessing’s work prior to its publication, so it is safe to assume they are closely related. The drafts for the sequel to the Laocoo¨n that Lessing planned to publish also contain extended discussions of arts that combine natural and artificial signs, which are very similar to the end of Mendelssohn’s essay. See Nisbet, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, 322–323. 108. Bacon, New Organon, 224. 109. Bacon, New Organon, 236–237. 110. Hobbes, Leviathan, 61. 111. On Hobbes’s conception of natural science, see Sorell, ‘‘Hobbes’ Scheme of the Sciences,’’ 45–61 and Jesseph, ‘‘Hobbes and the Method of Natural Science,’’ 86–107. 112. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, xi. 113. See, for example, Diderot, ‘‘Art,’’ 144. The same translation is available at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/textidx?cdid;ccdid;rgnmain;view text;idnodid2222.0000.139. 114. Translations of many of these entries are available from the website of the collaborative translation project devoted to the Encyclope´die, hosted by the University of Michigan Library. See http://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/did/. 115. D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, 4. 116. Beiser, Diotima’s Children, 46–47. Stefanie Buchenau and Paul Guyer also regard Wolff as one of the founders of modern aesthetics and the philosophy of art, though their reasons are slightly different than Beiser’s. I am inclined to agree with Buchenau, who holds that Wolff’s philosophy provides Baumgarten’s aesthetics with a method and a structure, making Wolff an essential part of the context of the emergence of aesthetics in Germany. See Buchenau, The Founding of Aesthetics in the German Enlightenment, 6–10. Guyer’s account of Wolff’s contribution to the philosophy of art in his A History of Modern Aesthetics is slightly different. Guyer emphasizes Wolff’s cognitivism: the view that the perception of perfection is a kind of knowledge. See Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics, I:31, 47–63. 117. Wolff, Preliminary Discourse on Philosophy in General, 22 (§39). 118. Wolff, Preliminary Discourse on Philosophy in General, 22 (§39*). 119. Wolff, Preliminary Discourse on Philosophy in General, 4 (§6). 120. Beiser points to the Elements of Civil Architecture (1738) as Wolff’s major contribution to the philosophy of art. This claim merits serious consideration, though I am not convinced that Wolff’s work on architecture is either a major contribution or an independent work on the art of architecture. It might also be described as an exploration of the practical applications of the philosophy of mathematics, since it was published as part of Wolff’s Elements of General Mathematics (1713–1715).

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121. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 58 (V:170). 122. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 198 (§51). 123. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 192 (§49). 124. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 192–193 (§49). 125. The idea that the arts possess an ‘‘indefinable something whose effects you feel,’’ which became known as the ‘‘je ne sais quoi,’’ was first articulated by Dominique Bouhours in The Conversations of Aristo and Eugene (1671). See Bouhours, ‘‘The Je ne sais quoi from The Conversations of Aristo and Eugene’’ 228–238. Leibniz appeals to this notion to explain his conception of confused ideas in his Meditations on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas: ‘‘Similarly,’’ he writes, ‘‘we see that painters and other artists correctly know what is done properly and what is done poorly, though they are often unable to explain their judgments and reply to questioning by saying that the things that displease them lack an unknown something.’’ See Leibniz, Philosophical Essays (‘‘Meditations on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas’’), 24. In chapter 4 we will see that Leibniz’s conception of confusion was an essential component of Baumgarten’s aesthetics.

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The Critique of Taste

In the preface to the first (A) edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), Immanuel Kant called the eighteenth century ‘‘the genuine age of criticism, to which everything must submit.’’1 Even the holiness of the church and the majesty of the state were to be subjected to what Kant called ‘‘the fiery test of critique.’’2 And though some civil and ecclesiastical authorities denied they could be criticized, Kant thought doing so would ‘‘excite a just suspicion against themselves’’ and prevent the church and the state from winning ‘‘that unfeigned respect that reason grants only to that which has been able to withstand its free and public examination.’’3 In order to be worthy of respect, they would have to accept public scrutiny and defend their doctrines as well as their actions using rational arguments. So confident was Kant in the powers of critique to determine the true and the good that he made the public use of reason the key to enlightenment in his essay ‘‘An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?’’ (1784). In this essay, Kant even says the freedom of the public use of reason makes enlightenment ‘‘almost inevitable.’’4 The same period Kant called ‘‘the genuine age of criticism’’ has also been called ‘‘the century of taste.’’ In a study of the theories of taste that were formulated during this period, George Dickie argued that the fascination with taste we find in the eighteenth century is the result of a shift from objective conceptions of beauty to a new emphasis on subjective experience.5 Instead of trying to identify the qualities that make objects beautiful in themselves, independently of anyone’s experience 71

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of them, theories of taste highlight the sensible, intellectual, and emotional dimensions of our experience of beauty, as well as the pleasure we derive from that experience. Dickie’s study is primarily concerned with Hutcheson, whose work he sees as the beginning of the theory of taste, and Hume, who he thinks perfected the theory of taste, yet there were also many promising accounts of taste in France and Germany, before and after Hutcheson and Hume. If we neglect these accounts, we risk a kind of provincialism that we do not find in discussions of taste in the eighteenth century. Taste was a genuine European obsession and not a primarily British concern. As such, it was explored by rationalists and empiricists, speculative thinkers and experimental philosophers, natural scientists and transcendental idealists, all of whom made significant contributions to the critique of taste. Assuming this larger and more diverse perspective will help us see how early modern philosophers brought the critique that defined their age to bear on matters of taste. In the first section of this chapter we see how the critique of taste emerged from philological critique and literary criticism at the beginning of the eighteenth century.6 In the second section we see that the philosophers involved in the critique of taste eschewed the caprice of individual preferences and the fashions of the moment, focusing their attention on the structure and function of human sense organs and the constitution of the mind to explain why and how we experience certain kinds of objects and their qualities as beautiful or ugly, pleasing or displeasing. Then, in the third section, we see how some European philosophers came to recognize the influence society and history have exerted upon taste. Finally, in the fourth section, we see how these philosophers began to reflect on the status of the critique of taste itself. Although much of this reflection was concerned with the relationship between the rules of good taste and the creativity of the artistic genius, there was also an important discussion about whether their critique could ever become a science.

VARIETIES OF CRITICISM The origins of the critique of taste in the early modern period can be traced back to Renaissance philology, which sought to restore the world of classical antiquity to currency. To this end, philologists engaged in a

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practice known as ‘‘critique.’’ Philological critique is not the evaluative judgment that came to be associated with literary criticism and art criticism during the eighteenth century; rather, it is the attempt to determine the authenticity of a manuscript or a text. This was an important task during the Renaissance and early modern period, because the manuscripts that were used to produce modern editions of classical texts were not always reliable. Some of their inconsistencies could be attributed to the errors of copyists. One example comes from The Lives of the Eminent Philosophers (ca. 225–250) by Diogenes Laertius. Some manuscripts of Diogenes’s Lives attribute to Aristotle the saying ‘‘Oh friends, there is no friend’’ (o philoi, oudeis philos).7 The eminent philologist Isaac Casaubon recognized this paradoxical formulation as a corruption of the more conventional saying ‘‘he who has many friends has no friends’’ (oi philoi, oudeis philos), which reflects Aristotle’s insistence that true friendship is rare and precious in works like the Nicomachean Ethics.8 Casaubon corrected the manuscript error in his edition of Diogenes’s Lives, and modern scholars have accepted his emendation as authentic. Other errors of transmission proved more difficult to correct. Richard Simon had to sort through manuscripts that included numerous errors of chronology and geography, transpositions of and variations on the same passages, and texts whose authorship was dubious at best, in order to produce reliable editions of the old and new testaments.9 He also faced religious persecution from the Catholic and Protestant defenders of scriptural authority, who regarded any suggestion that the text of the Bible might not be entirely stable as tantamount to heresy.10 Forgery was also an important problem for early modern philologists, since it was relatively common for ancient and modern writers to present themselves in the guise of earlier authors and also because forgery was difficult to detect. One example would be the Epistles of Phalaris, which were thought to date from the time of Pythagoras (ca. 570–495 BCE) until Richard Bentley used a variety of historical and stylistic anachronisms to prove they dated from a later period, probably around the time of Lucian (ca. 125–180 CE).11 Anthony Grafton has argued, in his book Forgers and Critics, that this kind of work was essential to the progress of criticism during the Renaissance and the early modern period, because the tools and techniques philologists developed to expose forgeries were essential for understanding the historical context as well as the contents of classical texts.12

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The connection between philological critique and early modern literary criticism is made explicit in a passage from Francis Bacon’s Of the Dignity and Advancement of Learning (1605). In this passage, Bacon distinguishes among three different aspects of critique. The first aspect of critique is clearly philological, because it identifies critique as ‘‘the true correction and amended edition of approved authors, whereby both themselves receive justice and their students light.’’13 The second aspect of critique is somewhat broader, encompassing ‘‘the interpretation and explication of authors–commentaries, scholia, annotations, collections of beauties, and the like,’’ but it is still closely related to philology.14 The third aspect of critique is perhaps the closest to literary criticism, because it authorizes the critic to pronounce ‘‘some brief judgment concerning the authors edited, and comparison of them with other writers on the same subjects,’’ so that ‘‘students may by such censure be both advised what books to read and better prepared when they come to read them.’’15 It is likely that Bacon had in mind something like the comparison of Homer and Virgil in Julius Caesar Scaliger’s Poetics (1561/1581) when he described this third aspect of critique. Scaliger was the son of the chronologer, philologist, and historian Joseph Justus Scaliger. He was also a gifted philologist himself, known for his polemical orations against Erasmus in defense of Cicero.16 But he shocked readers of his Poetics by providing a detailed comparison of Homer’s and Virgil’s poetic skill and then concluding that Virgil ‘‘did not so much imitate Homer as teach us how Homer ought to have spoken.’’17 This is important in the present context because it shows how judgments of literary quality and philological authenticity were closely related during the Renaissance and early modern period. Indeed, we see a clear connection between philology and literary criticism in the works of other early modern critics, especially those, like John Dryden, who produced numerous translations and editions of classical works. In his Author’s Apology for Heroic Poetry and Poetic License (1677), Dryden argues that the criticism should praise the ‘‘excellencies’’ of an author’s work and point out any ‘‘lapses of the pen’’ that might help the author improve his work.18 He is primarily concerned with the evaluation of the literary quality of the work, but the standards Dryden thought critics should use to make judgments of

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literary quality were not terribly different from those employed by philologists. It was not until the beginning of the eighteenth century, in the wake of the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns and the battle of the books, that the concerns of philology and literary criticism really began to distinguish themselves.19 Swift’s A Tale of a Tub and Battle of the Books show how some authors came to regard philology as an exercise in pedantry. Swift has little good to say about criticism in general, but he is careful to distinguish critics who serve as ‘‘restorers of ancient learning from the worms, and graves, and dust of manuscripts’’ from those he calls ‘‘true, modern critics,’’ whose work makes them ‘‘a discoverer and collector of writer’s faults.’’20 Swift announces that the first kind of critic, the philologist, has gone extinct, so he proceeds to heap scorn on the second kind of critic, who is more properly understood as a literary critic. Addison’s assessment of the qualities necessary for a critic of Paradise Lost differs from Swift, because it recognizes the value of both philology and literary criticism. Addison indicates that the ideal critic would be familiar with ancient and modern languages, but he goes on to emphasize the disposition and character of the critic, but he goes on to insist the ideal critic must be eloquent, worldly, charitable, reasonable, and without prejudice.21 Focusing on the character and disposition of the critic helped to distinguish philology and literary criticism, because it separated critical judgment from the scholarly erudition that had given philological critics their authority. The critique of taste can be understood as an attempt to formulate more extensive and more general principles than either philological critique or literary criticism. In Shaftesbury’s dialogue ‘‘The Moralists,’’ published in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711/1714), we find a philosophical justification for judgments of taste that extends well beyond the erudition and disposition of the critic. Shaftesbury describes nature as a complete system, arranged according to ‘‘one simple, consistent, and uniform design’’ that orders all of its parts, from the least to the greatest.22 And he proposes that we can know and appreciate the perfection of nature through ‘‘the idea or sense of order and proportion’’ that exists in the human mind.23 Timothy Costelloe is right to emphasize, in his book The British Aesthetic Tradition, that Shaftesbury does not think the beauty we find in the order and proportion of nature is actually sensed, even though Shaftesbury sometimes employs the language of the senses in his dialogue.24 Instead, he

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thinks it is the rational contemplation of the order and proportion of nature that allows us to appreciate the beauty of its design. As we contemplate the world around us, Shaftesbury thinks we are able to ascend from the beauty of ‘‘the dead forms’’ of inanimate objects to the beauty of ‘‘the forms which form,’’ associated with the creative powers of artists and craftsmen, whose intelligence and activity is responsible for beautiful works. Finally, we reach ‘‘that third order of beauty, which forms not only such as we call mere forms but even the forms which form.’’25 Shaftesbury thinks it is only when we contemplate ‘‘this last order of supreme and sovereign beauty’’ that we can truly appreciate ‘‘the principle, source, and fountain of all beauty,’’ but Francis Hutcheson disagrees.26 The argument he presents in his Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony and Design (1725) has much in common with the account laid out in Shaftesbury’s dialogue, but Hutcheson is more clearly committed to the view that we are endowed with a special ‘‘internal sense’’ that allows us to perceive the beauty of order and proportion.27 Hutcheson is careful to distinguish this ‘‘internal sense’’ from the five external senses, but still maintains that it is distinct from reason, because it is a source of pleasure. And pleasure ‘‘does not arise from any knowledge of principles, proportions, causes, or of the usefulness of the object; but strikes us at first with the Idea of Beauty: nor does the most accurate Knowledge increase this Pleasure of Beauty, however it may super-add a distinct rational Pleasure from prospects of Advantage, or from the Increase of Knowledge.’’28 Separating the sense of beauty from the external also presents serious challenges for Hutcheson, because it means beauty must be regarded as sensible, even though it is something that cannot be seen, heard, felt, touched, tasted, or smelled. His solution is to argue that ‘‘original’’ or ‘‘absolute’’ beauty is to be understood as the ‘‘Uniformity amidst Variety’’ that we find in all regular figures, whether they are part of nature, works of art, or mathematical theorems.29 This answer did not satisfy everyone, but it has been praised as ‘‘the first systematic treatment in English of what we would now call aesthetics’’ by scholars like Peter Kivy and George Dickie.30 Of course, there was more to the critique of taste in the early modern period than general explanations of order, proportion, and beauty. Shaftesbury was promoting Platonic metaphysics as an alternative to Lockean empiricism when he praised the order and proportion of nature, because he feared the rise of atomism, materialism, and mechanism would lead to skepticism about the goodness of creation and the

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wisdom of providence.31 He was also developing a moral philosophy opposed to the moral philosophies of Hobbes and Locke, which were based on self-interest. Shaftesbury’s defense of ‘‘moral beauty’’ and ‘‘moral taste’’ in the Characteristics was meant to strike a blow against the purely subjective conceptions of value advanced by his contemporaries and provide support for a more classical conception of virtue that recognizes the objective value of nature, art, and society.32 Hutcheson was less hostile to Locke than Shaftesbury, but he also had other ends in mind when he defended the idea of a special ‘‘internal sense’’ of beauty. Hutcheson’s theory of taste is, in reality, a contribution to moral theology. At the end of his first Inquiry, Hutcheson argues for the moral necessity of the sense of beauty, asserting that God’s goodness requires ‘‘that the internal Sense of Men should be constituted as it is at present, so as to make Uniformity amidst Variety the Occasion of Pleasure.’’33 ‘‘For were it not so,’’ he continues, ‘‘there must arise a perpetual Dissatisfaction in all rational Agents with themselves; since Reason and Interest would lead us to simple general causes, while a contrary Sense of Beauty would make us disapprove them.’’34 Because God reveals himself in the beauty of creation, appreciating that beauty provides evidence for the existence and goodness of God. The metaphysical, moral, and theological commitments that motivated Shaftesbury’s and Hutcheson’s contributions to the critique of taste should not be forgotten, as they provide the context necessary for understanding their works, as well as the place the critique of taste occupied in the early modern period. They also reflect the general interdisciplinarity of early modern philosophy, which was not a self-contained and self-referential academic discipline. On the contrary, it was deeply engaged in the scientific, religious, and social debates of its time. And its concerns were often entangled with them in complex ways. In the subsequent sections of this chapter, we see that in addition to being pressed into the service of diverse ends, the critique of taste was advanced by a variety of means, which were derived from early modern physiology, psychology, social theory, and history.

PHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY The mechanistic explanation of the emotions Descartes proposed in his The Passions of the Soul (1649) was an important source for those who

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sought to explain taste physiologically. Descartes had already made important contributions to the mechanistic accounts of human physiology in his Treatise on Man (1630–1633/1664) and Principles of Philosophy (1644/1649).35 At the request of Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, he developed these mechanistic explanations into a systematic account of the emotions in The Passions.36 Because Descartes approaches the emotions as a natural philosopher (Physicien), rather than as a rhetorician (Orateur) or moral philosopher (philosophe moral), he does not attribute them to the lower part of the soul or insist that they be subordinated to reason.37 Instead, he traces the emotions back to their first causes, which are to be found in the affection of the body by an external object. According to Descartes, affection stimulates the nerves, which send the animal spirits coursing through the body to the brain. It is in the brain—and, in particular, in the pineal gland in the middle of the brain—that the motions of external bodies and the animal spirits give rise to emotion. Take, for example, the feeling of wonder. Descartes defines wonder as ‘‘a sudden surprise of the soul which brings it to consider with attention the objects that seem to it unusual and extraordinary.’’38 Then he identifies two causes for wonder: ‘‘first, an impression in the brain, which represents the object as something unusual and consequently worthy of special consideration; and, secondly, a movement of the spirits, which the impression disposes both to flow with great force to the place in the brain where it is located so as to strengthen and preserve it there, and also to pass into the muscles which serve to keep the sense organs fixed in the same orientation so that they will continue to maintain the impression in the way in which they formed it.’’39 When the force of the impression is so great that it renders the body completely immobile, like a statue, wonder becomes astonishment. Descartes states that the ‘‘excess of wonder’’ one finds in astonishment ‘‘can never be other than bad,’’ but not because it corrupts our souls or clouds our moral judgment. On the contrary, it is the effect of such violent impressions on the body that concerns Descartes. At the end of The Passions, in a section called ‘‘A general remedy against the Passions,’’ he argues that knowledge of the passions helps us find ‘‘remedies’’ that can ‘‘correct our constitutional faults.’’40 In other words, knowledge of emotions and their causes has important medical applications, which can be used to make human beings healthier and happier.41

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There is much in Descartes’s account of the emotions that physiologists today would ridicule, especially his appeals to the animal spirits and his speculations about the pineal gland, yet the value of The Passions was clear to many of his contemporaries. Spinoza adopts a very similar approach to the emotions in part III of his Ethics (1677) and expands on Descartes’s account of the ‘‘remedies’’ for the emotions in his discussions of human bondage (part IV) and freedom (part V).42 Spinoza’s remedies are more explicitly moral than those Descartes proposes, since he seeks to instruct us in ‘‘the right way of living.’’43 Yet he shares Descartes’s naturalism and his hostility to those who regard the emotions as a ‘‘defect’’ in human nature.44 The French painter Charles LeBrun recognized the usefulness of Descartes’s account of the passions for the arts. In his Method to Learn to Design the Passions (1698), LeBrun uses Descartes’s physiological account of the emotions to explain the subtle differences between the expression of emotions like wonder and astonishment.45 The difference between these emotions must produce different effects, LeBrun reasoned, so he sought to identify the movements of the face and the body that corresponded to each emotion. And he illustrated those movements in drawings that have often been reproduced in modern editions of Descartes’s Passions.46 Wonder is expressed by raised eyebrows, wide eyes, flared nostrils, and an open mouth. The same features are used to express astonishment, but the eyebrows must be raised higher, the eyes wider, the nostrils broader, and the mouth gaping to indicate the greater force of the emotion. There are also echoes of Descartes’s physiology in Jean Baptiste Du Bos’s Critical Reflections (1719).47 Before elaborating upon the arts and the psychological principles that explain their structure, DuBos states the problem that most concerns him, namely, the fact that ‘‘we feel in general a greater pleasure in weeping, than in laughing at a theatrical representation.’’48 Our preference for representations that cause us pain, rather than those that cause us pleasure, is a genuine paradox for a hedonist like Du Bos. To clear up this paradox, he endeavors to ‘‘explain the origin of that pleasure, which we receive from poems and paintings.’’49 The explanation he proposes is a mechanical one, based on the causes of our emotions. Like Descartes, Du Bos traces the emotions back to the sensible impression an external object makes upon the body. This impression may cause pleasure or pain, depending on

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whether it satisfies the desires of the body or the mind. These desires may be satisfied by natural objects or by works of art that imitate the objects of our natural desires. The former are the causes of ‘‘real’’ passions, while the latter give rise to ‘‘artificial’’ passions.50 Because artificial passions are less intense than real passions, Du Bos thinks the pain spectators experience when they witness fearful things in a tragedy or see them depicted in a painting is less intense than it would be if they were to experience those things themselves. It is also less intense than the pleasure of being entertained, which arises from the satisfaction of the mind’s desire to be ‘‘incessantly occupied.’’51 As long as the pleasures of entertainment outweigh the pain caused by attending Racine’s Phaedra or seeing LeBrun’s Massacre of the Innocents, our taste for tragedies and gruesome paintings makes perfect sense. Physiological explanations of taste were not as influential in England as they were in France, probably because of the influence of John Locke. Locke was not opposed to mechanical explanations in natural science, but the account of human knowledge and emotion he presents in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) is psychological rather than physiological. Locke acknowledges that the sense organs ‘‘do convey into the mind several distinct perceptions, according to those various ways wherein those objects do affect them.’’52 However, in what follows, he denies that this process is physiological: ‘‘When I say the senses convey into the mind, I mean, they from external objects convey into the mind what produces there those perceptions.’’53 The ideas we have of sensible qualities are in fact produced by the mind, rather than the external objects that affect our sense organs. Still, many of Locke’s followers sought to trace these ideas back to their physiological source in the human body. In his essay Of the Standard of Taste (1757), David Hume notes that the impossibility of discerning ‘‘real beauty’’ and ‘‘real deformity’’ in things depends at least in part on the disposition of our sense organs.54 Later in the essay, Hume also notes ‘‘many and frequent are the defects in the internal organs, which prevent or weaken the influence of those general principles, upon which depends our sentiments of beauty and deformity,’’ although he ultimately denies these defects are cause for skepticism about the universality of standards of taste.55 Edmund Burke also appeals to the physiology of our sense organs at several points in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

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(1757), which was published the same year as Hume’s essay. At the beginning of a section in part IV called ‘‘Of the efficient cause of the sublime and beautiful,’’ Burke says he cannot adequately explain ‘‘why certain affections of the body produce such a distinct emotion of mind, and no other; or why the body is at all affected by the mind, or the mind by the body.’’56 Yet he goes on to propose a number of physiological explanations of our feelings of the sublime and the beautiful in his Enquiry, on the assumption that it would be beneficial to discover ‘‘what affections of the mind produce certain emotions of the body; and what distinct feelings and qualities of body produce certain determinate passions in the mind.’’57 Burke’s speculations about the origins of pain and fear (unnatural tension in the nerves), the reasons we find darkness terrible (the pain caused by antagonist muscles pulling on the sphincters of the eyes and overdilating the pupils), and the physical causes of love (looking at an object with a reclined head, rolling eyes, and an open mouth, while breathing slowly and holding our hands at our sides) are little better than Descartes’s Passions from a scientific point of view, but at least they are aware of their own insufficiency.58 Among the followers of Locke who preferred psychological explanations of taste, it has become conventional in the scholarly literature to distinguish between imagination theorists and association theorists.59 The difference between them is not really doctrinal; it is more a matter of emphasis. Imagination theorists like Addison and Burke emphasize the power of the imagination, which Locke characterizes as an ability to combine ideas in ways that do not correspond to what we find in the objects that affect our senses. Sense and imagination are still closely related for Locke, because he thinks it is impossible for us to imagine anything other than ‘‘sounds, tastes, smells, visible, and tangible qualities’’ that have their origin in sensation.60 Addison reiterates this point at the beginning of ‘‘On the Pleasures of the Imagination’’ when he says ‘‘we cannot indeed have a single image in the fancy that did not make its first entrance through the sight; but we have the power of retaining, altering, and compounding those images, which we have once received, into all the varieties of picture and vision that are most agreeable to the imagination.’’61 Addison then divides the pleasures of the imagination into two types. The first are the primary pleasures of the imagination, which are the pleasures we experience while we are actually viewing an object; the second are the secondary pleasures of the imagination,

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which we experience when the object is no longer ‘‘before the eye,’’ but may be ‘‘called up into our memories, or formed into agreeable visions of things that are either absent or fictitious.’’62 The primary pleasures of the imagination derive from the sight of things that are great, uncommon, or beautiful; the secondary pleasures follow from the memory of great, uncommon, and beautiful things. Taste is nothing more than the sensitivity to the pleasures of the imagination, imparted to us by God, so we would seek knowledge of things with which we are unfamiliar (the uncommon), appreciate the perfection of creation (the beautiful), and recognize the glory of God (the great).63 Burke’s appeal to the imagination functions rather differently. In the introduction ‘‘On Taste,’’ which he added to the second edition of his Enquiry (1759), Burke notes there is ‘‘not the same obvious concurrence in any uniform or settled principles which relate to taste’’ as there is regarding the rules of logic.64 In order to correct this oversight, he proposes a new definition of taste, calling it ‘‘that faculty, or those faculties of the mind which are affected with, or which form a judgment of the works of imagination and the elegant arts.’’65 Burke then states the purpose of his Enquiry, which is ‘‘to find whether there are any principles on which the imagination is affected, so common to all, so grounded and certain, as to supply the means of reasoning satisfactorily about them.’’66 The discussion of beauty and sublimity that appeared in the first edition preceded this account of the aims of the Enquiry, but it serves the (new) purpose Burke assigns it rather well. By tracing our ideas of the beautiful and the sublime back to the feelings of pleasure and pain, Burke shows that the same principles govern the way the imagination is affected in all human beings. And this provides the rules of taste with the generality and the certainty he hopes to give them. The association theorists emphasize Locke’s and Hume’s accounts of the association of ideas, rather than the power of the imagination. Locke added a chapter on the association of ideas to the fourth, Latin edition of the Essay (1701) in order to explain the difference between a natural connection between ideas and an association that is established by custom.67 A natural association of ideas follows from the objects the ideas represent, presumably because they are similar to one another. Ideas that are associated by custom need not have anything in common, since they can be associated with one another through chance or choice.

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Because custom can have dramatic effects on our reasoning, our passions, and our behavior, Locke thinks it is worthwhile ‘‘diligently to watch, and carefully to prevent, the undue connection of ideas in the minds of young people.’’68 Hume gave the association of ideas an even more prominent role in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740). According to Hume, ideas are associated by the mind, depending on their resemblance, their contiguity in space and time, and whether we take one to be the cause of the other.69 When two ideas are frequently and powerfully associated with one another, the association becomes customary or habitual. Hume was interested in the way customs and habits affect the passions, but the association theorists were more interested in the way it affected our tastes. In his Essay on Taste (1759), Alexander Gerard argues ‘‘the mind receives pleasure or pain, not only from the impulse of external objects, but also from the consciousness of its own operations and dispositions.’’70 ‘‘When these are produced by external objects,’’ he continues, ‘‘the pleasure or the pain, which arises immediately from the exertions of the mind, is ascribed to those things, which gave occasion to them.’’71 This insight is helpful for understanding taste, because it explains the connection between the objects of the seven senses of taste that Gerard discusses in the first part of his Essay—novelty, sublimity, beauty, imitation, harmony, humor, and virtue—and the mental acts that are associated with each of them. The pleasure the mind takes in exercising its capacities is transferred to unfamiliar objects that must be understood through study and investigation, leading to the taste for novelty.72 Hume’s cousin, Henry Home, Lord Kames, adopts a rather different approach in his Elements of Criticism (1763). Instead of emphasizing the connection between objects and mental activities, Home focuses on the relations between ideas that constitute the ‘‘train’’ of our perception. This is partly because he does not think the mind exerts itself when it perceives objects. For Home, the order and connection of our ideas is not produced by chance or by choice; it is a function of the way objects are given to us by the senses and the succession of ideas in our minds.73 Thus, the principles governing the order and connection of ideas are the same in all human beings and constitute our ‘‘common nature.’’ In the final chapter of the Elements of Criticism, on the standard of taste, Home argues ‘‘we are so constituted, as to conceive this common nature

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to be not only invariable, but also perfect or right; and consequently that individuals ought to be made conformable to it.’’74 ‘‘Every remarkable deviation from the standard,’’ he continues ‘‘makes accordingly an impression upon us of imperfection, irregularity, or disorder: it is disagreeable, and raises in us a painful emotion.’’75 The significance of this claim for moral judgments and judgments of taste is clear. Everything that deviates from the standard of common nature and the idea of perfection with which it is associated is to be regarded as ‘‘generally disagreeable,’’ and the taste for such things is to be condemned as ‘‘bad or wrong.’’76 Good taste is merely a taste for things that are ‘‘conformable to the common standard.’’77

SOCIETY AND HISTORY At the beginning of his Essay on Taste, Gerard remarks that ‘‘fine taste . . . derives its origin from certain powers natural to the mind; but these powers cannot attain their full perfection, unless they be assisted by proper culture.’’78 His remark reflects the growing awareness in the second half of the eighteenth century that general accounts of human physiology and psychology were not sufficient for the critique of taste. As Europeans became more aware of the differences between antiquity and modernity and different cultures around the world, they began to realize that society and history played an important role in shaping our tastes. That realization made it difficult to defend the adequacy of physiological and psychological accounts of taste, but it did help them incorporate new insights into the critique of taste in the second half of the eighteenth century. Hume’s essay ‘‘Of the Standard of Taste’’ contains some of the most valuable of these insights. Recognizing that disputes about matters of taste are common and often intractable, Hume acknowledges at the beginning of his essay that it is difficult to find ‘‘a rule, by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled; at least, a decision afforded, confirming one sentiment and condemning another.’’79 Still, he is confident there are ‘‘certain general principles of approbation and blame, whose influence a careful eye may trace in all operations of the mind.’’80 Neither physiology nor psychology can supply these principles by themselves, because the internal and external senses are often

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inadequate to appreciate the subtle differences between beauty and deformity. Sometimes it is because the sense organs are defective, making it impossible for someone to perceive the qualities of an object or a particular kind of object. Color blindness would be one example of this kind of defect. Hume is also aware that ‘‘particular incidents and situations occur, which either throw a false light on the objects, or hinder the true from conveying to the imagination the proper sentiment and perception.’’81 In these instances, perfectively healthy and otherwise properly functioning organs might not be able to perceive the beauty or deformity of an object, because of the conditions under which it is experienced. Similar things can be said about our psychological faculties. As an example, Hume notes that many people lack the delicacy of imagination, ‘‘which is necessary to convey a sensibility of those finer emotions.’’82 He uses the story of Sancho’s kinsman from Don Quixote to illustrate the importance of this faculty, describing how two of Sancho’s kinsmen could discern, in the wine from a newly opened cask, the taste of an old key with a leather thong, which had been dropped into the wine. The story of Sancho’s kinsmen might seem better suited to illustrate the difference between defective and highly refined external senses, especially the sense of taste, yet Hume uses it to illustrate the weakness of some people’s imaginations. Someone who cannot imagine it is possible to perceive such subtle flavors, or how people who do not possess such fine taste would mock Sancho’s kinsmen when they said they tasted iron or leather in the wine, will probably be unable to distinguish between beauty and deformity reliably, because the depth and breadth of his imagination would be too limited. At the end of his essay, Hume also argues that many people are too intemperate in their passions and too consumed by prejudices to exercise good judgment in matters of taste. Someone who is young, nationalistic, and extremely religious will be probably be psychologically unable to distinguish beauty and deformity, because his inexperience, emotional volatility, preference for the familiar, and superstitions will interfere with the operations of his mental faculties, preventing him from exercising good judgment. Hume recognizes that these shortcomings of human physiology and psychology make good taste extremely rare, but he does not think they are reason for skepticism about the standard of taste. Although defects of the internal and external senses prevent most people from cultivating their taste, Hume assures us there are those who

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possess properly functioning sense organs, delicate imaginations, and sufficient experience to be reliable judges in matters of taste. Society recognizes these people as ‘‘true critics’’ and holds their judgments to be authoritative throughout history, often much longer than philosophical systems and scientific theories retain their legitimacy.83 Ultimately, Hume thinks it is the esteem with which society regards the judgment of these critics that is the best evidence for the standard of taste. Even if we do not agree about the particular judgments of particular critics, society recognizes the authority of the ‘‘joint verdict’’ of true critics and relies on that judgment to settle disputes about matters of taste.84 While Hume emphasizes the social authority afforded to the ‘‘joint verdict’’ of critics and the historical longevity of their judgments, Herder is primarily concerned with the diversity of tastes and the historical change to which they are subject. He begins his essay On the Change of Taste (1766) by noting that ‘‘manners of thought and taste change with climate, with regions of the earth, and with countries.’’85 Herder mocks those for whom such diversity might be surprising or disconcerting, pointing out that there is nothing wrong with having different tastes than those of one’s family members, friends, or countrymen.86 He also turns the table on European chauvinism, reminding his readers that the Chinese are as convinced of the superiority of their tastes as Europeans are. ‘‘They [are] so stubborn in support of their opinions and sensations,’’ Herder says, ‘‘that they are as ready with the names dumb and foolish as the Greeks and Romans were with the title barbarian, which with sovereign majesty they conferred on all peoples who were not—Greeks and Romans.’’87 Some might take this diversity as grounds for relativism or skepticism, but Herder thinks it is better ‘‘to gather historical examples of how far the diversity of human beings can extend, to bring it into categories, and then to try to explain it.’’88 He attributes at least some of this diversity to the senses. Instead of treating the senses as Hume does, as more or less common faculties that function better or worse than average in some individuals, Herder insists human beings differ ‘‘not only in respect of the strength and weakness but in respect of the very constitution of their sensation.’’89 Even when we use words like ‘‘hard’’ and ‘‘soft,’’ ‘‘smooth’’ and ‘‘rough’’ in similar ways, Herder does not think they refer to the same sensations, because the nervous system of every individual is differently ‘‘tuned.’’90 He even goes so far as to say, ‘‘I would need to take on another body if I wanted

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to experience whether two different human beings have a completely similar sense of feeling.’’91 Here it is worth noting that Herder treats physiology as the cause of the diversity of taste among human beings and rejects the idea that the structure of the nervous system could provide the critique of taste with a solid foundation. Of course, there are some differences in matters of taste that Herder does not attribute to the ‘‘stubborn idiosyncrasy’’ of sensation. And these differences are best explained by history. In his fragment On the Change of Taste (ca. 1766–1767), Herder complains about ‘‘people, who, ignorant about history, know only their own age’’ and ‘‘believe that the current taste is the only one and so necessary that nothing but it can be imagined.92 Students of history recognize that ‘‘the spirit of changes is the kernel of history’’ and its only constant feature.93 Everything changes in the course of time, even ‘‘the form of the earth, its surface, its condition’’ and ‘‘the race, the manner of life, the manner of thought, the form of government, the taste of nations.’’94 Among these changes, Herder thinks changes in the manner of thought (Denkart) and the taste (Geschmack) of a people are the most difficult to understand: ‘‘Could it be that what a nation at one time considers good, fair, useful, pleasant, true it considers at another time bad, ugly, useless, unpleasant, false? – And yet this happens!’’95 At the end of his fragment, he seems to give in to skepticism, suggesting that changes in values over the course of time ‘‘should almost put us off trusting our own taste and sensation.’’96 Kant was not as inclined toward skepticism about standards of taste as his former student. In his Lectures on Anthropology (Anthropologie Collins, 1772–1773), he defines taste as ‘‘the principium through which human beings can enjoy a socially universal gratification.’’97 There are two important aspects of this definition. The first is the fact that Kant calls taste a principium. In the context of his lecture, this means taste is both a priori and universal. Kant admits ‘‘real’’ (wu¨rklichen) judgments of taste are almost always derived from experience, yet he insists ‘‘ideal’’ (idealischen) taste can be determined independently of experience by appealing to a set of universal rules.98 These rules are necessary, because Kant thinks ‘‘what is supposed to be in accordance with taste must please universally, i.e. the judgment of taste is not made in accordance with the private constitution of my subject to be affected with pleasure by an object, but in accordance with the rules of universal

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liking.’’99 The universality of the ‘‘liking’’ (Gefallen) to which Kant refers in this passage is not the abstract universality of a logical or metaphysical principle; on the contrary, it is the universal agreement of human beings living together in society. The sociality of taste is the second important aspect of the definition Kant proposes. In his lecture, Kant explains our liking for beautiful people and beautiful things by appealing, first, to the gratification we feel when others regard our judgment as valid, and second, to the satisfaction we derive from possessing something that pleases others as well as ourselves. Neither of these reasons to prefer beautiful people and beautiful things exists for a solitary person living alone in the wilderness, so Kant concludes that ‘‘everything beautiful one loves and seeks only for society.’’100 Responding to skeptics who worry that disagreement about matters of taste among the members of society might undermine the universality of the rules of taste, Kant denounces the view that taste is a matter of opinion or personal preference as ‘‘ignorant and unsociable.’’101 While he acknowledges that taste is a matter of considerable dispute among the members of a society, he insists arguments about judgments of taste indicate the rules governing these judgments are, in fact, universal. ‘‘If one disputes,’’ Kant says, ‘‘then one wants to prove that our judgment of taste is supposed to be valid for others too.’’102 And this is a sign that what we are disputing is not a matter of opinion or personal preference, but something universal. In his lecture, Kant tries to ground the universality of the judgments of taste in the faculty of sensibility and the laws governing sensible representation. If the laws governing sensible representation were not universal, then we would have no reason to think we were all perceiving the same objects in the same way, because our sensations would not be formed in the same way.103 But if the laws governing sensible representation are universal, then all of our sensible representations would be formed in the same way, and the reasons that a representation would be pleasing for me would be the same as the reasons it would be pleasing for others. I can expect universal agreement about aesthetic judgments, from every member of society, because all of our sensible representations are formed according to the same rules and are pleasing for the same reasons. Kant continues to emphasize the role that universal agreement plays in judgments of taste in the Critique of the Power of Judgment

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(1790).104 One important difference between the Lectures on Anthropology and the third Critique concerns the scope of these judgments. While Kant continues to hold that judgments of taste are universal, he qualifies the kind of universality they possess. He now insists that judgments of taste are subjectively rather than objectively universal, because they are not based on universal and necessary concepts.105 Judgments of taste are still valid for everyone whose faculties are constituted the way our faculties are constituted, but Kant does not think their validity can be established apart from ‘‘those who judge.’’106 As such, he is forced to concede that the universality of aesthetic judgment is merely subjective.107 Another important difference concerns the modality of judgments of taste. In the third Critique, Kant denies that actual consensus is necessary for judgments of taste to be considered valid. He thinks it is sufficient to establish the possibility that everyone could agree with a judgment of taste in order to demonstrate that they should.108 Whether someone could or should agree with a judgment of taste is determined by its form. The form of the judgment takes precedence over others’ actual agreement with the judgment, because Kant thinks there are ‘‘private conditions’’ that might prevent some people from assenting to judgments with which they should agree as a matter of principle.109 Someone who finds certain sensible qualities particularly agreeable might be partial toward objects possessing those qualities, yet Kant denies that that person’s judgments are valid as judgments of taste, because the form of his judgment is not ‘‘universally communicable.’’110 What it means for a judgment of taste to be ‘‘universally communicable’’ has been vigorously debated in the scholarly literature; however, it is clear that Kant thinks we are driven by our sociability to communicate our judgments to others and to expect them to agree.111 We cannot expect others to agree with our judgments when they are based on private conditions, but we can expect them to agree when our judgments concern what is truly common: the feeling of pleasure that we experience when a representation enlivens our cognitive faculties and inspires a spirit of ‘‘free play’’ between the imagination and the understanding.112 Whether our judgments concern what is truly common can be determined through the sensus communis. According to Kant, the sensus communis is ‘‘a faculty for judging that in its reflection takes account (a priori) of everyone else’s way of representing in thought, in order as it were to hold its judgment up to human reason as

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a whole and thereby avoid the illusion which, from subjective private conditions that could easily be held to be objective, would have a detrimental influence on the judgment.’’113 By grounding the universality of judgments of taste in the reflection of the sensus communis, rather than the faculty of sensibility, Kant makes it clear that judgments of taste are not concerned with the sensible ‘‘form’’ of the object itself. On the contrary, they reflect on our own cognitive faculties and the capacities we share with others. This is perhaps more abstract than the argument Kant proposed in his Lectures on Anthropology, yet it shows that universal agreement continued to play a central role in his understanding of judgments of taste.

GENIUS AND TASTE, CRITIQUE AND SCIENCE Along with debates about whether the critique of taste should be grounded in physiology, psychology, society, or history, the end of the eighteenth century saw an important debate about the value of good taste and the status of critical judgment. I consider these two debates together in the last section of this chapter, because they reflect on the critique of taste in the early modern period and attempt to determine its significance. The debate about the value of taste was inspired by the cult of artistic genius that spread across Europe during the second half of the eighteenth century.114 The defenders of genius often rejected established standards of taste, because they did not want rules to constrain the freedom, imagination, and creativity of the genius. An example of the suspicion with which they regarded the rules of good taste can be found in Jean-Franc¸ois de Saint-Lambert’s entry ‘‘Genius’’ (Ge´nie) in Diderot’s Encyclope´die. Saint-Lambert characterizes taste as ‘‘the work of study and time,’’ since ‘‘it relies on the knowledge of a multitude of rules.’’115 These rules suggest something must be ‘‘elegant, finished, refined without the appearance of being so’’ in order to be beautiful, so they would lead us to reject works of genius, which often appear to be ‘‘out of sorts, difficult to achieve, wild.’’116 Yet the entry argues the genius has license to break the rules of good taste and ‘‘steal from the sublime, the pathetic, and the great’’ in order to express ‘‘the expansiveness of the

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intellect, the force of imagination, and the activity of the soul’’ that distinguishes the genius from less gifted artists.117 Alexander Gerard presents a less antagonistic account of the relationship between taste and genius in his Essay on Genius (1774). Gerard does not think the genius should be limited by ‘‘blind deference to what has been universally approved,’’ but he rejects the idea that taste and genius are opposed to one another in principle.118 He even argues that taste is an essential element of artistic genius near the end of his essay. ‘‘In the artist,’’ Gerard explains, ‘‘taste exerts itself continually, restraining, regulating, and directing fancy; surveying the conceptions which that faculty has suggested, approving them when they are suitable to it, perceiving what is faulty, rejecting what is redundant, marking what is incomplete, correcting and perfecting the whole.’’119 This could be taken to mean that taste is the source of genius, since the genius would not be able to produce great works if he did not possess the restraint and the good judgment that taste provides; however, Herder insists the opposite is the case in his essay On the Causes of Sunken Taste among the Different Peoples in Whom It Once Blossomed (1774). Like many who see the genius as an ‘‘image of the Divinity,’’ Herder despises critics whose concern for good taste prevents them from appreciating the genius of writers like Shakespeare, to whom he had dedicated a laudatory essay in 1773. Shakespeare may have broken the rules laid down in Aristotle’s Poetics, but Herder insists his dramas reveal the ‘‘laws of historical, philosophical, or dramatic art’’ in every step their author takes.120 The idea that works of genius reveal the laws of art leads Herder to conclude that the rules of good taste ‘‘can arise only through geniuses’’ and must ‘‘desire to persist’’ in genius, if the tastes of a people are not to become corrupt and decline.121 Critics whose obsession with the rules of good taste make them hostile to genius actually threaten the taste of a people, because their judgments give rise to prejudices that undermine the very foundations of good taste. Lessing presents a similar account of the relationship between genius and the rules of good taste in his Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767–1769), but his suspicion of those who ‘‘flatter genius . . . in order that they too may be held to be geniuses’’ leads him to be more charitable toward critics than is Herder. Lessing agrees that genius is the source of the rules of good taste; however, he rejects the idea that these rules oppress the genius and undermine taste.122 Genius cannot be oppressed by rules,

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Lessing argues, because the genius carries ‘‘the proof of all rules within himself.’’123 Even if he is not consciously aware of the rules governing an art, Lessing thinks a genius will follow the example of the great artists who preceded him and the rules they established, because the practice of other geniuses has shown these rules to be the best means available to achieve what the genius hopes to accomplish. The genius may break with precedent in cases where he hopes to do something new and different; however, when he has done something great, it will become a model for other artists and a rule to follow. The work of genius is, therefore, the proof of the rule the critic employs in judging works of art. Because they are sensitive to the value of rules and the example they set, Lessing actually thinks geniuses make the best critics. ‘‘Not every critic is a genius,’’ he writes, ‘‘but every genius is a born critic.’’124 In addition to the debate about the relationship between taste and genius, the end of the eighteenth century saw a debate about the status of criticism. In the introduction to his Treatise (1739/1740), Hume counted criticism as one of the sciences in which ‘‘is comprehended almost every thing, which it can any way import us to be acquainted with, or which can tend either to the improvement or ornament of the human mind.’’125 Home did not think criticism could be considered a science, but he was optimistic about its prospects. In his Elements of Criticism, Home tried to provide ‘‘a foundation for reasoning upon the taste of any individual, and for passing sentence upon it: where it is conformable to principles, we can pronounce with certainty that it is correct; otherwise, that it is incorrect and perhaps whimsical.’’126 Thus, Home thought, criticism could be made into a ‘‘rational science’’ that would ‘‘redouble the pleasure’’ we take in the arts. Kant was not as confident as Home about the possibility of a science of criticism. Throughout his career, he denied the possibility that there could be a science of taste and opposed the science of aesthetics that had been proposed by Baumgarten and Meier. It is ironic that Kant cites Home as an authority in his critique of Baumgarten, since Home was just as committed to the idea of a ‘‘rational science’’ of criticism as Baumgarten was to the ‘‘science’’ of aesthetics, yet that did not stop Kant from treating Home’s ‘‘critique’’ (Critic) as if it were the opposite of Baumgarten’s ‘‘science’’ (Wissenschaft). In the notes he wrote in his copy of Meier’s Vernunftlehre (Reflexionen zur Logik, ca. 1760s/1770s), Kant writes that ‘‘beautiful (knowledge) arts permit only critique. Home. Therefore no science

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of the beautiful.’’127 And in his Lectures on Logic (Logik Politz, c. 1780), he says that ‘‘aesthetics cannot be a doctrine, because it can never be a science. Home more correctly calls it critique.’’128 The contrast between Home and Baumgarten is even more explicit in Kant’s Logic (1800), which was published by his former student and colleague, Benjamin Ja¨sche: Some, especially orators and poets, have tried to engage in reasoning concerning taste, but they have never been able to hand down a decisive judgment concerning it. The philosopher Baumgarten in Frankfurt had a plan for an aesthetic as a science. But Home, more correctly, called aesthetics critique, since it yields no rules a priori that determines judgment sufficiently, as logic does, but instead derives its rules a posteriori, and since it only makes universal, through comparison, the empirical laws according to which we cognize the more prefect (beautiful) and the more imperfect.129

The contrast Kant draws between Home and Baumgarten is even more ironic when one considers that Kant calls the critique he undertakes in his Critique of Pure Reason a ‘‘special science’’ and then claims to have demonstrated the a priori principles of the critique of taste in his Critique of the Power of Judgment.130 If the ‘‘critique of pure reason’’ (Critic der reinen Vernunft) really is a ‘‘special science’’ (besondere Wissenschaft) that provides a ‘‘complete estimation of synthetic a priori cognition,’’ including the a priori principles of ‘‘the science of the rules of sensibility in general, i.e., aesthetic’’ and ‘‘the science of the rules of the understanding in general, i.e. logic,’’ then the claim in Kant’s Logic that critique ‘‘yields no rules a priori’’ must be false.131 Similarly, the claim that aesthetics ‘‘derives its rules a posteriori’’ must be false, if Kant is able to demonstrate in the Critique of the Power of Judgment that judgments of taste ‘‘must be able to be assumed to be valid for everyone a priori,’’ because they depend only on ‘‘that subjective element that one can presuppose in all human beings (as requisite for possible cognitions in general.’’132 Some of these contradictions can be resolved by showing that the passage about Home and Baumgarten in Kant’s Logic is an anachronism, based on passages in notes and lectures from Kant’s precritical period, which were introduced into his later work by Ja¨sche’s editorial practices.133 But there can be little doubt Kant continued to deny the possibility of a ‘‘rational science’’ of criticism, whose judgments could be demonstrated to be

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correct through certain principles. Kant rejects this possibility in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, where he concludes that critics ‘‘cannot expect a determining ground for their judgment from proofs, but only from the reflection of the subject on his own state (of pleasure or displeasure), rejecting all precepts and rules.’’134

NOTES 1. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Axi. On the difference between the sense in which Kant employs the word ‘‘criticism’’ (Kritik) in this passage and the sense in which he employs it in the title of the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft), see McQuillan, ‘‘Beyond the Limits of Reason,’’ 66–82. 2. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A406/B433. 3. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Axi. 4. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 17 (VIII:36). 5. Dickie, The Century of Taste, 3. 6. I provide a similar but more extended account of the origins of early modern criticism in McQuillan, Immanuel Kant, ch. 1. 7. Although this saying is apocryphal, it is still commonly cited, because it was quoted by Montaigne, Kant, and Nietzsche. Jacques Derrida even used it as the basis for his book The Politics of Friendship. See Montaigne, Complete Works, 171; Kant, Practical Philosophy, 585 (VI:470); Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 148 ; and Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, vii–2. 8. Langer, Perfect Friendship, 17–20; Agamben, ‘‘The Friend,’’ 26–27; Theophanidis, ‘‘O Friends, There Are No Friends,’’ 2014. See also Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 151 (1171a15). 9. Turner, Philology, 60–61. 10. Turner, Philology, 73–80. 11. Haugen, Richard Bentley, 110–123. Haugen notes that there were many who already held this view when Bentley published his Dissertation upon the Letters of Phalaris. However, it could be argued that it was Bentley who proved the epistles to be forgeries, by enumerating the historical and stylistic anachronisms contained in the text. 12. Grafton, Forgers and Critics, 8–36. 13. Bacon, Of the Dignity and Advancement of Learning, 493. 14. Bacon, Of the Dignity and Advancement of Learning, 494. 15. Bacon, Of the Dignity and Advancement of Learning, 494. 16. Hall, ‘‘Life of Julius Caesar Scaliger,’’ 94–96. 17. Wilson-Okamura, Virgil in the Renaissance, 129. 18. Dryden, ‘‘Author’s Apology,’’ 106. 19. Levine, ‘‘Ancients and Moderns Reconsidered,’’ 82–89.

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20. Swift, A Tale of a Tub, 44–45. 21. Addison, The Spectator, no. 291. 22. Cooper, Characteristics, 274. 23. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 273. 24. Costelloe, The British Aesthetic Tradition, 15–16. See also Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics, vol. I, The Eighteenth Century, 34. 25. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 323. 26. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 324. 27. Hutcheson, Inquiry, 19–23. 28. Hutcheson, Inquiry, 25. 29. Hutcheson, Inquiry, 28–41. 30. Kivy, The Seventh Sense, 24. See also Dickie, The Century of Taste, 3. 31. See the excellent discussion of Shaftesbury’s objections to Hobbes and Locke in Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness, 60–69. 32. John McAteer helpfully distinguishes Shaftesbury’s ‘‘moral taste’’ theory from Hutcheson’s ‘‘moral sense’’ theory in McAteer, ‘‘Moral Beauty and Moral Taste Theory from Shaftesbury to Hume,’’ 77–137. 33. Hutcheson, Inquiry, 80. 34. Hutcheson, Inquiry, 80. 35. On Descartes’s physiology, its relation to his psychological theory, and their relation to other early modern approaches to physiology and psychology, see Hatfield, ‘‘Descartes Physiology and Its Relation to His Psychology,’’ 335–370. 36. Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, The Passions of the Soul, 327 (324). 37. Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, The Passions of the Soul, 327 (326). 38. Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, The Passions of the Soul, 353 (380). 39. Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, The Passions of the Soul, 353 (380). 40. Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, The Passions of the Soul, 403–404 (486–488). 41. Medicine is, in fact, one of the central themes of Descartes’s correspondence with Elisabeth. See Shapiro, The Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and Rene´ Descartes, 29–30. See also Mills, ‘‘The Challenging Patient,’’ 101–122. 42. On the relation between Descartes’s Passions and Spinoza’s Ethics, see Spinoza, Complete Works (Ethics), 277 (part III, preface). See also Shapiro, ‘‘Descartes’ Passions of the Soul,’’ 274–275. 43. Spinoza, Complete Works (Ethics), 358 (part IV, appendix). 44. Spinoza, Complete Works (Ethics), 277 (part III, preface). 45. On the relation between LeBrun’s Method and Descartes’s Passions, see Ross, ‘‘Painting the Passions,’’ 25–47.

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46. A translation of LeBrun’s text, along with his illustrations, is available in Montagu, The Expression of the Passions, 126–140. LeBrun’s drawings have been included in many modern editions of The Passions of the Soul, including the 1989 Hackett edition, edited by Stephen H. Voss. 47. This claim is advanced with some caution, since Du Bos has been described as an opponent of Cartesianism. This claim is certainly true to some extent. Du Bos criticized many of Descartes’s followers, denounced the extravagance of Spinoza’s system, sided with Leibniz in his debate with the Cartesians, and later became one of the most enthusiastic proponents of Lockean empiricism in Europe. See Lombard, L’Abbe´ Du Bos, 61, 189, 193, 194. In the Critical Reflections, he expresses some ambivalence about Cartesian philosophy, noting that ‘‘philosophers in general do justice to the personal merit of Descartes, yet they are divided with regard to the goodness of his philosophical system.’’ See Du Bos, Critical Reflections, 2:356. Still, Du Bos had been an enthusiastic proponent of Cartesian philosophy in his youth. And I would argue that the mechanistic account of the emotions in the Critical Reflections reflects the lasting influence of Cartesian psychophysiology. 48. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, 1:2. 49. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, 1:2–3. 50. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, 1:21. 51. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, 1:5. 52. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 122–123 (II.I.3). 53. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 123 (II.I.3) 54. Hume, Essays (Of the Standard of Taste), 230. 55. Hume, Essays (Of the Standard of Taste), 234. 56. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 159 (IV.I). 57. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 159 (IV.I). 58. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 161, 174, 177 (IV; IV.XVI; IV.XIX). 59. See, for example, Costelloe, The British Aesthetic Tradition, 37–131. See also James Shelley’s entry ‘‘18th Century British Aesthetics’’ in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Guyer departs from this convention in order to highlight discussions of the relationship between cognition and emotion, as well as the relationship between the aesthetics of play and the aesthetics of truth in the British tradition in the eighteenth century. See Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics, vol. I, The Eighteenth Century, 140–243. 60. Locke, Essay, 142 (II.II.3). 61. Addison, The Spectator, no. 411. 62. Addison, The Spectator, no. 411. 63. Addison, The Spectator, no. 413. 64. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 64. 65. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 65. 66. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 65. 67. Locke, Essay, 529 (II.XXXIII.5). 68. Locke, Essay, 531 (II.XXXIII.8).

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69. Hume, Treatise, 11 (I.IV). 70. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 3 (I.I) 71. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 3 (I.I) 72. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 5–6 (I.I). See also Dickie, The Century of Taste, 30–43; and Shelley, ‘‘18th Century British Aesthetics,’’ 3.1. 73. Home, Elements of Criticism, I:25 (18). 74. Home, Elements of Criticism, II:244 (491–492). 75. Home, Elements of Criticism, II:244–245 (492). 76. Home, Elements of Criticism, II:245 (492). 77. Home, Elements of Criticism, II:245 (492). 78. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 1. 79. Hume, Essays (Of the Standard of Taste), 229. 80. Hume, Essays (Of the Standard of Taste), 233. 81. Hume, Essays (Of the Standard of Taste), 234. 82. Hume, Essays (Of the Standard of Taste), 234. 83. Hume, Essays (Of the Standard of Taste), 234. 84. Hume, Essays (Of the Standard of Taste), 241. 85. Herder, Philosophical Writings (On the Change of Taste), 247. 86. Herder, Philosophical Writings (On the Change of Taste), 248. 87. Herder, Philosophical Writings (On the Change of Taste), 248. 88. Herder, Philosophical Writings (On the Change of Taste), 248–249. 89. Herder, Philosophical Writings (On the Change of Taste), 251. 90. Herder, Philosophical Writings (On the Change of Taste), 251–252. 91. Herder, Philosophical Writings (On the Change of Taste), 252. 92. Herder, Philosophical Writings (On the Change of Taste), 254. 93. Herder, Philosophical Writings (On the Change of Taste), 254. 94. Herder, Philosophical Writings (On the Change of Taste), 256. 95. Herder, Philosophical Writings (On the Change of Taste), 256. 96. Herder, Philosophical Writings (On the Change of Taste), 256. In The German Historicist Tradition, Frederick Beiser argues that Herder overcomes his early skepticism in his later work by redefining the task of criticism. Instead of judging works of art and literature by a universal standard of taste, Herder insists that they be evaluated according to the goals and standards that artists and authors set for themselves in the historical periods in which they lived and worked. The standard of criticism is, therefore, imminent to the work and its historical context. See Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, 109. 97. Kant, Lectures on Anthropology, 24 (XXV:179). 98. Kant, Lectures on Anthropology, 24 (XXV:179). It is important to note that Kant often rejected the claim that there were a priori principles of taste during the same period. On the development of his views on the possibility of a priori principles of taste, see Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, 25–28. 99. Kant, Lectures on Anthropology, 24 (XXV:179). 100. Kant, Lectures on Anthropology, 24 (XXV:179).

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101. Kant, Lectures on Anthropology, 25 (XXV:180). 102. Kant, Lectures on Anthropology, 25 (XXV:180). 103. Kant, Lectures on Anthropology, 26 (XXV:181). The concept of ‘‘play’’ also figures prominently in this part of Kant’s lecture. In Kant’s lecture, play is understood as an alteration in time, which is made possible by the faculty of sensibility and the way its laws ‘‘form’’ objects. In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, it is the free play of the imagination and understanding, rather than the faculty of sensibility, that gives rise to the pleasure with which judgments of taste are concerned. See Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 102–103 (V:217–218). The shift from the temporal play of sensibility to the free play of the imagination and understanding seems to represent a crucial stage in the development of Kant’s critical aesthetics. 104. On the relation between Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology and the Critique of the Power of Judgment, see Paul Guyer’s essay ‘‘Beauty, Freedom, and Morality: Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology and the Development of his Aesthetic Theory’’ in Guyer, Values of Beauty, 163–189. In addition to discussing the roles that universal agreement and the laws of sensibility play in Kant’s anthropology lectures and his aesthetics (esp. 167–173), Guyer also emphasizes the role of art, free play, and genius (173–180) and the combination of aesthetics and teleology in the third Critique (180–189). 105. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 96–97 (V:211–212). 106. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 100 (V:215). 107. On the subjectivity of judgments of taste in the third Critique, see Ginsborg, The Normativity of Nature, 15–31. 108. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 101 (V:216). 109. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 97 (V:211). 110. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 102 (V:217). 111. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 103 (V:218). 112. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 102–103 (V:217). 113. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 173–174 (V:293–294). 114. The concept of genius has a long history prior to the eighteenth century, especially during the Renaissance. For an account of the concept of genius in the Renaissance and the early modern period, see Starnes, ‘‘The Figure Genius in the Renaissance’’ 234–244 and Tonelli, ‘‘Genius from the Renaissance to 1770,’’ 293– 297. For an account of the rise of the cult of artistic genius in the eighteenth century, which surveys other sociological and historical accounts, see Bu¨rger, The Decline of Modernism, 57–69. For a wide-ranging and accessible history of the concept, see McMahon, Divine Fury, esp. 67–105. 115. Because this entry is not included in edition published by Hoyt and Cassirer, I have quoted from John S. D. Glaus’s translation, which is available from The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project (http:// hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.819).

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116. The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project (http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.819). 117. The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project (http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.819). 118. Gerard, Essay on Genius, 8, 36, 39–70. See also Costelloe, The British Aesthetic Tradition, 113–117. 119. Gerard, Essay on Genius, 392. 120. Herder, Selected Writings on Aesthetics (The Causes of Sunken Taste), 306. 121. Herder, Selected Writings on Aesthetics (The Causes of Sunken Taste), 310. 122. Lessing, Hamburg Dramaturgy, 253–254 (no. 96). 123. Lessing, Hamburg Dramaturgy, 254 (no. 96). 124. Lessing, Hamburg Dramaturgy, 254 (no. 96). 125. Hume, Treatise, xv–xvi. 126. Home, Elements of Criticism, 20 (6–7). 127. Kant, Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften, (XVI:27). 128. Kant, Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften, (XXIV:506). 129. Kant, Lectures on Logic, 530 (IX:15). 130. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A11/B24. 131. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A11/B24, A52/B76. 132. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 170 (V:290). 133. I have made an argument to this effect in McQuillan, ‘‘Kant’s Critique of Baumgarten’s Aesthetics’’ (forthcoming). 134. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 166 (V:285–286).

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Aesthetics

Many contemporary scholars would agree with Bernard Bosanquet that aesthetics ‘‘existed before the name,’’ since ‘‘reflection upon beauty and upon fine art begins among Hellenistic thinkers at least as early as the time of Socrates, if not, in a certain sense, with still earlier philosophers.’’1 Some would contend it existed before Plato, when Bosanquet says ‘‘the thought of Hellas passed through all the phases which were natural to profound and ardent intelligence at first freely turned upon the world; and the partial truths which it successively attained were uttered with a definiteness and audacity which conveys a first impression of something like perversity.’’2 Others would credit the eighteenth century with the invention of aesthetics, not because it was the first time philosophical reflections on art, beauty, and taste were called ‘‘aesthetics,’’ but because it was in the eighteenth century that these reflections first came to resemble what we now call ‘‘aesthetics.’’ Peter Kivy endorses the latter view in the preface to the first edition of his book The Seventh Sense (1976). Because he describes the book as ‘‘a study in eighteenth-century aesthetics,’’ Kivy says he has not hesitated ‘‘to use the noun ‘aesthetics’ and the adjective ‘aesthetic’ wherever they have seemed to me to be appropriate.’’3 He recognizes ‘‘objections have been raised to the use of these terms in describing the work of eighteenth-century critics and philosophers,’’ but Kivy provides only a very brief response to these objections.4 ‘‘Surely,’’ he argues, ‘‘what was done in the eighteenth century in the way of philosophy of art, of taste, of criticism, and of beauty is more like what we call ‘aesthetics’ than it is like anything else.’’5 To deny that what eighteenth-century 101

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British philosophers were doing was aesthetics because they did not call it ‘‘aesthetics’’ would be ‘‘too fussy—and misleading in the bargain.’’6 Kivy seems to agree with Bosanquet that when it comes to aesthetics, we should focus on the thing rather than the name. Many contemporary scholars would also agree with Katharine Everett Gilbert and Helmut Kuhn that Baumgarten’s contribution to aesthetics is ‘‘nominal rather than substantial.’’7 Gilbert and Kuhn recognize ‘‘givers of names, from Adam down, have been celebrated as a species of sage,’’ but insist that Baumgarten’s naming of aesthetics is incidental at best, because ‘‘names are not things.’’8 Few of the scholars who hold this view have worked their way through Baumgarten’s ‘‘obscure’’ and ‘‘barbarous’’ Latin or the French, Italian, and German translations of his Aesthetics that have become available in recent years.9 Those who have will find the work has little in common with aesthetics as we understand it today. We will not find carefully constructed arguments about the ontology of the artwork, attempts to define the necessary and sufficient conditions of natural or artistic beauty, or a general theory of criticism in Baumgarten’s aesthetics. Instead, we will find an account of a particular kind of cognition (sensible cognition) and its perfection (beauty) as well as discussions of universal characteristics of perfect sensible cognition (the beauty of things and thoughts, the beauty of order, and the beauty of signification).10 There are scholars who think this account is more substantial than others. Frederick Beiser’s Diotima’s Children (2009), Stefanie Buchenau’s The Founding of Aesthetics in the German Enlightenment (2013), and Paul Guyer’s A History of Modern Aesthetics (2014) all discuss Baumgarten’s aesthetics at length, though they disagree about the precise reason it is significant. Beiser thinks Baumgarten is significant because his aesthetics could be developed into a general theory of the fine arts, because he pays more attention to the senses than Wolff and Gottsched, and because he resists the irrationalism of Bodmer and Breitinger.11 Buchenau sees Baumgarten’s aesthetics as an attempt to resolve a long-standing debate in early modern philosophy about the possibility of a general method of invention.12 Guyer takes an interest in Baumgarten and Meier because they help to bridge the gap between the cognitivism and perfectionism of the Wolffian tradition in Germany and the British tradition that emphasized the passions and the pleasure we derive from the ‘‘play’’ of our cognitive faculties.13 If any of their claims are true, then there is good reason

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to think Baumgarten’s contribution to aesthetics is more substantial than Gilbert and Kuhn suggest. My own view is that philosophers should be concerned about names and things and the relationship between them. Baumgarten deserves our attention because he gave aesthetics its name, but also because he thought the name was appropriate for the new science he tried to introduce to philosophy. The name (aesthetics) and the thing (Baumgarten’s new science) came to be separated in the course of history, one being retained and the other fading into obscurity. That is a matter of considerable interest in itself. We should know why the name of a discarded science is still used by contemporary philosophers. And we should understand why Baumgarten’s plan for a science of aesthetics was discarded so soon after it was introduced. I try to explain why and how this happened in the pages that follow. The first section of this chapter provides an overview of Baumgarten’s conception of aesthetics and its elaboration by Georg Friedrich Meier. The second and third sections discuss the reception of Baumgarten’s aesthetics in eighteenth-century Germany, Kant’s and Hegel’s objections to Baumgarten’s new science, and the alternative use they made of the term ‘‘aesthetics.’’ In the fourth and final section, I discuss the attempt by twentieth-century philosophers to determine the proper object of philosophical aesthetics: whether it is aesthetic properties, aesthetic attitudes, aesthetic experiences, or something else. Some readers might wonder what aesthetics really is at the end of this chapter. I am not sure what to tell them, except that Aristotle thought philosophy begins in wonder and not in the assurance that we already know what philosophy is, what each of its parts is about, and which methods they should employ.

A NEW SCIENCE Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten was born into a devout Lutheran family in Berlin in 1714 and was educated at the Pietist Waisenhaus in Halle. He enrolled in the University of Halle in 1730, seven years after Christian Wolff was removed from his position at the university and expelled from Prussia. Wolff was expelled because members of the theology faculty accused him of undermining the religious foundations of morality,

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denying free will, promoting fatalism, and encouraging military desertion through his teaching and the philosophical textbooks he published.14 Baumgarten’s family was closely associated with many of Wolff’s critics, including August Hermann Francke, the leader of the Pietists in Halle and the founder of the Waisenhaus where Baumgarten was educated, and Joachim Lange, who led the public campaign against Wolff and his followers, yet Baumgarten was encouraged to study Wolff’s philosophy by his brother, Siegmund Jakob, a theologian who used Wolff’s philosophy to make Lutheran theology more rigorous and coherent.15 Wolff’s influence is clearly discernible in Baumgarten’s philosophical writings, which resemble those of Wolff and his followers in many ways. They have the same form, consisting of a series of propositions, followed by a brief explanation and a list of examples; employ many of the same definitions; address many of the same issues; and endorse many of the same conclusions—though not all, to be sure. Baumgarten is less interested in mathematics and natural science than is Wolff. And he is more conservative than Wolff is in theology, suggesting that some religious truths are only accessible through faith and not through the natural light of reason.16 Baumgarten’s aesthetics might also be an expression of his Pietism. The senses were thought by many Protestant theologians to be a more appropriate source of knowledge than reason for finite and sinful creatures like ourselves, because reason tempts us to try to know things beyond our limited abilities and improve our fallen state by ourselves, instead of relying on divine revelation and God’s grace.17 By focusing on sensible cognition in his aesthetics, Baumgarten attenuated Wolff’s rationalism and made philosophy less threatening to religion.18 Baumgarten first proposed his new science of aesthetics in his dissertation Reflections on Poetry (Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus, 1735). It is important to remember that Baumgarten’s dissertation is a work on poetics and not the exposition of his new science.19 Most of the Reflections on Poetry is devoted to the definition of the poem (‘‘a perfect sensible discourse,’’ §9), a description of its elements (words, §91; meter, §101; verses, §104; etc.), and an account of the things that contribute to a poem’s perfection (sensible representations, §24; examples, §21; images, §28; descriptions, §54; metaphors, §83; synecdoche, §84; allegory, §85; sonority, §97; etc.). It is only at the very end of the text that Baumgarten mentions aesthetics.

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Having shown that ‘‘philosophy and the knowledge of how to construct a poem, which are often held to be entirely antithetical, are linked together in the most amiable union’’ in earlier sections of his dissertation, Baumgarten turns at the end of Reflections on Poetry to the place of poetics within philosophy.20 Defining philosophical poetics as ‘‘the science guiding sensible discourse to perfection,’’ he notes that this science presupposes in the poet ‘‘a lower cognitive faculty’’ known as sensibility.21 If poetics guides the sensible discourse arising from the poet’s faculty of sensibility to perfection, then there must also be a science guiding the cognition that arises from the poet’s sensible cognition to perfection. Logic is often thought to perform this function, because logic is understood as ‘‘the science of knowing things philosophically.’’22 However, Baumgarten rejects the idea that logic could guide sensible cognition to perfection. First, he suggests logic is poorly suited for this purpose because it remains an uncultivated field.23 Then he explains the main reason that logic cannot guide sensible cognition to its perfection. It is because logic is ‘‘by its very definition . . . restricted to the rather narrow limits to which it is as a matter of fact confined’’ that it is unable to guide sensible cognition to its perfection. These limits are set by the inclusion of the term ‘‘philosophically’’ in the definition of logic. If logic is the science of ‘‘knowing things philosophically,’’ then it must be ‘‘the science for the direction of the higher cognitive faculty in apprehending the truth.’’24 To know things philosophically is to know them intellectually and rationally, and it excludes things known through the senses. So, it is because logic is concerned with the cognition of the higher cognitive faculty (understanding and reason) and its perfection (truth) that it is unable to direct the lower cognitive faculty of sensibility toward its perfection. A different science is necessary ‘‘to inquire also into those devices by which they might improve the lower faculties of knowing, and sharpen them, and apply them more happily for the benefit of the world.’’25 Psychology offers many interesting prospects in this regard, but ultimately Baumgarten thinks a new science is necessary, one that he calls aesthetics, after the Greek word ασθησις or ‘‘sense perception.’’26 Aesthetics is, therefore, the science of things perceived, which guides the lower cognitive faculty to perfection. In the final section of his dissertation, Baumgarten argues that poetics should be understood as the part of aesthetics that

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‘‘treats generally of the perfected presentation of sensible representations,’’ while rhetoric should be understood as the part of aesthetics that ‘‘treats generally of unperfected presentation of sensible representations.’’27 He also urges philosophers to take up his new science and use it to establish ‘‘accurate limits between poetry and ordinary eloquence.’’28 ‘‘The difference is, to be sure, only a matter of degree,’’ he writes, ‘‘but in the relegation of things to one side or the other it requires, we think, no less capable a geometer than did the frontiers of the Phrygians and the Mysians.’’29 Baumgarten’s Metaphysics (Metaphysica, 1739) describes the role aesthetics plays in systematic philosophy and its relation to psychology in greater detail than the Reflections on Poetry. Following the plan of Wolff’s Preliminary Discourse (1728), Baumgarten divides metaphysics into ontology, the science of the ‘‘more general’’ predicates of being (§4); cosmology, the science of the ‘‘general predicates’’ of the world (§351); psychology, the science of the ‘‘general predicates’’ of the soul (§501); and natural theology, the science of God, insofar as he is known through reason and not through faith (§800).30 Baumgarten makes aesthetics a part of empirical psychology, which is the part of psychology that ‘‘deduces its assertions based upon experience.’’31 And he specifies that aesthetics is the part of empirical psychology dealing with the cognition of the lower cognitive faculty, sensibility. Developing an idea he introduced in the Reflections on Poetry, but which is also found in Leibniz and Wolff, Baumgarten argues that sensible cognition is necessarily confused. ‘‘There is something obscure in every sensation,’’ he writes, ‘‘and hence to some extent there is always an admixture of confusion in a sensation, even a distinct one.’’32 This last remark is rather curious, because Leibniz and Wolff had defined distinct cognition as the cognition of a notion (notio) or concept (Begriff) whose predicates are clear enough to be distinguished from one another, so that we are not confused about which predicates are contained in the notion or concept. Leibniz had insisted in his Meditations on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas (1684) that sensible cognition can never be distinct.33 Wolff had concurred in his German Metaphysics (1719).34 Baumgarten agrees with Leibniz and Wolff in his Reflections on Poetry that ‘‘distinct representations, complete, adequate, profound through every degree, are not sensible, and, therefore, not poetic.’’35 He even introduces a distinction

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between intensive and extensive clarity to explain how sensible representations can be made clearer and more poetic without becoming more distinct. ‘‘In extensively very clear representations,’’ he writes, ‘‘more is represented in a sensible way than in those less clear, §16; therefore, they contribute more to the perfection of a poem, §7.’’36 Extensively clear representations differ from intensively clear representations, because intensive clarity is achieved through ‘‘a discrimination of characteristics’’ that makes the cognition of a representation more distinct and, therefore, less sensible.37 Extensively clear representations represent more things than other representations, so they are clearer than other representations, but they do not become more distinct in the process. As a result, their clarity is more poetic than the clarity of other representations, and it is still consistent with the necessary confusion of sensible cognition, because it remains ‘‘clear and confused’’ (clara et confusa) rather than ‘‘clear and distinct’’ (clara et distincta).38 Baumgarten repeats this argument in the Metaphysics, adding that extensively clear cognition is ‘‘lively’’ (vividus) and ‘‘a more lively perception is more perfect than a less lively one,’’ so that ‘‘a more lively perception can be stronger than a perception that is intensively clear and even distinct.’’39 Aesthetics is the science of knowing and presenting these lively sensible cognitions, so it should not be considered inferior to logic, just because the cognition of the faculty with which it is concerned remains confused and cannot be clear and distinct. Since lively cognition is ‘‘stronger’’ (fortior) than the clear and distinct cognition of the higher cognitive faculty of understanding in at least some cases, it follows that there are times when aesthetics takes precedence over logic. Baumgarten began lecturing on aesthetics at the University of Frankfurt on the Oder in 1741. He presumably started planning a treatise on aesthetics at about the same time, but his former student Georg Friedrich Meier published his Foundations of All Fine Arts and Sciences (Anfangsgru¨nde aller scho¨nen Ku¨nste und Wissenschaften, 1748–1750) two years before the first volume of Baumgarten’s Aesthetics (Aesthetica, 1750/1758) appeared. Meier acknowledges in the preface (Vorrede) that his Foundations is based on Baumgarten’s Collegio u¨ber die Aesthetik, which Baumgarten had shared with Meier before the publication of the Foundations.40 As a result, there are many similarities between Meier’s Foundations and Baumgarten’s Aesthetics. The first and most important point of agreement between Meier and Baumgarten concerns

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the definition of aesthetics. Meier and Baumgarten both say aesthetics is the science of sensible cognition.41 They also agree that ‘‘beauty’’ (scho¨nheit, pulcritudo) is the perfection of sensible cognition.42 Baumgarten had not identified beauty as the perfection of sensible cognition in either the Reflections on Poetry or the Metaphysics, but the account of beauty that Meier presents in the Foundations and that Baumgarten develops in the Aesthetics is clearly based on those early works, because Meier and Baumgarten both reject the suggestion that beautiful cognition can be clear and distinct. Because it is the perfection of the sensible cognition of the lower cognitive faculty, beautiful cognition has to remain clear and confused. Meier employs the distinction between intensive and extensive clarity to explain the clarity of beautiful cognition, yet Baumgarten does not appeal to that distinction anywhere in the Aesthetics. The structure of Meier’s Foundations and Baumgarten’s Aesthetics reflects another significant difference between the two works. The first volume of Meier’s Foundations is neatly divided into a series of chapters on different aspects of aesthetic perfection (richness, greatness, probability, vivacity, certainty, sensible life), while the chapters in the second volume address the particular faculties contained in the lower cognitive faculty (sensibility in general, attention, abstraction, the senses, imagination, wit, subtlety, memory, creativity, taste, foresight, supposition, description, appetite). Baumgarten’s Aesthetics is much less clearly structured. In the ‘‘Prolegomena’’ to his Aesthetics, Baumgarten says his new science is to be divided into theoretical aesthetics and practical aesthetics.43 Theoretical aesthetics is to be divided into three parts: (1) heuristics, which is concerned with invention; (2) method, which deals with the principles of order and arrangement; and (3) semiotics, which addresses the beauty and disposition of signs.44 Parts of the first chapter appeared in 1750 and 1758. Though these volumes address a wide range of issues (sensible cognition and its perfections, §§14–27; the character of the aesthetician, §§28–115; and the aesthetic perfections of richness, §§115–176; magnitude, §§177–422; truth, §§423–613; light, §§613–828; and persuasion, §§829–904), they do not contain everything Baumgarten planned to include in his heuristics (they exclude chapters discussing aesthetic certainty and ‘‘the life of aesthetic cognition’’).45 Neither the chapters on method and semiotics nor the second part on practical aesthetics ever appeared. The incompleteness of Baumgarten’s Aesthetics may explain why it received relatively little attention when it was published and why it was forgotten so

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quickly thereafter. Yet some have claimed it was Baumgarten’s decision to write in Latin that doomed his aesthetics to obscurity. Unlike Meier, whose Foundations was written in German for an educated but popular audience, Baumgarten’s Aesthetics was written in the academic language of the universities. The fact that Meier’s treatment of aesthetics did not fare much better than Baumgarten’s suggests that it was not the language in which they chose to write or the readership they chose to address that doomed their undertaking, but the way they conceived the new science they proposed.

CHANGING THE SUBJECT Meier’s Foundations and Baumgarten’s Aesthetics received mixed reviews in the years following their publication.46 Some readers became enthusiastic supporters of the new science they proposed, while others denounced them as philistines and charlatans. Some appropriated certain aspects of their aesthetics, while others applied the name to very different sciences. As we will see, this led to the concept of aesthetics being separated from Baumgarten’s understanding of his new science by the end of the eighteenth century. Moses Mendelssohn was generally favorably disposed toward Baumgarten’s conception of aesthetics. Both characters in Mendels¨ ber die Empfindungen, 1755) agree that sohn’s Letters on Sentiments (U ‘‘beauty rests . . . on the indistinct representation of perfection,’’ so that ‘‘no distinct concept is compatible with the feeling of beauty.’’47 This leads Theocles, the older and wiser character in the exchange, to declare that ‘‘extensively clearer representations’’ are ‘‘sheer sources of gratification,’’ because they contain ‘‘a richer multiplicity’’ and ‘‘more relations opposite one another’’ than other representations.48 Mendelssohn’s reference to ‘‘expansively clearer representation’’ (ausgebreitete klarere Vorstellung) in this passage is clearly a translation of the concept of ‘‘extensive clarity’’ (claritas extensiva) that Baumgarten employs in the Reflections on Poetry and Metaphysics. Mendelssohn’s identification of beauty and sensible perfection also reveals his debt to Meier’s Foundations and Baumgarten’s Aesthetics.49 Still, there are passages in the Letters that suggest Mendelssohn was a more committed defender of Wolffian rationalism than either Baumgarten or Meier.50

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One example is Mendelssohn’s conception of pleasure. Mendelssohn adopts the Wolffian view of pleasure as the perception of perfection.51 This leads him to distinguish three different kinds of pleasure: first, the sensuous gratification we derive from eating and drinking, which improve the state of our bodies; second, the pleasure associated with beauty, which arises from the clear but confused perception of unity in variety; and, finally, the intellectual pleasure that accompanies clear and distinct cognition.52 Mendelssohn’s account of intellectual pleasure does not contradict anything in Baumgarten and Meier, and may even be based on Baumgarten’s discussion of pleasure in the Metaphysics; however, it does prove ‘‘reason is not the killjoy of our pleasure,’’ as some of Wolff’s critics claimed.53 Anyone who hoped Baumgarten’s aesthetics would attenuate Wolff’s rationalism would be sorely disappointed by Mendelssohn’s Letters. Lessing was less favorably disposed toward Baumgarten’s Aesthetics than his friend Mendelssohn. In the preface to the Laocoo¨n (1766), Lessing says, ‘‘We Germans suffer from no lack of systematic books. No nation in the world surpasses us in the faculty of deducing from a couple of definitions whatever conclusions we please, in most fair and logical order.’’54 In the very next sentence, he says: ‘‘Baumgarten acknowledged that he was indebted to Gesner’s dictionary for a large proportion of the examples in his Aesthetics. If my reasoning be less close than that of Baumgarten, my examples will, at least, savor more of the fountain.’’55 There are two criticisms contained in these passages. The first concerns the method employed by the ‘‘systematic books’’ Lessing criticizes. Although he does not explicitly or specifically identify Baumgarten’s Aesthetics as one of these ‘‘systematic books,’’ it is difficult to miss Lessing’s suggestion that Baumgarten’s ‘‘close reasoning’’ involves deducing the conclusions he desires from definitions he chose arbitrarily or because they led to those conclusions. Similar objections were leveled against many Wolffians by their critics. Lessing is not usually counted among these critics, because he was generally very sympathetic to the Wolffians, yet he recognized their method could be abused by philistines and charlatans.56 That Lessing considered Baumgarten one of these charlatans is evident in the second passage. Lessing’s claim that Baumgarten draws his examples from a dictionary refers to a comment in the ‘‘Prolegomena’’ to the Aesthetics, where Baumgarten says Johann Matthias Gesner’s New Thesaurus of Latin

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Language and Learning (Novus Linguae Et Eruditionis Romanae Thesaurus, 1749) has been a great help to him ‘‘not only regarding language, but also with respect to the things that contribute to true beauty.’’57 Lessing implies that if Baumgarten had to rely on a dictionary to understand Latin poetry, then he does not know enough about language or poetry to write about them. And if he had to look up the things that contribute to true beauty in a dictionary, then he does not know enough about philosophy to publish a systematic treatise on the aesthetics. By claiming his examples ‘‘savor more of the fountain,’’ Lessing implies that his own knowledge of language, poetry, and philosophy is deeper and more authentic than Baumgarten’s, making his Laocoo¨n a more valuable contribution to German discussions about poetry, painting, and art than Baumgarten’s Aesthetics. Herder admired Lessing’s Laocoo¨n, but he was also an enthusiastic proponent of Baumgarten’s new science.58 He began studying Baumgarten’s Metaphysics in Kant’s lecture courses, which he attended in Ko¨nigsberg between 1762 and 1764. In the years that followed, Herder studied Baumgarten’s Reflections on Poetry and Aesthetics intensively, writing commentaries on the beginning of the Aesthetics and several essays about its author.59 Among these essays is the Monument to Baumgarten (1767), in which he describes Baumgarten’s new science as an attempt ‘‘to determine the fundamental concepts of the poem with a philosophical exactitude and rigor.’’60 While he admires the rigor of Baumgarten’s aesthetics and praises his definition of poetry as ‘‘the most philosophical . . . of all the definitions of poetry that have sought to comprehend its essence in a single concept,’’ it is neither Baumgarten’s rigor nor his philosophical acumen that impressed Herder the most. Instead, it is the way his definition ‘‘leads me deepest into the soul and allows me, as it were, to deduce the essence of poetry from the nature of the human spirit’’ that Herder found most valuable.61 He attributes the psychological depth of Baumgarten’s aesthetics to its basis in sensibility. Unlike Aristotle and Batteux, whose definitions of poetry ‘‘are directed more toward the barren matter of the thing imitated in a poem than the living person who operates upon such an object,’’ Baumgarten concentrates on the most ‘‘effectual’’ (wu¨rksamsten) and ‘‘vivid’’ (lebendigsten) part of the human soul.62 Herder commends Baumgarten for making the connection between poetry and sensibility, because he thinks sensibility is the faculty where ‘‘the sensations of the

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brute shade into the sensations of man’’ and also where ‘‘drives and emotions and pleasure and pain’’ arise.63 The fact that animals and humans share the faculty of sensibility makes the study of sensibility essential to human psychology and anthropology. And it is the relationship between emotion and pleasure that makes sensibility central to aesthetics. ‘‘What theory of the science of the beautiful,’’ Herder asks, ‘‘will be more pleasing than one that knows how to entice forth your sensations and that in colloquy with your heart vies with your self; one where everything that it presents to you it has purloined from your own being?’’64 Few of his contemporaries saw Baumgarten’s Aesthetics as a treatise on the passions, and even fewer scholars today see it as a guide to eliciting emotions through art, yet Herder was convinced some of the greatest psychological insights of the age lay behind Baumgarten’s deformed mode of expression and his ill-advised attempts to demonstrate the principles of aesthetics through ‘‘a priori deduction.’’65 Although he used Baumgarten’s Metaphysics and Meier’s Logic as textbooks in his lecture courses, Kant was perhaps the harshest critic of Baumgarten’s Aesthetics. Throughout the precritical period, Kant denied aesthetics could be a science because he thought aesthetic judgments were empirical. Even after he claimed in his correspondence with Reinhold to have discovered the a priori principles of aesthetic judgments and published the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant continued to deny the possibility of a science of aesthetics. Still, his appropriation of Baumgarten’s terminology probably did more to preserve the name of his new science than anything else. In a footnote at the beginning of the ‘‘Transcendental Aesthetic’’ in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant explains his reasons for giving this name to the part of his ‘‘Doctrine of Elements’’ devoted to the ‘‘science of all principles of a priori sensibility.’’66 He notes that ‘‘the Germans are the only ones who now employ the word ‘aesthetics’ to designate that which others call the critique of taste.’’67 He attributes this linguistic idiosyncrasy to ‘‘a failed hope, held by the excellent analyst Baumgarten, of bringing the critical estimation of the beautiful under principles of reason and elevating its rules to a science.’’68 Baumgarten’s aesthetics was bound to fail, Kant argues, because the rules governing judgments of taste are ‘‘merely empirical as far as their sources are concerned, and can therefore never serve as a priori rules according to which our judgment of

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taste must be directed.’’69 For this reason, Kant concludes, ‘‘it is advisable again to desist from the use of this term and to save it for that doctrine which is true science.’’70 The ‘‘true science’’ to which Kant refers is, of course, his own transcendental aesthetic. Like Baumgarten’s aesthetics, Kant’s transcendental aesthetic is concerned with the faculty of sensibility. But their similarities really end there. Kant’s aesthetic is not meant to guide sensible cognition to perfection, because Kant denies that sensible and intellectual cognition constitute different ‘‘kinds’’ of cognition.71 Instead, he thinks the faculties of sensibility and the understanding contribute intuitions (sensibility) and concepts (understanding), which are synthesized in judgment to produce cognitions of objects. The idea of perfection plays virtually no role in this process, so Kant dispenses with the conception of beauty Baumgarten had proposed. Instead, he focuses on the difference between the a priori forms of sensible intuition (space and time) and its a posteriori content (sensation).72 His ‘‘Transcendental Aesthetic’’ is solely concerned with the pure (a priori) forms of intuition, because the Critique of Pure Reason is ‘‘a critique of the faculty of reason in general, in respect of all the cognitions after which reason might strive independently of all experience.’’73 As such, it abstracts from the contingent empirical (a posteriori) conditions of actual experience to identify the universal and necessary (a priori) conditions of all possible experience. In the ‘‘Transcendental Aesthetic,’’ Kant argues that space and time are the universal and necessary conditions under which objects can be given to us through sensible intuition, so they can be regarded as ‘‘principles of a priori cognition.’’74 Together with the system of principles he derives from the pure concepts of the understanding in the first part of his ‘‘Transcendental Logic,’’ Kant thinks the principles articulated in the ‘‘Transcendental Aesthetic’’ constitute one of the basic ‘‘elements’’ of his critical metaphysics.75 Later, in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant uses Baumgarten’s terminology in a very different way. Instead of associating the term ‘‘aesthetic’’ with the faculty of sensibility and the a priori forms of intuition, as he had in the first Critique, Kant calls ‘‘what is merely subjective in the representation of an object, i.e., what constitutes its relation to the subject, not to the object,’’ the ‘‘aesthetic’’ property of a representation.76 Kant identifies the aesthetic properties of our representations with the feelings of pleasure or pain, but he insists these feelings

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‘‘cannot become an element of cognition at all,’’ since they are ‘‘related not to the object, but solely to the subject, and the pleasure can express nothing but its suitability to the cognitive faculties that are in play in the reflecting power of judgment, insofar as they are in play, and thus merely a subjective formal purposiveness of the object.’’77 Kant’s reference to the ‘‘reflecting power of judgment’’ (reflectirenden Urtheilskraft) in this passage is important, because he characterizes aesthetic judgments as reflecting judgments in the third Critique. Reflecting judgments differ from the determining judgments, because determining judgments subsume the particulars that are given in experience under the universal laws of the understanding. In reflecting judgments, the particular is given, but the corresponding universal must be sought. When none can be found, Kant thinks the power of judgment provides itself with a principle that it can neither derive from the object nor attribute to the object it judges. Aesthetic judgments are good examples of these kinds of judgments, because Kant thinks the judgment that an object is beautiful is ‘‘not grounded on any available concept of the object and does not furnish one.’’78 Instead, the judgment that an object is beautiful is based on the cognitive faculties ‘‘in play’’ (im Spiel) in the judgment and the feeling of pleasure that arises from the ‘‘free play’’ (freies Spiel) of those faculties. When he explains this conception of aesthetic judgment in greater detail in the ‘‘Analytic of the Beautiful,’’ Kant makes the curious claim that the judgment that an object is beautiful actually precedes the feeling of aesthetic pleasure. Most readers and commentators regard Kant’s claim with confusion and suspicion, since it implies that a beautiful object pleases us because we have judged it to be beautiful. It seems more natural to them to say we call things beautiful when they have pleased us.79 That may very well be true, but Kant’s claim follows from the conception of aesthetic judgment he employs in the third Critique. Because these judgments are subjective and beauty is a function of the free play of our faculties, aesthetic pleasure cannot be derived from the impression an external object makes on the senses, the way some empiricists imagine. Nor is it to be identified with the perfection of a particular kind of cognition, as Baumgarten and Meier proposed. Even if we talk about beautiful things and demand that others agree with our judgments about which objects are beautiful, Kant

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thinks aesthetic judgment is really about the conditions under which our faculties are enlivened and engage in ‘‘free play.’’ If we survey the use of the term ‘‘aesthetic’’ and discussions of ‘‘aesthetics’’ at the end of the eighteenth century, we find they are almost entirely absent from British and French discussions of art, poetry, literature, criticism, and philosophy.80 Kant is right that these terms are peculiar to German philosophy, but he does not tell us how differently they were used before and after the publication of the first Critique in 1781. Within a few years, there were very few philosophers willing to defend the Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophy, Baumgarten’s conception of aesthetics, or the idea that beauty is the perfection of sensible cognition. Mendelssohn’s aesthetic rationalism was challenged, first, by Johann Hamann’s Aesthetics in a Nutshell (Aesthetica in Nuce, 1760), which declares it is passion, not reason, that gives ‘‘spirit, life, and tongue’’ to ‘‘pictures and signs.’’81 The rationalist foundations of Mendelssohn’s aesthetics were subsequently attacked by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, who accused Lessing of Spinozism, the Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophy of fatalism, and Mendelssohn of denying that reason ‘‘must itself derive from faith, and must receive its force from faith alone.’’82 Lessing and Herder remained influential, but their views on Baumgarten’s aesthetics faded into obscurity. Lessing does not mention Baumgarten or ‘‘aesthetics’’ anywhere in his Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767–1769), the only major work on art and literature he published after the Laocoo¨n.83 Herder’s writings on art and literature made him an inspiration to the German romantics and the luminaries of the Goethezeit, but he had moved far beyond Baumgarten by the time he published his famous essay on Shakespeare in 1773. Kant was perhaps the most decisive influence on the way aesthetics was understood in German philosophy at the end of the eighteenth century. His followers adopted the terminology Kant employed in the ‘‘Transcendental Aesthetic’’ in discussions of sensibility and its contribution to our cognition. His discussion of aesthetic judgment in the third Critique also proved enormously influential. Some have even accused Kant of inaugurating a ‘‘subjective’’ turn in aesthetics, which made the experience of beauty an entirely personal experience that denied the work of art any objective truth.84

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THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART Aesthetics underwent another important transformation at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, when it came to be identified with the philosophy of art. The roots of this transformation can be found in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. The third Critique includes a discussion of the fine arts, but it does not make aesthetics the philosophy of art. Kant continued to regard aesthetics as ‘‘a science of all principles of a priori sensibility’’ and the aesthetic power of judgment as the capacity ‘‘to make out, in taste, the suitability of the thing (or its form) to our cognitive faculties (insofar as these decide not through correspondence with concepts but through feeling).’’85 His discussion of the fine arts in the third Critique is noteworthy for its discussion of ‘‘aesthetic ideas’’ and its account of the relationship between art and genius, yet it is essentially a side note in which Kant first tries to distinguish fine art from nature and handicraft, and second, denies art can be the subject of a science. The latter view was endorsed by romantics like Friedrich Schlegel and rejected by idealists like Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In the Critical Fragments (1797), Schlegel notes ‘‘one of two things is usually lacking in the so-called philosophy of art: either philosophy or art.’’86 The irony of this fragment is typical of Schlegel, for whom irony was ‘‘the form of paradox’’ that contained ‘‘everything simultaneously good and great.’’87 Presumably he means philosophical discussions of art usually lack the kind of rigor one finds in philosophical discussions of other subjects. Or else he means that philosophers lack the kind of understanding and appreciation of the arts that would make their discussions of art credible. Lessing advanced a similar criticism of Baumgarten in the preface to the Laocoo¨n, but Schlegel’s fragment goes much further than Lessing’s criticism. Schlegel’s fragment is not a specific criticism of the work of a particular philosopher, but a general criticism of the way philosophy treats the arts. Schlegel extends this line of criticism to aesthetics in the Athenaeum Fragments (1798) when he writes, ‘‘The necessary formalities of aesthetics degenerate into etiquette and luxury. As a way of verifying and testing virtuosity, these latter qualities have their purpose and value, like the bravura arias of

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singers and the Latin prose of philologists. Also they make a considerable rhetorical impression. But the main point is always to know something and say something. To want to prove or even explain it is in most cases wholly unnecessary.’’88 Schlegel’s dismissive attitude toward explanations and proofs in aesthetics should be distinguished from Kant’s claims that aesthetics can never ‘‘determine judgment sufficiently’’ because it ‘‘derives its rules a posteriori’’ and ‘‘only makes more universal, through comparison, the empirical laws according to which we cognize the more perfect (beautiful) and the less perfect.’’89 Schlegel is not merely disputing the possibility of philosophical explanations or logical proofs about matters of taste. He is denying that explanations and proofs are necessary or even desirable in discussions of the arts. And Schlegel is denying their necessity and desirability because he does not think philosophical aesthetics is the appropriate context in which to discuss the arts. In his Ideas (1800), he declares ‘‘vainly do you search through your so-called aesthetics for the harmonious fullness of humanity, the beginning and end of culture.’’90 In his fragments, he emphasizes grammar, philology, criticism, and history as alternative models for understanding the arts. These interests are expressed in fragments that praise grammar as ‘‘a pragmatic science,’’ philology as a way to ‘‘live classically and to realize antiquity practically within oneself,’’ criticism as ‘‘the sole surrogate of the moral mathematics and science of propriety which so many philosophers have sought for in vain,’’ and history as ‘‘the realization of all that is practically necessary.’’91 In A Dialogue on Poesy (1799), Schlegel also rejects philosophical theories for a ‘‘poetic’’ account of art. ‘‘It is unnecessary,’’ he writes, ‘‘for anyone to preserve and propagate poesy with their reasonable speeches and teachings (vernu¨nftige Reden und Lehren), much less to create it, invent it, set it up, and give it punitive laws, as poetics (Theorie der Dichtkunst) would so like to do. . . . [I]t is really only possible to speak about poesy with poesy.’’92 The German idealists were more optimistic about the philosophical prospects of aesthetics. In Oldest System Program of German Idealism (1797), Hegel, Ho¨lderlin, and Schelling declare ‘‘the philosophy of spirit is an aesthetic philosophy.’’93 The justification they offer for this claim does not mention Kant, Reinhold, or Fichte, who inspired their idealism. Instead, they refer to the Platonic idea of beauty and the medieval doctrine of the transcendentals. The former makes beauty

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something ‘‘absolute, pure, unmixed, not polluted by human flesh or colors or any other great nonsense of mortality.’’94 The latter asserts that unity, truth, goodness, and beauty are coextensive with being. The authors of the System Program modify both doctrines when they say ‘‘the highest act of reason, by encompassing all ideas, is an aesthetic act, and that truth and goodness are only siblings in beauty.’’95 In Plato’s Republic, it is the form of the good that illuminates all the other forms, including the forms of truth and beauty.96 The doctrine of the transcendentals holds that unity, truth, and goodness are equal in the sense that they have the same extension: everything that exists is one, true, and good, because it comes from God and is governed by his providence.97 Aquinas does not list beauty among the transcendentals in his Disputed Questions on Truth (Questiones Disputate de Veritate, 1256– 1259), but he says ‘‘the beautiful is the same as the good, and they differ in aspect only’’ in the Summa Theologica (1265–1273). While this suggests Aquinas regarded beauty as one of the transcendentals, there can be little doubt he would have rejected the idea that beauty, and only beauty, unites truth and goodness.98 By endorsing this claim in their System Program, the German idealists commit themselves to an idiosyncratic view of aesthetics whose implications for metaphysics are quite radical. If truth and goodness are only united in beauty, then a truth that is not beautiful cannot be good. Similarly, a good that is not beautiful cannot really be good, since its goodness would not be true if it were not beautiful. The System Program is too short to develop its claims about aesthetics or beauty in any detail, so it is unclear whether the idealists would have accepted these implications. Yet their philosophical ambition and willingness to embrace counterintuitive positions makes me think these are precisely the implications they had in mind when they called their idealism an aesthetic philosophy. It would also not be surprising if they dismissed philosophers unable to accept these implications as lacking ‘‘aesthetic power,’’ failing to ‘‘understand ideas,’’ and incapable of thinking ‘‘as soon as things go beyond tables and rosters.’’99 Schelling probably did more than any of the idealists to promote the philosophy of art at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In his System of Transcendental Philosophy (1800), he calls the philosophy of art ‘‘the universal organon of philosophy’’ and ‘‘the keystone of its entire arch.’’100 Art is the product of ‘‘aesthetic activity,’’ which is the only

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kind of activity uniting consciousness and nonconsciousness ‘‘in consciousness itself.’’101 This claim is admittedly obscure, but it helps to recall that Schelling regards transcendental idealism as a philosophical explanation of the natural world that begins with the subjective selfconsciousness of the ‘‘I.’’102 The philosophy of nature (Naturphilosophie) is an alternative and complementary approach to philosophy, which explains how intelligence emerges from objective nature.103 When he says aesthetic activity unites consciousness and nonconsciousness in consciousness itself, he means the work of art is the point where (subjective) self-consciousness and (objective) nature coincide. Their coincidence takes place ‘‘in consciousness itself’’ because the artist consciously and intentionally expresses their nature as well as their intelligence in his work. In the ‘‘Deduction of the Art-Product as Such’’ at the end of the System of Transcendental Idealism, Schelling characterizes the unity of nature and intelligence in the work of art as the combination of genius and freedom. Genius is for the artist ‘‘a dark unknown force’’ arising from his nature, while freedom is the intellectual capacity of the artist to create something that is not immediately given.104 Because both of these opposing principles are present in art, and the work of art is only possible when they coincide, Schelling concludes art is ‘‘the only true and eternal organ and document of philosophy.’’105 ‘‘Art is paramount to the philosopher,’’ he continues, ‘‘because it opens to him, as it were, the holy of holies, where burns in eternal and original unity, as if in a single flame, that which in nature and history is rent asunder, and in life and action, no less than in thought, must forever fly apart.’’106 Schelling further developed these ideas in the lectures on the philosophy of art he delivered in Jena (1802–1803) and Wu¨rzburg (1804). In the introduction to his lectures, Schelling asks his audience to distinguish the ‘‘science of art’’ he presents in his lectures from ‘‘anything previously presented under this or any other title as aesthetics or theory of the fine arts and sciences.’’107 Curiously, he rejects Baumgarten’s aesthetics because it is an ‘‘offspring of Wolffian philosophy’’ and reflects a time when ‘‘shallow popularity and philosophical empiricism held sway.’’108 During that time, ‘‘various theories of the fine arts and sciences were proposed, theories whose foundations were the psychological principles of the English and the French.’’ Schelling objects to these theories, because they ‘‘tried to explain beauty using empirical psychology, and in general treated the miracles of art the same way one

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treated ghost stories and other superstitions: by explaining them away.’’109 It is doubtful that Schelling thinks Wolffian philosophy is empiricist or that it is based on psychological principles, yet his objection to grounding aesthetics in empirical psychology and his distaste for rational explanations of art could very well be extended to Baumgarten and Meier.110 His suggestion that art is a ‘‘miracle’’ also reflects a more extreme view than one finds in his System of Transcendental Idealism. In his account of ‘‘The Construction of Art as Such and in General’’ in his lectures, Schelling goes well beyond the claim that art reflects the unity of nature and intelligence, genius, and freedom. He now declares God is ‘‘the immediate cause of all art,’’ since the ideas art represents ‘‘originate only in God’’ and are, in fact, ‘‘formed within God in eternal beauty.’’111 Art is therefore to be regarded as the manifestation of God in the world, the incarnation of the infinite and the ideal within the finite and the real.112 Hegel tried to place the philosophy of art on a solid foundation in the lectures on aesthetics he delivered in Heidelberg (1818) and Berlin (1820–1821, 1823, 1826, and 1828–1829). In the transcript of his 1823 lectures, Hegel rejects the claim that art cannot be subjected to scientific investigation because it arises from the free play of the imagination.113 He also denies that art ‘‘abides in deception’’ because it has to do with ‘‘appearance or semblance.’’114 Hegel insists art is not merely imaginative, because it shares with religion and philosophy the ability to ‘‘express thought.’’115 ‘‘Thought’’ (Gedancke) is not something fanciful or contingent. Nor is it to be confused with opinion or speculation as it is usually understood.116 ‘‘Thought’’ is a way of ‘‘bringing to consciousness the divine, the highest demand of spirit.’’117 Hegel does not think art is ‘‘the highest way’’ of bringing the divine to consciousness. Indeed, he thinks art is inadequate to express ‘‘the Christian idea in its highest stage,’’ which is why ‘‘we no longer pray to a work of art.’’118 And he is committed to the view that only philosophy can comprehend the divine as ‘‘absolute spirit’’ through its ‘‘absolute knowing.’’119 Still, he thinks art should be regarded as ‘‘a necessary component within the circle of philosophy as a whole,’’ because it has ‘‘a distinctive way of portraying, in a sensuous manner, what is itself higher, and of thus bringing it closer to sentient nature.’’120 The objection that art misrepresents the divine and deceives us about its nature arises because art represents what is supersensible (thought, the divine) in sensuous form

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(works of art). Responding to this objection, Hegel plays on the etymological connection between the German words for ‘‘beauty’’ (das Scho¨ne) and ‘‘appearance’’ (der Schein), reminding his students that ‘‘the beautiful gets its name from the appearance.’’121 He does not elaborate on this claim in the transcript of the 1823 lectures, but Hegel does provide the following defense of the sensible representation of the supersensible in works of art in the published edition of his lectures: ‘‘But appearance is essential to essence. Truth would not be truth if it did not show itself and appear, if it were not truth for someone and for itself, as well as for the spirit in general too.’’122 It is unclear whether this explanation is Hegel’s own or was added by H. G. Hotho, his former student and editor, yet it sums up Hegel’s view of the philosophical significance of fine art very concisely.123 Art allows the truth of spirit— the divine—to appear to those who are not yet able to grasp its truth through religion or philosophy. Its sensible form changes over time, passing from symbolic art, which tries to ‘‘embody’’ an intellectual or spiritual meaning within itself; to classical art, which tries to balance the universal and the particular in the form and content of the work; and finally to romantic art, which points beyond itself to a truth that lies beyond the beauty of sensible representation.124 Hegel uses ancient Indian and Egyptian art as examples of symbolic art, Greek tragedy and sculpture to explain the virtues of classical art, and Christian art from the iconography of the early church to Dutch Protestant painters to elucidate romantic art, yet he is not trying to reconstruct art history in the guise of philosophy.125 Instead, he is trying to show what is essential to the appearance of spirit in each art form, so we can understand what is essential about the thought it expresses. One curious feature of this approach to the philosophy of art is its conditional necessity. While Hegel insists the thought art expresses is necessary, and it is sometimes necessary to express that thought through art, he concedes it does not always need to be expressed through art. When the same thought can be expressed more adequately by religion or philosophy, as Hegel thinks it can be in the modern age, then ‘‘art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past.’’126 It is worth noting that Hegel complains about the inappropriateness of his title at the beginning of Hotho’s edition of his lectures. Because the subject matter of his lectures is ‘‘the spacious realm of the beautiful’’ and, more precisely, ‘‘art, or, rather, fine art,’’ Hegel says his lectures should really be called ‘‘philosophy of art’’ or ‘‘more definitely,

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philosophy of fine art.’’127 He is uncomfortable calling them ‘‘aesthetics,’’ because aesthetics is ‘‘the science of sensation, of feeling.’’128 Hegel reminds his students this science emerged ‘‘in the school of Wolff at the period in Germany when works of art were treated with regard to the feelings they were supposed to produce, as, for instance, the feeling of pleasure, admiration, fear, pity, and so on.’’129 This is not a terribly accurate characterization of Baumgarten’s aesthetics. Nor does it accurately reflect Kant’s appropriation of Baumgarten’s terminology. But it shows that Hegel is aware of the difference between earlier conceptions of aesthetics and the philosophy of art that he develops in his lectures. He feels compelled to adopt a title employing the terminology Baumgarten introduced into German philosophy, because it has ‘‘passed over into common speech’’ in the hundred years that separate Baumgarten’s announcement of his new science in the Reflections on Poetry (1735) and the posthumous publication of the Lectures on Aesthetics (1835/ 1842). Since names are matters of indifference, Hegel and Hotho let the title stand, even though they insist the subject matter of Hegel’s lectures is entirely different.

THE EMBARRASSED ETC. Debates about the subject matter of aesthetics continued throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among the parties to these debates are philosophers who think aesthetics is concerned with a special class of objects.130 Many of these philosophers regard works of art as the paradigm of the aesthetic object, but some consider artifacts and natural phenomena aesthetic objects as well.131 Others argue that it is a special set of properties, rather than a special class of objects, that falls within the purview of aesthetics.132 They maintain that objects are distinguished by their properties, so aesthetic objects must possess aesthetic properties. These properties might be formal properties like unity and harmony, representational qualities like realism and abstraction, expressive qualities like joy and melancholy, or affective qualities that move or touch the person who perceives them.133 Some philosophers have argued that aesthetic objects all share a single property, beauty, which they regard as an exemplary aesthetic property, yet it is also possible that beauty has less to do with the properties an object possesses

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and more to do with the way it is experienced. Those who hold that aesthetics is concerned with a special kind of experience, rather than special classes of objects or special kinds of properties, defend the latter view.134 Theories of aesthetic experience differ from accounts of aesthetic objects and aesthetic properties because they are subjective or intersubjective rather than objective, but that does not mean they succumb to relativism or skepticism about aesthetics. Indeed, they tend to think aesthetic experience has a distinctive phenomenology that distinguishes it from other kinds of experiences.135 Others suspect that aesthetic experience is really just the product of particular attitudes or institutional frameworks. Partisans of the aesthetic attitude insist that it is the disposition of the subject to regard an object in a certain way that produces aesthetic experience, while those who defend an institutional view of aesthetics associate aesthetic objects, properties, experiences, and attitudes with a set of social practices that are embedded in social institutions like galleries, museums, expositions, and so forth.136 The enumeration of these positions could go on indefinitely, extending debates about the subject matter of aesthetics into the future. It seems to me these debates can only end with an ‘‘embarrassed etc.’’ The concept of the embarrassed etc. was introduced by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble (1990) to address the problem of adequately determining the identity of a situated subject.137 Butler notes we often try to identify people by listing their race, nationality, class, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and so forth. We think we have determined a person’s identity more precisely as the list gets longer, but we cannot go on listing predicates forever, so we usually end the list with an ‘‘etc.’’ The etc. indicates the series is to be continued, yet it also acknowledges the inadequacy of the predicates we have listed. Given the complexity of real people and the multiplicity of conditions in which they are situated, it is probably impossible to achieve the kind of completeness Leibniz sought in real definitions and Russell associated with definite descriptions.138 If the definitions and descriptions we use are necessarily inadequate, then ending a list of predicates with an etc. is both necessary and appropriate. But it is also embarrassing, because it calls attention to philosophers’ inability to really say what they are talking about. This is especially embarrassing in the case of aesthetics, because it suggests philosophy is unable to determine the subject matter and status of one of its parts. Even if aesthetics is a relatively marginal part of

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contemporary academic philosophy, the difficulties philosophers encounter when they try to answer a relatively simple question—‘‘What is aesthetics?’’—raise serious questions about the methods they employ, the force of their arguments, and the certainty of their conclusions. If philosophers face similar difficulties when they try to answer questions about logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy—and I suspect they will face these difficulties, if they have not already—then we might wonder whether philosophy has achieved the kind of self-knowledge that Socrates recommended to Alcibiades.139 I would like to suggest that a more pluralistic approach to philosophy and a greater appreciation for its history might help aesthetics avoid this predicament. Instead of seeing the list of subjects with which aesthetics is supposed to be concerned as an attempt to determine its identity or its essence, perhaps it would be better to understand this list as a variety of topics that have been discussed in the context of aesthetics in its relatively short history. A pluralist would be happy to grant that all of these subjects can be included within aesthetics, whether or not there is anything natural or necessary that binds them together. Pluralism allows us to see aesthetics as a complex and multifaceted part of philosophy addressing a variety of different subjects. And even if we were to ask what sensible cognition; the pure forms of intuition; feelings of pleasure and pain; works of art; and special classes of objects, properties, experiences, attitudes, and institutions have to do with one another, with aesthetics, and with related discussions in other parts of philosophy and other disciplines, the pluralist could always answer that they are connected to one another historically. By studying the history of aesthetics, and the way these different subjects came to be incorporated into philosophy and into aesthetics as a part of philosophy, we might also discover conceptual relations between them we had not anticipated.140 Certainly the reasons that philosophers discussed these subjects within aesthetics and argued that some should take precedence over others are worth thinking about. And anything worth thinking about is worth thinking about philosophically. NOTES 1. Bosanquet, A History of Aesthetic, 1. 2. Bosanquet, A History of Aesthetic, 10.

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3. Kivy, The Seventh Sense, vii. 4. Kivy, The Seventh Sense, vii. 5. Kivy, The Seventh Sense, viii. 6. Kivy, The Seventh Sense, viii. 7. Gilbert and Kuhn, A History of Esthetics, 289. 8. Gilbert and Kuhn, A History of Esthetics, 289. 9. The characterization of Baumgarten’s Latin as ‘‘obscure’’ and ‘‘barbarous’’ comes from Herder’s Monument to Baumgarten (1767). See Herder, Selected Writings on Aesthetics (A Monument to Baumgarten), 42. 10. Baumgarten, A¨sthetik, Teil I, §1, §14, §18. 11. Beiser, Diotima’s Children, 121–122. 12. Buchenau, The Founding of Aesthetics, 115–116. 13. Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics, I:339–340. 14. In his dissertation ‘‘Professors of Enlightenment at the University of Halle 1660–1730,’’ John Holloran suggests that the theologians opposed Wolff because they saw the universalism of his method and his desire to reform and systematize the curriculum as a threat to the disciplinary autonomy of the other faculties. Courtney Fugate and John Hymers endorse this view in their translation of Baumgarten’s Metaphysics; however, I do not think there is sufficient evidence to prove that concerns about academic freedom, rather than theological objections to Wolffian philosophy, were the real source of the theologians’ hostility to Wolff. Some faculty members might have resented the suggestion that philosophy ought to dictate the way that theology or law is studied. And some might have objected to Wolff’s ideas about pedagogy. But these concerns do not explain the extent of the theologians’ hostility to Wolff or their animus against the philosophical rationalism he represented. 15. Baumgarten, Metaphysics, 6. Siegmund Jakob was accused by Lange and Francke’s son of employing banned Wolffian methods in his theology courses in 1733, the same year the king invited Wolff to return to his position in Halle. See the very interesting discussion of Siegmund Jakob Baumgarten’s interest in Wolff and his use of Wolff in theology in Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment, 121–128. 16. Baumgarten, Metaphysics, 280 (§800). Fugate and Hymers’s footnote to §800 helpfully contrasts Baumgarten’s and Wolff’s conceptions of natural theology. For more on Wolff’s conception of natural theology, see Corr, ‘‘The Existence of God, Natural Theology and Christian Wolff,’’ 106–109. 17. While Luther is famous for calling reason ‘‘the devil’s whore,’’ he also maintains that reason is ‘‘the most important and highest rank among all things and, in comparison with other things of this life, the best and something divine’’ in his Disputation Concerning Man (1536). The privilege many Pietists afforded the senses can be traced back to the same text, where Luther insists that human beings know nothing a priori through reason, but only draw conclusions through reason is a posteriori. Luther also insists that reason is uncertain, fragmentary, fleeting, and base, especially when compared to the truths known through revealed theology.

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18. This view is defended in Schwaiger, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, 22–23. 19. Stefanie Buchenau rightly notes that many commentators ignore the majority of Baumgarten’s dissertation and its contributions to philosophical poetics (which remains distinct from aesthetics). I do not know that I am convinced by Buchenau’s claim that Baumgarten’s Reflections on Poetry and Aesthetics are attempts to found a general method of invention, but her elucidations of Baumgarten’s texts are compelling and highly informative. See Buchenau, The Founding of Aesthetics in the German Enlightenment, 114. 20. Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry, 36. 21. Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry, 77 (§115). 22. Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry, 77 (§115). Baumgarten’s definition of logic differs considerably from Wolff’s definition in the Preliminary Discourse, which says logic is ‘‘the science of directing the cognitive faculty in the knowing of truth’’ and ‘‘that part of philosophy which treats of the use of the cognitive faculty in knowing truth and avoiding error.’’ See Wolff, Preliminary Discourse, 35 (§61). That Wolff makes logic the science guiding the entire cognitive faculty, and Baumgarten makes it the science guiding only the higher cognitive faculty, is a significant difference between the two. This difference reflects Baumgarten’s attempts to restrain Wolff’s intellectualism and rationalism. 23. Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry, 77 (§115). 24. Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry, 77 (§115). 25. Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry, 78 (§115). 26. Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry, 78 (§116). 27. Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry, 78 (§117). 28. Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry, 78 (§117). 29. Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry, 78 (§117). 30. Although Baumgarten’s understanding of the structure and elements of metaphysics is very close to Wolff’s, there is an important difference in their definitions of natural theology. While Wolff defines natural theology as ‘‘the science of those things which are known to be possible through God,’’ Baumgarten specifies that the knowledge of God that can be acquired through natural theology is separate from any knowledge that might be gained through faith. See Wolff, Preliminary Discourse, 34 (§57) and Baumgarten, Metaphysics, 280 (§800). 31. Baumgarten, Metaphysics, 198 (§503). 32. Baumgarten, Metaphysics, 207 (§544). 33. Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, 27. 34. Wolff, Vernu¨nftige Gedancken, 153 (§277). 35. Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry, 42 (§14). 36. Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry, 43 (§17). 37. Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry, 43 (§16).

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38. I discuss the concepts of clarity, confusion, and distinctness in the Leibnizian-Wolffian school and in Baumgarten’s works, along with Kant’s objections to attempts to use distinctness as a criterion for distinguishing sensible and intellectual cognition, in McQuillan, ‘‘Baumgarten on Sensible Perfection,’’ 49, 57. 39. Baumgarten, Metaphysics, 204–205 (§§531–532). 40. Meier, Anfangsgru¨nde, I:1–2. 41. Meier, Anfangsgru¨nde, I:3 (§2); and Baumgarten, A¨sthetik, I:10–11 (§1). 42. Meier, Anfangsgru¨nde, I:38 (§23); and Baumgarten, A¨sthetik, I:20–21 (§14). 43. This division was common in early modern logic textbooks. Wolff’s Latin logic (Philosophica Rationalis sive Logica, 1728) is a good example. The first section, on theoretical logic, contains chapters on the nature of logic, the operations of the mind, the concepts with which logic is concerned, judgment, and reasoning. The second section, on practical logic, applies logical principles to a wide variety of topics, including experience, reading and interpreting sacred and profane texts, communication, and others. 44. Baumgarten, A¨sthetik, I:16–19 (§13). 45. For helpful details of Baumgarten’s treatment of these issues in English, see especially Buchenau,The Founding of Aesthetics in the German Enlightenment, 137–151; and Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics, 1:327–340. 46. For an account of some of the controversies surrounding Baumgarten’s Aesthetics in Germany in the late eighteenth century, see Witte, Logik ohne Dor¨ sthetik’ in Eighteenth nen, 59–73; and Reiss, ‘‘The ‘Naturalization’ of the Term ‘A Century German,’’ 645–658. 47. Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings (On Sentiments), 12–14. 48. Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings (On Sentiments), 14. The text of the Meiner edition of Mendelssohn’s A¨sthetische Schriften (2006), edited by Anne Pollok, refers to ‘‘clearer’’ (klarere) but not ‘‘expansively clearer’’ (ausgebreitete klarere) representations. I have not been able to check the original 1755 edition of ¨ ber die Empfindungen to confirm the reference to ‘‘expansively Mendelssohn’s U clearer representations,’’ but it is present in the original (1761) edition of Mendelssohn’s Philosophische Schriften. See Mendelssohn, Philosophische Schriften, 16. 49. Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings (On Sentiments), 22. On Mendelssohn’s approval of Baumgarten and Meier, see also his review of Meier’s Foundations in Mendelssohn, A¨sthetische Schriften, 102–107. 50. This rationalist interpretation of Mendelssohn is defended in Beiser, Diotima’s Children, 196–243; and Blincoe, ‘‘The Priority of Reason,’’ 105–120. It is contested by those who see Mendelssohn as a transitional figure between Wolffian rationalism and Kant’s critical philosophy. For examples of this interpretation of Mendelssohn’s aesthetics, see Beck, Early German Philosophy, 326–329; and Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition, 18–19.

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51. Wolff, German Metaphysics, 247 (§404). Baumgarten endorses this view of pleasure as well, though he specifies that pleasure may be sensible or intellectual, depending on the way the perfection is perceived. See Baumgarten, Metaphysics, 237 (§656). 52. Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings (On Sentiments), 48. 53. Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings (On Sentiments), 10, 25. 54. Lessing, Laocoo¨n, x–xi. 55. Lessing, Laocoo¨n, x. 56. On Lessing’s Wolffianism, see Goldenbaum, ‘‘Lessing ein Wolffianer?,’’ 267–281. 57. Baumgarten, A¨sthetik, I:4–5. 58. Herder’s first Critical Forest (Critische Wa¨lder, 1769) is a detailed commentary on Lessing’s Laocoon. See Herder, Selected Writings on Aesthetics (Critical Forests: First Grove), 51–176. 59. The editors of Herder’s Werke have grouped these texts together under the title ‘‘Founding an Aesthetics Through an Exchange with Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (Begrundu¨ng einer A¨sthetik in der Auseinandersetzung mit Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten).’’ They include a reflection on Baumgarten’s way of thinking (Denkart) and his writings; a detailed commentary on the beginning of the Aesthetics; a memorial for Baumgarten, J. D. Heilmann, and Thomas Abbt; and the text translated as Herder’s ‘‘Monument’’ (Denkmal) to Baumgarten in Moore’s edition of Herder’s Selected Writings on Aesthetics. See Herder, Werke, Bd. 1, Fru¨he Schriften, 1764–1772, 651–694. For evidence of Kant’s influence on Herder’s reading of Baumgarten, see the comparison of Baumgarten and Home in Herder, Selected Writings on Aesthetics (A Monument to Baumgarten), 49–50. 60. Herder, Selected Writings on Aesthetics (A Monument to Baumgarten), 42. 61. Herder, Selected Writings on Aesthetics (A Monument to Baumgarten), 42. 62. Herder, Selected Writings on Aesthetics (A Monument to Baumgarten), 43–44. 63. Herder, Selected Writings on Aesthetics (A Monument to Baumgarten), 44. 64. Herder, Selected Writings on Aesthetics (A Monument to Baumgarten), 45. 65. Herder, Selected Writings on Aesthetics (A Monument to Baumgarten), 48–49. 66. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A21/B35. 67. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A21/B35. 68. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A21/B35. 69. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A21/B35. 70. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A21/B35. 71. Kant defended the view that sensible and intellectual cognition are different in kind in his inaugural dissertation On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intellectual World (1770), but he explicitly rejects this view in the introduction to the ‘‘Transcendental Logic’’ of the Critique of Pure Reason when he asserts that

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cognition only arises from the unification of intuitions and concepts. See Kant, Theoretical Philosophy 1755–1770, 384–386 (§§3–5) and Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A51/B75–B76. 72. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A19–A21/B33–B35. Croce’s comments on the difference between intuitive and logical knowledge, his account of the relation between the form and matter of intuition; and his discussion of the relation among intuition, sensation, and perception at the beginning of his Aesthetic (1902) is inspired by the ‘‘Transcendental Aesthetic’’ of the first Critique. Unlike Kant, Croce takes this conception of intuition to be related to expression and to art. See Croce, Aesthetic, 1–9, 12–21. 73. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Axii. 74. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A22/B36. 75. On the division of the ‘‘Doctrine of Elements’’ (Elementarlehre) of the first Critique into a ‘‘Transcendental Aesthetic’’ and a ‘‘Transcendental Logic,’’ see Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A15–A16/B29–B30. On the system of principles Kant constructs in the ‘‘Transcendental Logic’’ and its relation to the principles he discovers in the ‘‘Transcendental Aesthetic,’’ see Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A148–150/B187–189. 76. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 75 (V:188). 77. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 76 (V:189). 78. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 76 (V:190). 79. Donald Crawford and Paul Guyer advance these kinds of criticisms of Kant’s arguments in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. See Crawford, Kant’s Aesthetic Theory, 69–74; and Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, 88–105. 80. Costelloe, The British Aesthetic Tradition, 1–3. 81. Hamann, Aesthetica in Nuce, 14. 82. Jacobi, Main Philosophical Writings (Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza), 230. 83. Although he published no major works on art or literature after the Hamburg Dramaturgy, some of Lessing’s greatest dramas, including Emilia Galoti and Nathan the Wise, were published during the 1770s. 84. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 42–101. For a response to this criticism, see Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant, 168–169; and Makkreel, Orientation & Judgment in Hermeneutics, 35–43. 85. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A21/B35; and Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 79–80 (V:194). 86. Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, 2 (Critical Fragments, 12). The relationship between romanticism and philosophy, especially Kant’s critical philosophy, has been the subject of considerable debate in the scholarly literature. Manfred Frank sees the romantics as skeptical critics of philosophical foundationalism, while Frederick Beiser sees the romantics as transcendental idealists. Their positions are developed in Frank, Philosophical Foundations, 23–37; Beiser, German Idealism, 359–461; and Nassar, The Relevance of Romanticism, 15–43. For very

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insightful studies of romanticism that expand on this debate, see Milla´n-Zaibert, Friedrich Schlegel, 1–24; and Nassar, The Romantic Absolute, 8–14. 87. Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, 6 (Critical Fragments, 48). 88. Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, 29 (Athenaeum Fragments, 82). 89. Kant, Lectures on Logic, 530 (IX:15). 90. Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, 100 (Ideas, 72). 91. Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, 29, 37 (Athenaeum Fragments, 89, 90, 92, 147). 92. Schlegel, A Dialogue on Poesy, 181. 93. Hegel, Ho¨lderlin, and Schelling, Oldest System Program of German Idealism, 186. 94. Plato, Symposium, 211e. 95. Hegel, Ho¨lderlin, and Schelling, Oldest System Program of German Idealism, 186. 96. Plato, Republic, 508b–c. 97. Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate, I.1; and Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I–II.27.1. 98. This view is defended in Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, 20–48; Gilson, Elements of Christian Philosophy, 159–163, and Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, 27–41. It is contested in Aertsen, ‘‘Beauty in the Middle Ages,’’ 68–97. 99. Hegel, Ho¨lderlin, and Schelling, Oldest System Program of German Idealism, 186. 100. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 12 (§3). 101. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 12 (§3). 102. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 5–7 (§2). 103. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 5–7 (§2). 104. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 219–224 (§1). 105. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 231 (§3). 106. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 231 (§3). 107. Schelling, Philosophy of Art, 11. 108. Schelling, Philosophy of Art, 11. 109. Schelling, Philosophy of Art, 12. 110. Schelling makes it clear that he thinks Wolff is a rationalist follower of Leibniz, and not an advocate of British empiricism and French physico-theology, in his lectures on the history of modern philosophy. See Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy, 84–93. 111. Schelling, Philosophy of Art, 32 (§§23–24.). 112. For an excellent exposition of these passages, see Shaw, Freedom and Nature in Schelling’s Philosophy of Art, 99–111. 113. Hegel’s denunciation of art as ‘‘an object of free fantasy’’ is most likely a criticism of Kant, who made art the product of ‘‘play’’ and the creativity of ‘‘imagination’’ in the third Critique. See Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Art, 182; and Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 183, 192–193 (V:304, 314–315).

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114. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Art, 182. 115. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Art, 182. 116. Although thought is not to be confused with ‘‘speculation,’’ if speculation is understood as ‘‘mere conjecture,’’ there is an important sense in which Hegel’s philosophy is speculative. In The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy (1801), Hegel defines ‘‘speculation’’ as ‘‘the activity of the one universal reason directed upon itself.’’ This definition suggests that any philosophy of self-knowledge or self-consciousness is necessarily speculative. See Hegel, The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, xvi–xxiv, 88. 117. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Art, 182. 118. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Art, 182. 119. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §§788–808. 120. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Art, 183, 187. 121. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Art, 182. See also Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, I:4. 122. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, I:8. 123. Modern editions of Hegel’s lectures are based on the edition produced by Hegel’s former student, H. G. Hotho, in 1835 and the revised edition of 1842. While Hotho claims to have been faithful to Hegel’s manuscript notes, there are a number of places where he inserts his own views into the text. See the discussion of these insertions in Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Art, 69–86. Comparison of the 1823 lecture, edited by Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert and translated into English by Robert F. Brown, as well as the discussions of the philosophy of art in Hegel’s Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences (esp. Philosophy of Mind, §§556– 563) suggests that this passage reflects a Hegelian conception of the philosophy of art that is consistent with understanding of the place the philosophy of art occupies within philosophy itself, even if they are not Hegel’s own words. 124. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Art, 282, 311, 333; Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, I:312–313, 427–431, 517–518. 125. Hegel seems to appreciate the contributions of art history more than many philosophers of art. See his remarks on art history in Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, I:21. See also Gombrich, ‘‘Hegel und die Kunstgeschichte,’’ 202–219. 126. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, I:11. This meaning of this claim has been the subject of intense debate in the scholarly literature. See Danto, After the End of Art, 30–33; Danto, ‘‘The End of Art,’’ 127–143; Donougho, ‘‘Art and History,’’ 179–215; Harries, ‘‘Hegel and the Future of Art,’’ 677–696; Henrich, ‘‘Art and Philosophy of Art Today,’’ 107–133; and Houlgate, ‘‘Hegel and the ‘End’ of Art,’’ 1–21. See also the very helpful discussion in Annemarie GethmannSiefert’s introduction to the transcript of Hegel’s 1823 lectures, included in Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Art, 13–17. 127. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, I:1. 128. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, I:1.

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129. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, I:1. 130. On aesthetic objects, see Beardsley, Aesthetics, 15–74; and Wollheim, Art and Its Objects, 1–157. For a very helpful overview of debates about the ontology of art and attempts to determine what kind of objects works of art are, see Thomasson, ‘‘Debates about the Ontology of Art,’’ 245–255. 131. For a compelling argument that conceptions of the aesthetic should be extended beyond art and nature, see Irvin, ‘‘The Pervasiveness of the Aesthetic in Ordinary Experience,’’ 29–44. 132. On aesthetic properties, see Sibley, ‘‘Aesthetic Concepts,’’ 421–450; Walton, ‘‘Categories of Art,’’ 334–367; and Levinson, ‘‘What Are Aesthetic Properties?,’’ 191–227. 133. For helpful surveys of kinds of aesthetic properties, see De Clercq, ‘‘The Structure of Aesthetic Properties,’’ 894–909; and Schellekens, ‘‘Aesthetic Properties,’’ 86–87. 134. On aesthetic experience, see Urmson, ‘‘What Makes a Situation Aesthetic?,’’ 75–92; Beardsley, ‘‘The Aesthetic Point of View,’’ 10–28; Carroll, ‘‘Art and the Domain of the Aesthetic,’’ 191–208; Carroll, ‘‘Aesthetic Experience Revisited,’’ 145–168; Carroll, ‘‘Recent Approaches to Aesthetic Experience,’’ 165–177; and the essays collected in Shusterman and Tomlin, Aesthetic Experience, 2008. Paul Guyer also defends the view that aesthetic experience is central to aesthetics in Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics, vol. 1, The Eighteenth Century, 5–7. 135. On the Kantian origins of this conception of aesthetic experience, as well as a helpful overview of the debate, see Matravers, ‘‘Aesthetic Experience,’’ 74–83. On the phenomenology of aesthetic experience, see Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, esp. xlv–lxvii. 136. On the aesthetic attitude, see Bullough, ‘‘Psychical Distance,’’ 87–118; Stolnitz, ‘‘On the Origins of Aesthetic Disinterestedness,’’ 131–143; and Stolnitz, ‘‘The Aesthetic Attitude,’’ 409–422. The aesthetic attitude was famously criticized by George Dickie in Dickie, ‘‘The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude,’’ 56–65. It has been defended in Kemp, ‘‘The Aesthetic Attitude,’’ 392–399. For a helpful overview of the debate about the aesthetic attitude, see Fenner, The Aesthetic Attitude, 1996. The institutional theory of art and aesthetics is developed in Danto, ‘‘The Artworld,’’ 571–584; Dickie, Art and Aesthetic, 1974; Dickie, The Art Circle, 1984; and Dickie, ‘‘The New Institutional Theory of Art,’’ 85–97. David Graves surveys discussions about the institutional theory in Graves, ‘‘The Institutional Theory of Art,’’ 51–67. 137. Butler, Gender Trouble, 182–183. 138. See Leibniz, Philosophical Essays (Discourse on Metaphysics), 41 (§8); and Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, 82–91. For a further development of Russell’s views on definite descriptions, in which he addresses problem cases like ‘‘the present king of France,’’ see Russell, ‘‘On Denoting,’’ 479–493. 139. Plato, Alcibiades, 124b, 129a–135e. Recent debates in metaethics and the rise of metametaphysics indicate that ethics and metaphysics are making good

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progress toward this kind of disciplinary self-knowledge. See, for example, the essays collected in Horgan and Timmons, Metaethics after Moore, 2006; and Chalmers, Manley, and Wasserman, Metametaphysics, 2009. 140. Although I have insisted that early modern aesthetics is to be distinguished from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century discussions of the ancients and moderns, the fine arts, criticism, and taste in earlier chapters of this book, I have only done so for historical reasons. My goal was to avoid anachronism in my treatment of early modern aesthetics. Because these subjects were not identified with aesthetics when it was first introduced, I thought it would be helpful to distinguish what Baumgarten, Kant, Hegel, and others thought aesthetics was from what it was not. A complete history of aesthetics, extending from the eighteenth century to the present, would have to explain how all these subjects came to be associated with aesthetics. I have no doubt there are historical and philosophical reasons for this development.

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Having explored early modern debates on the ancients and moderns, the fine arts, and the critique of taste, as well as the emergence and transformation of aesthetics in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, I now consider the significance of these discussions for the present. The first section of this chapter addresses the problem of modernism, which has vexed philosophers, scientists, artists, and critics since the early modern period. The second surveys twentieth-century attempts to update Lessing’s Laocoo¨n and determine the limits of the arts. The third takes up two approaches in contemporary criticism that extend early modern debates about the origins of taste. Finally, in the last section I discuss the modernity of aesthetics and its distinctness as a part of philosophy. I hope this will show that interest in early modern aesthetics is not merely antiquarian.

ARTISTIC MODERNISM The quarrel between the ancients and moderns in France and the battle of the books in Britain show that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century discussions of art and literature encountered the same problem philosophy and the sciences were facing during the early modern period. That problem has a name: modernism. I suggest that modernism constitutes a genuine philosophical problem for philosophy, science, and the arts. What kind of philosophical problem is modernism? One possibility is that modernism is a metaphysical problem. If that is the case, then 135

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we will have to determine whether modernity is real, what its essence is, and what properties it possesses. In order to do that, we will have to refute skepticism about modernity, establish the legitimacy of our knowledge of modernity, and examine the evidentiary basis of our claims about its properties. Modernism as a metaphysical problem gives way to modernism as an epistemic problem. Of course, it is also possible that modernism is neither a metaphysical problem nor an epistemological problem, but merely a taxonomic problem. If that is the case, then we will have to design a system of classification and place modernity within that system. Of course, there will be debates about how modernity is related to the other elements of the system, because these relationships are never neutral. The debates about modernism that raged in academic disciplines and popular culture in the twentieth century show that modernity is subject to moral evaluation and political contestation of many kinds.1 So we will have to figure out whether to praise modernity for its achievements, blame it for its failures, or strike the appropriate balance between them. Those who want to restore a lost past will argue that we should dispense with modernism entirely, while those who intend to complete the unfinished project of enlightenment will agitate in its favor. Philosophy will be a part of all of these debates, because it recognizes questions about what kinds of things there are, how they are related to one another, how we know them, how we judge them, and what we do with them as philosophical problems. Modernism is just one of the many points where all these problems converge. Philosophy and the sciences have tried to come to grips with the problem of modernism in a variety of ways. There was a time when modern philosophy was confident it was superior to ancient and medieval philosophy in almost every respect. Recent scholarship in the history of philosophy has made that position very difficult to maintain. This scholarship has revealed the debts modern philosophers owe to their ancient and medieval predecessors, as well as the problems modern philosophers faced in articulating and developing their new philosophies.2 The view of modern philosophy that has emerged from this scholarship is very much at odds with the rhetoric some early modern philosophers employ, which makes it seem like the new philosophy is a complete break with the past.3 The sciences have proven more resistant to the idea that modern science is continuous with its ancient and

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modern predecessors, yet studies of the history and philosophy of science have shown the history of science is characterized by continuity (traditions) as well as discontinuities (revolutions).4 The history and philosophy of science have also complicated our picture of the scientific revolution in the early modern period, making it impossible to say that modern science comes into its own by overcoming Aristotelian natural philosophy; rejecting scholastic metaphysics; taking experience seriously; beginning to experiment; adopting a new method; or through any particular discovery in mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, or economics. The emergence of modern science is a complex phenomenon, which can only be explained by rigorous analysis of everything that makes modern science what it is. It could be objected that such an undertaking would have to remain incomplete, since the number of factors affecting the development of modern science exceed the scope of any inquiry.5 Even if that is true, historians and philosophers of science have taken up the task in a way that is both ambitious and rigorous. Studies of modernism in art and literature have much to contribute to debates about modernism in philosophy and the sciences. Like historians of philosophy and historians of science, the historians and philosophers who study art and literature place their subject in its historical context, examining both the rhetoric and the arguments that are deployed in discussions of art and literature in the early modern period. The works they study presuppose that modernism is real, because they distinguish the ancients and the moderns. Knowledge of the difference between them is attained by comparison. Perrault compares ancient and modern poets, painters, and sculptors to demonstrate the superiority of the moderns. Perrault and Fontenelle also provide explanations for these differences. Perrault maintains that modern art and literature are superior, because the moderns had discovered techniques and strategies that were unknown to their ancient predecessors. Fontenelle suggests that the achievements of the moderns surpass those of the ancients, because the moderns had corrected the mistakes that plague ancient art and literature. I do not find either of these explanations plausible, yet they are not so different from the kinds of arguments early modern philosophers and scientists use to promote their achievements. Dacier’s condemnation of modernism and her call for a return to classical tastes in On the Causes of the Corruption of Taste is probably not the best

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response to these arguments, however impressive her scholarship might be. Boileau’s Art of Poetry provides a more measured response to the modernists, though it is also unsatisfying as a reply to their arguments. Wotton’s Reflections is more helpful in this regard, because it shows that Perrault has not proved his case. Wotton makes it very clear that the passage of time is not a sufficient condition for progress in the arts, and the discovery of previously unknown techniques is not necessary or sufficient to produce great works.6 And while he does not provide alternate criteria for evaluating the relative merits of ancient and modern art, Wotton does think it is possible to defend modernism. Indeed, he endorses the claim that modern philosophy and science are superior to ancient philosophy and science.7 And he ranks modern painting and sculpture equal to their ancient predecessors.8 The criteria Wotton employs in these parts of the Reflections are not always entirely clear, but his remarks about the relative skill, design, and judgment of ancient and modern painters and sculptors can be treated as philosophical arguments.9 I am not sure they prove Wotton’s case any better than Perrault’s arguments prove his case, but they are no less worthy of philosophical investigation and evaluation than arguments defending modernism in philosophy and science. It would be worthwhile to examine Wotton’s arguments in more detail here, but I have only mentioned them to show that modernism is a genuine philosophical problem. That problem inspired vigorous debate among philosophers, scientists, artists, and critics during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The history of these debates shows that many of the participants were trying to demonstrate the reality of modern philosophy, science, and art; articulate their defining features; establish their relation to their ancient and medieval predecessors; determine their relative merit; and convince others of their value. It also shows that we miss an essential part of the history of modernism when we overlook the history of modern art and literature and focus solely on the history of philosophy and the history of science. ¨N THE LATEST LAOCOO In his Laocoo¨n, Lessing tries to define the relationship between poetry and painting by identifying the limits of each art. Pitting himself against

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a long tradition affirming the resemblance of the two arts, Lessing points out a number of ways in which they are not alike.10 He emphasizes, for example, that poetry is able to express a wide range of emotions, while painting must limit expression for the sake of beauty. He also shows that literature is able to describe a succession of events, while the plastic arts must focus on a particular moment.11 These claims were controversial even among Lessing’s admirers, who raised probing questions about the limits he imposed on the arts.12 Yet they are typical of early modern attempts to understand the arts in themselves, in relation to one another, and in the context of a broader system. Inspired by their achievements, a number of twentieth-century authors tried to update Lessing’s Laocoo¨n and extend his methods to subsequent art history and other art forms. Among the most influential of these attempts is The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts by the American critic Irving Babbitt. Babbitt distinguishes two kinds of confusion of the arts in his New Laokoon: the pseudo-classic confusion and the romantic confusion. Babbitt associates the former with the formalist interpretations of Aristotle’s Poetics promoted by French neoclassicism. The latter is connected to the romantic cult of originality and spontaneity that was inspired by Rousseau. Babbitt condemns both neoclassicism and romanticism as confusions, though he says the former confuses the arts objectively, while the latter confuses them subjectively.13 Against these confusions, Babbitt advocates a new humanism characterized by moderation and self-discipline. Moderation is the antithesis of neoclassical formalism, because it takes a less rigid and formulaic approach to the ‘‘laws’’ governing the arts, allowing for variation and innovation.14 Selfdiscipline is the antithesis of romanticism, which Babbitt accuses of dispensing with the very concepts of unity and measure, purpose and law, as it aspired ‘‘to be the very opposite of everything that had gone before.’’15 Moderating formalism and disciplining romanticism produce a more naturalistic approach to the arts, which is preferable to the pseudo-classical and romantic confusions, but which still carries its own risks. Babbitt worries that scientific naturalism leads back to mechanistic formalism, while sentimental naturalism leads back to the extremes of romanticism.16 Still, he hopes a moderate and self-disciplined approach to the arts will lead to a revival of the very best that classical humanism has to offer.

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The ambitions of Rudolf Arnheim’s essay ‘‘A New Laocoo¨n: Artistic Composites and the Talking Film’’ (1938) are more limited. Inspired by the precision of Lessing’s reflections on poetry and painting, Arnheim undertakes an examination of the talking film, a new artistic medium that necessarily involves ‘‘more than one medium—such as the spoken word, the image in motion, the musical sound.’’17 As a result, Arnheim believes, the different media that are combined in the talking film end up ‘‘fighting one another’’ for the attention of the audience, instead of attracting them through ‘‘united effort.’’18 This is a curious claim, since theater had always combined images and speech, yet there are important differences between dramatic poetry and the talking film. While the theater has vacillated between the extremes of visible action and dialogue, Arnheim argues that the talking film tries to achieve a complete representation of visible action and complete dialogue. Despite the efforts of some directors to emphasize the visual dimension and limit the role dialogue plays in their films, the standard practice of the film industry is to show everything on screen and make sure nothing remains unsaid.19 The auteur tries to disguise a silent movie as a talking film, but the practices of the film industry reveal the true nature of the talking film as a medium that seeks to achieve a ‘‘parallelism’’ of the moving image and the spoken word that is absent from even the theater. Arnheim suspects that attempts to achieve this parallelism will inevitably produce ‘‘visually poor scenes full of dialogue,’’ which will be much less interesting than the ‘‘traditional style of rich, silent action’’ in earlier motion pictures.20 He finds this suspicion confirmed in contemporary films, but he remains hopeful, because hybrid art forms remain unstable and could easily change. Clement Greenberg’s essay ‘‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’’ (1940) is in many ways a response to Babbitt, but Greenberg does not share Babbitt’s nostalgia for classical humanism.21 He shares Arnheim’s concern for modern art, though he is not as pessimistic about the ‘‘nonobjective’’ and ‘‘abstract’’ approaches to painting that have emerged in the twentieth century as Arnheim is about the talking film.22 In fact, Greenberg tries to demonstrate the purity of these approaches to the plastic arts by highlighting the differences between the plastic arts and literature. Literature is for Greenberg the dominant art form in the European tradition, making it the model for every other art form.23 Following the literary model, European painting neglected the specific features of the visual medium, depicting scenes as though they were

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describing them in minute detail. It was not until the emergence of the avant-garde at the end of the nineteenth century that painting finally began to liberate itself from literature. Greenberg credits Gustave Courbet for being the first avant-garde painter to depart from the literary model, because Courbet introduced a new ‘‘flatness’’ into his work that showed a greater concern for the distribution of paint on his canvas than the dramatic staging of his subject matter.24 The impressionists went a step further by showing ‘‘insolent indifference’’ to their subject matter and turning their paintings into ‘‘color vibrations.’’25 The cubists carried what Greenberg calls ‘‘the destruction of realistic pictorial space’’ even further by abandoning perspective, replacing the gradation of tones with primary colors, and emphasizing the most abstract elements of the painting: line and geometrical form.26 The result of these developments was a pure, abstract painting, freed from the confusions with literature that had dominated the history of visual art. Attempts to update Lessing’s Laocoo¨n were not always well received. T. S. Eliot studied under Babbitt and was initially drawn to his humanism, yet he broke with Babbitt for religious reasons in his essay ‘‘Irving Babbitt’s Humanism’’ (1927).27 Eliot went on to criticize humanistic approaches to the arts in his essay ‘‘Second Thoughts on Humanism’’ (1928). There he accuses Babbitt and his disciple, Norman Foerster, of trying to make literature ‘‘do the work of philosophy, ethics, and theology.’’28 Eliot worries that ‘‘The Newest Laocoon’’ is really just an attempt to promote the moral virtues of moderation and self-discipline through art. And he fears this way of thinking will ‘‘vitiate one’s judgment and sensibility in literature,’’ because it turns humanism into an ideology and art into propaganda.29 Arnheim probably cannot be accused of this kind of ideological distortion of the arts, though he has been criticized for insisting on a principle of ‘‘medium-differentiation’’ and the doctrine of ‘‘medium purity.’’30 David Davies has pointed out that Arnheim’s principles and doctrines presume a kind of essentialism about the nature of artistic media that is difficult to defend metaphysically.31 They also presuppose a rather strange view of the relationship between the arts and the media they employ. Arnheim seems to think art should be constrained by its medium, instead of exploiting its medium and any other available media to achieve artistic effects.32 A slightly different objection was raised against Greenberg by T. J. Clark. Focusing on Greenberg’s Marxism, Clark shows that Greenberg thinks

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there is an internal logic to the development of the arts by the avantgarde in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, leading from the contradictions of modern society to the self-justification of art.33 The latter is achieved by separating art from the kitsch that is produced for mass consumption in modern capitalist societies and by making art autonomous.34 Why Greenberg thinks this separation should be achieved by purifying an art form and emphasizing the peculiarities of its medium remains unclear. Clark suspects the abstraction one finds in avant-garde painting has less to do with the autonomy of painting than it does with ‘‘the lack of consistent and repeatable meanings’’ in a culture where capitalism has undermined every traditional value and replaced them with its own merely instrumental reason.35 Abstract painting could be said to reflect the destructive tendencies of capitalist economics, which would mean it is not the separate, pure, autonomous art form Greenberg thinks it is. One response to these objections would be to call for an even newer Laocoo¨n to settle the boundaries between the arts once and for all. But we might also ask whether early modern reflections on the relations between the arts and more recent attempts to extend those reflections are fundamentally misguided. Certainly there are those who would deny, as a matter of principle, that any philosophical theory could definitively and finally determine the relationship between the arts. They would remind Lessing’s disciples that the arts change over time, mixing with one another and separating from one another at different points in their history. And they would also point out that artists regard the attempt to impose boundaries on an art form by critics and theorists as an invitation to transgression. I am not sure Babbitt, Arnheim, or Greenberg would appreciate the constant change that has become such an important part of contemporary art or the urge to transgress that distinguishes the modern artist, yet I think these are impulses that Lessing would appreciate to at least some degree. His career as a controversialist and polemicist indicates that he shared the transgressive tendencies of contemporary artists.36 And if we put his account of the limits of painting and poetry in the Laocoo¨n in dialogue with his discussion of the relation between genius and the rules of art in the Hamburg Dramaturgy, we see that his view of the relation between the arts is not nearly as restrictive as it might appear from the Laocoo¨n. Because the genius

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carries ‘‘the proof of all rules in himself,’’ Lessing says he ‘‘comprehends, remembers, and follows only those that express his feelings in words.’’37 The genius pays attention to general rules when they apply to a specific work and contribute to its beauty, so he will respect the limits of an art form or a medium when doing otherwise would diminish the quality of the work. But the genius will not accept rules that compromise the quality of his work or prevent him from making innovative use of media. The only thing that will stop the genius from breaking rules is his critical judgment, which may or may not agree with the limits imposed on an art form by less gifted critics and theorists. If Lessing is right about the genius, then there is no reason to think the latest Laoco¨on will also be the last one. Artists will continue to push the boundaries of the arts, combining and separating different media and using whatever techniques appeal to them, as they discover what is most fitting for their work. Philosophers will continue to reflect on their successes and their failures, trying to come up with general rules and principles that express what works or does not work in a particular art form.38 These rules and principles will be always be provisional, but that does not mean they are worthless.

HISTORICISM AND NATURALISM During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, philosophers and scientists tried to ground the critique of taste in human physiology and psychology, sociality and history. These efforts continued throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their history continues to shape discussions of taste, critical judgment, and aesthetic value. Historicism provided a ready explanation for the diversity of taste in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Historicists argued that because human societies form under different conditions, they must also develop along different paths. The difference in their histories leads different societies to espouse different values and exhibit a wide variety of tastes. Understanding these differences requires a degree of fairness and impartiality that is noticeably absent from European accounts of non-European cultures in the early modern period. Even if we leave aside hysterical reports of cannibalism and human sacrifice, we find few Europeans were willing to treat cultural practices like facial

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tattooing as evidence of anything but corruption or degeneration. The British physician John Bulwer was eager to denounce Native American facial tattoos as a kind of ‘‘cruel bravery’’ in his treatise Anthropometamorphosis (1650), because he thought they altered the form nature intended for humanity.39 Kant expressed similar concerns about Maori facial tattoos in his Critique of the Power of Judgment, where he objected to embellishing the human figure with ‘‘all sorts of curlicues and light but regular lines.’’40 Kant’s description of Maori tattoos is most likely taken from Hawkesworth’s account of the voyages of Captain Cook, where their spirals are said to be ‘‘drawn with great nicety and even elegance.’’41 Yet he does not seem to have appreciated the impartiality with which Cook and his German draftsman, Georg Forster, tried to describe the people they encountered on their voyages.42 Historicists like Herder and Humboldt were more sympathetic to this approach. Inspired by Forster’s descriptions of his travels and their implications for the study of human history, culture, morality, and taste, they began to promote the idea that Europeans should be as impartial as possible in the study of non-European cultures. They did not always practice what they preached, yet they displayed a genuine curiosity about the origin and value of non-European cultural practices that is sorely lacking in earlier critics.43 When they extended this more generous spirit to matters of taste, the historicists adopted a kind of ‘‘enlightened relativism’’ that allowed them to judge the tastes of different cultures by their own standards.44 At the beginning of the twentieth century, Marxist critics found a way to explain the diversity of tastes that did not succumb to relativism. They agree with the historicists that works of art reflect the social conditions in which they are produced. But they insist there are principles governing the history and development of human societies and the modes of production they use to produce the means of their subsistence.45 Similar principles can be said to govern artistic and cultural production. An early example of this approach to the arts can be found in the Theory of the Novel (1916/1920) by Georg Luka´cs. Luka´cs describes the novel as ‘‘the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, which yet still thinks in terms of totality,’’ because it is the product of a time when the unity of classical civilization and the Christian Middle Ages had been destroyed by the rise of

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industrial capitalism.46 Walter Benjamin agrees with Luka´cs that art is a product of historical and social forces, but he also calls for its revolutionary transformation in his essay ‘‘The Author as Producer’’ (1934).47 By transforming the production of literature—changing its form, altering the relationship between the artist and the audience, and so forth— Benjamin thinks authors can serve the cause of revolutionary struggle. Terry Eagleton is not as lyrical as Luka´cs or as revolutionary as Benjamin, but he carries on the tradition of Marxist criticism in works like The Function of Criticism (1984) and The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990). Eagleton argues that criticism emerges as part of ‘‘a struggle against the absolutist state,’’ in which ‘‘the European bourgeoisie begins to carve out for itself a distinct discursive space, one of rational judgment and enlightened critique, rather than the brutal ukases of an authoritarian politics.’’48 He attributes a somewhat less noble origin to aesthetics. Eagleton thinks aesthetics is also a response to absolutism, but he does not think it challenges political authority the way criticism does. Instead, he says aesthetics extends the reach of political power into the subjective sphere of individual sensation and feeling, subordinating them to reason, rational principles, and, ultimately, the law.49 I agree with Paul Guyer that this account of the origins of aesthetics is highly suspect, but I think it would be a mistake to think aesthetics emerged in a social, political, or economic vacuum.50 Marxist, and later, postcolonial, critics have shown that art, criticism, and aesthetics almost always reflect the historical and social conditions in which they emerge.51 Contemporary criticism has embraced many of the insights of historicism, Marxism, and postcolonialism. But in recent years it has also explored the possibility that, behind the veil of human society and its history, there is something natural about taste. Concerned that anthropologists have ceded too much ground to cultural relativism, some philosophers and scientists have begun to explore the evolutionary origins of art and taste.52 Works like Denis Dutton’s The Art Instinct (2009) suggest taste should be regarded as an anthropologically universal evolutionary adaptation, instead of an artificial and unnatural cultural practice that is separate from and elevated above human nature. If Dutton is correct in his supposition, then evolution can explain how Homo sapiens became ‘‘a species obsessed with creating artistic experiences with which to amuse, shock, titillate, and enrapture

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ourselves, from children’s games to the quartets of Beethoven, from firelit caves to the continuous worldwide glow of television screens.’’53 The explanation Dutton offers suggests our aesthetic sensibilities emerge from our connection to the earth and our appreciation for landscape. Noting that ‘‘people in very different cultures around the world gravitate toward the same general type of pictorial representation: a landscape with trees and open areas, water, human figures, and animals,’’ Dutton insists that ‘‘fundamental attraction to certain types of landscapes is not socially constructed but is present in human nature as an inheritance from the Pleistocene, the 1.6 million years during which modern human beings evolved.’’54 Because habitat choice was ‘‘a crucial, life-and-death matter for people (and proto-people) in the Pleistocene,’’ Dutton concludes that humanity developed an emotional predisposition for places that seemed to offer ‘‘a small average survival advantage.’’55 Stephen Davies contests this conclusion in The Artful Species (2012). Davies argues that Dutton (and others) have confused attraction with aesthetic appreciation.56 While he does not deny that evolutionary theory can explain aesthetic experience, Davies thinks the explanation it offers will have to distinguish particular aesthetic experiences from general feelings of attraction, even when those feelings of attraction influence our responses to artistic representations of landscapes, nonhuman animals, and other human beings. In other words, it will have to explain a properly aesthetic ‘‘awareness and appreciation for something’s aesthetic properties.’’57 To distinguish this awareness and appreciation from mere attraction, Davies argues that aesthetic awareness and appreciation should be regarded as an emotional response to beauty, sublimity, and their opposites, whether or not that response is pleasurable.58 One implication of this view is that aesthetic experience is not the kind of disinterested pleasure philosophers like Shaftesbury and Kant took it to be. Indeed, Davies argues that taste can be interested in a variety of ways: it can be interested in the functionality of things, their relation to our practical interests, their place in our social lives, or their suitability for their environment, and a variety of other ways.59 This view is supported by studies of the evolution of disgust, which is often regarded as the most extreme form of aesthetic disapproval. These studies suggest feelings of disgust are an evolutionary adaptation that helps us avoid contaminants, contagion, and disease. As a result, we are disgusted by ‘‘human waste and other effluvium, animal

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by-products, rotting or unfamiliar food, creatures that are typically vectors of disease (like rats and flies), and anything exhibiting signs of infectiousness, such as being greasy, sticky, discolored, or malodorous.’’60 Aesthetic responses to these qualities suggest that we have a strong interest in avoiding them, though Carolyn Korsmeyer has noted that this aversion is in many cases accompanied by a paradoxical allure.61 In addition to evolutionary theory, naturalistic approaches to art and taste have enlisted perceptual psychology and neuroscience in their cause. Considering why it might be advantageous for human beings to take pleasure in the contemplation of beautiful objects from an evolutionary perspective, Mohan Matthen argues that the answer might be found in our modes of perception.62 Because sense experience involves ‘‘a booming, buzzing confusion of stimulation,’’ perception has to be able to ‘‘construct a stable and coherent image of the world,’’ so it can provide consciousness with a ‘‘clear and coherent presentation of discrete objects arrayed in three-dimensional space.’’63 In order to construct that image, perception has to be sensitive to pattern and order in our sensations and recognize the significance of different objects and events in our experience. The aesthetic contemplation of art is, for Matthen, ‘‘the fun of perceptual play.’’64 It helps us hone the perceptual skills necessary for constructing a coherent image of the world, sometimes to a truly extraordinary degree. Bence Nanay provides a different account of the role of perception in aesthetic contemplation in his article ‘‘Philosophy of Perception as a Guide to Aesthetics’’ (2014). Nanay shows how the philosophy of perception, informed by empirical psychology, can help aesthetics solve problems about depiction, where we imagine we are seeing an object when we are really seeing an image depicting an object; engagement with works of literary fiction, where descriptions of fictional events elicit strong emotional responses; and identification with fictional characters in plays, movies, and television shows, where we put ourselves in the positions of fictional characters and imagine what they must be like ‘‘from the inside.’’65 Each of these problems involves sensory imagination, which the philosophy of perception is better able to explain than more traditional approaches to aesthetics, because it is informed by the latest developments in empirical psychology.66 Of course many of these developments are now being explained through neuroscience, which has also informed naturalistic

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approaches to art and taste. Some of the proponents of neuroaesthetics take a reductionist and deterministic approach to taste, suggesting there are ‘‘neural laws’’ that ‘‘dictate human activity in all spheres—in law, morality, religion, and even economics and politics, not less than in art.’’67 Because they are committed to the view that ‘‘all human activity is ultimately a product of the organization of our brains, and subject to its laws,’’ neuroscientists like Semir Zeki expect taste to be governed by these laws as well. 68 They have committed themselves to finding ‘‘distinct cerebral areas whose activities correlate with the experience of beauty or of ugliness, respectively.’’69 Using fMRI scans, Zeki and Hideaki Kawabata discovered that activity within the occipital cortices and the left anterior cingulate increase when people see paintings they like.70 Others agree that aesthetics should be ‘‘neurobiologically informed’’ and should explore the ‘‘neural underpinnings’’ of aesthetic experience, but resist the reductionism and determinism of some of the more enthusiastic proponents of neuroaesthetics.71 Instead, they advocate an approach to aesthetics and the philosophy of art that is ‘‘beholden to the facts’’ that philosophers seek to ‘‘rationally comprehend.’’72 These facts include facts about the brain, but they also include facts about art, criticism, and aesthetic experience that are too often overlooked by neuroscientists.73 Contemporary naturalism provides a more compelling explanation of taste than early modern physiology or psychology, because the sciences are so much more advanced today than they were in the eighteenth century. The same could be said of historical approaches to taste, which have benefited from a dramatic increase in historical knowledge, the development of new and better methods, and the critical objections that have been raised against the lingering ethnocentrism of European conceptions of taste and beauty in the last century. Still, no matter how advanced they become, both approaches can trace their origins back to the critique of taste in the early modern period.

AESTHETICS NOW Throughout this book, I have argued that aesthetics did not exist as a part of philosophy until the eighteenth century. While discussion of subjects that are now considered part of aesthetics took place outside

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philosophy and in other parts of philosophy in earlier periods, there simply was no part of philosophy that brought all these discussions together. I think this is important, because the systematic articulation of philosophy affects the way we understand the insights it provides. If we treat Plato’s discussions of the form and content of poetry and music in the Republic as part of aesthetics, then we are less likely to see them as contributions to what we would now call moral psychology or the philosophy of education; if we include Aristotle’s discussion of imitation in aesthetics, then we will forget that he regarded poetics as a productive science that had to be distinguished from theoretical sciences, like mathematics and physics, and practical sciences, like ethics and politics; if we consider discussions of the relation between beauty and goodness in Pseudo-Dionysius and Aquinas as part of aesthetics, then it will be difficult to appreciate their significance for medieval logic and metaphysics; and if we are convinced that Hutcheson’s account of the internal sense of beauty really belongs to aesthetics, then we might turn a blind eye to the theological purpose it serves.74 To understand these discussions, we have to know where to place them in the history of philosophy and how they relate to other parts of philosophy. One implication of the position I have taken is that aesthetics is a distinctively modern part of philosophy. Perhaps it is best to call it a late addition to the catalog of new sciences that were invented during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Neither of these descriptions would have appealed to Baumgarten, who thought he was following the lead of ‘‘the Greek philosophers and the Church fathers,’’ who ‘‘carefully distinguished between things perceived (α σθητ) and things known (νοητ).’’75 Kant might also object to these descriptions, since he claimed his use of the term ‘‘aesthetics’’ was superior to Baumgarten’s, because it was ‘‘closer to the language and the sense of the ancients, among whom the division of cognition into α σθητ κα νοητ was very well known.’’76 And we should expect further objections from others who are committed to the antiquity of aesthetics. Those who believe the thing existed before the name are sure to deny that aesthetics was really invented during the eighteenth century. Some of them might be willing to admit that it was renewed or reformed, enlivened or enlightened, or changed in some other way during that time, yet even that might be too much to ask from the more dogmatic defenders of perennial philosophy. I am more sympathetic to those who

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focus on arguments about subjects currently associated with aesthetics and conclude there are enough similarities among ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary philosophers to say they are all ‘‘practicing the same subject’’ in some respect.77 But I still think they are begging the question when they say discussions of beauty, art, literature, criticism, and taste, in any part of philosophy or any other context, in any period in history, really belong to aesthetics. Even the most cursory glance at the texts will show that many of the philosophers involved in these discussions thought they were doing something else entirely. Ignoring the specific context in which these discussions took place can be illuminating in some cases, but it can also obscure what is most important about them. So I am convinced that greater clarity and greater accuracy can be achieved by recognizing the historical specificity of aesthetics, paying attention to the place it occupies in the systems of modern philosophy, and understanding the institutions on which they depend. The modernity of aesthetics and its distinctness as a part of philosophy might suggest an analogy between the history of art and the history of aesthetics. It is often said that the arts were essentially crafts until the liberal arts were distinguished from the mechanical arts, freeing some creative activities and areas of inquiry from the constraints of utility.78 Eventually the fine arts were distinguished from the liberal arts and freed from the work of decoration, completing their separation from the world of the everyday and taking a step toward the constitution of a new world of art.79 This version of the history of arts usually culminates in ‘‘the golden legend of the avant-garde,’’ which explains how the avantgarde helped the fine arts cast aside bourgeois convention and the demands of representation, finally allowing them to achieve full autonomy.80 If we were to construct a similar narrative for the history of aesthetics, we might begin with the dark days when aesthetics had no name of its own and was dominated by other parts of philosophy. Then we could sing the praises of Baumgarten, the philosopher who found a place for aesthetics, alongside logic, under psychology, within metaphysics. And we could either condemn Kant and Hegel for deviating from the original vision of the founder or praise them for bringing aesthetics a few steps closer to what it is today. Finally, we could celebrate contemporary aesthetics as a fully autonomous part of philosophy, even though it is unjustly marginalized by other philosophers, who are too

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shortsighted and close-minded to appreciate its significance. The problem with this narrative is that it is just as misleading as a history of aesthetics as it is as a history of art. A more fitting analogy between the history of art and the history of aesthetics is suggested by the counter-history of art Jacques Rancie`re proposes in his book Aisthesis (2011). Against the history of art I have just described, Rancie`re holds that the modern concept of art begins to take shape in the early modern period, when the traditional hierarchies of the arts and the rules of genre begin to break down.81 Instead of separating itself from life, emphasizing the purity of the medium, and insisting on its autonomy, Rancie`re shows modern art ‘‘tends to erase the specificities of the arts and to blur the boundaries that separate them from each other and from ordinary experience.’’82 He traces this development back to Winckelmann’s rapturous description of the Belvedere Torso, which abandons classical ideas about the representation of harmonious proportion and the beautiful expression of emotion, because its subject lacks limbs and a head.83 After considering a variety of scenes in which art challenges the demands of representation and the privilege afforded to certain subjects, objects, and activities, from Murillo’s paintings of beggars to Walker Percy’s photographs and James Agee’s descriptions of the lives of sharecroppers in rural Alabama in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), Rancie`re concludes that the development of modern art is ‘‘an unending break with the hierarchical model of the body, the story, and action’’ that opens up a space for free play, in which different people can participate as equals in different activities, with different objects, in different contexts.84 Extending this model to aesthetics, we could say aesthetics appeared at a time when the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment were breaking down the hierarchy that characterized ancient and medieval philosophy and theology, forcing philosophers and scientists to reconsider what they thought they knew. Philosophers tried to reestablish the order they had lost by founding new sciences and constructing new systems. Aesthetics was one of these new sciences, but eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentiethcentury debates about its subject matter and methods failed to clearly determine its object or status. Now, in the twenty-first century, aesthetics is recognized as a distinct but relatively marginal part of philosophy, concerned with a set of loosely related topics (art, beauty, taste, and criticism) and debates (about different kinds of objects, properties,

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experiences, attitudes, and institutions). It has been brought into dialogue with other parts of philosophy (especially metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics) and the sciences (especially biology, psychology, and neuroscience), but it would be wrong to suggest that these dialogues are discussions that have taken place among equals. Still, I suspect a greater appreciation for the history of philosophy and science and an openness to pluralism and interdisciplinarity will lead aesthetics, philosophy, and science in that direction in the future. NOTES 1. Philosophical contributions to these debates include Lo¨with, Meaning in History, 1957; Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 1966/1985; Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 1985; Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity, 1991; and Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem, 1999. 2. See chapter 1, n6. 3. These problems are most obvious and take their most extreme form in debates about first principles among the post-Kantians and German idealists. On these debates, see Franks, All or Nothing, 2005. 4. On the resistance to Duhem’s claims that modern science is continuous with medieval science, see Ariew and Barker, ‘‘Duhem and Continuity in the History of Science,’’ 323–343, as well as the essays collected in Ariew and Barker, Revolution and Continuity, 1991. 5. See the discussion of the ‘‘embarrassed etc.’’ in chapter 5. 6. Wotton, Reflections, 47–48. 7. Wotton, Reflections, 42. 8. Wotton, Reflections, 77. 9. Wotton, Reflections, 71–77. 10. Horace’s dictum ‘‘A poem is like a picture’’ (ut pictura poesis) is usually cited in this context, though Lessing is actually challenging a broader tradition asserting the similarity of the two art forms. This broader tradition includes Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintillian, as well as Voltaire and Winckelmann. See Hardison and Golden, Horace for Students of Literature, 18; and Lessing, Laocoo¨n, vii–ix. 11. Lessing most likely adopted this view from Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, 180–185. 12. On the reception of the Laocoo¨n, see Nisbet, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, 326–328. Some of the most probing questions about the limits Lessing imposed on the arts were asked by Herder in the ‘‘First Grove’’ of his Critical Forests (1769). See Herder, Selected Writings on Aesthetics, 51–176. For a very informative discussion of Herder’s reading of the Laocoo¨n, see Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics, vol. 1, The Eighteenth Century, 381–388.

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13. Babbitt, The New Laokoon, 186. 14. Babbitt, The New Laokoon, 189–191. 15. Babbitt, The New Laokoon, 193–194. 16. Babbitt, The New Laokoon, 200–201. 17. Arnheim, Film as Art, 200. 18. Arnheim, Film as Art, 199. 19. Arnheim, Film as Art, 208–212. 20. Arnheim, Film as Art, 230. 21. Indications that Greenberg’s article is a response to Babbitt can be found in his reference to the ‘‘confusion’’ of the arts in the second paragraph, in his discussion of romanticism, as well as the footnote referring to Babbitt. See Greenberg, ‘‘Towards a Newer Laocoon,’’ 60, 62–65, 70. 22. Greenberg, ‘‘Towards a Newer Laocoon,’’ 61. 23. Greenberg, ‘‘Towards a Newer Laocoon,’’ 61–62. 24. Greenberg, ‘‘Towards a Newer Laocoon,’’ 64. 25. Greenberg, ‘‘Towards a Newer Laocoon,’’ 64–65. 26. Greenberg, ‘‘Towards a Newer Laocoon,’’ 68. In this respect, Greenberg argues, avant-garde painting comes to resemble absolute music. 27. Eliot, Selected Essays, 383–392. 28. Eliot, Selected Essays, 398. 29. Eliot, Selected Essays, 398. 30. Davies, ‘‘Medium in Art,’’ 184–185. 31. Davies, ‘‘Medium in Art,’’ 185. 32. Davies, ‘‘Medium in Art,’’ 185–186. 33. Clark, ‘‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,’’ 71–74. 34. Clark, ‘‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,’’ 75–77. See also Greenberg, ‘‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch,’’ 29–47. 35. Clark, ‘‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,’’ 82. See also the exchange between Clark and Michael Fried on this point in Fried, ‘‘How Modernism Works,’’ 87–101; and Clark, ‘‘Arguments about Modernism,’’ 102–112. 36. On Lessing’s career as a controversialist and polemicist, see Moore, ‘‘Lessing’s Theory of Polemic,’’ 1990. On the relation between Lessing’s polemics and his criticism, see Berghahn, ‘‘Lessing the Critic,’’ 67–88 and Berghahn, ‘‘From Classicist to Classical Literary Criticism,’’ 49–62. 37. Lessing, Hamburg Dramaturgy, 254 (no. 96). The reference to ‘‘words’’ at the end of the quotation reflects the dramatic context of Lessing’s discussion, but I suspect Lessing would endorse the same principle as applied to painting or any other art form. 38. For a fascinating account of what it means for an artwork to succeed or fail, see Mag Uidir, Art and Art Attempts, 2013. 39. The absence of impartiality in Bulwer’s treatise is already apparent in the full title: Anthopometamorphosis (Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d, or the Artificial Changeling. Historically presented, in the mad and cruel Gallantry,

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foolish Bravery, ridiculous Beauty, filthy Fineness, and loathesome Loveliness of most Nations, fashioning & altering their Bodies from the Mould intended by Nature. With a vindication of the Regular Beauty and Honest of Nature, and an Appendix of the Pedigree of the English Gallant). See the illuminating discussion of this text in Smith, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference, 124–125. 40. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 115 (V:230). 41. Hawkesworth, Voyages, III:49. 42. Sikka, Herder on Humanity and Cultural Difference, 26. 43. Herder’s ethnocentrism is evident in his Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man (1784–1791). Although he had used the example of China to warn Europeans against cultural chauvinism in his earlier essay ‘‘On the Change of Taste,’’ he declares that ‘‘Chinese taste seems to be as much a consequence of illformed organs, as despotism of their form of government, and barbarism of their form of wisdom’’ in the Outlines. This is a shocking example of how enlightened relativism and ethnocentrism could coexist in German historicism. See Herder, Philosophical Writings, 248–249; Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, 1:234–291; and Sikka, Herder on Humanity and Cultural Difference, 27, 106–116. 44. I borrow the idea of ‘‘enlightened relativism’’ from the subtitle of Sonia Sikka’s Herder on Humanity and Cultural Difference. On the role immanent criticism plays in Herder’s aesthetics and hermeneutics, see Beiser, The German Historicism Tradition, 108–109. 45. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 42–48. 46. Luka´cs, Theory of the Novel, 56. Luka´cs describes himself as ‘‘in the process of turning from Kant to Hegel’’ when he wrote Theory of the Novel in his 1962 introduction, but the Marxism he later espoused could already be said to be present in the historical analysis of the novel he proposes. 47. Benjamin, Selected Writings (Vol. 2), 768–782. See also Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism, 59–76. 48. Eagleton, The Function of Criticism, 9. 49. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 13. 50. Guyer, ‘‘History of Modern Aesthetics,’’ 36–40; and Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics,vol. 1, The Eighteenth Centur), 10n14. 51. Postcolonial critics tend to embrace the historicism and materialism of Marxist criticism, while rejecting the priority it affords to economic relations. Edward Said provides a useful summary of this approach in Culture and Imperialism: ‘‘My method is to focus as much as possible on individual works, to read them first as great products of the creative or interpretative imagination, and then to show them as part of the relationship between culture and empire. I do not believe that authors are mechanistically determined by ideology, class, or economic history, but authors are, I also believe, very much in the history of their societies, shaping and shaped by that history and their social experience in different measure. Culture and

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the aesthetic forms it contains derive from historical experience, which in effect is one of the main subjects of this book.’’ Said, Culture and Imperialism, xxii. 52. It should be noted that the relativism espoused by modern ethnography derives, more or less directly, from the ‘‘enlightened relativism’’ of Herder and Humboldt, though Dutton argues that Ludwig Wittgenstein, Benjamin Lee Whorf, and Thomas Kuhn also played an important role in promoting this ideology among anthropologists. See Dutton, The Art Instinct, 10. Ellen Dissanayake also criticizes this tendency in Dissanayake, What Is Art For?, 167–193 (esp. 183–188) and Homo Aestheticus, 212–214. 53. Dutton, The Art Instinct, 3. 54. Dutton, The Art Instinct, 18. 55. Dutton, The Art Instinct, 25. 56. Davies, The Artful Species, 88. Davies also contests the claim that aesthetic preferences are always adaptive. Dutton considers the possibility that they (1) arise from chance, (2) are adaptive, and (3) are by-products, but Davies points out that they might be (1) adaptive, (2) by-products, (3) vestiges, or (4) entirely unconnected developments. See Dutton, The Art Instinct, 90–102; and Davies, The Artful Species, 45. 57. Davies, The Artful Species, 9. 58. Davies, The Artful Species, 15. 59. Davies, The Artful Species, 15–23. 60. Strohminger, ‘‘The Meaning of Disgust: A Refutation,’’ 214. See also Strohminger, ‘‘Disgust Talked About,’’ 478–493. 61. Korsmeyer, Savoring Disgust, 113–136. 62. Matthen, Eye Candy, 2014. 63. Matthen, Eye Candy, 2014. 64. Matthen, Eye Candy, 2014. 65. Nanay, ‘‘Philosophy of Perception as a Guide to Aesthetics,’’ 105. See also Nanay, Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception, 2016. 66. Nanay, ‘‘Philosophy of Perception as a Guide to Aesthetics,’’ 112–113. 67. Zeki, Statement on Neuroestetics. See also Zeki, Inner Vision, 1. 68. Zeki, ‘‘Aesthetic Creativity and the Brain,’’ 52. 69. Kawabata and Zeki, ‘‘Neural Correlates of Beauty,’’ 1699. 70. Kawabata and Zeki, ‘‘Neural Correlates of Beauty,’’ 1700–1702. See also Chatterjee, The Aesthetic Brain, 138–139. A different set of fMRI experiments is described in Starr, Feeling Beauty, 151–158. 71. Davies, ‘‘This Is Your Brain on Art,’’ 58; and Starr, Feeling Beauty, xi, 21–22, 160n3. 72. Davies, ‘‘This Is Your Brain on Art,’’ 74. 73. John Hyman makes a forceful case for this conclusion in Hyman, ‘‘Art and Neuroscience,’’ 245–261. 74. Plato, Republic, 376d–401d; Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1025b19–1025b28, 1064a10–1064a28; Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, 701c–708b; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I–II.27.1; Hutcheson, Inquiry, 80.

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75. Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry, 78 (§116). 76. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A21. 77. Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics, vol. 1, The Eighteenth Century, 3–5. 78. On liberal education as freedom from utility, see Cicero, De Oratore, I.72– 73. On the distinction between liberal and mechanical arts, see Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalion, II.20–27. For an overview of the liberal arts in the Middle Ages, see Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 36–42. See also Kristeller, ‘‘The Modern System of the Arts, Part I,’’ 507–510. 79. On the development of the concept of ‘‘fine art’’ (beaux arts) see Kristeller, ‘‘The Modern System of the Arts, Part I,’’ 521–527. See also Shiner, The Invention of Art, 80–88. On the concept of the art world, see Danto, ‘‘The Artworld,’’ 582– 584; Dickie, The Art Circle, 1997. For a more sociological take on the art world, see Becker, Art Worlds, 1982; Bourdieu, Distinction, 1987; and Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 1993 (esp. 254–266). 80. See Greenberg, ‘‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch,’’ 48–59; and Greenberg, ‘‘Towards a Newer Laocoon,’’ 60–70. The phrase ‘‘the golden legend of the avantgarde’’ is borrowed from Rancie`re, Aisthesis, xiii. For Ranciere’s criticism of Greenberg’s approach to the history of art, see Rancie`re, Aisthesis, 26–262. 81. Rancie`re, Aisthesis, ix. 82. Rancie`re, Aisthesis, xii. 83. Rancie`re, Aisthesis, 1–20. 84. Rancie`re, Aisthesis, xiv.

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Index

absolute, 76, 118–120 abstraction, 1, 108, 122, 142 adaptation, 145–147 Addison, Joseph, ix, 47, 54–55, 60, 75, 81–82; On the Pleasures of the Imagination, 54–55, 81–82; The Spectator, 50, 54, 66n58 Adorno, Theodor, 3–4; Dialectic of Enlightenment, 3–4 Aesop, 20 aesthetics, ix-xi, 4–9, 10, 11–12, 14n33, 15n37, 18, 34–35, 40, 53, 59, 62–63, 69n116, 70, 76, 92–93, 98, 101–124, 133, 145–146, 148–152 Aesthetics for the Birds, 4 Agee, James, 151; Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 151 agreement, 87–90 Al-Farabi, 5, 7 Alberti, Leon Battista, 44; On the Art of Building, 44 Alcibiades, 124 allegory, 104 anachronism, x, 7–8, 10, 15n35, 21, 64n27, 73, 93, 94n11, 133n140 anatomy, 24 ancients and moderns, 10, 12, 17–38, 133n140, 135

animal Spirits, 78–79 animals, 112, 146, 147 anthropology, 112, 145 antiquity, 22, 25, 27–32, 33–34 41, 42, 48, 72, 84, 117, 149 appearance, 120–121 appetite, 108 Apple computers, 6 Arabia, 24 architecture, 24, 40, 44–45, 52, 54, 57, 60, 61, 62 arias, 116 Aristophanes, 21, 24 Aristotle, 5, 7, 17, 22, 24, 27, 32, 37n58, 46, 52, 65n41, 73, 91, 103, 111, 139, 148, 152n10; Nicomachean Ethics, 73; Poetics, 46, 91, 139 arithmetic, 40 Arouet, Franc¸ois-Marie (Voltaire), 50, 152; Letters Concerning the English Nation, 50 Arnheim, Rudolf, 140, 141; A New Laocoo¨n, 140 art, ix-xi, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10–12, 17–18, 20, 22–23, 25–28, 30, 32, 39–63, 72–73, 76, 77, 80, 82, 91–92, 101, 111, 112, 115, 116, 119, 120–121,

179

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Index

124, 135, 137, 139, 145, 147–148, 150, 151 artistic license, 58 association theorists, 82–84 astonishment, 78, 79 astrology, 40 astronomy, 2, 24, 26, 30, 40, 137 Athens, 67n66 atomism, 4, 76 attraction, 146 audience, relationship between artist and, 145 Augustine, 5 Augustus, 23 authority, 2, 11, 17, 24, 26, 27, 32, 33, 51, 73, 75, 86, 92, 145 autonomy, 142, 150–151 avant-garde, 150 Babbitt, Irving, 139–140, 141; The New Laokoon, 139–140 Bacon, Francis, 17, 21, 32, 60, 61, 74; Of Studies, 21; Of the Dignity and Advancement of Learning, 74; Outline of a Natural and Experimental History, 17, 60 ballet, 49 baroque, 44–45 Batteux, Charles, 57–58, 60, 111; A Course of the Belles Lettres, 57–58; The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle, 57 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 59, 62, 69n116, 70n125, 92–93, 103–109, 114, 133n140, 150; Aesthetics, 6, 101–102, 107–109, 111; Collegio u¨ber die Aesthetik, 107; Metaphysics, 6, 106–107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112; Reflection on Poetry, 6, 104–106, 108, 109, 111, 122 Baumgarten, Siegmund Jakob, 6, 102–103, 104–109, 110–113, 115, 119, 149

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beauty, 5–6, 41, 43, 54, 57, 58, 59, 60, 71, 72, 75–77, 81, 82, 83, 85, 101, 102, 108, 110, 111, 113, 114, 117–118, 120, 121, 122, 139, 143, 146, 148, 149, 150, 151; artistic beauty, 7, 58–59, 102; of antiquity, 22, 28, 34; picturesque beauty, 44, 64n30 Beeckman, Isaac, 45 Beethoven, Ludwig von, 146 Beiser, Frederick, 69n116, 69n120, 97n96, 102, 129n86; Diotima’s Children, 102 Belvedere Torso, 151 Benjamin, Walter, 145; ‘‘The Author as Producer’’, 145 Bentley, Richard, 21, 25–26, 27, 31, 33, 37n48, 73, 94n11; Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris, 25, 27 Berlin, 120 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 25, 41, 44 biology, 39, 137, 152 Bodmer, Johann Jakob, 47, 51, 102; On the Miraculous in Poetry, 47 body, 59, 61, 78, 80, 86–87, 110, 151 Bohours, Dominique, 63 Boileau-Despre´aux, Nicolas, ix, 20, 27–28, 31, 33, 49, 138; Art of Poetry, 28, 138 Borromini, Francesco, 44 Bosanquet, Bernard, 101 botany, 24 bourgeoisie, 145, 150 Boyle, Charles, 31 Boyle, Robert, 24 Boyle, Thomas, 2 Breitinger, Johann Jakob, 47, 51, 52, 102 Britain, 18, 21, 24, 29, 33, 115, 135 Buchenau, Stephanie, 65n43, 69n116, 102, 126n19, 127n45; The Founding of Aesthetics in the German Enlightenment, 102

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Index Bulwer, John, 144, 153n39; Anthropometamorphosis, 144 Burke, Edmund, 80–81, 82; A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, 80–82 Butler, Judith, 123; Gender Trouble, 123 calligraphy, 47 cannibalism, 144 capitalism, 142, 145 Casaubon, Isaac, 73 catharsis, 46 censorship, 49 character, 29, 75, 52–53,108 chauvinism, 86 chemistry, 39, 137 China, 24, 29 Christian marvelous, 47, 65n43 chronology, 73 Chrysippus, 5 Cicero, 22, 74, 152n10, 156n78 clarity, 106–107, 108, 109, 150 Clark, T.J, 142 Clarke, Samuel, 20 class, 123 classical scholarship, 10, 19–22, 24, 33, 46 classification, 136 climate, 29 coffeehouses, 50 cognition, 6, 93, 102, 104, 105, 107, 108, 110, 113–115, 124, 149 cognitive faculties, 82, 85–86, 89, 90, 102, 105–108, 113–116, 126n22 color, 41, 43, 46, 55, 58, 62, 85, 141 color blindness, 85 comedy, 46, 56 complexity, 123, 124 composition, 41 Comte, Auguste, 13 concept, 2, 63, 89, 106, 109, 110, 113

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181

consciousness, 110, 119 consonance, 45 contagion, 147 contaminant, 147 contemplation, 147 contextualism, 3 contiguity, 83 continuity, 137 convention, 150 Cooper, Anthony Ashley (Shaftesbury), ix, 25, 75–77; The Moralists, 75 Corneille, Pierre, 20, 46, 49, 52; Three Discourses on Dramatic Poetry, 20, 46; Cinna, 24; Horace, 24 Corneille, Thomas, 24; Ariane, 24 corruption, 144 cosmology, 106 Costelloe, Timothy, 64n15, 64n30, 65n44, 75; The British Aesthetic Tradition, 75 Courbet, Gustave, 141 creativity, 47, 90, 108 criticism, ix-x, 3, 5, 11, 18–19, 21, 31, 34–35, 46, 47, 50, 51, 71–94, 101, 115, 117, 143, 144–145, 148, 150 , 151 Croce, Benedetto, 129n72 cubism, 141 culture, 84, 117, 136, 143–144, 145 curiosity, 56, 144 custom, 83 D’Alembert, Jean le Rond, 40, 61; Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedie, 40, 61 Da Cortona, Pietro, 44 Dacier, Andre´, 20, 47 Dacier, Anne Le Fe`vre, 20–21, 28–29, 31, 33, 49, 137; On the Causes of the Corruption of Eloquence, 29, 49, 137 Dafoe, Daniel, 51 dance, 48, 57, 58, 59, 60

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182

Index

darkness, 81 Darnton, Robert, 49 Davies, David, 141 Davies, Stephen, 146; The Artful Species, 146 De Chambray, Roland Fre´art, 41; An Idea of the Perfection of Painting, 41 De la Baraudie`re, Jacques Boyceau, 44; Treatise on Gardening According to the Rules of Nature and Art, 44 De la Motte, Antoine, 29 De Piles, Roger, 41, 43; The Art of Painting, 41 death, 55, 63 deception, 120 decoration, 150 definition, 104, 110, 123 deformity, 85 degeneration, 144 Demosthenes, 22, 67 depiction, 147 Descartes, Rene´, 2, 5, 7, 17, 30, 32–33, 37n54, 39, 42, 45, 77–79, 81, 95n35, 95n41, 96n47; Compendium of Music, 45; Discourse on Method, 17; Passions of the Soul, 42, 77–78; Principles of Philosophy, 39, 78; Treatise on Man, 78 description: aesthetic, 108, 123, 147; poetic, 54–55, 60, 104; design, 41, 47, 76, 80, 138 determinism, 148 deus ex machina, 46, 52 dialogue, 140 Dickie, George, 71, 76 Diderot, Denis, ix, 42, 61, 90; Encyclopedie, 46, 61, 90; Notes on Painting, 42 Diogenes Laertius, 73 disciplines, 136 disease, 147 disgust, 146–147

................. 18806$

disorder, 84 displeasure, 94 dissonance, 45 Don Quixote, 85 drama, 46–47 draping, 40 Dryden, John, 20, 74; Author’s Apology for Heroic Poetry and Poetic License, 74 Du Bos, Jean-Baptiste, ix, 55–57, 60, 79–80, 96n47; Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting, and Music, 55–57, 79–80, 96n47 Du Fresnoy, Charles Alphonse, 41; De Arte Graphica, 41 Duhem, Pierre, 13 Dutton, Denis, 145; The Art Instinct, 145–146 Eagleton, Terry, 145; The Function of Criticism, 145; The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 145 economics, 137, 142, 148 education, 149, 156n78 effluvium, 147 Egypt, 24 elegance, 90 Eliot, T.S, 141; Irving Babbit’s Humanism, 141; Second Thoughts on Humanism, 141 eloquence, 27–29, 106 emotion, 43, 60, 65n44, 77–78, 80, 81, 84, 85, 96n47, 96n59, 112, 139, 151 empiricism, 76, 96n47, 119, 130n110 England, 10, 50–52, 72 Enlightenment, 1–2, 71, 80, 146, 151 envy, 63 epic, 144 epistemology, 7, 14n16, 34, 124, 152 Epistles of Phalaris, 21, 25, 31, 73 equals, 151, 152 Ernesti, Johann August, 21 erudition, 32

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Index essence, 121, 124, 136 ethics, 14n16, 30, 34, 40, 124, 132n139, 141, 149, 152 ethnocentrism, 148, 154 ethnography, 155n52 etiquette, 116 Euripides, 24 evolution, 12, 145–146 example: Aesthetics, 110–111; Reflections on Poetry, 104 experience, aesthetic, 115, 123, 132n134, 137, 146, 148, 151, 152 explanation, 76, 137; mechanical, 77, 79, 80; philosophical, 117, 119; physiological, 80; psychological, 18, 81; rational, 120 exposition, 104, 123 expression, 59, 60, 151 faith, 104, 106, 115 fame, 28, 63 fashion, 47 fatalism, 104, 115 fear, 81, 122 feeling, 76, 113–114, 122, 124, 143, 146–147 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 117 fiction, 2, 147 Fielding, Henry, 51 film, 140 flavor, 85 Foerster, Norman, 141 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bouvier, 23–24, 25, 26, 29, 31, 33, 137; A Digression on the Ancients and the Moderns, 23, 29; Of Eclogues, 23 forgery, 25, 73 form, of art, 76, 120, 141, 142, 143, 148 formalism, 139 Forster, Georg, 144 Foucault, Michel, 3, 63 France, 10, 18, 23, 27–28, 32, 33, 48–52, 72, 80, 115, 135

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183

Francke, August Hermann, 104 free will, 104 freedom, 90, 120, 156n78 Galilei, Galileo, 2, 17, 33; Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems, 17 galleries, 123 garden, 44, 49, 54, 60 gender, 123 genius, 27, 32, 34, 41, 42, 59, 116; and taste, 90–92; of the artist, 57–58, 76, 119–120, 142–143; works of, 47, 50, 52 genre, 47, 151 geography, 40, 73 geometry, 40, 106 Gerard, Alexander, 83, 84; Essay on Genius, 84; Essay on Taste, 83, 84 Germany, 10, 51, 72, 102–103, 108, 115, 117–120, 122 Gesner, Johann Matthias, 21, 110; New Thesaurus of Latin Language and Learning, 110–111 Gilbert, Katharine Everett, 102, 103 Gilpin, William, 44, 64n30; A Dialogue of the Right Honorable the Lord Viscount Cobham, 44; Observations, Relative Chiefly to the Picturesque Beauty, 44 Girardon, Franc¸ois, 22; Apollo and the Nymphs, 22–23 glory: of God, 82; of king and nation, 49; of learning, 24 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 52; The Sorrows of Young Werther, 52 goodness, 118, 148 Gottsched, Johann Christoph, 47, 51, 62, 102; Contributions to the Critical History of the German Language, Poetry, and Oratory, 51; Critical Poetics for the Germans, 47, 51; The German Theater, 51; The

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184

Index

Rational Tatlers, 51; The Respectable Man, 51 Grafton, Anthony, 73 grammar, 24, 117 greatness, 54, 90, 108 Greece, 24, 31 Greek revival, 44 Greenburg, Clement, 140–141; Towards a Newer Laocoon, 140 Grotius, Hugo, 20 Guyer, Paul, 14n33, 15n37 , 65n44, 69, 96n59, 97n98, 98n104, 102, 145; A History of Modern Aesthetics, 69n116, 102 habit, 83 Halle, 103, 104, 125n14 Hamann, Johann, 115; Aesthetica in Nuce, 115 harmony, 44, 45–46, 59, 83, 117, 122 Harvey, William, 30 Hawkesworth, John, 144 Hazard, Paul, 18, 32; The Crisis of the European Mind, 18 hearing, 59, 76 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm, 6–9, 10, 11, 103, 116, 117–118, 120–122, 130n113, 131n116, 131n123, 131n125, 133n140, 150; Lectures on Aesthetics, 6, 122; Oldest System Program of German Idealism, 117–118 Heidelberg, 120 Heinsius, Daniel, 20; On Plot in Tragedy, 20 Herculaneum, 43 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 52–53, 67n66, 86–87, 91, 111–112, 154n43, 154n44, 155n52; The Critical Forest, 128n58, 152n12; Monument to Baumgarten, 111, 125n9; On the Change of Taste, 86, 154n43; On the Causes of Sunken

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Taste, 91; Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, 154n43; Shakespeare, 91, 115; Werke, 128n59 Herotodus, 22 Heyne, Christoph Gottlob, 21 hierarchy, 42, 151 historicism, 143–145, 154n43, 154n51 historicists, 12 history, 8, 40, 77, 87, 90, 117, 124, 142, 144, 148 Hobbes, Thomas, 2, 17, 20, 30, 32, 40, 60–61, 77; Leviathan, 40, 61 Hogarth, William, 51 Ho¨lderlin, Friedrich, 117 Home, Henry (Lord Kames), 83–84, 92–94; Elements of Criticism, 83–84, 92 Homer, 17, 22, 24, 74 Horace, 20,25, 26, 27, 28, 35n7, 46, 47, 52, 152n10; Art of Poetry, 20, 27, 28, 41, 46, 47 Horkheimer, Max, 3–4; Dialectic of Enlightenment, 4 hosiery, 40 Hotho, H.G, 121–122 humanism, 19, 32, 140 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 144 Hume, David, ix, 5, 8, 61, 72, 80, 82, 84, 92; Of the Standard of Taste, 8, 80, 84; Treatise of Human Nature, 61, 82, 92 humor, 83 Hutcheson, Francis, ix, 72, 76, 149; Inquiry, 76 idea: aesthetic, 62–63, 116; association of, 82–83; Idea of Beauty, 76 ideal, 120 idealism, 117–120 identity, 123, 124 ideology, 141 illusion, 90

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Index image: coherent, 147; moving, 140; poetic, 60, 104 imagination, 11, 18, 21, 31, 40, 42, 47, 54–55, 61, 62–63, 65n44, 68n76, 81–82, 85, 86, 89, 90–91, 98n103, 108, 120, 130n113, 147, 154n51 imagination theorists, 81–82 imitation, 42, 43, 57–58, 59, 60, 83 imperfection, 84 Impressionism, 141 India, 24, 29 indifference, 141 institution, 123, 152 intellectualism, 126n22 intelligence, 119–120 interdisciplinarity, 152 interest, 146 internal sense, 76–77, 149 intuition, 63, 113, 124 irony, 116 irregularity, 84 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 115 Ja¨sche, Benjamin, 93 Je ne sais quoi, 63 Jena, 119 joy, 59, 122 judgment, 5, 6, 11, 25, 29, 34, 42, 57, 73–74, 75, 78, 82, 84–90, 91, 93–94, 112–115, 116–117, 138, 141, 143, 145 Junius, Franciscus, 41; The Painting of the Ancients, 41 Juvenal, 20 Kant, Immanuel, ix, 5, 6–9, 10, 11, 14n30, 52–53, 61, 62–63, 71, 87–90, 92–94, 94n7, 98n103, 98n104, 103, 111, 112–116, 117, 122, 127n38, 127n50, 128n59, 128n71, 129n72, 129n75, 129n79, 129n86, 130n113, 132n135, 133n140, 144, 146, 150, 154n46;

................. 18806$

185

Critique of Pure Reason, 6, 71, 93, 112–113; Critique of the Power of Judgment, 62–63, 88–90, 93–94, 112, 113–116, 144; Kant’s Logic, 93; Lectures on Anthropology, 87–89; Lectures on Logic, 93; Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, 52; What is Enlightenment, 71 Kawabata, Hideaki, 148 Kepler, Johannes, 33 kitsch, 142 Kivy, Peter, 76, 101; The Seventh Sense, 101 knowledge, 2, 11, 19, 24, 30, 32, 39, 40, 43, 50, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63n1, 69n116, 76, 78, 80, 82, 90, 92, 104, 105, 111, 120, 136, 137, 148; self-knowledge, 124, 129n72, 131n116, 132n139 Korsmeyer, Carolyn, 147 Koyre´, Alexandre, 13 Kristeller, Paul Oskar, 40–41, 47, 60; The Modern System of the Arts, 40–41 Kuhn, Helmut, 102–103 Kuhn, Thomas, 2, 63n3, 155n52 landscape, 146 Lange, Joachim, 19, 104 language, 59, 110–111 Laocoo¨n (statue), 23, 43 Laugier, Marc-Antoine, 44; Essay on Architecture, 44 law: aesthetics and, 114 117, 139, 145, 148; arts and, 62 Le Noˆtre, Andre´, 44 LeBrun, Charles, 22, 42, 79, 80; Massacre of the Innocents, 80; Method to Learn to Design the Passions, 42, 79 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 2, 33, 51, 63, 70, 95, 106, 123; Meditations on

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186

Index

Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas, 70, 106 LeRoy, Julien-David, 44; The Ruins of the Most Beautiful Monuments of Ancient Greece, 44 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, ix, 12, 19, 20, 43, 47, 62, 91–92, 110–111, 115, 116, 135, 138–139, 141–143; Correspondence on Tragedy, 47; Hamburg Dramaturgy, 91–92, 115, 143; Laocoo¨n, 12, 20, 43, 110–111, 116, 135, 138–139, 141–143 life, aesthetics and, 108, 115, 145–146, 151 light, 108 limits, 8, 12, 24, 63, 105–106, 135, 138–139, 142–143 literature, ix-x, 10, 20, 25, 28, 31–34, 47, 50–52, 57, 81, 89, 115, 135, 137, 139, 140–141, 145, 150 Livy, 67 Locke, John, 77, 80–82; Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 80, 82 logic, 5, 7, 14n16, 24, 40, 93, 105, 107, 113, 124, 126n22, 127n43, 129n75, 142, 149, 150 Longinus, 20, 27; On the Sublime, 20, 27 Louis XIV, 23 Louis XV, 50 love, 63, 81 Lucan, 20 Lucian, 20 Lucretius, 20 Luka´cs, Georg, 144–145; on meaning in life, 144–145; Theory of the Novel, 144–145 Lully, Jean-Baptiste, 23 Luther, Martin, 125n17 luxury, 116 manners, 21, 25, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 47, 50, 53, 86,

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Martianus Capella, 20 materialism, 4, 76 mathematics, 4, 24, 30, 45, 69n120, 76, 104, 117, 137, 149 Matthen, Mohan, 147 McAteer, John, 95 measure, 139 mechanics, 39 medicine, 24, 39, 62, 78 medium, used in art, 58, 140–142, 143, 151 Meier, Georg Friedrich, 11, 92, 103, 107–109, 112, 114; Foundations of All Fine Arts and Sciences, 107–109; Logic/Vernunftlehre, 92, 112 melancholy, 122 melody, 45–46 memory, 108 Menander, 22 Mendelssohn, Moses, ix, 47, 58–60, 62, 69, 109–110, 115, 127; Correspondence on Tragedy, 47; Jerusalem, 68n105; Letters on Sentiments, 59, 109–110; On the Main Principles of the Fine Arts and Sciences, 58–60 Mersenne, Marin, 45; Universal Harmony, 45 metaphor, 104 metaphysics, 2, 7, 14n16, 24, 34, 39, 76, 77, 106, 113, 118, 124, 126n30, 132n139, 135, 136, 137, 141, 149, 150, 152 meter, 104 method, 108 Michelangelo, 41 Middle Ages, 5, 9, 30, 41, 144, 156n78 Milton, John, 47, 52, 75; Paradise Lost, 52, 75 miracle, 19, 119 moderation, 139, 141 modernism, 10, 12, 18, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 32–35, 135–138

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Index morality, 77, 103, 118, 144, 148 motion, 4, 58, 78, 140, movies, 147 multiplicity, 109, 123 Murillo, Bartolome´ Esteban, 151 museums, 123 music, 5, 8, 10, 23, 24, 26, 30, 40, 41, 45–46, 48, 49, 52, 54, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 148, 153n26 Nanay, Bence, 147 national traditions, 40, 48–53, 85, 123 naturalism, 12, 19, 44, 79, 139–140, 143–148 nature, 54, 57–58, 116, 119, 120 navigation, 30, 40 neoclassicism, 20, 47, 52, 139 neuroaesthetics, 148 neuroscience, 12, 147–148, 152 Newton, Isaac, 2, 17, 33 Nicolai, Friedrich, 47; Correspondence on Tragedy, 47 novel, 49, 52, 144 novelty, 32, 83 ontology, 106 opera, 49, 60 optics, 24, 40 order, 19, 39, 40, 47, 53, 60, 75, 76, 83, 102, 108, 147 organon, 118 originality, 139 Oudry, Jean-Baptiste, 42; Discourse on the Practice of Painting and Its Main Processes, 42 Ovid, 20, 22 pain, 79–80, 81, 83, 113–114, 124 painting, 10, 12, 20, 23, 24, 26, 41–45, 48–49, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56–57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 79, 80, 111, 138–142, 148, 151 Palais du Luxembourg, 44

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187

passions, 45, 46, 47, 55–56, 59, 77–80, 102, 112 patronage, 49–50 pedantry, 25, 30, 75 perception, 80, 83, 85, 105, 107, 110, 147, 149 Percy, Walker, 151 perfection, 19, 26, 28, 29, 41, 42, 43, 52, 58, 59, 60, 75, 82, 84, 102, 104, 105, 107–110, 113–115, 117 perfumery, 47 Perrault, Charles, ix, 18, 22, 23, 25, 26, 31, 33, 41, 49, 137; Parallel of the Ancients and Moderns, 23, 41; The Century of Louis the Great, 22, 49 perspective, 41, 44, 45 phenomenology, 123 philjobs, 4 philology, x, 11, 17, 21, 25, 26, 72, 74–75, 117 philosophy, x, xi, 1–12, 14n16, 17, 18, 24, 32, 34, 39, 40, 62, 72, 77–78, 101, 103, 104–106, 111, 115, 116–122, 123–124, 135, 136, 137, 138, 148–149, 150, 152, philpapers, 5 physico-theology, 130n110 physics, 24, 26, 39, 45, 137, 148 physiology, 77–81, 84, 90, 148 picture, 10, 51, 55, 56, 81, 115, 137, 140 picturesque, 44 pietism, 19, 103–104, 125n17 pineal gland, 78, 79 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 44; Observations on the Letter of Monsieur Mariette, 44 pitch, 45 pity, 47, 56, 122 Plato, 5, 7, 8, 22, 23, 76, 101, 117, 118, 149; Republic, 8, 118, 149 play, 62, 89, 96n59, 98n103, 102, 114, 115, 120, 130n113, 147, 151

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188

Index

pleasure, 47, 54–56, 57, 72, 76, 79–83, 87, 89, 94, 102, 110, 112, 113–114, 122, 124, 146, 147 Pleistocene, 146 plot, 20, 46, 52 Plotinus, 5 pluralism, 124, 152 Plutarch, 20 poetics, 47, 104, 105, 148 poetry, 5, 6, 8, 10, 17–18, 20–21, 23–24, 26, 28, 29, 30–31, 40–43, 46–49, 52, 55–62 74, 104, 106, 111, 117, 137, 138–139, 148 politics, 35, 40, 136, 148 Poquelin, Jean-Baptiste (Molie`re), 24, 49 Pope, Alexander, 28 pottery, 60 Poussin, Nicolas, 25, 41, 43 prehistory, 10, 14 prejudice, 85 principles, 3, 5, 6, 8, 11, 26, 28, 34, 41, 44–47, 53, 57–58, 58–59, 61, 75, 76, 79, 80, 82–84, 88, 92–94, 108, 112, 113, 120, 143, 144 prints, 51 probability, 46, 108 progress, 32–33, 62 propaganda, 141 properties, 12, 103, 113, 122–123, 136 proportion, 23, 44, 54, 75–76, 151 propriety, 117 prose, 20, 28, 117 Prussia, 103 Pseudo-Dionysius, 5, 7, 149 psychology, 11–12, 58, 77, 84, 85, 90, 105, 106, 111–112, 119–120, 137, 147, 148, 150, 152 purity, 118, 140, 151 Pythagoras, 24 qualities, 24, 27, 71, 72, 75, 80, 81, 85, 89, 116, 122, 147

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Quintillian, 29, 152n10; A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or the Causes of the Corruption of Eloquence, 29 Rabelais, Franc¸ois, 18; Gargantua and Pantagruel, 18 race, 53, 87, 123 Racine, Jean, 80; Phaedra, 80 Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 45–46, 49; Treatise on Harmony, 45 Rancie`re, Jacques, 151–152; Aisthesis, 151–152 Raphael, 22, 41 Rapin, Rene´, 46; Reflections on Aristotle’s Poetics, 46 rationalism, 4, 19, 47, 72, 104, 109–110, 115, 125n14, 126n22 realism, 122, 141 reason, 2, 6, 19, 23, 28, 40, 42, 59, 63, 71, 76, 89–90, 104, 105, 106, 110, 118, 142 Reformation, 17 Reimarus, Hermann Samuel, 19; Apology, or Defense of the Rational Worshippers of God, 19 Reinhold, Karl Leonhard, 112, 117 Reiske, Johann Jakob, 21; relativism, 86, 123, 144, 154n43; enlightened, 144 religion, 77, 120–121, 141, 148 Renaissance, 18, 32, 40–41, 43, 48, 73 representation, 5, 47, 55, 79, 88, 104–107, 109, 146, 150, 151 resemblance, 83 Revett, Nicholas, 44 revolution, 137, 145, 151 Reynolds, Joshua, 42; Discourses on Art, 42 rhetoric, 24, 40, 47, 57, 62, 78, 106, 136 Ribeiro, Anna Christina, 4 Richardson, Samuel, 51; Pamela, 52 richness, 108 romanticism, 46, 63, 115, 139

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Index Rome, 24, 31 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, ix, 45–46, 49–50, 139; Dictionary of Music, 45; Dissertation on Modern Music, 45; Encyclopedie, 46; The Village Soothsayer, 50 Rubens, Peter Paul, 41, 43 rules, 6, 20, 27, 28, 30, 41, 42, 44, 46, 47–48, 50, 52, 57–58, 82, 84, 87–88, 90–94, 112, 117, 143, 151 Russell, Bertrand, 123 sacrifice, 144 Saint-Lambert, Jean-Franc¸ois de, 90; Genius, 90–91 Sansouci, 44 Scaliger, Joseph Justus, 74 Scaliger, Julius Caesar, 74; Poetics, 74 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 117–119; Oldest System Program of German Idealism, 117–118; Philosophy of Art, 119–120; System of Transcendental Idealism, 118–119 Schlegel, Friedrich, 116–117; A Dialogue on Poesy, 117; Athenaeum Fragments, 116; Critical Fragments, 116; Ideas, 117 Schloss Belvedere, 44 Schloss Ludwigsburg, 44 Schmidt, Johann Lorenz, 19; Wertheim Bible, 19 scholarship, 21, 30, 31–32, 46 scholasticism, 17 science, 1, 2–3, 18, 30, 32, 34, 39, 61, 77, 112, 113, 116, 135, 145, 148, 149, 151, 152, 152n4 sciography, 40 sculpture, 10, 20, 22–23, 24, 26, 40, 41, 42–43, 45, 48, 52, 54–55, 57–58, 60–62, 121, 138; ancient, 138; Greek, 43; modern, 137, 138 self-consciousness, 119, 131n116

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189

self-discipline, 139, 141 self-interest, 77 self-knowledge, 124 semblance, 120 semiotics, 108 sense, 42, 59, 76, 80–81, 84, 85–86, 87, 93–94 105, 106, 108, 111, 112, 113, 115, 141, 146, 149 sensus communis, 89–90 sentiment, 42, 58, 80, 84–85 sentimentalism, 46–47, 139 sexual orientation, 123 Shaftesbury. See Cooper, Anthony Ashley Shelley, James, 96n59 sight, 54, 59, 76, 81–82 signs, 59–60, 108, 115 simile, 60 Simon, Richard, 19, 73 skepticism, 4, 76, 85, 86, 123, 136 skill, 74, 138, 147 smell, 43, 76, 81, society, 12, 21, 47, 72, 84–86, 88, 90, 142, 145 Socrates, 101, 124 sonority, 104 Sophocles, 24 soul, 5, 54–56, 59, 78, 91, 106, 111 sound, 45, 58–59, 61, 81, 140 speculation, 120 speech, 61–62, 117, 122, 140, Spinoza, Baruch, 18, 79, 115; Ethics, 79; Theological-Political Treatise, 18 Spinozism, 115 spirit, 19, 25, 62, 78–79, 87, 111, 115, 117, 120, 121 spontaneity, 139 Steele, Richard, 47; The Tatler, 50 Sterne, Lawrence, 18, 51; The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, 18 stimulation, 147

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190

Index

Stuart, James, 44; The Antiquities of Athens, 44 Sturm und Drang, 52 sublime, 81, 82, 83, 90, 146 subtlety, 108 suitability, 146 superstition, 85, 120 supposition, 108 surgery, 24 surprise, 54, 78 Swift, Jonathan, ix, 30–31, 33, 75; A Tale of a Tub, 30–31, 33, 75; Battle of the Books, 30–31, 75 synecdoche, 104 system, 39, 40–41, 48, 53–63, 75, 86, 106, 113, 136, 139, 150, 151 Tasso, Torquato, 65n43; Jerusalem Delivered, 65n43 taste, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 29, 31, 32,33, 34, 35, 53, 62, 71, 76, 77, 80, 81, 83, 87, 90–92, 101, 108, 112, 143, 144, 148, 151 tattoos, 144 taxonomy, 136 television, 147 Temple, William, 25, 29–30, 31, 33; Essay upon Ancient and Modern Learning, 25, 29, 31 terror, 56 theater, 140 The´aˆtre du Palais Royal, 50 theology, 17, 77, 103, 104, 106, 126n30, 149 Thomas Aquinas, 5, 7–8, 118, 149; Disputed Questions on Truth, 118; Summa Theologica, 118 thought, 41, 53, 86, 87, 89, 102, 119, 120,121 Thucydides, 20 tone, 141 touch, 42, 76 tradition, 2, 102, 137, 140

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tragedy, 20, 28, 46, 47, 49, 52, 56, 80, 121 transcendentals, 8, 117–118 transgression, 142 translation, 20–21, 26–29, 33, 46–47, 74, 102, 109, travel, Forster’s, 144 truth, 19, 104, 105, 108, 115, 118, 121 typography, 48 ugliness, 5, 148 uncommon, 54 understanding, 62, 89, 93, 105, 107, 113, 114, uniformity, 76–77 unity, 44, 46, 58, 110, 118–120, 122, 139, 145 utility, 57, 150, 156n78 value, 2, 4, 8, 12, 77, 87, 116, 138, 142, 143 variation, 19, 73, 139 Versaille, 44 verse, 104 Vico, Giambattista, 21–22; New Science, 21–22. Virgil, 20, 22, 43, 74 virtue, 28, 77, 83, 141 virtuosity, 116 vision, 42, 81 Vitruvius, 44 vivacity, 108 Waisenhaus, 103–104 Whewell, William, 13 Whorf, Benjamin Lee, 155n52 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 20, 43, 44, 151, 152n10; History of Ancient Art, 20, 43; Notes on the Architecture of the Ancients, 20, 44; Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, 20 Winter Palace, 44

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Index wit, 52, 108 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 155n52 Wolff, Christian, 19, 61–62, 69n120, 102, 106, 126n22; Elements of Civil Architecture, 69n120; Elements of General Mathematics, 69n120; German Metaphysics, 106; Preliminary Discourse on Philosophy in General, 62, 106, 126n22 Wolff, Friedrich August, 22; Prolegomena to Homer, 22 Wolffians, 109–110 Wo¨lfflin, Henrich, 53; Principles of Art History, 53 wonder, 78, 79

................. 18806$

191

woodworking, 60 words, 55, 58–59, 104, 140, 143 Wotton, Henry, 44; Elements of Architecture, 44 Wotton, William, 24–25, 26, 31, 33, 41, 138; Reflections Upon Ancient and Modern Learning, 24, 41, 138 Wu¨rzburg, 119 Xenophon, 67n66 Zarlino, Giossefo, 45; The Harmonic Institutions, 45 Zeki, Semir, 148 zoology, 24

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