Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Disinterestedness and denial of the particular: Locke, Adam Smith, and the subject of aesthetics
- 2 The beginnings of “aesthetics” and the Leibnizian conception of sensation
- 3 Of the scandal of taste: social privilege as nature in the aesthetic theories of Hume and Kant
- 4 Why did Kant call taste a “common sense”?
- 5 Art and money
- 6 “Art” as a weapon in cultural politics: rereading Schiller's Aesthetic Letters
- 7 Thinking about genius in the eighteenth century
- 8 Creation, aesthetics, market: origins of the modern concept of art
- Index
2 - The beginnings of “aesthetics” and the Leibnizian conception of sensation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Disinterestedness and denial of the particular: Locke, Adam Smith, and the subject of aesthetics
- 2 The beginnings of “aesthetics” and the Leibnizian conception of sensation
- 3 Of the scandal of taste: social privilege as nature in the aesthetic theories of Hume and Kant
- 4 Why did Kant call taste a “common sense”?
- 5 Art and money
- 6 “Art” as a weapon in cultural politics: rereading Schiller's Aesthetic Letters
- 7 Thinking about genius in the eighteenth century
- 8 Creation, aesthetics, market: origins of the modern concept of art
- Index
Summary
The term “aesthetics” was coined by A. G. Baumgarten in 1735 to designate a projected discipline which was to do for sensate, or “confused,” knowledge what logic did for rational, or demonstrative, knowledge. When he followed through with the first volume of his Aesthetic in 1750, he in effect consolidated a theory which Leibniz had adumbrated in various dispersed passages. This theory was based in a view of sensation as a “confused” mode of representation or knowledge in the sense that its apparently immediate qualities were actually constituted by the summation of impressions which, taken singly, would be beneath the threshold of awareness. Leibniz thereby found a means of bringing out the virtues of ways of knowing grounded in confused ideas or representations, as opposed to the clear and distinct representations that were fundamental to the Cartesian conception of necessary knowledge. Along with other advantages of such “con-fusion” Leibniz revealed the role played by subliminal or marginal awareness (registered in consciousness at most as feeling) in knowledge and action generally. Understanding these insights will be the task of the final section of this essay.
Baumgarten's new discipline of aesthetics also continued tendencies of seventeenth-century thought in which, under headings such as gusto, ingenio, and agudeza, or finesse, délicatesse, and je ne sais quoi, subtle sensitive modes of perception and judgment were delineated that had been ignored or excluded by the new insistence on reasoning grounded in clear and distinct ideas, which was common to the poetics of classicism and the methodology of rationalism.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993
- 4
- Cited by