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Kant and Herder on Baumgarten's Aesthetica

while philosophers since antiquity have offered reflections and theories on subjects such as the beautiful, the sublime, art, and its appreciation, “aesthetics” as a discipline in its own right dates back only to the second half of the eighteenthcentury. We owe to Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762) the introduction of ‘aesthetics’ into philosophical discourse. At the moment of its inception, however, this discipline had little to do with art and was not primarily concerned with the beautiful. it was instead a theory of the cognitive value of human sensibility—a doctrine of “sensible cognition.” A general historical and systematic question presents itself at this point: How shall human sensibility be conceived in order for aesthetics as a theory of sensibility to gain an independence of its own in philosophical discourse? And accordingly: How shall the human being be conceived in order for our aesthetic experience to claim a philosophical value of its own? in this essay, i elaborate the results of the hypothesis that i submit in response to these questions.1 My claim is that the mind/body dualism dominating the rationalist tradition of modern philosophy is the principal obstacle preventing aesthetics from becoming an independent science of human sensibility.2 in the rationalist tradition within which Baumgarten’s work is placed, truth concerns the higher cognitive faculty. Besides logic, the investigation of this faculty occupies the discipline of psychology traditionally divided into rational and empirical psychology. While rational psychology abstracts from sensibility in dealing with a disembodied metaphysical soul and its properties, empirical psychology is still viewed as a branch of metaphysics bound to the reduction of all faculties to the theoretical one. Such a view prevents the important results of empirical research from connecting to fields such as history, anthropology, and moral philosophy in a way that can positively defy the charge of materialism and the attacks of skepticism.