The Emergence of Modern Aesthetic Theory: Religion and Morality in Enlightenment Germany and Scotland by Simon Grote (review)

In The Emergence of Modern Aesthetic Theory, Simon Grote proposes an alternative to conventional explanations for the appearance and development of philosophical aesthetics over the course of the 1700s. Most of those explanations, as Grote points out in the introduction, are essentially archaeologies of the immensely influential aesthetics defined by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). In other words, they work by cherry-picking ideas from the works of thinkers active in the early 1700s for arguments that seem to foreshadow the ones that Kant would articulate later in the century. In this book, by contrast, Grote develops a contextual explanation, detailing the contemporary intellectual controversies propelling the emergence of what would later be understood as aesthetic theory.

Grote's approach offers a convincing alternative to prevailing narratives in the history of aesthetics. Consider his treatment of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762), the figure usually credited with introducing the term 'aesthetics' into the lexicon of European philosophy. It is usually argued that Baumgarten turned to aesthetics because he wanted to extend Christian Wolff's (1679–1754) philosophical project, with its expectation that all human knowledge could be made mathematically or logically certain, to include poetry and the other fine arts. By contrast, Grote shows that both Wolff and Baumgarten were participants in a diffuse but nonetheless pervasive debate about the foundations of morality. With a long history in Protestant theology, this debate concerned the depravity of human nature and the question of whether compulsion was needed to make individuals turn away from evil. Are we so degenerate that we can only behave well if forced to do so by an external agent, threatening us with rewards and punishments in the afterlife? Or do we possess instead an internal sense of morality that makes it possible for us to pursue virtue without needing the motivation supplied by a divine legislator and his menaces?

Identifying Baumgarten as a participant in this debate, Grote interprets the emergence of modern aesthetic theory as an outgrowth of the theological and moral concerns that preoccupied the intellectuals affiliated with the Protestant universities of northern Germany. This interpretation reveals how important religious models of experience and persuasion were to the development of a field still too often regarded as fundamentally secular in its orientation. Far from seeking simply to make poetry into an object of knowledge, Baumgarten built on the works of Pietist theologians such as August Hermann Francke (1663-1727). Those theologians sought out ways of provoking what they termed aisthēsis—the experiential state aroused when individuals "perceive[d] […] the affections of the sanctified people whose words are recorded in the Bible" (76). Appropriating both the term 'aesthetic' and his approach to moral persuasion from those thinkers, Baumgarten theorised the causes and experience of beauty because he wanted to show that poetry—especially the poetry of the Bible—could exercise a salutary effect on the lower faculties and their appetites. Through poetry, he suggested, individuals could cultivate an innate disposition to good conduct, activating a latent tendency to take pleasure in virtue.

Grote uses the second half of the book, moreover, to show that at a version of this debate on the causes of morality had a remarkably similar role in the emergence of aesthetic thought in Scotland at around the same time. Focusing once again on thinkers associated with the universities, he shows that the debate in this case turned on the question of whether it was possible to separate pleasure from self-interest, and thus the disinterested pursuit of virtue from behaviour motivated by the prospect of rewards and punishments. As in the section on Germany, Grote sheds light on the terms of this debate by placing well-known figures such as Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746) and David Hume (1711-1776) into conversation with contemporaries who are now far less famous. Chief among them is William Cleghorn (1718-1754), a philosopher known today less...