Beyond Wolff

With the decline of Wolffianism after 1754, German philosophy was for a time at loose ends. The decline was prompted not only by the criticisms offered by the Thomasians, but also by the internal developments of Wolffianism proposed by various of Wolff's disciples. Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768), for instance, developed a rationalist critique of revelation, arguing that for the rational person religion had to be based on reason (Apologie oder Schützschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes, published posthumously). Others began to extend Wolffianism into areas Wolff himself had not considered, thereby contributing to significant development. Here the area of aesthetics is paramount. Moreover, by the middle of the 18^th century, French and English (particularly) Scottish philosophy (Hume's Inquiry, Locke's Essay along with other texts by Hume, Reid, Hutcheson, Beattie, Condillac) began to be available in translation, thus offering a clear (empiricist) alternative to Wolffian rationalism. These texts were immensely influential. Recall Kant's claim that his recollection of David Hume had awoken him from his dogmatic slumber (Prolegomena, Ak. IV, 260). The empiricists, for instance Feder and Garve also played a significant role in early Kant-criticism (see Sassen, Kant's Early Critics). By and large, the period of 18^th century German philosophy after 1750 and before 1781 was a period not of any one dominant school, but of individuals loosely associated with a number of different trends. Among individuals who cannot be clearly assigned anywhere were Johann Heinrich Lambert, Moses Mendelssohn and Johann Nikolaus Tetens. Not either Thomasians or Wolffians, they must be considered in relation to Kant's pre-critical and critical philosophy, not from the point of view of German philosophy prior to Kant.

4.1 Aesthetics

Even though Wolff sought to integrate virtually all aspects of philosophy into his system, he had nothing to say about the philosophy of art. In some way this is not surprising if we consider that in the Germany of the early Enlightenment, the arts, particularly poetry and literature, were as good as nonexistent. The German literary greats had not even been born when Wolff wrote his German texts (Lessing was born in 1729, Herder in 1744, Goethe in 1749). First to develop a theory of the arts, particularly poetry, was Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700-1766), who published his ‘Critical Poetry’ (Versuch einer critischen Dichtkunst vor die Deutschen) in 1730. Treating poetry scientifically, he set out a set of rules that were to guide the composition. Given his conception of what a poem was (a moral fable) and given as well his idea of what was involved in its composition (a set of rules), there was little room here for beauty and even less for sentiment and inspiration. But sentiment and inspiration was precisely the direction in which poetry was going by the middle of the century. Gottsched's Wolffian philosophy of poetry, accordingly, was quickly supplanted by Johann Jakob Breitinger's Critische Abhandlung (1740), a book that emphasized the a posteriori experience of poetry, not its rule-bound composition.

A quasi-Wolffian synthesis of these two approaches was brought about by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714-1762), probably Wolff's most famous disciple. Baumgarten produced two major texts, his metaphysics in 1739 (Metaphysica), which Kant would use as a textbook, and, in 1750 and 1758, his aesthetics (Aesthetica). That he designated the term ‘aesthetics’ to identify the philosophy of art, particularly poetry, would hardly be thought important had he done nothing else. However, in developing the ‘field’ of aesthetics, he also contributed significantly to the study of the senses. Whereas Wolff had conceived of the senses merely as providing the raw material for processing, a task performed by understanding and governed by the rules of logic, Baumgarten thought that the senses had their own rules and their own perfection, rules and perfection that differ from logical rules and the knowledge generated by logical processing. The rules of sensation are studied by the science of perception, which Baumgarten called aesthetics. But aesthetics is also the study of poetry. In Reflections on Poetry he set out the notion of aesthetic clarity. Although poetic representations are confused representations (§14, 42), they have sensuous clarity. Baumgarten identified this clarity as extensive clarity to differentiate it from the intensive clarity of logic (§17, 43). Appealing to the senses, poetic representation can be more illuminating than representations produced by logical processing and reasoning. Moreover, appealing to the affects, such representations are connected to pleasure. One cannot but see the influence that Baumgarten likely had on Kant's critical philosophy -- his vindication of the senses reappears in an inherently Kantian way both in the Transcendental Aesthetic of the Critique of Pure Reason and in the Critique.

Date: 2014-12-21; view: 1197