Page 39 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

22 Birgit Meyer and Jojada Verrips

eye alone, and finally abstract thinking and reasoning based in their turn
on these representations. Particularly after Descartes presented his cogito
ergo sum, expressing his sharp division between body and mind (cf. Meyer
2003: 22), the aisthesis of Aristotle, the aisthetic way of knowing the world,
the knowing through our body, rapidly lost ground in intellectual circles.
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s introduction of the term aesthetica in
the middle of the eighteenth century to designate the science of sensuous
knowing (scientia cognitionis sensitivae) in the classical sense was a
milestone, but it did not denote a return to or lasting reestablishment of
more balanced relations between aisthetic and rational knowing of the world
(Baumgarten 1936). It may be that his qualification of the aesthetica as a
science that concentrates on the facultates cogniscitivae inferiores (inferior
or lower cognitive faculties, i.e., the sensorial ones) of human beings, instead
of on their facultates cogniscitivae superiores (higher or superior cognitive
faculties: i.e., the rational or logical ones) contributed to this lopsided
development. Whatever the case, it is a pity that Baumgarten’s touching
plea to philosophers to pay serious attention to the importance of aisthetic
knowing or sensorial impressions of the world did not get the response he
expected (see Schweizer 1973: 108–9; cf. Plate 2005: 19–20). This was a
pity, for after him a trajectory was set in which the Aristotelian heritage faded
into the background in works on aesthetica, and movement was instigated
in a very specific direction. Aesthetica gradually became a cerebral science of
the beautiful and the philosophy of art.

Kant’s legacy

A major role in this one-sided and rather narrow-minded development was
played by Immanuel Kant. Kant was familiar with Baumgarten’s seminal
treatises on the relevance of taking into consideration ways of knowing
through the senses or the body alongside those connected with the faculty
of reason or the mind, and he deemed the aesthetic judgment of an object
to be based on a subjective feeling of pleasure (Lust) or reluctance (Unlust),
which was the result of an unintended confluence of imagination and
reason. Nevertheless, he ventured toward a rather rational approach to this
experience, as from his perspective the feeling of Lust or Unlust was based
on a (pure) judgment of taste or on reflection by a subject that disposes of
both Sinnlichkeit und Verstand (Vernunft) (sensuality and reason [common
sense]). Characteristic for the feeling of aesthetic pleasure or displeasure
(and the experience of beauty or ugliness) is (1) that it is not related to an
interest or does not generate a specific desire, (2) that it pertains to a single
object and never to a class of objects, (3) that it can be judged as having
a “Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck” (appropriateness without purpose), and