[No work could better refute the claim that only antinazis were and are heirs to the spirit of the 18th Century, of the ideals of the Enlightenment, that the German Völkisch circles not only ignored but despised such a heritage than Alfred Bäumler’s The Problem of Irrationality in the Aesthetics and Logic of the XVIIIth century1. We know that pangermanist Houston Stewart Chamberlain wrote on Kant in 19052, but Bäumler’s infinitely rich work has the advantage of being that not of a dilettante, but of a true scholar. It is even a classic, present in all serious Kant bibliographies, yet is, like the rest of the Author’s works, vastly untranslated3 due to the stamp of infamy: having been a support of the Third Reich. This work does not simply contain an analysis of Kant’s aesthetics according to the Third Critique, but also a masterful broad look on the European 18th Century, showing how aesthetics and logics were so intertwined, how rooted in his times Kant was, and how he so well crowned it. The following excerpt comes from the first — genealogical — part of this work, and more precisely from the short chapter dedicated to the abbé Du Bos4 and the revolution he provoked in European thought. Brackets indicating the original German page numbers present in the French edition were kept; notes were only conserved when containing more than references; mine are in brackets.]

Du Bos

Only four years separate the Reflexions5 of Du Bos from Crousaz’s Treatise6; yet we feel as if they belong to a different Century. The feeling, having just earned its right to be present as an analogon rationis, pushes reason to its limits at once. How can this be explained? If new ideas could have such an influence on a cartesian such as Crousaz, how much more grip should it have on a spirit far from the rigours of the School! Du Bos is inspired by Addison (and by Shaftesbury?7): the aesthetics of delicateness could develop without hindrance within him. The result is an aesthetics of the feeling cleared from the last marks of rationalism. For Crousaz, the beautiful in the end coincided with the “convenience of things”; [50] it revealed a former harmony, of divine origin, between the nature of things and the impressions they produce upon us, between these impressions and the feelings that accompany them. Crousaz has a classical taste. He rejects figurative style with almost brutal formulas: representing a thing with the image of another only suits those with an evil cause to defend. We must reduce metaphorical expressions to the simplest. How far from this metaphysics of the beautiful and of taste Du Bos is! His book expresses the revolt of good sense not only against metaphysics, but also against logics. Crousaz had wanted to nuance the speculative type; Du Bos rejects it. The judgement “by ways of analysis” is far below the judgement “by way of feeling”. The goal of art is to touch us; a poem or a painting that fails to move us is not good. But it is the feeling, not the understanding [Verstand] that tells me what touches me. This way, only the feeling can tell if a work of art reaches its goal, and not understanding, which only assumes the perfections and flaws. The discussion, the analysis are useful in order to discover the causes of pleasure, but they can never enable one to decide whether something pleases or not. Reasoning must submit here to the judgement of feeling. Du Bos explicitly compares the judgement of art to the judgement a gourmet makes of a ragout. Along the way, however, he gives a brief characterization of the judgement of taste, which has a far-reaching impact (and which historically constitutes the middle term between Gracian on the one hand, and König and Baumgarten8 on the other). The feeling is a sense that judges the value of works of art9; it is the eye when it comes to painting, and the ear when it comes to words or chants. [51] This judgment of the senses (judicium sensuum, as would later say Baumgarten) is a part of ourselves and gets expressed without consulting “any rule or compass”. Du Bos had the misfortune of using the term “sixth sense”; while getting into polemics around this name, we believed to be exempt from the need to further examine this fruitful idea of a “judiciary” sense.

The connection between judgement and feeling established by Du Bos is not new. Pascal attached the feeling to judgement like sciences to the spirit10. And Muratori11 already exposed in greater detail all that was said by Du Bos. (The main part on judgement can be found in Chapter 10 of the Perfetta poesia, I, Book 2.) The power of judgement (il giudizio) is an essential component of good taste. It lies in knowing and distinguishing the value of all truths, of all sciences and of all arts12. It is a power for discernment and for choice — “un discernimento dell’ottimo”. Giudicare and gustare are employed on an equal footing, the power of judging is prime within us, “judges so to speak all of our acts and thoughts”13. It is a rare virtue. It is best to possess a mediocre knowledge coupled with a great power of judgement than a tremendous amount of knowledge and an extraordinary spirit (ingegno) without judgement. The power of judgement has to be distinguished from the understanding (intelletto) and from the spirit (ingegno). Muratori refers to Quintilian. According to him, he who is deprived of judicium gets caught by the mere appearance of good. This obviously comes from an error [52] in the assessment of values. The judicium is therefore above all the ability to estimate things at their fair value. Since such a value cannot be established rationally, but depends on the subjects and circumstances (from the sentimento, the opinion, the affect), it is logical to connect the judicium to the taste. Feeling and judgement, buon gusto and giudizio designate a single same thing: the reaction, that cannot be motivated or taught14, of a subject who takes position in relation to what he feels. The one who correctly and at once judges what is worthy to him can be said to be wise, to possess a good sense15. The one who correctly appreciates the things of the art and the sciences possesses the “good taste”.

Muratori, despite not making his business of theory, formulates another property of the power of judgement, of far greater philosophical significance, and of particular interest to us. The conception of the judgement of taste as judgement of value has its origins in Gracian. Muratori adds this determination: the judgement is a power based upon “the consideration of individuals and of particular things; and since they are in a way innumerable, so are the laws and rules of judgement”16. The spirit (ingegno) and the imagination acknowledge the laws and follow general rules. The power of judgement renders its decrees according to the individuals and to the circumstances. It is ceaselessly in need of new laws; reflexions that can be applied to one cannot to be applied to an other17. Being a power to decide what is appropriate, it cannot be applied to the adequation of words with the object, of means with the ends18, [53] and rather chooses what is convenient19. In sum, it is the power of economia poetica.

But the definition of the power of judging as a mediator between the spirit and particular things, as the power to apply the rules of the beautiful to different cases is not the only anticipation of the Critique of the Power of Judgement20. Muratori again gives the giudizio a property that, under the name of reflexion, plays a great role in the “Critique of taste” that prepares the Critique of the Power of Judgement21. The judgement, he says, pushes me to put myself in another’s position and to ask myself: how would I express this, was I Petrarch? If I encountered this image somewhere, what pleasure would I find in it22? Even if it has a taste of a poetry cookbook somehow, there is something deeply original in connecting this idea to the notion of power of judgement. To put oneself in the position of the other is an important method for the aesthetics (and also for the psychological foundation of aesthetic critique), and to attach a specific logico-psychological term to it was not a mean feat23.

The influence and importance of Du Bos do not lie in his aesthetic theory alone. In addition to the first aesthetic theory of sentimentalism24, his Reflexions contain a new understanding of man: the historical view. The arising of this historical view of life in the 18th Century is inherent to the birth of modern aesthetics. [54] It is in the “new” science that the transformation of the vital feeling, happening between the beginning and the end of the 18th Century, receives its first expression. What cannot find room within the framework of traditional science takes shelter in aesthetics. Du Bos is not the first aesthetician to conceptualise the feeling of the historicity of existence. Here, again, Muratori preceded him; Giambattista Vico, who devotes his life to the scienza nuova (which is aesthetics) is also the first great modern philosopher of History25. If aestheticians are the first ones to notice the determination of men by their country, their environment and their era, it is because they take very great care in the differences in taste between the nations and between the centuries. Boileau is the first to label the taste of the Renaissance as “gothic”. The word is here purely negative and means something like “confused” or “overflowing”. But the historical form this judgement takes is very characteristic! Times are changing: no one does better notice that than the critic, engaged in the front lines of the fight for the new generation’s taste. The critic and historical consciousness support one another, in a way. Hence why even the rationalist, as long as he is also at the same time a judge of taste, ends up giving a historical form to his judgement of value.

Muratori opposed to the refined judgement of his time the corrupted judgement of the previous era26. But another component, far from this consciousness of changes in taste, pushes towards a relativist vision of men. The rise of taste and of aesthetic critique comes along with a reinforcement of national consciousness. French and Italians alike become extremely conscious of their specificities27. Boileau already gave a blow to the Italians28. [55] Bouhours calls out the Italians, the Spaniards and the Germans with an equal arrogance. Muratori’s massive book, whose title already feels like a declaration of war (Della perfetta poesia italiana) is mainly a defence of Italian poetry against the attacks coming from the French29. Art, the language of individuality, makes the modern civilised peoples conscious of their national features. It is then easy to understand that this consciousness of national individuality could have an influence over the shaping of a historical self-consciousness.

In Du Bos, historical relativism gains in sharpness, since it arises in opposition to a radical rationalism. As a consequence of his sentimentalism, Du Bos replaces the cartesian res cogitans that reasons, both abstract and out of time, with the individual, concrete man, and replaces the audience of Boileau that embodies Reason with a real “crowd” [parterre]. If he appeals to the public, it is in a way completely foreign to Boileau. A work that is not esteemed by the audience is worthless, and both agree on that30. But Boileau goes on: men can very well, for some time, “take the false for the true, and admire ill things; but it is not possible that in the end, a good thing fails to please them” (Preface from 1701). Through the public, some absolute gets to express itself. For Du Bos, on the contrary, the real audience, that is to say a certain historical state of the society, constitutes the supreme instance. There is nothing above it to justify its taste. In the same way what is beautiful moves the individual, the Beautiful is what really pleases most. The audience of Boileau represents Reason; [56] the crowd of Du Bos is a human being that does not “represent” this or that more than some other thing, but that simply is.

Du Bos achieves what Gracian undertook, but the type of man he fights against is the cartesian, and no longer the humanist. To the intemporal, isolated, reasonable being, he substitutes the man determined by his nation, by his era, by the climate31, who lives in society. The foundations from which Du Bos develops his historical view of existence are the disdain for reason, the praise of chance and of experience, the apology of exceptions. Voltaire, but also Montesquieu, had in Du Bos their much-needed forerunner and teacher. (For example, the section 14 or the second part of the Reflexions treats of the physical causes for the fate of illustrious eras, and section 15, the character of nations.)

Significant in our such context are the themes of exception and of chance that Du Bos highlights. In the history of philosophy, the essential mission of the nascent aesthetics is to preserve the idea of chance, of fortuitous correspondance that was getting lost with rationalism, and the importance of the exception. It is first in the aesthetic field, in the artist’s activity that the value of the fortunate encounter, independant from all rule, becomes manifest to the eyes of the rationalist century. “It is impossible to estimate quite what must result from the fortunate irregularities of a poet”. Taking sides for the feeling, Du Bos gets on that of individuality. His issue finds room in the sphere of leibnizian ideas. But he only agrees with Leibniz on the problem, not on the solution to it. From that point on, German and French philosophy would know diverging evolutions — and this, not just in the 18th Century. Du Bos is on the opposite side to Descartes’; he depreciates reason in favour of the feeling. Rationalism has transformed into sentimentalism. [57] This process characterises all further evolution in France. Since French rationalism could not offer the intellectual means to satisfy the exigencies contained in the problem of the individual and of the contingent, such an issue would go on and undermine it unabatedly. French thought could not find any rest, for it lacked a Leibniz. In Germany, irrationalism never represented any danger, since Leibniz already had it integrated in his thought, and gave his successors the rational instruments enabling them to master it32.

The concept of ends spares German philosophy from falling back into irrationalism. If we far too easily tend to overlook its role in the history of philosophy, it is only because wolffism employed it with such excess and pedantery that it has been made into some sort of a scarecrow for historians. The explanation Wolff gives of daylight (it is useful for reading) shall not yet prevent us from recognising the deep philosophical use of finalism. The concept of ends is the rational answer to the issue of irrationalism. Thanks to it, what could not enter into the mechanical regularity of modern scientific cosmology could receive a rational justification in leibnizian philosophy. In the framework of cartesianism, on the contrary, one could only deny the irrational — or else, dive into irrationalism.

[58] This swing between reason and feeling, to which the German evolution puts an end with the Critique of the Power of Judgement, gives its footprint to the French aesthetics of the 18th Century. To take two iconic names, it sways between Crousaz and Du Bos.

Overall, the rational tendency wins over. But it is ceaselessly questioned by the sentimental tendency. Mrs Davier, Father André, Voltaire and Batteux represent the strictly rational aesthetics. Voltaire distinguishes sensitive taste from artistic taste. “And since the arts have real beauties, there is a good taste that perceives them, and a bad one that ignores them…”. But one can also find these words in his works: “The feeling of beauties and of flaws in all arts: this is a swift discenrment such as that of the tongue and the palate, which prevent the reflexion alike.” Batteux defines taste as “the knowledge of rules by ways of feeling” and considers this way of knowing as “far more refined and far more certain than that of the spirit”. Diderot formally rejects the idea that the beautiful is more of a felt thing than depending on the understanding. The feeling only grasps the relative beautiful. It is the understanding that states that the object is beautiful. But his explanation of the taste sounds completely different: it is “a facility acquired by repeated experience, to grasp the true or the good, [59] with the circumstance that makes it beautiful, and to be promptly and keenly moved”33. Montesquieu endorses Du Bos’ sentimentalism. His article on “Taste” in the Encyclopédie offers an extension to the aesthetics of Du Bos to us. The natural taste is “a prompt, exquisite application of even the rules one does not know”34. D’Alembert, completing Montesquieu’s article, restores the primacy of rationalism. He desires to solve this frequently asked question, “if the feeling is preferable to discussion in order to judge a work of taste”. He wants to play the role of a mediator, starting from an idea admitted on both sides: taste is not arbitrary. The immediate impression is the judge of the first moment, and the rational examination, that of the second moment. — To juxtapose the two theories obviously cannot be a solution. Indeed, taste does not rely upon the arbitrary. Is it yet true that the first impression always coincides with the reflexion that follows? By simply laying down such a claim, d’Alembert eludes the obstacle. The goal he ascribes to aesthetics shows that the rationalism he wants to so osensively save against Montesquieu is not better grounded. In the end, “to reduce the principles of our pleasures to a small number of unquestionable observations on our way of feeling in the matter of taste” is the task of a psychological aesthetics; one cannot find any criterium for the beautiful (which yet is what is the most important to d’Alembert) taking this path. The rationalism of taste in d’Alembert relies upon the will and the tradition, and not upon the principles. His principles are those of [60] Locke; the tradition is Boileau’s. D’Alembert does not seem to be conscious of the anarchy resulting from this. It’s all very well to say : “Here, in the matters of taste, a semi-philosophy leads us away from the true, and a better understood one takes us back to it.” The problem is, d’Alembert did not show us the way leading us to the true.

France and Germany

The evolution was different in Germany, since Locke did not have the influence he could have upon the cartesian France. If he found room within German thought, it has only ever been besides the school of Wolff, which on top of that stays particularly impermeable to his ideas. Leibniz bars the road. Another element, no longer philosophical but cultural-historical, prevents sentimentalism to get into Germany. France maintains aesthetic rationalism by artistic tact, so to speak, while it has long been hollowed out of its principles. But She at least could have given into her strong attraction to the sentimentalism of Du Bos. The society was ripe and cultured, its taste had been fixated for a long time. One could without fear abandon himself to the feeling: it never teaches anything other than what answers to the opinion of all. That is why, in the middle of the Century’s France, there is not a single thinker, however rationalist he is, that does not fully trust his instinctive taste. German thinkers, on the contrary, have no classical literature behind them: this is the literature to come. They want first to create a society unified by taste. We can only very difficultly imagine the brutishness of taste that surrounded them. The crowd of Du Bos listened to the verses of Racine; the audience of Gottsched howled in front of podium adventurers. The French theory of taste could renounce reason without any following issue; the aesthetics [61] of the Germans had to first mistrust the feeling. That the German theoricians, so inferior to Du Bos in terms of experience and taste, did not follow him, should be interpreted by final causes, in a way. German aesthetics paved the way for the classical German poetry. It is in relation to this goal that we must understand and judge Gottsched’s and the Swiss’ theory of taste, and not by comparing it arbitrarily with their fellows from abroad’s. We should not compare Gottsched to Du Bos, but rather the entirety of German 18th Century aesthetics with the entirety of the French theory from the same era. It is only in context that each thinker acquires his own scope. As long as we only consider the thinker uniquely in himself and for himself, we will ignore what was at work within him. Still, in the broader historical context, Gottsched and Bodmer are superior to Du Bos to the extent that German aesthetics of the late 18th Century are superior to the 18th C. French. No thinker can be judged outside of the evolution which he is part of; each is (historically) worthy, not by himself, but by his contribution to this common fulfillment. In this view, Bodmer and Gottsched are placed very high, despite naturally losing in a direct comparison to the refined and learned Du Bos. They brought what the historical moment needed — a moment that already bore the Critique of the Power of Judgement. We owe to the lucid and sharp vision of the hated “rationalists” a considerable part of the cultural fundations of our philosophy and of our literature. This implied first a return to Boileau. Progress could not be possible without norms. Where one poses norms, says H. von Stein, a classical aesthetic is on the way. Let us admit that these men often went [62] too far in practice, that they may have too eagerly drawn rules on taste. This does not take back anything off the depth of their views. History is more just than men: it also takes intentions into account. If their practice sparked opposition, what König, Gottsched and Bodmer wanted was never lost for German aesthetics.

The clarifications taken from the historical situation, such as those we are just doing an attempt at, ordinarily lead to this false idea, that the underlying component in cultural history must be at the same time the weakest in terms of theory. Not only should the France of Du Bos be superior, by its culture, to the Germany of Wolff, but also the theory of Du Bos should be more fruitful in the intemporal edifice of aesthetic ideas than the rationalist theory of Gottsched and of the Swiss. Du Bos undoubtedly had the great merit of putting the emphasis on the importance of feeling. The issue then became sharper, and the solution to it all the more urgent. But we should never forget that only the question was formulated. Du Bos did not give any solution to it. The judgement of feeling that he held for a solution was only the entry point for a deepening, and not an arrival. If we consider the respective contribution of Du Bos and of the German theoricians to the final resolution of the problem, we can note that the pans of the weighing scale almost achieve balance over time. We found in Du Bos the beginning of an assimilation of the judgement of feeling to the judgement of value. We discover something along these lines in Gottsched, the departure point no longer being feeling but understanding. As distant as these two poles are, the orientation towards a rational solution is the same. And what matters in the end, in a historical evaluation, is what leads to the solution, be it only the seed of this idea.

What guides Gottsched and Bodmer in their rejection of sentimentalism is that they notice the main weakness of the aesthetics of Du Bos. If what is beautiful is what pleases the audience, where does beauty lie? Without doubt, Du Bos asserts that the “public” only includes the connoisseurs, to him. But how can we acquire the [63] “taste of comparison” that makes the connoisseur? Who can tell us if their taste is correct? Or if, as Crousaz says, what pleases them “was indeed well worthy of pleasing” one? Such a question from a rationalist shows that Du Bos did not solve anything; sentimentalism does not bear any answer. The return to Boileau implied this fitting idea, that we find ourselves at the end of sentimentalism as soon as we take its path. The English followed the way Du Bos indicated in suggesting that the causes of pleasure must be inquired. But if we could end up to a classical aesthetics through that, could we also end up to a theory of art and to a psychological analysis of aesthetic phenomenons.

“Sentimentalism and rationalism” — that was the issue in the beginning of the 18th Century. For an era wanting to renounce neither of them, but that did not yet want to abandon itself to one of them, there were only two paths: rationalism could tame the feeling, or sentimentalism could use reason as a means to its ends. The first eventuality realized itself in Germany; the second one, in France. In this country, both currents stayed parallel until Rousseau. At the middle of the Century, a sudden change took place: sentimentalism triumphs, the pathos of the sentimental subject puts reason at its service and ends up giving birth to the Revolution. This is the practico-political solution to the problem of individuality: the subject uproots himself from his bonds, but simultaneously — and that is what is proper to the French synthesis of sentimentalism and rationalism — calls to the eternal norms of the “rights of men”. The synthesis was indeed revolutionary, in other words, unstable, since there was in sentimentalism taken in itself no objective principle, and its amalgamation with reason, that should substitute this lack, cannot produce any [64] solid result. Such was the fate of France: not being able to find any mediation between the feeling and reason. In Germany, on the contrary, nothing other than finding this mediation gets done, all through the 18th Century. The final result of this effort is the ideal of civilisation of the Goethe, Humboldt, Schiller, and the philosophy of history of Hegel. Such an evolution stays internal — but it has a lasting spiritual result.35