Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb

« of the connection of the images and resemblance between images.

Such wholes are simple or complex, but since complexity is understood as having many themes, not parts, simplicity is an aesthetic virtue.

Perceptions and images (which are secondary perceptions) are confused representations because they are not abstract, intelligible forms, which alone would be conceptually distinct.

But while they lack intensional clarity, they may have great extensional clarity, and may form thematic wholes based on resemblance, the connection of the images, and ordering of the sensate elements.

Baumgarten applied this scheme to poetry and poetic language in his Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (1735, translated as Reflections on Poetry ), and he suggested ways in which it would also apply to painting, sculpture and music.

His goal was a science of the perceptual realm that would parallel the more precise sciences of metaphysics and logic. 2 Aesthetic implications A number of points in Baumgarten's aesthetics bear on later developments in aesthetics.

He focused on the affective side of perception.

Sensate representations are ‘marked degrees of pleasure or pain' (1735: 47 ).

Stronger impressions are more poetic because their impressions are extensively clearer ( 1735: 27 ).

On the other hand, Baumgarten distinguished aesthetic effects quantitatively, not qualitatively.

It is not that feelings of pleasure are intrinsically valuable, but that more effects contribute to a greater perfection of the discourse.

The closest that Baumgarten came to a qualitative aesthetic is in his discussion of ‘the wonderful' , which he characterized as an intuitive grasp of the inconceivable that is not present in perception ( 1735: 53 ).

He was obviously trying to account for the sense of awe or wonder that is one of the classical marks of the sublime, yet he still explained it in essentially quantitative terms.

The wonderful is an intuition of something that is not present.

Hence it is an added element in the aesthetic.

It depends on a mixture of the unfamiliar and the familiar, and since it cannot be traced to sense impressions, gives a scope to the imagination it would not otherwise have.

However, it provides little justification for promoting feeling directly to prominence.

Baumgarten is at the opposite extreme from Friedrich Schleiermacher in his regard for intuitive feeling. Baumgarten also gave scope to the imagination in a way that reveals a contrast with later exaltations of imagination as the aesthetic faculty.

The imagination is productive of fictions.

But fictions are categorized in terms of possible worlds.

True fictions are possible in this world.

The imagination may go beyond what is actually perceived to what may very well be the case.

When a painter poses figures to construct a tableau, his painting is a fiction, but a possible representation of an actual event.

There could be such an event, and for all we know, this is how it may have looked.

Fictions per se , however, are impossible in this world.

They may be divided into those which are impossible in all worlds, called utopian fictions, and those which are impossible in this world but possible in some world, called heterocosmic fictions.

There are no centaurs, and such combinations are biologically impossible.

But they are nevertheless possible in some world, whereas a round square is not possible. »