Diotima's Children: German Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing (review)

This book, by a well-known scholar of German Idealism, German classics, and Romanticism, comes as a surprise. Why would anyone who knows Kant and his followers so well want to go back to pre-Kantian aesthetics and thus to dogmatism? But it happens, and Beiser turns to Wolff, Gottsched, Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, and Lessing with a fresh eye, which leads him to surprising, even breathtaking insights. In the introduction, he writes, "The more we re-examine the objections made against the rationalist tradition by its two most powerful critics—Kant and Nietzsche—the more we see that they are groundless." Then on page 23, we read, "Kant's historical sketch was as misleading as it was self-serving." And as for Kant's critique of Mendelssohn, uncritically seen as definitive for the last two hundred years, Beiser calls even this into question: "The Kantian interpretation of Mendelssohn is shamelessly biased, not to mention anachronistic. It simply begs the question to make Kant the standard of Mendelssohn's contribution to aesthetics" (199).

This book represents a revolution in the historiography of German aesthetics and philosophy, shaped and canonized since Kant and Hegel. However, its provocative statements are simply the result of carefully rereading the long-dismissed pre-Kantian thinkers and of trying to understand them from the perspective of the questions which originally motivated their thinking. The result is the most informative and comprehensive presentation of German aesthetics and philosophy from Leibniz to Kant available today, one that can finally replace Beck's Kant and his Predecessors.

Kant scholarship has already turned to Alexander Baumgarten and his friend, Friedrich Georg Meier, thanks to Kant's obvious interest in their writings. But these authors were read through Kantian glasses and not understood from their own perspectives. Beiser begins his presentation with Leibniz, whom he rightly calls the grandfather of German aesthetics, even though he never wrote any complete text on beauty or the arts. However, Leibniz's terminology of "obscure," "clear and confused," and "clear and distinct" ideas, connected with his epistemology, became the basis upon which all German philosophers, including Kant, discussed our perception of beauty and the sublime. Indeed, unfamiliarity with this Leibnizian terminology has sometimes led to error in the translation of Kant's terminology into English.

While Leibniz is generally highly regarded, this is not at all true for Christian Wolff; no one reads Wolff, it seems, except in order to slander him for writing weighty but pointless books. He is considered the paradigmatic dogmatic philosopher. Not so in the estimation of Beiser, who takes Wolff absolutely seriously and gives a fascinating presentation of Wolff's innovative approach to understanding our striving for beauty. The most exciting part of the chapter on Wolff is Beiser's explanation of Wolff's theory of the arts. This is followed by chapters on Gottsched, Baumgarten, Winckelmann, Mendelssohn, and Lessing, each written in a way that shows Beiser's intimate familiarity with the sources. There is no chapter on Bodmer and Breitinger, although there is one about their often-misinterpreted battle with Gottsched.

It is difficult to quibble with such a solid presentation of eighteenth-century German aesthetics, but the author himself raises the question of whether Winckelmann really does belong to aesthetic rationalism. While acknowledging Winckelmann's strong opposition to Wolff and the latter's geometrical method, Beiser still wants Winckelmann to be part of the rationalist movement because of his great impact on aesthetic rationalists like Mendelssohn and Lessing. But the latter authors were influenced by other opponents of rationalism as well, without giving up their basic arguments. What is more puzzling, though, is Beiser's image of the aesthetic rationalists as Diotima's children: he rightly points to their emphasis on the continuity between reason and erōs, which he sees rooted in Plato. While this is certainly right for Winckelmann, I cannot see the same emphasis on erōs in aesthetic rationalism. I would not...