diotimas children german aesthetic rationalism from leibniz to lessing jan 2010

[...]... cultures of Europe Rarely in history has aesthetic thought been so central to philosophy, and rarely has it been so vital to a culture as a whole If only on these historical grounds, we have strong reasons to study aesthetic rationalism Nevertheless, interest in aesthetic rationalism nowadays is bound to seem strictly antiquarian Although we have good historical reasons to study it, it seems we do not... as the fount of aesthetic rationalism, we can begin to appreciate why aesthetic rationalism gave such importance to beauty, and why contemporary aesthetics is so blind to dismiss it By making beauty the object of love, Diotima shows us that it is integral to life, that it is behind our strongest drives, the goal of our deepest aspirations If she is right, beauty must be central to aesthetics, and we... premature It intends to show that the tradition of aesthetic rationalism deserves re-examination not only for historical but also for philosophical reasons Although it forswears any attempt to revive aesthetic rationalism as a whole, it does invite us to reconsider some of its central doctrines: specifically, its theory of aesthetic judgment, its conception of rules, and the place it gives to beauty in the... the rationalists stress different factors in different works; nowhere do they weld them together into a single cohesive theory So, to understand their aesthetics, we have no choice but to reconstruct it; we must bring together its various parts and see how, and indeed whether, they form a whole One of the most salient features of aesthetic rationalism is its attempt to strike a middle path between an... irrational but a protorational and pro-rational drive whose goal is to achieve unity with the eternal forms This teaching was the teat that nourished the aesthetic rationalists; the young Leibniz, Winckelmann, Lessing, and Mendelssohn would suckle from it and grow We do best to imagine all the rationalists as Diotima’s children, to see them sitting before her and listening raptly to her golden words... innocent age, now gone forever And, to be sure, there can be no going back to the age of aesthetic rationalism, no revival of its grand ideals or central doctrines We 2 introduction are no more likely to reinstate aesthetic rationalism than we are to wear wigs, stockings, and breechcoats Nowadays we measure our intellectual sophistication almost by our distance from the rationalists; and, understandably... aesthetic rule It is hard to imagine another concept more fateful for the history of aesthetics but also so little understood Now that the traditions that once invoked the concept have disappeared into the mists of history, its very purpose and meaning have been lost to us All the more reason, then, to return to the rationalist tradition to recover its original meaning What did the rationalist mean by rules?... as a whole; he mentions Winckelmann and Lessing en passant, though only to praise them.³⁶ Nevertheless, virtually all of Die Geburt der Trag¨ die can be read as an attack on aesthetic rationalism For o Nietzsche formulates his tragic philosophy in opposition to ‘ aesthetic Socratism’’, which he characterizes in terms that perfectly fit aesthetic rationalism. ³⁷ Aesthetic Socratism holds that the beautiful... does Kant share some ground with aesthetic rationalism True to his eighteenth-century heritage, he holds that beauty has a central place in aesthetics Nevertheless, Kant’s pairing of the sublime with the beautiful—his insistence that they are independent and equal concepts—shows his distance from the tradition of aesthetic rationalism ¹ All references to Kant’s works are to Kants gesammelte Schriften,... Mary Mothersill, Beauty Restored (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); Elaine Scarry, On Beauty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); John Lane, Timeless Beauty (Totnes: Green Books, 2003); and Alexander Nehemas, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007) ³ Arthur Danto has reacted against the trend to restore beauty in his The Abuse . in aesthetics is to go backwards. To avoid the aporias of the present, we must recover the aesthetic tradition before Kant, especially the tradition of aesthetic rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing, . 1949– Diotima’s children : German aesthetic rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing / Frederick Beiser. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978 –0 –19 –957301 –1 (hardback:alk.paper)1. Aesthetics, German 17th. class="bi x0 y0 w0 h0" alt="" Diotima’s Children This page intentionally left blank Diotima’s Children German Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing Frederick C. Beiser 1 1 Great Clarendon