Ideal Embodiment: Kant's Theory of Sensibility

7. Aesthetics of the Body

7 Aesthetics of the Body Enlightenment is not a place, no use rushing to get there —anne carson, Plainwater in the conclusion of the meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (1735) and then in his Aesthetica (1750/58), Baumgarten proposes the idea of a new scientific discipline that should parallel and complement logic by presenting a theory of “sensible cognition.” According to Baumgarten’s famous definition, “Aesthetica (theoria liberalium artium, gnoseologia inferior, ars pulchre cogitandi, ars analogi rationis) est scientia cognitionis sensitivae.”1 Following the ideal of science promoted by German eighteenth-century scholasticism, “aesthetics” must be developed as “science ,” address the “lower faculties of the soul,” function as “lower gnoseology ,” and thereby work as an analogon rationis. Within the framework of his theory of knowledge, for which Baumgarten introduces the neologism gnoseologia, aesthetics is the “science of sensible cognition” and parallels logic as the sci­ ence of rational cognition. Sensitivus is the Latin translation of the Greek aisthetikos, out of which Baumgarten coins the Graecism aesthetica. The term is thereby introduced for the first time in philosophy as the title for an independent discipline. Baumgarten’s aesthetics has the merit of promoting the topic of sensibility to a dignity of its own. Thereby, he rehabilitates the lowest, darkest region of the soul—the fundus animae or grunt der sêle, which after Eckhart and departing from his view came to designate the confused and inscrutable depths of the soul. In Wolff’s empirical psychology, the 198 The Body reflected “kingdom of darkness (regnum tenebrarum)”2 of the soul had a merely negative significance and indicated only a “defect in perception.” Baumgarten is the first to attribute to the sensible representations that populate this realm—and remained ignored, on his account, by most philosophers3 —the positive meaning of Eckhart’s fundus animae. In Eckhart’s doctrine, however, the grunt der sêle is neither the lowest part nor the most obscure region of the soul. It is, on the contrary, the pure light that is immediate knowledge of itself and of all things, the source of all the faculties of the soul and its innermost essence, the point of utmost proximity to god, and the place of the subject’s pure self-determination. Moreover, in Eckhart’s view, the grunt der sêle escapes any ontological or psychological hierarchy, for hierarchization can only concern the soul’s faculties, not their uncreated source (their grunt). Scholastic anthropology and psychology later imposed on Eckhart’s original idea the hierarchy of lower and higher (inferior and superior) faculties of the soul that is still alive in Kant’s writings.4 Following this tradition, Baumgarten places the Grund der Seele at the bottom of the hierarchy, and yet recognizes, against Wolff, both its cognitive accessibility and its specific and positive content. Thereby the sphere of aesthetics marks the lowest limit of cognition and the origin of a peculiar impetus aestheticus.5 Baumgarten offers a rationalistic approach to an issue that traditionally led either to the assimilation of sensibility to logic or to epistemological skepticism. In the first case, since sense-apprehension and concept-formation are not distinct in kind but merge psychologically into each other, sensibility loses its autonomy with regard to the higher concept. In the second case, the uncorrectable subjectivity and relativity of sensibility lends itself to the skeptical doubt that undermines the truth of sensible cognition. In the Leibnizian tradition endorsed by Baumgarten, sensible representations are the most indistinct and confused ideas. Sensible cognition deals with ideas or representations that can never be distinct—even though they may very well be clear. It is precisely the clarity of indistinct representations that constitutes the “perfection” of sensible cognition.6 Here Baumgarten takes up Leibniz’s doctrine and claims that sensible perfection is “beauty.” Thereby, the important link between sensible cognition and the idea of the beautiful is established for the first time under the name of aesthetics. Baumgarten’s aesthetics is based upon two general assumptions rooted in the tradition of German scholasticism. First, as a branch of “gnoseology,” aesthetics admits sensibility in science exclusively with regard to the cognitive faculty and in relation to its cognitive function. To the extent that the dark region of the soul can be cognitively explored, it can also, at the same time, be aesthetics of the body 199 brought to the light of reason whereby darkness is fully dissipated. Second, despite its...