A Comprehensive History of Western Aesthetics, Volume 3: Aesthetics of the 17th and 18th Centuries

Author: Fan Mingsheng
Publisher:
Publication Date: 1999-12-01
Features: In the history of Western aesthetics, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance are a period with the longest time span, yet relatively weak in existing research achievements. Baumgarten's Aesthetics defines aesthetics as the science of sensitive cognition, the theory of free arts, the epistemology of class hierarchy, and the art of thinking and symbolizing beauty. According to this standard, except for the symbolic tradition of medieval exegesis to poetics and the theory of free arts that echoes the prevailing art philosophy of the Renaissance, there was essentially no aesthetics from the 5th to the 16th century over a thousand years. The so-called "Enlightenment," as defined by Kant in his famous essay Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?, is the movement where humanity liberates itself from its own immaturity. To dare to know! To have the courage to use your own reason! This is the slogan of the Enlightenment. In fact, the Enlightenment was an ideological and cultural movement of the European bourgeoisie and its predecessors, as well as the masses, against feudalism in the 17th and 18th centuries. It was the second liberation movement of modern humanity after the Renaissance. Reasoning spirit runs through the entire Enlightenment. The reasoning spirit discussed here has a dual meaning: First, rational cognition, which corresponds to sensory cognition in philosophical epistemology. It refers to the advanced stage and form of human cognition in the process of understanding, where humans grasp the essence and internal connections of things through abstract thinking. Rational cognition is characterized by abstractness, indirectness, and universality, with the essence and laws of things as its object and content. Second, the "thinking understanding" as the sole measure of all things, as discussed by Engels. Enlightenment thinkers did not recognize any external authority, regardless of its source. Religion, natural philosophy, society, and state systems were all subjected to merciless criticism; everything had to defend its existence before the court of reason or forfeit the right to exist. Of course, this "rational realm" is fundamentally nothing more than an idealized kingdom of the bourgeoisie. However, it undeniably played an immeasurable role in the anti-feudal ideological liberation at the time. Of course, this dual meaning of reason, when applied to the Enlightenment thinkers of Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, takes on different forms, becoming even more intricate in aesthetic thought. The influence of the Enlightenment-reasoning spirit on the development of aesthetics throughout the 17th and 18th centuries was the mainstream and essence of aesthetic thought of that era. However, this does not mean that every aesthetician of this period was an Enlightenment thinker or a rationalist. Even the most outstanding thinkers did not necessarily apply the Enlightenment-reasoning spirit consistently across all their aesthetic theories.