THE NEGLECTED PROGRAMME OFAESTHETICS

Steffen W. Gross

Aesthetics is today widely seen as the philosophy of art and/or beauty, limited toartworks and their perception. In this paper, I will argue that today’s aesthetics and theoriginal programme developed by the German Enlightenment thinker AlexanderGottlieb Baumgarten in the first half of the eighteenth century have only the name incommon. Baumgarten did not primarily develop his aesthetics as a philosophy of art.The making and understanding of artworks had served in his original programmeonly as an example for the application of his philosophy. What he really attempts topresent is an alternative philosophy of knowledge that goes beyond the purelyrationalist, empiricist, and sensualist approaches. In short, Baumgarten transcendsthe old opposition between rationalism and sensualism. His core theme is theimprovement (perfectio) of human knowledge and cognition and the ways to reachthis goal. The study of Baumgarten’s foundational works on aesthetics should not beundertaken merely out of antiquarian interest. I will argue, instead, that Baumgarten’simportance and contemporary relevance lies in this: that his Aesthetica may serve as aprofound contribution to the philosophy of the cultural sciences and humanities.Revisiting Baumgarten’s original idea of aesthetics will lead us to a more inclusiveconcept of that philosophical discipline.

I. INTRODUCTION

A LITTLE over 250 years ago, in 1750, the Frankfurt1 philosophy professor Alex-ander Gottlieb Baumgarten published the first part of his two-volume Aestheticaand founded a new philosophical discipline—modern aesthetics. Almost everyphilosophical dictionary tells us that aesthetics owes its name to Baumgarten.Unfortunately, Baumgarten wrote and published all his major works in an oftencryptic Latin and so even during his lifetime the discussion of his highly originalapproach was limited to a relatively small circle of academics. The attention ofthe wider public soon turned to Baumgarten’s disciple, Georg Friedrich Meier,and particularly to his Anfangsgründe aller schönen Wissenschaf ten [Principles of AllBeautiful Sciences], written in a popular and accessible German. Meier’s concept of

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1 Baumgarten taught philosophy from 1740 until his untimely death in 1762 as a full professor(ordinarius) at the Viadrina-University of Frankfurt/Oder. This is the east German Frankfurt, notto be confused with Frankfurt/Main. The University of Frankfurt/Main was founded only afterWorld War One in 1919, while the Viadrina-University Frankfurt/Oder was established in 1506.

aesthetics as a philosophy of art and its production became influential in both thedebates of the academic community and ordinary language. Meier frequentlymaintained that he was following Baumgarten and using the conceptual mean-ings developed by his teacher, so that Meier’s concept of ‘aesthetica’ was taken forBaumgarten’s. Almost nobody studied the original Baumgarten any more, andeven today there is no complete modern edition and translation of Baumgarten’swritings, either in German or English. ‘Guardians of the sacred Baumgartianflame are rare these days’, said Francis Sparshott in his Ryle Lectures, publishedas The Future of Aesthetics in 1998.2

But why should we spend our time on a book that was unfortunately nevercompleted, on a fragment which is more than 250 years old? Reading Baumgartenis indeed sometimes a torture. Even one of his most sympathetic critics, Herder,who called Baumgarten the ‘real Aristotle of our time’,3 complained of his‘barbaric and dreadful language, his Neo-Latin, his scholastic style’.4 None theless, studying Baumgarten today is well worth doing, despite all the difficulties,and offers us important insights.

In this paper, I will argue that Baumgarten did not develop his aestheticsprimarily as a philosophy of art. The making and understanding of art had beenused in his original programme only as an example (among others) of theapplication of his philosophy. Poetry apart, Baumgarten himself had no specialrelation to fine art and the empirical material he included is less than marginal.What he really attempts to provide is an alternative approach to the philosophy ofhuman knowledge, experience, and perception that goes beyond the purelyrationalist, empiricist, and sensualist approaches. In short, Baumgarten tran-scends the old opposition between rationalism and sensualism. His core theme isthe improvement of human knowledge and cognition and how to reach this goal.

To support this thesis, I will concentrate on two of Baumgarten’s most centralnotions, which are essential for the Aesthetica: his concept of beauty (pulchritudo)and his concept of completion (perfectio). Secondly, I will attempt to explain hisimage of man, that is, his anthropological conception. Baumgarten considers thehuman being as a felix aestheticus. His felix aestheticus is by no means merely theartist or the poet: instead he is the whole man, accommodating within himself agreat number of sometimes conflicting or contradictory faculties, forces, andpoietic powers, a great number of different aims, some of them incommensurablewith each other. Man cannot, and—this is the ethical imperative of Baumgarten’sAesthetica—ought not to, be reduced to either a purely rational or a purely sensualbeing. Given this unavoidable tension of different faculties, felix aestheticus can be

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2 Francis Sparshott, The Future of Aesthetics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), p. 5.3 See Johann Gottfried Herder, Fragment über die Ode, in Bernhard Suphan (ed.), Herders Sämmtliche

Werke, vol. 32 (Berlin, 1899), p. 83.4 See Johann Gottfried Herder, Von Baumgartens Denken in seinen Schriften, in Bernhard Suphan (ed.),

Herders Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 32 (Berlin, 1899), pp. 178-192, particularly p. 189.

interpreted as the sensible creator and developer of his own world, that is, humanculture. Cassirer, one of the very few leading modern philosophers who workedexplicitly on Baumgarten, wrote in his Philosophy of the Enlightenment5 that Baum-garten’s Aesthetica above all underpins a theory of man. I will argue, furthermore,that Baumgarten’s importance for our times may lie in this: that the Aesthetica is aprofound contribution to the philosophy of the cultural sciences and humanities(‘Kulturwissenschaf ten’ in the meaning of the term in Cassirer). RevisitingBaumgarten’s original aesthetics will lead us to broader perspectives and to amore inclusive concept of that philosophical discipline. Actually to achieve this is,of course, a challenge.

The study of the history of ideas, and of the history of enlightenment aestheticsin particular, is not undertaken just for pleasure or out of antiquarian interest. Onthe contrary, there are at least three important motives at work. The first is tocome to terms with and to understand the plurality of views on the human beingand his faculties and capacities that was possible in the eighteenth century. I amconvinced that Enlightenment thinkers still retain the power to inspire; that someof their insights are more comprehensive and, in certain respects, more ‘modern’than the achievements of their successors and heirs in later centuries. A secondgoal is to achieve an understanding of how we moderns (or post-moderns) havebecome what we are, based on an analysis of our evolution that includes andconsiders the restrictions which emerged in the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies. The third aim is to judge the worth of various models of human natureand human faculties.

II. COGNITIO SENSITIVA—AESTHETICA AS THE PHILOSOPHY OF SENSITIVE KNOWLEDGE

Since Baumgarten’s peculiar and novel approach to philosophy and humanknowledge can be understood only against the background of the specific situ-ation of his time, against the background of the intellectual climate of his yearsas a student and later as a lecturer, it seems both necessary and helpful to startwith some brief remarks about Baumgarten’s own development and, inparticular, his scientific socialization as a philosopher and aesthetician.6 Born inBerlin in 1714, the fifth child of a Protestant clergyman of extraordinarily com-prehensive learning, he lost his mother at the age of three and his father at the ageof eight. His relatives then sent him to the orphanage in Halle founded by theprofessor of divinity, Hermann August Francke. This orphanage was part of one

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5 Ernst Cassirer devoted the final section of his powerful study The Philosophy of the Enlightenment(Princeton, 1955, ch. VII, §VI, ‘The Foundation of Systematic Aesthetics—Baumgarten’,pp. 338–360 [first published in German in 1932]) to Baumgarten and his aesthetic theory.

6 There are two biographies of Baumgarten written by his contemporaries and disciples Meier andAbbt: Georg Friedrich Meier, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgartens Leben (Halle, 1763), and Thomas Abbt,Leben und Charakter Alexander Gottlieb Baumgartens, in Thomas Abbts vermischte Werke, VierterTheil welcher vermischte Aufsätze enthält (Berlin and Stettin, 1780), pp. 215–244.

of the largest public charities in Europe, created by Francke. It also housed afamous school that prepared orphans and gifted children from poor families foruniversity studies, preferably in theology.

From around 1700 until the late 1730s, the University of Halle was theprincipal centre of German Pietism. Pietism emerged in the late seventeenthcentury as a reform movement within the Lutheran Church. This new move-ment located the essence of Christianity more in the quality of an individual’spersonal sense of his or her relationship to God than in rational assent to thevarious and often divergent forms of Christian theology. Pietists were hostile tosophisticated theological disputes and tried instead to personalize Christian beliefby strengthening inner feelings towards God. Pietism primarily addressed theinner sensibility of man and concentrated on the deepening of sentimentality/emotionality as the most important faculty, they believed, that humans couldhave.

However, the University of Halle was not only the principal centre ofemotionalist Pietism, but a stronghold of rationalist enlightenment too. ChristianWolff, later one of the principal leaders of the German Enlightenment andrationalism, was appointed as a professor in 1706 and taught with great successnatural sciences, mathematics, and philosophy, developing a rationalist approachand applying it rigorously. Despite all the tensions between Pietists and rationalistfollowers of the Enlightenment, there was an intense exchange between them,fruitful for both movements. But around 1718 Halle Pietism became more andmore anti-intellectual, doctrinaire, absolutist, and, it must be said, sometimeseven autistic in certain respects, and its hostility to all rational approaches toman’s life, his soul, and his beliefs grew rapidly. Wolff ’s writings and lectures nowentangled him in serious quarrels with critics led by second-generation Pietistfaculty members, particularly Joachim Lange. Primarily the issues had to do withthe proper roles of reason, rationality, and faith in human life, and Wolff ’sapplication of a strict rational method even to the questions of God and religiousfeelings. Halle’s Pietist faculty of theology claimed to have the last word con-cerning all issues of man’s life, his knowledge, his perceptions, and his relation toGod.

These were, in brief, the intellectual conditions under which the youngAlexander Baumgarten grew up, went to the orphanage school, and later startedhis studies at the University of Halle. Although the Pietists associated with Langehad successfully removed Wolff in person, his philosophy was by no means deadin Halle, and elsewhere in Prussia, on the contrary, it was proving very attractive,especially to the younger students. Even in the Pietist orphanage, Wolff ’sphilosophy was taught secretly; and one of its principal lecturers was AlexanderBaumgarten’s elder brother, Sigmund Jacob Baumgarten, later a famousEnlightenment theologian, celebrated by Voltaire as ‘die Krone der deutschenGelehrten’, the king of German scholars. For Wolff and his disciples the model of

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perfect and complete knowledge was mathematics or mechanics. The rigorousapplication of such models seemed to promise clear, distinct, and self-evidentknowledge of maximal certainty by leading to clear and distinct concepts andterms. Mathematics and the natural sciences became the measuring-rod for allother forms of knowledge. Sensual perceptions, aistheta, in contrast, could leadonly to ‘dark’ concepts (cognitio confusa) that lack the required lucidity and dis-tinctness and so must fail to reach the status of ‘real’ knowledge. The sensualforces, called facultas inferior, the lower faculties, of human beings were thought ofonly as a deliverer of sensual data for the ‘higher’ faculties or facultas cognoscitivasuperior, that is, rational reasoning, cognitio rationalis resp. intellectualis. In thissystem, the ‘lower’ faculties were not given a value of their own, they were seenas unable to lead to knowledge from their own resources, but fully dependenton the ‘higher’ faculties, which were thought of as the ‘proper’ human powers.So the rationalist stream in the Enlightenment movement established a clearhierarchy among human faculties and capacities, privileging one-sidedly logicalthinking and the capacity to develop distinct concepts and knowledge, and seeinghuman emotionality primarily as a darkening threat to clear thinking. On theother hand, Pietism concentrated on inner feelings, placed them at the top of thehierarchy, and showed hostility towards logical thinking and abstractions ingeneral.

Even as a pupil in the orphanage Alexander Baumgarten had been deeplyinfluenced both by the rationalist stream of the Enlightenment and by Pietism.And he soon developed a deep awareness of the limits of both approaches. Bothhave their specific advantages, but both have their limitations too: they areunavoidably one-sided. So the traditional dichotomy between rationalism andsensualism must be misconceived: there are no good reasons to assume that oneof them, whether cognitio intellectualis or sensual feelings, addresses and expressesthe ‘proper’ man in full; neither of them can make a justified claim to offer finalsolutions to the problems of knowledge and the organization of human cognitivefaculties. Cassirer highlighted in particular Baumgarten’s Grenzbewußtsein, hisawareness of the limits of every human approach to the real world. Baumgarten’s‘decisive historical merit’ is, for Cassirer, that he

was not only the outstanding scholastic logician who was a master of all aspects of thisdiscipline, and who developed it to its highest degree of formal perfection, but his realintellectual accomplishment consists in the fact that through his mastery of the subjecthe became especially conscious of both the intrinsic and the systematic limitations offormal logic. As a result of his consciousness of these limitations, Baumgarten was ableto make his original contribution to the history of thought, which lay in thephilosophical foundation of aesthetics. . . . Thus aesthetics evolves from logic, but thisevolution discloses the immanent weakness of traditional scholastic logic. Baumgartendoes not remain a mere ‘artist of reason’; in him that ideal of philosophy is realizedwhich Kant called the ideal of the ‘self-knowledge of reason’. He is a master ofanalysis; yet his mastery does not lead him to overestimate its value but rather to define

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clearly, and to distinguish sharply between, the means and ends of analysis. Thehighest development of analysis stirs it into productivity again, bringing it to the pointwhere, as if by itself, a new starting-point appears and a new intellectual synthesisopens up.7

I am convinced that the Aesthetica was born out of the special and stressfulcircumstances in Halle in the 1720s and 1730s, out of the tensions betweenEnlightenment rationalism and Pietism that sharpened certain intellectuallyfertile powers, and made the demand for an alternative theory of knowledge, thatis, a more complex theory, more appropriate to ordinary experiences, more andmore urgent. No doubt Baumgarten was in search of a third position beyond thetraditional division and vertical hierarchization of human faculties, namely thedivision of man, as such, into a rational or intellectual and a sensual side.Baumgarten’s project in his Aesthetica, first sketched in the final sections ofhis Master’s thesis of 1735, Meditationes Philosophicae de Nonnullis ad PoemaPertinentibus8 and further developed in his Metaphysica of 1739 and finally in theAesthetica of 1750/58, is an attempt to conceive the relation between rational andsensuous powers in a new way: human sensibility and emotionality are neithermerely a compensation for rationality nor are they of a ‘lower’ quality. Hisaesthetic project asks radical questions. He calls into question the legitimacy of allattempts to erect a hierarchy among human faculties. He calls radically intoquestion the assumption that ‘cognition’ should be only logico-rational, that thereshould be no additional forms of knowledge of equal legitimacy. And indeed,the life of the unfragmented human spirit does know other forms. AlthoughBaumgarten continues to operate with the traditional terminology of facultascognoscitiva inferior resp. superior, which caused and still causes much confusionamong interpreters, he seems to be the first Enlightenment thinker who in factabandoned the old hierarchy in favour of placing its elements on the same level.

The important step forward was, then, that there are no ‘higher’ or ‘lower’powers, but all of them are now thought of as being of the same rank: they differqualitatively but there is no way to order them hierarchically. The crucial point isthat Baumgarten is close to defining the sensuousness of human beings as oneof the authentic functions of the human spirit, acknowledging the ‘original,formative power’ of sensuousness and expressing this in the first and still morecomplex definition of Aesthetica that we find in his Metaphysica of 1739. HereBaumgarten stresses the authentically creative, formative powers of sensitivecognition inseparably connected to the cognitive power: ‘Scientia sensitive cog-noscendi & proponendi est AESTHETICA, . . .’9 Cassirer makes this relation still

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7 Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, pp. 338–339.8 Karl Aschenbrenner and William B. Holter edited an English translation of this first published

work of Baumgarten. See Reflection on Poetry (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of CaliforniaPress, 1954).

9 Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Metaphysica [1739] (7th edn, Halle, 1779), §533, p. 187.

more explicit in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, probably inspired by his readingsof Baumgarten’s Aesthetica:

Every authentic function of the human spirit has this decisive characteristic incommon with cognition: it does not merely copy but rather embodies an original,formative power. It does not express passively the mere fact that something is presentbut contains an independent energy of the human spirit through which the simplepresence of the phenomenon assumes a definite ‘meaning’, a particular ideationalcontent. This is as true of art as it is of cognition; it as true of myth as of religion.10

And indeed, to develop his concept of aesthetica, Baumgarten referred explicitly toAristotle’s notion of aisthesis, that is, sensuous perception, and Aristotle had seenaistheta as closely related to spiritual powers, to nous. I do not hesitate to award toaisthesis the character and status of an ‘authentic function of the human spirit’ inCassirer’s sense.

Seen from the point of view of theory of knowledge, Baumgarten’s Aestheticafocuses on a realm that has usually been discredited, particularly in ordinarylanguage: the sphere of confused and indistinct perception. Normally ‘confusion’evokes negative associations, but not so in Baumgarten. He takes the positiveview that there is an important realm of human experience which cannot (andought not to) be grasped by means of logical thinking, since the cognitio intel-lectualis aims at generality and builds abstract concepts of an intense, that is, thegreatest possible clarity from a logical point of view. But aesthetics is the spherewhere rational cognition cannot play a role: on the contrary, it would havedamaging effects. Why? Sensuous experiences cannot be resolved into distinctelements that can be analysed separately. A split would destroy them. Abstractionalways means losses and impoverishments or, as Baumgarten puts it, in the formof a question: ‘Quid enim est abstractio, si iactura non est?’11 To designate thisindependent province of sensuous cognition, Baumgarten introduces the termsensitivus. In fact, this term had already been used by Wolff in a different manner:in his Psychologia empirica of 1732 Wolff speaks of an ‘appetitus sensitivus’12 in relationto the representations we get through the so-called ‘lower’ faculties.

Baumgarten’s introduction of the cognitio sensitiva now relates this termexplicitly to a kind of knowledge that is sui generis. The goal of the cognitio sensitivais the grasp of the special, the particular, in the diversity and complexity of itsrelations and connections. Abundance, magnitude, richness of being, and live-liness should be preserved in their respective specificity, and we must avoidconceptual reduction and concentration. The most important means to reach this

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10 Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1: Language (New Haven: Yale U.P., 1955),p. 78.

11 Baumgarten, Aesthetica (Halle, 1750), §560, p. 363.12 Christian Wolff, Psychologia empirica (Frankfurt, 1732), §580, p. 440.

goal are aisthesis, sensitive perception, and the cultivation of the inner powers ofrepresentation. The central subject-matter of Baumgarten’s Aesthetica is, then, theconfused representations which possess what he calls ‘extensive clarity’ (repres-entatio confusa, extensive clarior).13 ‘Confused’ means here of course not a mentaldefect but a specific property of this class of representations: it is impossible todivide them into smaller entities or components, they must be dealt with as thecomplex assemblages that they are. And exactly this is the task of the cognitiosensitiva which Baumgarten defines as follows: ‘COGNITIO SENSITIVA est a potioridesumpta denominatione complexus repraesentationum infra distinctionemsubsistentium’ [‘sensitive knowledge is complex representation below thethreshold where the analytical separation of discrete elements of that repres-entation becomes possible’].14

Baumgarten’s Aesthetica is then a philosophy of a specific manner of graspingreality, grounded in essentially sensuous, sensitive experience and representation.This is exactly the task Baumgarten’s Aesthetica is intended to fulfil: thedevelopment and perfection of the capacity for sensitive cognition as such. Or, asBaumgarten puts it himself: ‘Aestheticis finis est perfectio cognitionis sensitivae,qua talis. Haec autem est pulcritido’ [‘The aim of aesthetics as a discipline is thedevelopment and improvement of the sensitive knowledge’].15 We should reflecton the last part of the first sentence: qua talis means ‘as such’, and with thisBaumgarten wishes to make clear, firstly, that the cognitio sensitiva is a (relatively)independent phenomenon and subject of philosophical interest, and secondlythat the cognitio sensitiva produces knowledge and concepts different in qualityfrom logical knowledge and concepts. Moreover, in making every effort to meetthe goal of perfect sensitive cognition, we experience what he calls beauty,pulchritudo.

III. BEAUTY (PULCHRITIDO) AS THE BASIC CONCEPT OF BAUMGARTEN’S AESTHETICA

AND PERFECTIO AS A CENTRAL PERENNIAL TASK

In connection with the above quotation from paragraph 14 of Baumgarten’sAesthetica I should add some more remarks on Baumgarten’s concepts of beauty(pulchritudo) and completion (perfectio). The concept of beauty has had aremarkable career in aesthetics since the eighteenth century. But Baumgartenintroduced and used this concept in his Aesthetica in a very special manner, ratherdifferent from the psychologized versions of mainstream aesthetics and ordinarylanguage. In Baumgarten, beauty still has nothing to do with the feeling ofbeauty: when, for example, we look at a piece of art, beauty is not essentiallyconnected with any feeling of pleasure and delight. In Baumgarten, beauty is

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13 Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Meditationes Philosophicae de Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus (Halle,1735), §§16–18.

14 Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §17, p. 7 (my translation).15 Ibid., §14, p. 6 (my translation).

mainly an intellectual category closely related to his theory of cognition andknowledge.

As Baumgarten shows in his paragraph 14, the perfection of sensitive cognitionis a precondition for beauty. In Baumgarten, perfectio is not a discrete state butrather an activity, an activity that is everlasting. Human beings are thought of asbeing unable to reach finally the state of perfection: they are always on the waytowards it. So Baumgarten formulated perfectio as the perennial task of completingone’s own capabilities, powers, and knowledge. This gives his aesthetics anextraordinary dynamic. Pulchritudo aims at, through perfectio, the whole, theconfused whole [Ganzheit], that is, the whole with all its connections andrelations. The perennial task of perfectio is furthermore to cultivate one’s aware-ness of the ‘other side’: Baumgarten knows that every cognitive activity of man,either logico-rational or sensitive, must be an abstracting activity, depending onand preconditioned by the circumstances of one’s own situation—and thatimplies the task, or, better, the duty, not to take the part for the whole.

This duty is expressed by probably one of the most essential parts of Baum-garten’s definition16 of Aesthetica: his notion of ars pulchre cogitandi,17 the art ofbeautiful thinking. Beautiful thinking is a way of thinking that is very muchaware of and sensitive to its object, and not to the object alone but to all therelations of that object. Of course, this thinking will always be incomplete, sinceman cannot grasp the whole from his limited position. But this view opens atheoretical space for a plurality of possible answers, each of them limited in theirclaims, and that means there is no final, decisive answer. This is indeed aninteresting and still important approach that could have altered the method ofmainstream Enlightenment rationalism, which Isaiah Berlin describes as theone-sided ‘pursuit of the ideal’. According to Berlin, almost all versions ofrationalism are ultimately derived from the so-called ‘Platonic ideal’, consisting ofthree component beliefs:

in the first place that, as in the sciences, all genuine questions must have one trueanswer and one only, all the rest being necessarily errors; in the second place, thatthere must be a dependable path towards the discovery of these truths; in the thirdplace, that the true answers, when found, must necessarily be compatible with oneanother and form a single whole, for one truth cannot be incompatible with another—that we knew a priori.18

Indeed, this rationalism still has its strongholds in both the sciences and the

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16 The definition, given in §1 of the Aesthetica is in full: ‘Aesthetica (theoria liberalium artium,gnoseologia inferior, ars pulchre cogitandi, ars analogi rationis) est scientia cognitionis sensitivae’(Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §1, p. 1).

17 See Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Metaphysica, §533, Aesthetica, §1, respectively.18 Isaiah Berlin, The Pursuit of the Ideal, in Henry Hardy (ed.), The Crooked Timber of Humanity

(Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1990, pp. 5–6).

humanities, and a confrontation with aesthetics, in its capacity as a theory ofcognition and knowledge, could help to make clear that orthodox rationalism is adead end.

IV. ‘PHILOSOPHUS HOMO EST INTER HOMINES’—AN AISTHETIC ANTHROPOLOGY?

‘The problem of the beautiful thus leads not only to the foundation of systematicaesthetics but to the foundation of a new “philosophical anthropology” . . .’19 Iwill finish this paper with a few remarks on Cassirer’s claim that there is thefoundation of a new philosophical anthropology to be found in Baumgarten’sAesthetica and, moreover, on why his image of man could be important for ustoday.

Baumgarten never intended to write abstract theory separated from so-called‘real’ life. In spirit, though not in language and style, his philosophical aestheticsis related to the concrete human being. His image of man is both an applicationof and a precondition for the systematic theory of cognition and knowledgedeveloped in the Aesthetica. Moreover, this image of man suggests a permanentduty for philosophy. How does this come about?

Baumgarten demands clearly that philosophy must be more humanistic, that is,it should find its objects in the sphere of ordinary life and not merely in logic.This demand finds its expression in Baumgarten’s new ideal of humanity,particularly in his image of the philosopher as a man among men—‘philosophushomo est inter homines’.20 According to Baumgarten, the proper felix aestheticusmust not concentrate on the development of particular talents and capabilities.The fulfilment of the duty of philosophy requires that no field of knowledge liefallow and no gift of the mind go unnourished. The philosophical mind must notthink itself above the gifts of intuition and imagination; it must be fully endowedwith these gifts and it must balance them with the gifts of judgement andinterference. The two faces of Baumgarten’s aesthetics—theory of knowledgeand philosophical anthropology—mirror each other. To think beautifully, that is,to grasp the object in a way that acknowledges its embeddedness in the variousrelations that constitute its specific character, unavoidably presupposes a personin a continual process of developing all his powers and senses, and exploringthem in all possible directions.

This, the foundation stone of Baumgarten’s anthropological conception, mustappear quite unorthodox in times like ours, where educational strategies aim tomake young people fit for the labour market, that is, to develop only thoseabilities which promise a ‘return on investment’ in terms of monetary income: allother faculties and senses are devalued and implicitly suppressed. But humanbeings cannot live by breadwinning alone and it is highly problematic to fragment

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19 Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, p. 353.20 Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §6.

human capacities into ‘useful’ and ‘useless’ parts, and to develop them in anunbalanced way. This is the important message of the anthropological side ofBaumgarten’s aesthetics.

V. CONCLUSION

Let me draw a brief conclusion and, for that purpose, address once more, directly,the introductory question why we have reason today to spend time onBaumgarten and his sometimes obscure writings. A main source of inspirationmay lie in Baumgarten’s discovery of sensitive perception both as the essentialfoundation of man’s experience of and access to reality and as an independentprinciple for the shaping and reshaping of realities. Sensitive knowledge, cognitiosensitiva, is an ars in the best and broadest sense of that term in the ancient world.It is not merely passive reception and mimesis but always an active doing andexpressing, an active bringing out of its own objects of knowledge and cognition.Analysis and understanding of the complex spiritual-cultural and symbolichuman worlds require an appropriate methodology, appropriate to the specialconstitution and conditions of the objects within these worlds, particularlyconcepts that are able to express adequately and to mirror the special, theparticular, the single individual, that is, concepts that are able to bring it aboutthat the objects reappear within us; a methodology of individualizing concept-formation beside, not below, the abstracting concept-formation of the ‘hard’sciences. This requires a sharp sensibility on the part of the human being in hisdifficult double position as the creator of culture as well as the discoverer ofcreated cultural achievements, a sensibility that is able to recognize both roles asexpressions of the same poietic capabilities of man. On the other hand, importantmembers of the family of human sciences, for example sociology and, inparticular, my own discipline, economics, have lost the sense that, for them assciences of the sense-bestowing activities of man, questions of meaning, inter-pretation, and sense should be core themes. Instead they are unduly preoccupiedby the highly abstract and formalistic thinking of the so-called ‘hard’ sciences anda corresponding concept of rationality that leaves almost no space for questions ofthe understanding of expression, sense, and meaning. This makes us forget thatsense is essentially achieved by sensibility. Baumgarten expanded the scope ofknowledge dramatically and in exciting ways. He regards asthetics as a legitimatesui generis source of knowledge—and presents this form of knowledge as morepractically effective ultimately than all a priori rational concepts.

Progress within the human sciences, that is, the anthropological sciences,depends on nothing so much as the deepening of insight into the conditions ofknowledge and cognition. Given Baumgarten’s unremitting emphasis on theproductive importance of every form of knowledge and cognition, and on thedangers of granting overarching authority to abstract mathematical knowledge,we have every reason for coming to terms with his work and with his approach.

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In our own times we too experience—and suffer from—the dominating power ofthe quantitative and mathematico-logical principles of thought.21

Steffen W. Gross, Wolfson College, Oxford OX2 6UD, UK. Email: stephen.gross@wolfson.oxford.ac.uk

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21 I am indebted to my colleague Dr Henry Hardy of Wolfson College, Oxford, for useful commentson the first draft of this paper.