Free Play and True Well-Being: Herder's Critique of Kant's Aesthetics

Abstract

>The philosophical discipline of aesthetics, as is well known, did not receive its name until 1735, when the twenty‐one‐year‐old Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten introduced it to mean episteme aisthetike, or the science of what is sensed and imagined.1 But Baumgarten's denomination of the field was an adult baptism: without the benefit of a name, aesthetics had been part of philosophy since Plato attacked the educational value of many forms of art in the Republic and Aristotle briefly defended them in his fragmentary Poetics. In particular, Aristotle defended the arts from Plato's charge that they are cognitively useless, trading in mere images of particulars rather than universal truths, by arguing that it is precisely the arts, or at least poetry, that deliver universal truths in a readily graspable form, unlike, for example, history, which deals merely with particular facts.2 And if experience of the arts can reveal important moral truths, then it can also be important to the development of morality, the other pole of Plato's doubts. Some variant of Aristotle's response to Plato was the core of aesthetics through much of subsequent philosophical history and, indeed, continued to be central to aesthetics well into the twentieth century—one need only think of T. W. Adorno. In the eighteenth century, however, an alternative response to Plato was introduced, namely, the idea that our response to beauty, whether in nature or in art, is a free play of our mental powers that is intrinsically pleasurable and thus needs no epistemological or moral justification, although it may in fact have epistemological and moral benefits. This line of thought was introduced in Britain in Joseph Addison's 1712 Spectator essays on “The Pleasures of the Imagination,” and developed by subsequent Scottish writers such as Francis Hutcheson, Henry Home (Lord Kames), and Alexander Gerard. It was only slowly received in Germany, making its first sustained appearance in the emphasis on the pleasure of the unhindered activity of our powers of representation in some of the entries in Johann Georg Sulzer's Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–1774), for example, the entries on “beauty” and “taste,” but then quickly becoming central to the aesthetic theories of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) and the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind (1795).3

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