Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten - Views On Aesthetics

Views On Aesthetics

Baumgarten appropriated the word aesthetics, which had always meant sensation, to mean taste or "sense" of beauty. In so doing, he gave the word a different significance, thereby inventing its modern usage. The word had been used differently since the time of the ancient Greeks to mean the ability to receive stimulation from one or more of the five bodily senses. In his Metaphysic, § 451, Baumgarten defined taste, in its wider meaning, as the ability to judge according to the senses, instead of according to the intellect. Such a judgment of taste is based on feelings of pleasure or displeasure. A science of aesthetics would be, for Baumgarten, a deduction of the rules or principles of artistic or natural beauty from individual "taste." Baumgarten may have been motivated to respond to Pierre Bonhours' opinion, published in a pamphlet in the late 17th century, that Germans were incapable of appreciating art and beauty.