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15 ChAPter 1 The Modern Philosophical concept of the Aesthetic The approach based on engaging ancient or medieval texts using the modern notion of aesthetics as a starting point of the dialogue still faces a challenge: in order to proceed with a dialogue, one must delimit the field, which, in the case of aesthetics, has been traditionally extremely broad. is it possible to establish certain common characteristics of the concept of the aesthetic that have developed in the Western european philosophical tradition since the time when the principles of aesthetics as a separate discipline were formulated in the eighteenth century by Alexander Baumgarten?1 Aesthetics as a separate discipline appears against the general intellectual background of its time: the increased significance of the human point of view over the divine (the “withdrawal of the divine”) and greater value accorded to sensibility.2 still retaining an earlier bias that favors the rational element, in the introductory chapter to his Aesthetics, Baumgarten discusses the position of aesthetics in relation to rationality and truth. in order for aesthetics to be justified as a separate science, it must be in some way concerned with cognition or truth.3 Following this train of thought, aesthetics is defined as a “lower1 . Although the following sketch of the formation and development of aesthetic thought was developed independently from any consideration of von Balthasar’s work, the latter discusses most of the same authors in his account in Glory of the Lord, vol. 5 (GL5; see Appendix to chapter 2). in particular, he notes the importance of schelling’s view of aesthetics to his own project in GL1 in GL5 566–67. A recent study examines much the same list of authors, and also explains why it is important to look at the german tradition in aesthetics: k. hammermeister , The German Aesthetic Tradition (cambridge: cambridge University Press, 2002). 2. cf. Ferry, Homo Aestheticus; my understanding of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetics is greatly influenced by his account. Also cf. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-garde. 3. truth in this case is understood without doubt as “correctness” or “correspondence”: 16 -The contemporary horizon level epistemology” (gnoseologia inferior),4 “art of the analogue of reason” (ars analogi rationis), or “science of sensory cognition” (scientia cognitionis sensitivae).5 Baumgarten tries to avoid presenting the subject of his science , which he describes as “sensible things, phantasms, fables, perturbations of affections,” as unworthy of a philosopher’s attention on account of its concern with the “lower” region of the human faculties (§6, p. 4). The task of the new science, he says, is to “extend correct knowledge even beyond the boundaries of things clearly known to us” (§ 3, p. 3). The “analogue of reason,” central to Baumgarten, implies not inferiority to reason but similarity to it. Aesthetics must strive for the “perfection of sensory cognition,” which is beauty (pulchritudo, §14, p. 10), and avoid its imperfection, which is ugliness (deformitas). Baumgarten is anxious to assign to aesthetics its own separate area: it will occupy a middle position between proper cognition (rationality) on the one hand and sense impulses on the other.6 in accordance with the task of elevating aesthetics to the level of science , Baumgarten tries to show that aesthetics, too, possesses its own “truth,” which he calls “aesthetic truth” (veritas aesthetica). “Metaphysical truth” (the most general category) sometimes presents itself to the “intellect”—in the case “when it resides in the things clearly perceived by the soul”—and then it appears as logical, and “sometimes—to the analogue of reason and the lower faculties of cognition,” and then it appears as aesthetic (§424, p. 54). While “logical meditations,” he writes, “aspire to the clear and intellectual perception of things,” aesthetic meditations , “subsisting below the horizon of the former, try to intuit the same things in an elegant way by means of the senses and the analogue of see a discussion of the meanings of the term “truth” in M. heidegger, “The origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by A. hofstadter (new york: harper & Row, 1971), 50–52. heidegger does not understand truth in art and aesthetics in this way (see the end of this chapter). cf. the discussion of the various meanings of truth below in chapter 4. 4. “lower-level” here is simply a reference to the “lower” realm of the senses with which it deals, not to the lower status of aesthetics as a science. 5. A. g. Baumgarten, Theoretische Ästhetik: Die grundlegenden Abschnitte...

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