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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
The dominant feature of eighteenth-century aesthetic is the inquiry and discussion concerning the theory of “taste.” There is material or bibliographical evidence of this in the rapid sequence of treatises, essays, inquiries, observations, and controversies on this subject, extending from the close of the seventeenth to the last years of the eighteenth century, and bearing the names, in France, of Dacier, Bellegarde, Bouhours, Rollin, Seran de la Tour, Trublet, Formey, Bitaubé, Marmontel, and, still more eminent, of Montesquieu, Voltaire, d’Alembert; in England, of Addison, Hume, Gerard, Home, Burke, Priestley, Blair, Beattie, Percival, Reid, Alison; in Italy, of Muratori, Calepio, Pagano, Corniani; in Germany, of Thomasius, J. U. König, Bodmer, A. von Schlegel, Wegelin, Heyne, Herz, Eberhard, J. C. König, and, by German influence in Hungary, Szardahely; and, greatest of all, Immanuel Kant, whose Critique of Judgment consists in the main of a critique of the aesthetic judgment of taste.
page 157 note 1 The Hungarian aesthetician, G. Szardahely, named in the text, observes: “... ista hominis facultas sentiendi pulchrum et turpe dicitur gustus, non penitus novo, sed magis usitato nomine: constat enim mihi, ac eadem intelligentia locutos aliquando fuisse Graecos Latinosque veteres, metaphora a gustu palati facta. Modus iste loquendi tune erat infrequens, deinde penitus cecidit iacuitque, dum tandem ab hominibus antiquae originis et spiritus suscitaretur et ilia hominis proprietas facundo hoc Latinismo cognominaretur. lam modo nomen illud gentium praecipuarum civitate est donatum, habetque sensum non adscititium sed proprium” (Imago Aesthetice sen doctrina Boni Gustus breviter delineata, Budae, , 1780, p. 8Google Scholar).
page 157 note 2 L'art de sentir et de juger en matière de goût, nouvelle édition revue et corrigée par Rolland, M. (Strasbourg, 1790; ed. 1, 1762).Google Scholar
page 160 note 1 E.g. Gerard (Essai sur le goût, French tr., Paris, 1766, p. 241Google Scholar): “On dit communément qu’il ne faut pas disputer des goûts. Cette maxime est vraie si par goût on entend le palais, qui rebute certains aliments et qui en aime d’autres.... Mais la maxime est fausse et pernicieuse, lorsque on l’applique à cegoût intellectuel qui a les arts et les sciences pour objets. Comme ces objets ont des charmes réels, de meme qu’il y a un bon goût qui ne les appercoit point; et il y a certaines méthodes dont on peut se servir pour corriger ces défauts de l’esprit qui corrompent le goût.”
page 161 note 1 See the researches of Schlapp, O., Kants Lehre vom Genie und die Entstehung der K. d. U. (Gottingen, 1901)Google Scholar, and more lately those of Baeumler, , Kants Kritik der Urteilskraft, ihre Geschichte und Systematik (Halle, 1903)Google Scholar, and Cassirer, , Die Philosophie der Aufklarung (Tübingen, Mohr, 1932), to omit others of less importance.Google Scholar
page 161 note 2 See the preface and especially the appendix (1, 185–197) added by him to his translation of a work by one of these empiricists: Alison, Archibald, Ueber den Geschmack, dessen Natur und Grundsätze, verdeutscht und mit Anmerkungen und Abhandlungen begleitet von K. H. Heydenreich (Leipzig, Weygand, 1792).Google Scholar
page 161 note 3 See my essay, Le due scienze mondane, I’Estetica e I’Economia, in Critica, xxix (1931), part vi.Google Scholar
page 162 note 1 “Da es vorher noch vier Kategorischen Momente ohne Begriff und Interesse, ohne Vorstellung des Zweckes u. f. nicht nur allgemein gefalien musste, sondern sogleich vom Schönen hinabsank, sobald man an Güte dachte; jetzt im letzten Paragraph des Werks wird das Schöne: ein Symbol des Guten, des Sittlichen sogar, und zwar alles Schöne: schöne Formen, schöne Kleider, schöne Farben, schöne Gebäude” (Kalligone: vom Angenehmen und Schönen. Leipzig, Hartknoch, 1800, III, 259–260).Google Scholar
page 163 note 1 Geschichte der Aesthetik als philosophischer Wissenschaft, p. 147.
page 163 note 2 It is sometimes incorrectly attributed to the Gracian, Spaniard, who, as I have elsewhere pointed out (Estetica, p. 209)Google Scholar, refers the term not to the sphere of the beautiful and art, but to that of practice. Before and after him, the Italians, with or without the word in question, asserted a special aesthetic power or faculty, capable of judging without logical reasoning; this was very clearly denned by Zuccolo as early as 1623. See my recent researches into the history of aesthetic ideas in seventeenth-century Italy, in Storia dell’ età barocca in Italia (Bari, 1929, pp. 160–210, 217–232).Google Scholar
page 163 note 3 For the authorship and date of the De Sublimitate see the recent and important investigations of Rostagni, , Il sublime nella storia dell’ Estetica antica (Pisa, 1933).Google Scholar
page 163 note 4 Cf. the way in which he remarks à propos of an ode of Sappho that the things said in it are the things said by every lover, but that the excellence of the poem lies in choosing the culminating points (ή ληψις των ων) and combining them (ή είς τÚντò συναlpεσις): De Subl. 110.
page 164 note 1 Even now most German historians of aesthetic (Baeumler, Cassirer, etc.) persist in ignoring Vico or brushing him aside, because (they say) he was unknown and did not influence the Germans. None the less, he lived and thought; and the history of thought is not the history of influences on German writers, or any others.
page 164 note 2 That Baumgarten belongs to another tradition than that of the theory of taste emerges even from what Baeumler writes, though intended to connect him with that tradition: “Baumgarten hat für das Geschmacksproblem im engeren Sinne nicht viel Interesse bezeigt” (op. cit., p. 87).
page 164 note 3 Mendelssohn, Ueber die Hauptgrundsätze der schönen Kunste und Wissenschaften (op. cit. Zimmermann, , p. 181Google Scholar), expressly says: “1st die Erkenntnisder Vollkommenheit sinnlich, so wird sie Schönheit genannt... die verständliche Vollkommenheit erleuchtet die Seele und befriedigt ihren ursprünglichen Trieb nach bündigen Vorstellungen. Wenn sie aber die Triebfeder des Begehrungsvermögens in Bewegen setzen soll, so muss sie sich in eine Schönheit verwandeln.”
page 164 note 4 Kritik der Urteilskraft, 15.
page 164 note 5 Zimmermann, , op. cit., pp. 60–61Google Scholar (cf. p. 433), says that for Baumgarten beauty is “sinnlich erkannte Vollkommenheit,” but neither these words nor this notion are to be found in §§ 15–16 of the Aesthetica, to which he refers; it is always perfectiones cognitionis sensitivae. Stein, Von (Die Entstehung derneueren Aesthetik, Stuttgart, Cotta, 1886, p. 358)Google Scholar rightly observes that if Kant means to allude to Baumgarten he is misunderstanding him; thus alsoSommer, , Grundzüge einer Geschichte der deutschen Psychologie und Aesthetik von Wolff-Baumgarten bis Kant-Schiller (Würzburg, 1892), p. 345.Google Scholar Perhaps the explanation is to be sought, as by Baeumler (op. cit., pp. 113–119), in the fact that Kant knew the references to the subject in the Metaphysica, where Baumgarten on this point was confining himself to Wolff's definition, and also knew Meyer and Mendelssohn, but perhaps had not read, or not read with care, the Aesthetica.
page 165 note 1 The difficulty was felt by some writers of the time; cf. the following quotation fromMeiners, , Revision der Philosophic, pp. 226 seqqGoogle Scholar., in the learned work of Politz, K. H., Die Aesthetik für gebildete Leser (Leipzig, Hinrichs, 1807, I, 22–23):Google Scholar “In der Aesthetik ist die Hauptquelle unserer Kenntnisse noch streitig. Eben so zweifelhaft ist es bisher ob die aesthetischen Begriffe zu dem Foro der bis jetzt von den Philosophen entdeckten Kräften oder einer eignen von den Griechen und RÖmer nicht wahrgenommen Fähigkeit gehÖren. Es giebt Männer, die einen angeborenen Gescbmack des SchÖnen und Guten vertheidigen, und dabei unsere Idee von SchÖnheit u. s. w. als etwas ganz Relatives ausehen. Umgekehrt sieht man wieder unveranderliche Ideale des SchÖnen und Guten von solchen behaupten, die den Geschmack fur eigentumliche kraft hatten. So lange diese Punkte unausgewacht bleiben, scheint die Aesthetik in die Form einer Wissenschaft nicht gebracht werden zu KÖnnen.”
page 167 note 1 For this school of separate Kunstwissenschaft, cf. what was already to be said about it in 1911, in my essay on Fiedler (Nuovi saggi di estetica, Bari, 1926, esp. pp. 240–241Google Scholar), and in 1915, à propos of a book by Utitz, my Conversazioni critiche, I, 20–22; cf. also a short recent book by Utitz, , Geschichte der Aesthetik, Berlin, 1932, pp. 70–73Google Scholar, where he expresses himself with more caution and reserve.