IV

ÆSTHETIC IDEAS IN THE CARTESIAN AND LEIBNITIAN SCHOOLS, AND THE "ÆSTHETIC" OF BAUMGARTEN

The obscure world of wit, taste, imagination, feeling and the je ne sais quoi was not selected for examination or even, so to speak, included in the picture of Cartesian philosophy. The French philosopher abhorred imagination, the outcome, according to him, of the agitation of the animal spirits: and though not utterly condemning poetry, he allowed it to exist only in so far as it was guided by intellect, that being the sole faculty able to save men from the caprices of the folle du logis. He tolerated it, but that was all; and went so far as not to deny it anything "qu'un philosophe lui puisse permettre sans offenser sa conscience."[1] It has been observed that the æsthetic parallel with Cartesian intellectualism is to be found in Boileau,[2] slave to rigid raison ("Mais nous que la raison à ses règles engage ...") and enthusiastic partisan of allegory. We have already had occasion to draw attention to the diatribe of Malebranche against imagination. The mathematical spirit fostered in France by Descartes forbade all possibility of a serious consideration of poetry and art. The Italian Antonio Conti, living in that country and witness of the literary disputes raging around him, thus describes the French critics (La Motte, Fontenelle and their followers): "Ils ont introduit dans les belles lettres l'esprit et la méthode de M. Descartes; et ils jugent de la poésie et de l'éloquence indépendamment des qualités sensibles. De là vient aussi qu'ils confondent le progrès de la philosophie avec celui des arts. Les modernes, dit l'Abbé Terrasson, sont plus grands géomètres que les anciens: donc ils sont plus grands orateurs et plus grands poètes."[3] The fight against this mathematical spirit in the matters of art and feeling was still going on in France in the day of the encyclopædists; the din of the battle was heard in Italy, as is shown by the writings of Bettinelli and others. At the time when Du Bos published his daring book there was a counsellor in the parliament of Bordeaux, Jean-Jacques Bel by name, who composed a dissertation (1726) against the doctrine that feeling should be the judge of art.[4]

Cartesianism was incapable of an Æsthetic of imagination. The Traité du beau by the eclectic Cartesian J. P. de Crousaz (1715), maintained the dependence of beauty not upon pleasure or feeling, matters about which there can be no difference of opinion, but upon that which can be approved and therefore reduced to ideas. He enumerates five such ideas: variety, unity, regularity, order and proportion, observing, "La variété tempérée par l'unité, la régularité, l'ordre et la proportion, ne sont pas assurément des chimères; elles ne sont pas du ressort de la fantaisie, ce n'est pas le caprice qui en décide": for him, that is to say, they were real qualities of the beautiful founded in nature and truth. He discovered similar characteristics of the beautiful in the individual beauties of the sciences (geometry, algebra, astronomy, physics, history), of virtue, eloquence and religion, finding in each the qualities laid down above.[5] Another Cartesian, the Jesuit André (1742),[6] distinguished between an essential beauty, independent of every institution, human and even divine; a natural beauty, independent of the opinions of mankind; and, lastly, a beauty to a certain extent arbitrary and of human invention: the first composed of regularity, order, proportion and symmetry (here André relied upon Plato and also as an afterthought brought in St. Augustine's definition): the second having its principal measure in the light which generates colours (as a good Cartesian, he took full advantage of Newton's discoveries): the third belonging to fashion and convention, but never at liberty to violate essential beauty. Each of these three forms of beauty was subdivided into sensible beauty pertaining to bodies, and intelligible beauty of soul.

Like Descartes in France, Locke in England (1690) is an intellectualist, and recognizes no form of spiritual elaboration save reflexion on the senses. None the less he takes over from contemporary literature the distinction between wit and judgement; according to him the former combines ideas with pleasing variety, discovering their similarities and relations and thus grouping them into beautiful pictures which divert and strike the imagination: the latter (judgement or intellect) seeks dissimilarities, guided by the criterion of truth. "The mind, without looking any further, rests satisfied with the agreeableness of the picture, and the gaiety of the fancy; and it is a kind of an affront to go about to examine it by the severe rules of truth and good reason; whereby it appears that it consists in something that is not perfectly conformable to them."[7] England produced philosophers who developed an abstract and transcendent Æsthetic, but one more tinged with sensationalism than that of the French Cartesians. Shaftesbury (1709) raises taste to a sense or instinct for the beautiful; a sense of order and proportion identical with moral sense and, with its preconceptions or presentations, anticipating the recognition of reason. Bodies, spirits, God are the three degrees of beauty.[8] Lineal descendant of Shaftesbury was Francis Hutcheson (1723), who succeeded in popularizing the idea of an inward sense of beauty as something intermediate between sense and reason, and adapted to distinguish unity in variety, concord in the manifold, the true, the beautiful and the good in their substantial identity. Hutcheson maintains that from this sense springs the pleasure we take in art, in imitation and in the likeness between copy and original: the last a relative, as distinct from an absolute, beauty.[9] This view on the whole predominated in England during the eighteenth century and was adopted by Adam Smith as well as by Reid, head of the Scottish school.

Much more thoroughly and with much greater philosophical vigour Leibniz opened the door to that crowd of psychic facts from which Cartesianism recoiled in horror. In his conception of the real, governed by the law of continuity (natura non facit saltus), presenting an uninterrupted scale of existence from the lowest beings to God, imagination, taste, wit and the like found ample room for shelter. The facts now called æsthetic were identified by Leibniz with Descartes' confused cognition, which might be clear without being distinct: scholastic terms borrowed, it would appear, from Duns Scotus, whose works were reprinted and widely read in the seventeenth century.[10]

In his De cognitione, veritate et ideis (1684), after dividing cognitio into obscura vel clara, the clara into confusa vel distincta, and the distincta into adaequata vel inadaequata, Leibniz remarks that while painters and other artists are able to judge works of art very fairly they can give no reason for their decisions, and if questioned as to the reason of their condemnation of any work of art, they reply it lacks a je ne sais quoi: ("at iudicii sui rationem reddere saepe non posse, et quaerenti dicere, se in re, quae displicet, desiderare nescio quid").[11] They do possess, in fact, clear cognition, but confused and not distinct; what we should call to-day imaginative, not ratiocinative, consciousness: and indeed the latter does not exist in the case of art. There are things impossible to define: "on ne les fait connaître que par des exemples, et, au reste, il faut dire que c'est un je ne sais quoi, jusqu'à ce qu'on en déchiffre la contexture."[12] But these perceptions confuses ou sentiments have "plus grande efficacité que l'on ne pense: ce sont elles qui forment ce je ne sais quoi, ces goûts, ces images des qualités des sens."[13] Whence it appears plainly that in his discussion of these perceptions Leibniz reposes upon the æsthetic theories we discussed in the preceding chapter; indeed at one point[14] he mentions Bouhours' book.

It might seem that by according claritas and denying distinctio to æsthetic facts Leibniz recognized that their peculiar character is neither sensuous nor intellectual. He might seem to have distinguished them by their "claritas" from pleasure or sense-motions, and from intellect by their lack of "distinctio." But the "lex continui" and the Leibnitian intellectualism forbid this interpretation. In this case obscurity and clarity are quantitative degrees of one single consciousness, distinct or intellectual, towards which both converge and with which in the extreme case they unite.

To admit that artists judge with confused perceptions, clear but not distinct, does not involve denying that these perceptions may be capable of being connected and verified by intellectual consciousness. The self-same object that is confusedly though clearly recognized by imagination is recognized clearly and distinctly by the intellect; which amounts to saying that a work of art may be perfected by being determined by thought. In the very terminology adopted by Leibniz, who represents sense and imagination as obscure and confused, there is a tinge of contempt, as well as the suggestion of a single form of all cognition. This will help us to understand Leibniz' definition of music as "exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi." Elsewhere he says: "Le but principal de l'histoire, aussi bien que de la poésie, doit être d'enseigner la prudence et la vertu par des exemples, et puis de montrer le vice d'une manière qui en donne l'aversion et qui porte ou serve à l'éviter."[15]

The "claritas" attributed to æsthetic fact is not specifically different from, but rather a partial anticipation of, the "distinctio" of intellect. Undoubtedly this distinction of degree marks a great advance: but careful analysis shows that Leibniz does not differ fundamentally from those who, by inventing the new words and empirical distinctions examined above, called attention to the peculiarities of æsthetic facts.

We find the same invincible intellectualism in the speculations on language greatly in vogue at the time. When critics of the Renaissance and sixteenth century tried to rise above merely empirical and practical grammar and strove to reduce grammatical science to a systematic form, they fell into logicism and described grammatical forms by such terms as pleonastic, improper, metaphorical or elliptic. Thus Julius Cæsar Scaliger (1540); thus, too, the most learned of all, Francisco Sanchez (Sanctius or Sanzio), called Brocense, who, in his Minerva (1587), asserts that names are attached to things by reason, exclusive of interjections which are not parts of speech but merely sounds expressive of joy or sorrow; he denies the existence of heterogeneous and heteroclitic words, and works out a system of syntax by means of four figures of construction, proclaiming the principle "doctrinam supplendi esse valde necessarium," that is to say, that grammatical diversities must be explained as ellipsis, abbreviation or omission with reference to the typical logical form.[16] Gaspare Scioppio follows him exactly, abusing the old grammar with his accustomed violence and crying up the "Sanctian" method, at that time still almost unknown, in his Grammatica philosophica (1628).[17] Amongst critics of the seventeenth century, Jacopo Perizonio must not be forgotten; he wrote a commentary on Sanchez' book (1687). Amongst recognized philosophers who studied the philosophy of grammar and noted the merits and defects of various tongues, we find Bacon.[18] In 1660 Claude Lancelot and Arnauld brought out the Grammaire générale et raisonnée de Port-Royal, a work applying the intellectualism of Descartes rigorously to grammatical forms, and dominated by the doctrine of the artificial nature of language. Locke and Leibniz both speculated about language,[19] but neither succeeded in creating a fresh point of view, although the latter did much to provoke inquiry into the historical origin of languages. All his life Leibniz cherished the notion of a universal language and of an "ars characteristica universalis" as a combination likely to result in great scientific discoveries: prior to him, Wilkins had fostered the same hope, nor indeed, in spite of its utter absurdity, is it even yet wholly extinct.

In order to correct the æsthetic ideas of Leibniz it was necessary to alter the very foundations of his system, the Cartesianism upon which it rested. This could not be undertaken by disciples of his own personal school, in whom we notice rather an increase of intellectualism. Giving scholastic form to the brilliant observations of the master, Johann Christian Wolff's system began with the theory of knowledge conceived as an "organon" or instrument, followed by systems of natural law, ethics and politics, together constituting the "organon" of practical activity: the remainder was theology and metaphysics, or pneumatology and physics (doctrine of the soul and doctrine of phenomenal nature). Although Wolff distinguishes a productive imagination, ruled by the principle of sufficient reason, from the merely associative and chaotic,[20] yet a science of imagination considered as a new theoretical value could find no niche in his schematism. Knowledge of a lower order, as such, belonged to Pneumatology and was incapable of possessing its own "organon": at most it could be brought under the organon already existing, which corrected and transcended it by means of logical knowledge in the same way in which Ethics treats the "facilitas appetitiva inferior." As in France the poetics of Boileau corresponded with the philosophy of Descartes, so in Germany the rationalistic poetics of Gottsched[21] reflect the Cartesian-Leibnitian theories of Wolff (1729).

It was no doubt dimly seen that even in the inferior faculties some distinction was operative between perfect and imperfect, value and non-value. A passage in a book (1725) by the Leibnitian Bülffinger has often been quoted where he says: "Vellem existerent qui circa facultatem sentiendi, imaginandi, attendendi, abstrahendi et memoriam praestarent quod bonus ille Aristoteles, adeo hodie omnibus sordens, praestitit circa intellectum: hoc est ut in artis formant redigerent quicquid ad illas in suo usu dirigendas et iuvandas pertinet et conducid, quem ad modum Aristoteles in Organo logicam sive facultatem demonstrandi redegit in ordinem."[22] But on reading the extract in its context one recognizes at once that the desired organon would have been merely a series of recipes for strengthening the memory, educating the attention, and so forth: a technique, in a word, not an æsthetic. Similar ideas had been spread in Italy by Trevisano (1708), who, by declaring that the senses might be educated through the mind, asserted the possibility of an art of feeling which should "endow manners with prudence and judgement with good taste."[23] We notice, moreover, that in his day Bülffinger was counted a depreciator of poetry, so much so that a tract against him was written in order to show that "poetry does not diminish the faculty of clear conception."[24] Bodmer and Breitinger were ready "to deduce all the parts of eloquence with mathematical precision" (1727), and the latter sketched a Logic of the Imagination (1740) to which he would have assigned the study of similitudes and metaphors; even had he carried out his project, it is difficult to see how it could have differed materially, from a philosophic point of view, from the treatises on the subject written by the Italian rhetoricians of the seventeenth century.

These discussions and experiments filled the boyhood and helped to form the intellect of young Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten of Berlin, a follower of the philosophy of Wolff and, at the same time, student and teacher of Latin rhetoric and poetry; these studies led him to reconsider the problem and search for some method by which the precepts of rhetoricians could be reduced to a rigorous philosophical system. On taking his doctor's degree in September 1735, when twenty-one years old, he published a thesis Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poēma pertinentibus:[25] in which the word "Æsthetic" appears for the first time as name of a special science.[26] Baumgarten always remained much attached to his youthful discovery, and in 1742 when called to teach at the university of Frankfort-on-the-Oder, and again in 1749, he gave by request a course of lectures on Æsthetic (quaedam consilia dirigendarum facultatum inferiorum novam per acroasin exposuit).[27] In 1750 he printed a voluminous treatise wherein the word "Æsthetic" attained the honours of a title-page;[28] in 1758 he published a more slender second part: illness and finally death in 1762 prevented him from completing the work.

What was Æsthetic to Baumgarten? Its objects are sensible facts (ασθητά), carefully distinguished by the ancients from mental objects (νοητά);[29] hence it becomes scientia cognitionis sensitivae, theoria liberalium artium, gnoseologia inferior, ars pulcre cogitandi, ars analogi rationis[30] Rhetoric and Poetry constitute two special and interdependent disciplines which are entrusted by Æsthetic with the distinction between the various styles in literature and other small differences,[31] for the laws she herself investigates are diffused throughout all the arts like guiding-stars for these various subsidiary arts (quasi cynosura quaedam specialium)[32] and must be extracted not from isolated cases only, or from incomplete induction empirically, but from the totality of facts (falsa regula peior est quant nulla.)[33] Nor must Æsthetic be confounded with Psychology, which furnishes its presuppositions only; an independent science, it gives the norm of sensitive cognition (sensitive quid cognoscendi) and deals with "perfectio cognitionis sensitivae, qua talis," which is beauty (pulcritudo), just as the opposite, imperfection, is ugliness (deformitas)[34] From the beauty of sensitive cognition (pulcritudo cognitionis) we must exclude the beauty of objects and matter (pulcritudo obiectorum et materiae) with which it is often confused owing to habits of language, since it is easy to show that ugly things may be thought of in a beautiful manner and beautiful things in an ugly manner (quacum ob receptam rei significationem saepe sed male confunditur; possunt turpia pulcre cogitare ut talia, et pulcriora turpiter).[35] Poetical representations are confused or imaginative: distinctness, that is intellect, is not poetical. The greater the determination, the greater the poetry; individuals "omnimode determinata" are highly poetical; poetical also are images or phantasms as well as all that appertains to the senses.[36] That which judges sensible or imaginary presentations is taste, or "indicium sensuum." These, in brief, are the truths displayed by Baumgarten in his Meditationes and, with many distinctions and examples, in his Æsthetic.[37]

Nearly all German critics[38] are of opinion that from his own conception of Æsthetic as the science of sensitive cognition Baumgarten should have evolved a species of inductive Logic. But he can be cleared of this accusation: a better philosopher, perhaps, than his critics, he held that an inductive Logic must always be intellectual, since it leads to abstractions and the formation of concepts. The relation existing between "cognitio confusa" and the poetical and artistic facts which belong to the realm of taste had been shown before his day, by Leibniz: neither he nor Wolff nor any other of their school ever dreamed of transforming a treatment of the "cognitio confusa" or "petites perceptions" into an inductive Logic. On the other hand, as a kind of compensation, these critics attribute to Baumgarten a merit he cannot claim, at least to the extent implied by their praises. According to them, he effected a revolution by converting[39] Leibniz' differences of degree or quantitative distinctions into a specific difference, and turning confused knowledge into something no longer negative but positive[40] by attributing a "perfectio" to sensitive cognition qua talis; and by thus destroying the unity of the Leibnitian monad and breaking up the law of continuity, founded the science of Æsthetic. Had he really accomplished such a giant stride, his claim to the title of "father of Æsthetic" would have been placed beyond question. But, in order to win this appellation, Baumgarten ought to have been successful in unravelling all those contradictions in which he was involved no less than Leibniz and all intellectualists. It is not enough to posit a "perfectio"; even Leibniz did that when he attributed claritas to confused cognition, which, when devoid of clearness, remains obscure, that is to say, imperfect. It was imperative that this perfection "qua talis" should be upheld against the "lex continui," and kept uncontaminated by any intellectualistic admixture. Otherwise he was bound to fall back into the pathless labyrinth of the "probable" which is and is not false, of the wit which is and is not intellect, of the taste which is and is not intellectual judgement, of the imagination and feeling which are and are not sensibility and material pleasure. And in that case, notwithstanding the new name: notwithstanding (as we freely admit) the greater insistence than that of Leibniz upon the sensible nature of poetry, Æsthetic, as a science, would not have been born.

Now Baumgarten overcame none of the obstacles above mentioned. Unprejudiced and continued study of his works forces one to this conclusion. Already in his Meditationes he does not seem able to distinguish clearly between imagination and intellect, confused and distinct cognition. The law of continuity leads him to set up a scale of more and less: amongst cognitions, the obscure are less poetical than the confused; the distinct are not poetical, but even those of the higher kinds (that is the distinct and intellectual) are to a certain extent poetical in proportion as they are lower in their nature; compound concepts are more poetical than simple; those of larger comprehension are "extensive clariores."[41] In the Æsthetic Baumgarten expounds his thought more fully and thereby exposes its defects. If the introduction of the book leads one to believe that he sees æsthetic truth to consist in consciousness of the individual, the belief is shattered by the explanations which follow. As a good objectivist he asserts that truth in the metaphysical sense has its counterpart in the soul, namely, subjective truth, logical truth in a wide sense, or æsthetico-logical.[42] And the complete truth lies not in the genus or species, but in the individual. The genus is true, the species more true, the individual most true.[43] Formal logical truth is acquired "cum iactura," by jettisoning much great material perfection: "quid enim est abstractio, si iactura non est?"[44] So much being granted, logical truth differs from æsthetic in this: metaphysical or objective truth is presented now to the intellect, when it is logical truth in a narrow sense; now to the analogy of reason and the lower cognitive faculties, when it is æsthetic;[45] a lesser truth in exchange for the greater which man is not always able to attain, thanks to the "malum metaphysicum."[46] Thus moral truths are comprehended in one fashion by a comic poet, in another by a moral philosopher; an eclipse is described in one way by an astronomer and in another by a shepherd speaking to his friends or his sweetheart.[47] Universals even are accessible, in part at least, to the inferior faculty.[48] Take the case of two philosophers, a dogmatic and a sceptic, arguing, with an æsthete listening to them. If the arguments of either party are so balanced that the hearer cannot determine which is true and which false, this appearance is to him æsthetic truth: if one adversary succeed in overbearing the other so that one argument is shown clearly to be wrong, the error just revealed is likewise æsthetic[49] falsity. Truths strictly æsthetic are (and this is the decisive point) those which appear neither entirely true nor entirely false: probable truths. "Talia autem de quibus non complete quidem certi sumus, neque tamen falsitatem aliquam in iisdem appercipimus, sunt verisimilia. Est ergo veritas æsthetica, a potiori dicta verisimilitudo, ille veritatis gradus, qui, etiamsi non evectus sit ad completam certitudinem, tamen nihil contineat falsitatis observabilis."[50] And especially the immediate sequel: "Cujus habent spectator es auditor esve intra animum quum vident audiuntve, quasdam anticipationes, quod plerumque fit, quod fieri solet, quod in opinione positum est, quod habet ad haec in se quandam similitudinem, sive id falsum (logice et latissime), sive verum sit (logice et strictissime), quod non sit facile a nostris sensibus abhorrens: hoc illud est εἰκός et verisimile quod, Aristotele et Cicerone assentiente, sectetur æstheticus."[51] The probable embraces that which is true and certain to the intellect and the senses, that which is certain to the senses but not to the intellect, that which is probable logically and æsthetically, or logically improbable but æsthetically probable, or, finally, æsthetically improbable but on the whole probable or that whose improbability is not evident.[52] So we reach the admission of the impossible and absurd, the αδύνατον and ἄτοπον of Aristotle.

If after reading these paragraphs, highly important as revealing the true thought of Baumgarten, we turn once more to the Introduction to his work, we notice at once his commonplace and erroneous conception of the poetic faculty. To a friend who suggested that there was no need for him to concern himself with confused or inferior consciousness both because "confusio mater erroris" and because "facilitate inferior es, caro, debellandae potius sunt quam excitandae et confirmandae," Baumgarten replied that confusion is a condition wherein to find truth: that nature makes no sudden leap from obscurity to clarity: that noonday light is reached from night time through the dawn (ex node per auroram meridies): that in the case of the inferior faculties a guide, not a tyrant, is needed (imperium in facilitates inferiores poscitur, non tyrannis).[53] This is still the attitude of Leibniz, Trevisano and Bülffinger. Baumgarten is terrified lest he should be accused of treating subjects unworthy a philosopher. "Quousque tandem" (says he to himself), "dost thou, professor of theoretic and moral philosophy, dare to praise lies and mixtures of true and false as though they were noble works?"[54] And if there is one thing above all others from which he is anxious to guard himself it is sensualism, unbridled and non-moralized. The sensitive perfection of Cartesianism and Wolffianism was liable to be confused with simple pleasure, with the feeling of the perfection of our organism:[55] but Baumgarten falls into no such confusion. When in 1745 one Quistorp combated his æsthetic theory by saying that if poetry consisted in sensuous perfection it was a thing hurtful to men, Baumgarten answered disdainfully that he did not expect he should ever find time to reply to a critic of such calibre as to mistake his "oratio perfecta sensitiva" for an "oratio perfecte (that is omnino) sensitiva."[56]

Save in its title and its first definitions Baumgarten's Æsthetic is covered with the mould of antiquity and commonplace. We have seen that he refers back to Aristotle and Cicero for the first principles of his science; in another instance he attaches his Æsthetic to the Rhetoric of antiquity, quoting the truth enunciated by Zeno the Stoic, "esse duo cogitandi genera, alterum perpetuum et latius, quod Rhetorices sit, alterum concisum et contractius, quod Dialectices," and identifying the former with the æsthetic horizon, the latter with the logical.[57] In his Meditationes he rests upon Scaliger and Vossius;[58] of modern writers beside the philosophers (Leibniz, Wolff, Bülffinger) he quotes Gottsched, Arnold,[59] Werenfels, Breitinger[60]; by means of these latter he is able to make acquaintance with discussions upon taste and imagination, even without direct acquaintance with Addison and Du Bos, as well as the Italians, whose writings had immense vogue in Germany in his day, and with whom his resemblances leap to the eye. Baumgarten always feels himself to be in perfect accord with his predecessors; never at variance with them. He never felt himself to be a revolutionary; and though some have been revolutionaries without knowing it, Baumgarten was not one of them. Baumgarten's works are but another presentation of the problem of Æsthetic still clamouring for solution in a voice so much the stronger as it uttered a commonplace: he proclaims a new science and presents it in conventional scholastic form; the babe about to be born receives the name of Æsthetic by premature baptism at his hands: and the name remains. But the new name is devoid of new matter; the philosophical armour covers no muscular body. Our good Baumgarten, full of ardour and conviction, and often curiously brisk and vivacious in his scholastic Latinism, is a most sympathetic and attractive figure in the history of Æsthetic: of the science in formation, that is to say, not of the science brought to completion: of Æsthetic condenda not condita.