From the Depths of Rhetoric: The Emergence of Aesthetics as a Discipline

The recent emergence of aesthetics to the surface of contemporary thought has brought to the fore questions about its genesis in the modernity of the eighteenth century. Of the many stories that standard histories of aesthetics tell,1 the one attached to the German philosophical tradition warrants special attention if only because it claims a definitive starting point, i.e., the coinage of the term aesthetica, as well as a comprehensive theory of art. According to that story, modern aesthetics emerged from philosophy, more specifically rationalism, the dominant philosophy of the early 1700s. Following Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff, so the story goes, Alexander Baumgarten inaugurated aesthet ics as an independent discipline, a discipline that soon thereafter achieved a high stage of development in the hands of Immanuel Kant. The merits of this account notwithstanding, one major difficulty stands out. Inasmuch as the rationalism of the early eighteenth century concerned itself with innate ideas and the geometrical method, it had little or no room for Baumgarten's interest in ta aistheta (the materials of sense-perception) or Kant's interest in common sense and judgments of taste. But if this is so, neither Baumgarten nor Kant could have proceeded with their respective projects had they stayed within the generally accepted parameters of the philosophy of their not-too-distant prede cessors. In fact, a close look at Baumgarten's Reflections on Poetry (1735)2 and Kant's The Critique of Judgment (1790)3 reveals that both aestheticians were looking beyond the tenets of rationalism.4 My contention in this essay is that their search points us in the direction of the rhetorical tradition. If we follow that path, we will discover that a great deal of the aesthetics of the eighteenth century is indebted to rhetoric. Up until the eighteenth century the rhetorical tradition had been a per manent feature of Europe's intellectual landscape. With the general outline