Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten

Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (July 17, 1714 – May 26, 1762) was a German philosopher. He was a follower of Leibniz and Christian Wolff, and gave the term aesthetics its modern meaning. Baumgarten was born in Berlin as the fifth of seven sons of the pietist pastor of the garrison, Jacob Baumgarten and his wife Rosina Elisabeth. Both his parents died early and he was taught by Martin Georg Christgau where he learned Hebrew and got interested in Latin Poetry. Whilst words may change their meaning through cultural developments anyway, Baumgarten's reappraisal of aesthetics is often seen as the key moment in the development of aesthetic philosophy. Previously the word had merely meant 'sensibility' or 'responsiveness to stimulation of the senses' in its use by ancient writers. With the development of art as a commercial enterprise linked to the rise of a nouveau riche class across Europe, the purchasing of art inevitably lead to the question, 'what is good art'. Baumgarten developed aesthetics to mean the study of good and bad "taste," thus good and bad art, linking good taste with beauty. By trying to develop an idea of good and bad taste, he also in turn generated philosophical debate around this new meaning of aesthetics. Without it, there would be no basis for aesthetic debate as there would be no objective criterion, basis for comparison, or reason from which one could develop an objective argument.

Kant and Baumgarten's Aesthetics

Baumgarten used the word aesthetics to mean taste or "sense" of beauty. The word had been used differently since the time of the ancient Greeks to mean the ability to receive stimulation from one or more of the five bodily senses. In his Metaphysic, § 451, Baumgarten defined taste, in its wider meaning, as the ability to judge according to the senses, instead of according to the intellect. Such a judgment of taste is based on feelings of pleasure or displeasure. A science of aesthetics would be, for Baumgarten, a deduction of the rules or principles of artistic or natural beauty from individual "taste." In 1781, Kant declared that Baumgarten's aesthetics could never contain objective rules, laws, or principles of natural or artistic beauty.

The Germans are the only people who presently (1781) have come to use the word aesthetic[s] to designate what others call the critique of taste. They are doing so on the basis of a false hope conceived by that superb analyst Baumgarten. He hoped to bring our critical judging of the beautiful under rational principles, and to raise the rules for such judging to the level of a lawful science. Yet that endeavor is futile. For, as far as their principal sources are concerned, those supposed rules or criteria are merely empirical. Hence they can never serve as determinate a priori laws to which our judgment of taste must conform. It is, rather, our judgment of taste which constitutes the proper test for the correctness of those rules or criteria. Because of this it is advisable to follow either of two alternatives. One of these is to stop using this new name aesthetic[s] in this sense of critique of taste, and to reserve the name aesthetic[s] for the doctrine of sensibility that is true science. (In doing so we would also come closer to the language of the ancients and its meaning. Among the ancients the division of cognition into aisthētá kai noētá [felt or thought] was quite famous.) The other alternative would be for the new aesthetic[s] to share the name with speculative philosophy. We would then take the name partly in its transcendental meaning, and partly in the psychological meaning.

– Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 21, note.

Nine years later, in his Critique of Judgment, Kant use the word aesthetic in relation to the judgment of taste or the estimation of the beautiful. For Kant, an aesthetic judgment is subjective in that it relates to the internal feeling of pleasure or displeasure and not to any qualities in an external object.

See also

• Aesthetics

Works

• Dissertatio chorographica, Notiones superi et inferi, indeque adscensus et descensus, in chorographiis sacris occurentes, evolvens (1735)
• Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (1735)
• De ordine in audiendis philosophicis per triennium academicum quaedam praefatus acroases proximae aestati destinatas indicit Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1738)
• Metaphysica (1739)
• Ethica philosophica (1740)
• Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten eröffnet Einige Gedancken vom vernünfftigen Beyfall auf Academien, und ladet zu seiner Antritts-Rede [...] ein (1740)
• Serenissimo potentissimo principi Friderico, Regi Borussorum marchioni brandenburgico S. R. J. archicamerario et electori, caetera, clementissimo dominio felicia regni felicis auspicia, a d. III. Non. Quinct. 1740 (1740)
• Philosophische Briefe von Aletheophilus (1741)
• Scriptis, quae moderator conflictus academici disputavit, praefatus rationes acroasium suarum Viadrinarum reddit Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1743)
• Aesthetica (1750)-1758)
• Initia Philosophiae Practicae. Primae Acroamatice (1760)
• Acroasis logica in Christianum L.B. de Wolff (1761)
• Ius naturae (posthum 1763)
• Sciagraphia encyclopaedia philosophicae (ed. Johs. Christian Foerster 1769)
• Philosophia generalis (ed. Johs. Christian Foerster 1770)
• Alex. Gottl. Baumgartenii Praelectiones theologiae dogmaticae (ed. Salomon Semmler (1773)
• Metaphysica (übers. Georg Friedrich Meier 1776)
• Gedanken über die Reden Jesu nach dem Inhalt der evangelischen Geschichten (ed. F.G. Scheltz & A.B. Thiele; 1796-1797)