The Founding of Aesthetics in the German Enlightenment: The Art of Invention and the Invention of Art by Stefanie Buchenau (review)

It is widely accepted that when the young Alexander Baumgarten (1714–62) coined the term ‘aesthetics’ in 1735 to characterize his science of perception, the philosophical roots of the nascent discipline had been put down already by writers in France and Britain. Curious then to find Stefanie Buchenau insisting that “philosophical aesthetics is a particular German tradition” (3) with its origins in Christian Wolff (1679–1754) and the first generation of his students. Buchenau claims to find in the Frühaufklärung a “valid and productive, though not fully actualized, conception of art and aesthetics” (1), subsequently obscured by the poor availability of relevant texts, a dearth of translations for non-German/non-Latin readers, and a “standard line of interpretation” that takes Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft and its nineteenth-century aftermath as the fulfillment of a tradition that renders Wolff et al. merely “transitory authors in a linear evolution extending from Leibniz to Kant, Herder, and Hegel” (4–5). At the end (chapter 10), Kant is a villain by association, with Critical philosophy reformulating and supplanting the Wolffian. Buchenau promises to remedy this situation with an “alternative hermeneutic approach” that demonstrates how the Wolffians “pursued a clearly conceived project” (7), one that is “modern … original and productive.” This approach could also aid in discovering forgotten relations between aesthetics and other disciplines, she suggests, and might “provide new historical support for thinking about contemporary options in aesthetics” (1).

This is a tangle of competing theses, although most fall away to reveal at the core a focused attempt to reconstruct the contribution of Wolff and his followers to a range of aesthetic matters. Buchenau begins (chapter 1) with the fall of the scholastic artes disserendi and rise (under the influence of Bacon) of an ars inveniendi that terminates in the modern “liberal arts,” a double movement of art and invention that elicits the chiasmus of the subtitle. Wolff contributes by emphasizing the arts as a realm independent of the sciences with its own distinct cognitive pleasure (chapter 2), and by developing a view of poetry as ars figendi, a method for producing and arranging images through the creative powers of imagination (chapter 3). The latter, Buchenau explains (chapter 4), subsequently became the cause célèbre for Wolff’s students, Johann Jakob Bodmer (1698–1783) and Johann Jakob Breitinger (1701–76) in Switzerland, and Christoph Gottsched (1700–66) in Germany, who together treated poetry as an “imitative art” or “logic of the imagination” (88) aimed at revealing nature through images with a semblance of truth that appealed to an audience’s sensitive faculty. As Buchenau documents subsequently (chapter 5), sibling rivalry eventually undid this common project when Bodmer used the introduction to his translation of Paradise Lost to attack the Milton-deprecating Gottsched and reveal a deep and (unresolved) dialectic between the Swiss, who urged literary criticism be grounded on the judgment of the critic (thesis), and the Germans, adamant that the reaction of a wider audience should be the test of genius (antithesis). In the meantime (chapters 6–7), Baumgarten was busy reinterpreting the ars inveniendi as a “sort of logical activity” (122) and, as Buchenau reads the history, thereby “founding” the “new discipline” of aesthetics (114). Baumgarten observed that both philosophers and poets employ reason, albeit in different ways, the former for conceptual clarification and the latter for intuitive clarity and beauty, a proposal he developed in Aesthetica (1750) by showing philosophy and poetry to be forms of invention with faculties (sensibility and reason) and methods (aesthetics and logic) to match. Contrary to some commentators, Buchenau concludes, Baumgarten amended but never abandoned the idea of reason (chapter 8), and continues to display his modern credentials in recognizing poetry—and aesthetics generally—as a necessary element of moral education (chapter 9).

Readers will learn much about Wolff and his...