Alexander Baumgarten: Theory of Aesthetics, Philosophical Study of Art and Natural Beauty
"Aesthetics is the name of the philosophical study of art and natural beauty" (Miller, 2004). The theory of aesthetics started controversies over its legitimate existence as a fully developed science. Alexander Baumgarten was the first who used the word "aesthetics" in 1735 to designate the concept of beauty as being gathered through sensation and result in perfection (Martin, 2004). However, the contemporary use of the term "aesthetics" is originating in the Critique of Judgment, by Kant, written in 1790 (idem). The philosophic thinkers of the seventeenth century in Germany were the first to analyze the phenomenon of beauty. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten is credited for having established an autonomous branch of philosophy named "aesthetics" (Wessell, 1972). Baumgarten defined the discipline of aesthetics as the "science of sensible knowledge", taking the object of beauty beyond the limitation of art (Makkreel, 1996). "In the Prolegomena of his Aesthetica (1750 - 1758), he foresees it as also relevant to all the liberal arts and the practical activities of daily life" (idem). Owever, Makkreel emphasizes that Baumgarten's study of the object of beauty was focused on "the cognitive condition" for its appreciation (idem).
Baumgarten calls this extensive level of clarity "richness". He "thought of art and aesthetics as correlated, but not coextensive, fields of study linked by the common goal of understanding the structure of perception" (idem). The science of the soul has two faculties, thus two ways of perception of the universe, according to Baumgarten (idem). Makkreel explains that Baumgarten showed that the aesthetic knowledge enriches a representation with more marks making them "extensively clearer" and thus rendering the field of aesthetics its perfection (idem). Baumgarten laid the ground for what today is called cognitive science and aesthetics that comprises the interconnection of several disciplines and their theories and methods. His intention was to merely add some missing elements to the aforementioned theories: "The major inferior faculties of cognition, namely the natural developed ones, are required for beautiful thinking. It is established that the sensitive representation produces a type of knowledge in Baumgartne's theories. Returning to the model of the two representations of the universe in the souls as objects of consciousness, Wessell mentions the two types of cognition as observed by Baumgarten: "facultas cogniscitiva superior (624 ff. Crediting the mind as the source of lack of clarity and not the object, Baumgarten seems to give credit here to Liebnitiz's theory of continuity (idem). Nevertheless he labeled a completely new science (idem). In his attempts to define and explain the filed of aesthetics, Baumgarten did not seek to define beauty per se, but like his predecessors, to make "the distinction of two ways of apprehension: an intellectual way in which one can "enumerate one by one the marks which suffice for distinguishing the thing from others" and the aesthetic in which apprehension is and must remain sensuous and "confused" (repraesentatio confusa)" (Ogden, 1933). Nevertheless, unlike any other philosopher before him, Baumgarten gave a name to this new distinctive discipline and broke with the Leibnizian perspective of rationalism . He elaborated on the theories of precursors like Leibniz and Wolff, laying the ground for what will be later in the eighteenth century developed by Kant into the science of aesthetics (Hammermeister, 2002). Consequently, although he did not develop the theory of a new philosophical field as an art connoisseur or lover, art owes to Baumgarten its contemporary status in philosophical terms: "Philosophical aesthetics originated as advocacy of sensibility, not as a theory of art. "The things perceived"(Wessell, 1972), that are in Baumgarten's theory, "the objects of perception"(idem), objects of the science called "aesthetics" are distinct from the "things known"(idem) that are "the objects of logic"(idem).
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