Another kind of knowledge

A word from a student’s thesis

In 1735, in the German university town of Halle, a student in his early twenties handed in a master’s thesis on poetry. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten had been born in Berlin in 1714; his father, a garrison preacher, died when he was eight. The thesis is titled Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (Philosophical Reflections on Some Matters Pertaining to the Poem), and near its end, in section 116, he runs into a gap in the map of knowledge. The Greek philosophers and the church fathers, he writes, had always distinguished things perceived by the senses (aisthēta) from things known by the mind (noēta). The second kind has a science, logic. Why, he asks, should the first not have one too? He calls it aesthetica.

The thesis opened a career. Baumgarten began teaching at Halle on its acceptance and, in 1740, took a chair at the university of Frankfurt on the Oder, a small town east of Berlin, where he lived the rest of his life. He began his large treatise on the subject in 1742 and published its first volume there in 1750, from the press of Johann Christian Kleyb, with the title Aesthetica. A second volume followed in 1758 under pressure from the publisher. Both together cover only a little less than a third of what he had planned, and he died in 1762, aged 47. A pupil, Georg Friedrich Meier, had already beaten him into print with his own textbook, Anfangsgründe aller schönen Wissenschaften (1748–50). The word that now covers museums, design schools, and the shelf in the bookstore began as the ambition of a young man and the unfinished work of an old one.

The first sentence of Aesthetica gives the definition, with four alternative names in parentheses: aesthetics (“theory of the liberal arts, lower gnoseology, art of thinking beautifully, art of the analogue of reason”) is the science of sensitive cognition. Section 14 says what such knowledge is for: the aim of aesthetics is the perfection of sensitive cognition as such, “that is, beauty.” Notice the grammar. For Baumgarten, beauty is not mainly a quality of objects. It is the best that knowing-by-the-senses can be.

Four ways to meet the world

Why did the thing need a name at all? The lectures behind this course answer with a frame of their own. There are, they say, four ways in which a person meets the world, and each has its own verb. This course uses the frame as a thesis, not as an established classification, and it follows the lecture’s wording closely.

The first way is everyday perception, to see. It begins from me: my habits, my interests, what I can use. The lecture draws attention to how much of English is built on sight: insight, view, perspective. (It adds that perceive itself comes from “see.” In fact, Latin percipere means to seize or grasp.) The second way is science, to know: to find out, to discover, and, in this reading, to put to use. The lecture quotes Francis Bacon’s “knowledge is power,” and that needs a note. The Latin words “knowledge itself is power” are a passing remark in Bacon’s Meditationes Sacrae (1597), in a discussion of God’s knowledge and power. The nearer statement is in the Novum Organum (1620), aphorism 3: human knowledge and human power “meet in one,” because without knowing a cause you cannot produce the effect. The tidy Latin slogan scientia potentia est first appears in Thomas Hobbes’s Latin Leviathan (1668). Course 2 (How science became useful) tells the story of Bacon’s program.

The third way is philosophy, to think: to step back, contemplate, and ask what a thing is. Course 25 (The Philosophical Gaze) follows that look from Socrates to the Stoics. The fourth way, the lecture says, is the aesthetic: to fit, to feel, and to make. Here one does not try to use the thing, to explain it, or to define it. One tries to find a fitting response to it, and often to make something from the response: a song, a drawing, a sentence. The lecture’s wording for the ideal is pleasure that wants nothing from its object, “for beauty’s sake.” Immanuel Kant, whom Lesson 2 meets, had said something close in 1790 when he called the pleasure in the beautiful disinterested.

Try the four ways on an ordinary thing.

Two cautions. First, the frame is the lecture’s own. It resembles older ideas: Kant’s disinterested pleasure, Arthur Schopenhauer’s “will-less” contemplation of beauty, and, closest, Pierre Hadot’s two attitudes to nature, one that questions it and one that listens, which Lesson 2 describes. But it is not a standard scheme, and people move among the four ways many times in a day. Second, each way has a blind spot. The aesthetic way does not tell you what is true or what to do. It does not replace the other three. In this reading, what it adds is the missing fourth.

A defense of the senses

Baumgarten wrote inside a tradition, and the tradition had an opinion of the senses. The school of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Christian Wolff, which dominated German universities in his day, divided the mind into a higher and a lower faculty of knowing. The higher faculty, the understanding, produced clear and distinct ideas. The lower, the senses and imagination, produced ideas that were clear at best but “confused”: vivid, but not analyzable into parts. Baumgarten stayed inside Wolff’s framework, and yet he did something new with it. By calling aesthetics the “art of the analogue of reason,” he gave sensory knowledge a standing parallel to reason, a field with its own rules and its own kind of perfection, and not merely a lower grade of the same thing. He even called the new science “lower gnoseology,” a plain name for the part of the mind it studies.

The lecture adds a larger story. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it says, science made the world mechanical, a clockwork, and aesthetics arose to defend the human capacity to feel against the machine. There is something to the first half. Johannes Kepler wrote to a patron in February 1605 that he wanted to show the heavens to be less a divine animal than a clock, run by one simple force as a clock is run by one weight. In 1651 Thomas Hobbes asked in the introduction to Leviathan what the heart is, “but a Spring.” In 1747 (the title page says 1748) Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s L’Homme machine was printed in Leiden; the Leiden consistory ordered copies destroyed, and he fled to the Berlin of Frederick II. Course 4 (Newton’s clockwork universe) tells how the picture took hold. But the second half of the lecture’s story is a reading. Baumgarten never says he is rescuing feeling from a machine. He extends Wolff’s rationalism downward, and his beauty is still a kind of perfection. The turn from the object to the person who feels it comes mainly from British writers, as the next lesson shows.

The lecture also compresses Baumgarten into a neat triad: beauty is the perfection of knowing by the senses, truth the perfection of knowing by reason, and goodness the perfection of the moral will. Only the first of these is his. Section 14 gives it. The triad is a later tidy-up of Wolffian faculty psychology, which assigned the mind two powers, to know and to desire, each with a lower and a higher part. It is a useful picture, but it is not a quotation, and this course does not use it as one.

Immanuel Kant was not impressed. In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) he noted that Germans were the only people who used the word “aesthetic” for what others called the critique of taste, and said that the usage began with Baumgarten’s “abortive attempt” (in Norman Kemp Smith’s English; the German says a failed hope) to bring the judging of beauty under rational principles. In Kant’s view, rules of taste could only be gathered from experience and could never serve as laws. He suggested giving the word back to its Greek sense, the theory of sensibility. Nine years later, in the Critique of Judgment (1790), he himself wrote one of the century’s landmark books on taste, and the word spread. The irony is part of the story.

The tongue gets eyes

Baumgarten had named the field. What name did the faculty get, the thing in a person that feels beauty? In the eighteenth century the answer, in language after language, was taste. The lecture makes this the hinge of the whole story, and it is a surprising choice, because taste, of all the senses, had the worst reputation.

Western philosophers ranked the senses from early on. Plato says in the Timaeus that sight is the source of the greatest benefit to us, for without it there would be no study of the stars. Aristotle begins the Metaphysics by praising sight above the others, and says in the Nicomachean Ethics that the pleasures of touch and taste are “slavish and brutish,” shared with the other animals. Hegel, in his lectures on aesthetics (given in Heidelberg in 1818 and in Berlin from 1820 to 1829, and published by his students in 1835), allowed art to address only the “two theoretical senses,” sight and hearing, because smell, taste, and touch are bound up with matter and use, and a work of art has to be free of both. Joseph Addison could open his famous essays on the pleasures of the imagination in The Spectator (No. 411, 21 June 1712) with the sentence, “Our Sight is the most perfect and most delightful of all our Senses.” Yet two issues earlier, in Spectator No. 409 (19 June 1712), he had defined taste as the faculty “which discerns the Beauties of an Author with Pleasure.”

That is the oddity. The sense that was ranked lowest lent its name to the highest judgment. The history is gradual. The Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracián made buen gusto, good taste, a mark of the discerning person in the 1640s (El Discreto, 1646; Oráculo manual, 1647). Francis Hutcheson in 1725 spoke of an “internal sense” of beauty, so named because it works like the external senses: pleasure that comes at once, before any reasoning. In 1757 David Hume and Edmund Burke each published a major text, Hume’s on the standard of taste and Burke’s on the sublime and the beautiful. In 1790 Kant built his book around “the judgment of taste.” In 1795 Friedrich Schiller published his letters on aesthetic education. The lecture speaks of two hundred years between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries; a better statement is that taste had a vigorous career in the 1600s and a theoretical one in the 1700s.

Why taste? The lecture leans on Giorgio Agamben’s short book on the subject, which began as an entry titled “Gusto” in an Italian encyclopedia (Einaudi, 1979), came out as a small book in Italian in 2015, and was published in English as Taste (translated by Cooper Francis, 2017). Agamben’s argument, as reviewers summarize it, is that taste sits between knowing and enjoying. It names a knowledge that does not exactly know but enjoys, and a pleasure that knows. The eighteenth century felt this when it spoke of the je ne sais quoi, the “I know not what” of a beautiful thing that cannot be reduced to a rule. The lecture puts it in a sentence: reason knows the truth but cannot enjoy it, while taste enjoys beauty and cannot explain it. That is a fair paraphrase, not a quotation. (The lecture says the book appeared in Chinese “this year”; we found no Chinese edition, and the point does not matter here.)

The lecture adds that taste cannot leave its object free: to taste is to take in, to break down, to use up, whereas sight and hearing leave the thing as it was. That is Hegel’s argument more than Agamben’s, and it explains why the founders of aesthetics had to be bold. Still, there is another side that the lecture’s phrase “giving the tongue eyes” captures. The word taste kept the bodily root. It says that beauty is not only thought about but felt, and felt by someone, with a quickness that comes before argument. Goethe has a famous line about a sculpture lover in the fifth of his Roman Elegies, written in Rome in 1788–90 and first printed in 1795: “Sehe mit fühlendem Aug’, fühle mit sehender Hand,” which one translator renders “See with a feeling eye, feel with a seeing hand.” The lecture gives a similar sentence, “a lover’s touch is a touch with open eyes,” and attributes it to The Sorrows of Young Werther. We could not find it there, and the nearest real lines are the elegy’s. The sentence about the eye and the hand is Goethe’s plainest picture of what “the tongue wearing eyes” would mean.