A boy who came every day and simply lay down at the furnace to rest was left to himself by Tolstoi. After a few months this child was able to write apparently simply by passive observation. This for Tolstoi confirmed that there are many different ways to learn something.
Further alternative school projects were established in Spain by Francisco Ferrer — and his Escuola Moderna, or also the school of A. When the first free schools were founded in Germany in the s the texts of A. Less attention however was given to the first radical school projects during the Weimar Republic.
It is possible that this potential historical reference was largely neglected because of the eradication of the entire libertarian-alternative school reform movement during the time of fascist rule in Germany. Only a few radical left wing teachers like Minna Specht returned from exile after and got involved in the establishment of democratic forms of schooling in West Germany. Since their early days FAS represents a diverse movement. In different towns the beginnings varied a lot: This fate—years of running a school without state funding and under pressure of illegality—was shared by many other schools in the FRG, e.
Target groups for these schools were children and adolescents, in particular also from a working class background. A centre of the Kinderlaeden movement was Berlin. In the Kinderlaeden anti-autoritarian lifestyles were practiced with reference e. The target groups of Kinderlaeden were children before official school age i. In big cities in the US, schools had been founded in which particularly children and adolescents of lower social classes were catered for.
An essential element for these schools was the voluntary attendance of lessons Maas, , p. These three strands—which can be summarized as reform and model schools, anti-authoritarian Kinderlaeden and voluntary attendance of lessons—provided the basis for the first Free Alternative Schools FAS in the FRG. It took until the end of the s for this development to gain some attention in the public sphere at a time when the debates of school reform were no longer dominated by the topic of comprehensive schooling.
A first national meeting of FAS and start-up groups was organised in New input came from the side of the ecological and the peace movement. Elements of ecological education and intercultural learning played a role in the further development of the alternative schools. By there were already 18 such schools in the FRG. This development also led to the establishment of a national umbrella organisation: At the end of the s there were 36 FAS operating in Germany as a whole East and West reunified with a total of students.
The vast majority of these schools operate as independent schools, some are run by local authorities. As of September , there were students registered within FAS. The schools offer a full day programme, with 20 of the schools also running a day-nursery. Forty-eight of the schools include primary and secondary school level, and three of the schools lead up to the German Abitur numbers taken from Normally parents pay a school fee according to their income level. This is meant to allow also children from families of lower income strata to attend the schools.
In principle every school fee is an obstacle to all inclusive participation. Only if FAS were funded exactly in the same manner as state schools would it be possible to assess their strengths and weaknesses in a fair comparison. What the member schools of BFAS have in common is the wide ranging participation of students in all aspects of school organisation, group activities, and decision making.
Students are involved in the everyday tasks within the schools, tidying, cleaning, but also offering learning projects, and a variety of extra activities often planned and carried out as mixed age activities. There is however a risk that a kind of educational arbitrariness creeps in that allows schools to act differently on a random basis, changing from day to day. Strong personalities often find great scope for their ideas within alternative schools. Where personal biographic, religious-esoteric, ideologic or other attitudes of teachers in alternative schools become dominant factors an essential point is lacking: FAS are there for the children and adolescents to allow them their own experiences and to enable them to develop their own attitudes.
A central idea in this context is the concept of self-regulation, or autonomy. This concept needs to be understood via its counterpart: The concept of self-regulation in FAS is meant to apply to all actors. Nevertheless it is particularly important for the children. For teachers this means to reflect on their own practice and avoid unconscious transferences.
It is of secondary interest that working in FAS for teachers also means a great deal of educational freedom. The common basis of the Free Alternative Schools is described in eight theses. These were agreed by the member schools of BFAS in Alternative schools seek to offer children, teachers and parents the opportunity to practice self-regulation and democracy again and again in everyday life.
This is the most important political dimension of alternative schools. Rules and restrictions are created through group processes of conflict resolution, addressing both conflicts between children and conflicts between adults and children. These rules, however, can be changed by the group at any time. The selection of subject matter is a continuous process that involves the experiential background of children and teachers. The complexity of learning is taken into account through varied and flexible forms of learning that involve play as well as the everyday life and social environment of the school.
They support emancipatory learning processes that open new and unusual paths of insight for everyone involved. In this way, such schools can help to lay the groundwork for the solution of present and future problems of society. The design of the self-government is a meaningful experience in democratic collaboration for parents, teachers and pupils. In this way, they offer the chance to experience adventure and learn about life. In autumn the principles of the BFAS were extended in the form of a declaration: Free Alternative Schools are diverse. Each school is different.
Free Alternative Schools are communities that are cooperatively created by everyone involved. The experiences and the knowledge gained in this process encourages and enables them to face social problems, work out constructive solutions and try out new forms of social life. Free Alternative Schools are autonomous schools.
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Practicing self-governance is an influential experience of democratic sociality for children, adolescents, parents and staff. They create their own rules and structures that at the same time remain open to change. This fosters a sense of community, non-violent conflict solutions and appreciation of the situation of others. In Free Alternative Schools children, adolescents and adults enjoy similar rights for self-determination and protection. Learning presupposes reliable relationships. At Free Alternative Schools respectful togetherness and the deriving trust are the basis for all relationships.
People at Free Alternative Schools understand learning as a life-long process. Elements of learning are also play, social and emotional experiences and the interests of children, adolescents and adults. This leads to individual ways of learning that can initiate emancipatory learning processes. Free Alternative Schools are spaces of learning and living that are characterised by sensitivity and openness for change and development. They integrate diverse educational ideas in their concepts and implement them in diverse manner.
Therefore FAS are quite relevant as models of future schooling for the general school system. All it needs is the willingness to engage with their potential. At the same time the erroneous belief should be avoided that alternative schools are better than the state schools: If alternative schools are compared to or evaluated against state schools the question is always: What are the parameters applied?
An elitist attitude in my opinion is neither justified, nor wise, nor intended. Today, just as 20 years ago, the paramount aim of Free Alternative Schools lies in the establishment of the ability to organise learning processes with freedom and self-responsibly. To develop this ability children need teachers who are willing to give up their monopoly on lesson structuring and who see their end goal as rendering themselves dispensable. On the one hand administrational regulations from the side of school authorities make this difficult, on the other hand teachers have rarely had experiences in their own education and training with self-determined learning.
Teaching in FAS requires a great openness for collective reflection and a renunciation of metaphysical constructions: Radical democracy as educational task Oskar Negt wrote: To educate them, to support autonomy and obstinacy on all levels … is the main task nowadays Free Alternative Schools are places of participation for the children. There are different focal points in the spectrum of alternative schools. They reach from weekly school assemblies with or without voting power for adults over representative models to juridical committees. In all alternative schools participation is a central topic.
It is neither restricted to the space of a school yard nor is it restricted to certain phases of the school day. Free play enables children to have innumerable experiences and they can try out what they learned. Children invent games and apply themselves to them with interest and an energy that can only be stopped by tiredness. Children imitate everything they see adults doing. Everything that children learn in their contacts with adults they can explore in free play amongst themselves.
In turn this means that adults need to design every project, every assembly and every conflict mediation in a way that allows children greater autonomy and lets them test their experiences in free play. A school where there is no space for free play is restrictive and closes off one of the most important fields of learning for children. Grading In alternative schools there is essentially no grading.
This principle is only negotiated by school laws. In Berlin for instance the education law stipulates that all primary schools have to conform to the enrolment criteria of secondary schools. The secondary schools, however, accept enrolments only on the basis of graded certificates. It is a pleasure to expose the defects of this system. In it we see a legacy of tyrannical history. It is always the same centralisation, everywhere we find the same official intrusion. Children and adolescents should as far as possible recognise their own processes and products.
And this self-reliance should be experienced as delightful. There are at this stage numerous studies to prove that the transitory difficulties disappear after a few months. And what are the rules in accordance with which judgments of taste are tacitly made? The most general rule is simply that art should imitate nature, so that in order to be beautiful art must imitate what is beautiful in nature.
Gottsched does not interpret this rule to mean that poets can describe only the actual actions and feelings of actual people; of course poetry can present fables as well as history. But for Gottsched a fable is. Philosophically one could say that it is a piece of another possible world Schriften , p. In this regard even the fable must still be an imitation of nature with all its perfections. Of course Gottsched's rider that the fable must contain a hidden moral truth means that it must also be consistent with the real rules of moral perfection, and indeed that the point of poetic indulgence in fable or fiction is precisely to make a moral truth alive and forceful to us by showing that it holds even in a possible world that differs from the actual world in certain of its facts but not in its principles.
Breitinger —76 taught Greek, Hebrew, logic, and rhetoric, and edited the works of the German Baroque poet Martin Opitz. These essays did not concern painting at all or even general issues about the arts very much—the name merely reflects their use of the names of famous painters as pseudonymous signatures for their articles—although one of Bodmer's articles on Opitz celebrated the imagination as the key to poetic success: The emphasis on the imagination seems to have been the central issue in Bodmer and Breitinger's dispute with Gottsched, which came to a head in Breitinger's own Critische Dichtkunst , published in with a forward by Bodmer.
Because they shared with Gottsched the general assumption that art is based on the imitation of nature and has the goal of making important moral truths come alive for us, it is hard to see exactly what divided the two sides in this dispute, but the key seems to lie in their conception of poetic fables.
As we saw, Gottsched believed that a poetic fable describes events in a possible rather than in the actual world, but he insists that the laws of nature and human nature must remain constant: Bodmer and Breitinger, however, as advocates of Shakespeare and Milton, believed that important moral truths could be made alive to us through works of the poetic imagination that depart more drastically from actual nature and history.
Their idea is that the more imaginative inventions of the poets—the Satan of Milton or the Caliban of Shakespeare rather than the more human heroes of Racine and Corneille admired by Gottsched—make moral truths appear more alive precisely by their attention-grabbing departure from the familiar creatures of the real world. Thus Bodmer and Breitinger thought that the moralistic aim of poetry that they accepted in common with Gottsched could be better achieved by a freer use of the imagination in poetry than Gottsched was prepared to allow. They agreed in their philosophical analysis of the ends of art but disagreed in their empirical assessment of its most effective means.
By their advocacy of Milton and Shakespeare, the most imaginative poets of the preceding century, Bodmer and Breitinger prepared the way for subsequent artistic movements that emphasized the freedom of the imagination, even while they continued to work within the conceptual framework of Wolffian perfectionism. The same is true for two professional philosophers of the time who also worked within the Wolffian framework but took at least one step towards an aesthetic theory that could subsequently give the play of the mental powers equal importance with the sensible representation of truth by treating the aesthetic qualities of representations as parallel to rather than identical with their purely cognitive qualities.
So let us now turn to the innovations of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten and his disciple and ally, Georg Friedrich Meier. Meier actually responded directly to Gottsched in a number of polemics, but since his views were based largely—although not entirely—on Baumgarten's, it will be better to treat them together than to treat Meier now. Baumgarten's new name for the discipline did not, however, signify a complete break with earlier philosophical views, that is, with the perfectionist aesthetics of Leibniz and Wolff.
But Baumgarten nevertheless remained more a Moses who glimpsed the new theory from the shores of Wolffianism than a Joshua who conquered the new aesthetic territory. Baumgarten was the son of a Pietist minister from Berlin, but was orphaned by the time he was eight. He followed his older brother Jacob Sigismund who would become a prominent theologian and historian of religion to Halle when he was thirteen. The Baumgartens thus arrived in Halle just after Wolff had been expelled and the study of his philosophy banned, although the ban was less strictly enforced at the famous Pietist orphanage and school in Halle the Franckesche Stift where they went first than at the university.
The younger Baumgarten started at the university at sixteen in , and studied theology, philology, poetry, rhetoric, and philosophy, especially Leibniz, whose philosophy unlike that of Wolff had not been banned.
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He began teaching there himself in , upon the acceptance of his thesis on poetry, and published his Metaphysics in In , the same year as he published his Ethics , he was called to a professorship—or more precisely, ordered to accept it—at another Prussian university, in Frankfurt an der Oder. Georg Friedrich Meier — , who had been studying with Baumgarten, took over his classes and was himself appointed professor at Halle in Having published the textbooks for his metaphysics and ethics classes which Kant would still use decades later , Baumgarten then returned to aesthetics, and began working on a major treatise in The first volume of his Aesthetica appeared in It was written in Latin, like Baumgarten's other works, and was the first work ever to use the name of the new discipline as a title.
The next year, however, Baumgarten's health began to decline, and a second volume of the Aesthetica came out only in , under pressure from the publisher. The two volumes cover just under a third of Baumgarten's original plan, although they may have included the most original part of the plan. Meanwhile, Meier had been publishing profusely in Halle since the early s, with works in or relevant to aesthetics including a Theoretical Doctrine of the Emotions in , a twenty-five part Evaluation of Gottsched's Poetics collected in book form in , a three-volume Foundations of the Beautiful Sciences from —, and a condensation of the latter, the Extract from the Foundations of the Beautiful Arts and Sciences in Meier also published massive textbooks in logic, metaphysics, and ethics, as well as a memoir of Baumgarten and a German translation of Baumgarten's Latin Metaphysics.
Although Meier thus published his main treatise in aesthetics before Baumgarten did, he claimed it was based on Baumgarten's lectures, and always presented himself as a disciple of Baumgarten. But this work says nothing about in what way the new discipline might be a general science of perception, and analyzes only the nature of poetry and our experience of it.
We will first see what is novel in Baumgarten's theory of poetry, and then turn to his larger work to see what it suggests about the general character of the new discipline. Thus Baumgarten introduces the idea that the sensible imagery a work of art arouses is not just a medium, more or less perfect, for conveying truth, but a locus of perfection in its own right. This is a view that was barely hinted at by Wolff, and not at all in his discussion of imitation as the perfection of mimetic arts, but only in his discussion of mixed arts like architecture, where he took into account the appearance as well as the function of structural elements.
Thus Baumgarten turns what is a vice in scientific knowledge—connoting too many ideas without clearly distinguishing among them—into the paradigm virtue of poetry. What is particularly striking is that he then uses what we might call this quantitative conception of the aim of poetry, that it arouse more and denser rather than fewer and more clearly separated images, as the basis for an argument that poetry should be emotionally affecting. First he argues that poetry aims to arouse our affects or engage our emotions simply because they are sensible:. Since affects are more notable degrees of pain and pleasure, their sensible representations are given in representing something to oneself confusedly as good or bad, and thus they determine poetic representations, and to arouse affects is poetic.
The same can be demonstrated by this reasoning also: Now such representations are motions of the affects, hence to arouse affects is poetic. Baumgarten thus innovates within the formal structure of Wolffian philosophy in order to accommodate a non-cognitivist aspect of the aims of art. Aesthetics is in general the science of sensible cognition. This science concerns itself with everything that can be assigned in more detail to sensible cognition and to its presentation.
Now since the passions have a strong influence on sensible cognition and its presentation, aesthetics for its part can rightly demand a theory of the emotions. However, since Baumgarten himself does not give as much emphasis to the emotional aspect of the experience of art in his Aesthetica as his earlier Meditations might lead us to expect, perhaps because it remained incomplete, we will return to Meier's development of this theme only after we have considered Baumgarten's mature work.
Sensible representations can be developed in either of two ways, however: It is this liveliness rather than probative clarity which is the basis of aesthetic experience. Baumgarten then defines judgment as the representation of the perfection or imperfection of things. So taste is the ability to judge perfections and imperfections sensibly rather than intellectually. Thus far, then, Baumgarten has remained within the conceptual framework of Wolff.
I cognize the interconnection of some things distinctly, and of others indistinctly, consequently I have the faculty for both. Consequently I have an understanding, for insight into the connections of things, that is, reason ratio ; and a faculty for indistinct insight into the connections of things, which consists of the following: All of these lower faculties of cognition, in so far as they represent the connections among things, and in this respect are similar to reason, comprise that which is similar to reason analogon rationis , or the sum of all the cognitive faculties that represent the connections among things indistinctly.
Baumgarten's departure from Wolff here may be subtle, but his idea is that the use of a broad range of our mental capacities for dealing with sensory representations and imagery is not an inferior and provisional substitute for reason and its logical and scientific analysis, but something parallel to reason. Moreover, this complex of human mental powers is productive of pleasure, through the sensible representation of perfection, in its own right.
Baumgarten has not yet introduced the idea that aesthetic pleasure comes from the free play of our mental powers, but he has relaxed the grip of the assumption that aesthetic response is a straightforward case of cognition. The potential of this idea finally begins to emerge in the Aesthetica. Aesthetics the theory of the liberal arts, the logic of the lower capacities of cognition [ gnoseologia inferior ], the art of thinking beautifully, the art of the analogon rationis is the science of sensible cognition.
Baumgarten's list of synonyms may be confusing, for it includes both traditional and novel designations of his subject matter. He explains in the preface to the second edition of the Metaphysics that he. Vorreden zur Metaphysik , p. Yet it is clear that he means his own new science to be broader in scope than some of the more traditional definitions he brackets: Although Baumgarten makes some broad claims for the new science, this is not where the novelty of the Aesthetica lies, for at least in the extant part of the work Baumgarten never actually develops this theme.
Instead, the innovation comes at the beginning of the first chapter of the work, when Baumgarten writes that. The aim of aesthetics is the perfection of sensible cognition as such, that is, beauty, while its imperfection as such, that is, ugliness, is to be avoided. Baumgarten's departure from Wolff's formula that beauty is the sensitive cognition of perfection may easily be overlooked, but in his transformation of that into his own formula that beauty is the perfection of sensitive cognition he is saying that beauty lies not—or as his subsequent practice suggests, not just—in the representation of some objective perfection in a form accessible to our senses, but rather—or also—in the exploitation of the specific possibilities of sensible representation for their own sake.
In other words, there is potential for beauty in the form of a work as well as in its content because its form can be pleasing to our complex capacity for sensible representation—the analogon rationis —just as its content can be pleasing to our theoretical or practical reason itself.
The satisfaction of those mental powers summed up in the analogon rationis is a source of pleasure in its own right. What does this mean in practice? Baumgarten's recognition of the perfection of sensible cognition as well as the perfection of what is represented as a distinct source of pleasure in beauty leads him to recognize not just one but in fact three different potential sources of beauty in a work of art: Here Baumgarten is importing the traditional rhetorical concepts of inventio , dispositio and elocutio into his system, and conceiving of the latter two, the harmony of the thoughts and the harmony of the expression with the thoughts, as the dimensions in which the potentials for pleasure within our distinctively sensible manner of representing and thinking are realized.
He thus recognizes those aspects of works of art, which were touched upon only in passing by Wolff and Gottsched, as sources of pleasure internal to works of art that are equally significant with the pleasure that arises from the content of works, considered as representations of perfections outside of the works themselves. As it happened, Baumgarten did not live to complete even the first of these three parts.
Further, the material he did complete suggests that he may have been more successful in making conceptual space for the appreciation of the particularly sensible aspects of art than in substantively changing how art is actually experienced. Nevertheless, some of Baumgarten's categories of aesthetic qualities are important. However, in his classroom lectures on the Aesthetica , Baumgarten particularly emphasized the moral magnitude of the subject matter of works of art as a major source of our pleasure in them, and there mentions that works of art will therefore be touching, that is to say, emotionally moving.
Baumgarten stressed that the moral content of a work of art is only one source of beauty, and that a work of art can be beautiful without any moral grandeur. What is important here, finally, is the moral standing of what is contained in the work of art, not the actual morality of the artist himself. Baumgarten did not extensively develop his comment that art must be touching, but this became central to Meier's aesthetics.
Meier analyzes the passions, in spite of their name the German term Leidenschaft , like the Latin passio , etymologically means something that happens to someone rather than something that one does, an actio , as a form of mental activity: Thus in the emotions the soul is sensitive of the strength of its powers, that is, of its perfection. It must therefore necessarily be gratified with its own strength. It must be joyous when it feels as much as it can. Living cognition becomes alive through the sensible representations.
The lower powers of the soul, the desires and aversions, constitute the life of a cognition. Everything that leaves our powers in peace when we cognize it is a dead cognition. Art aims for the opposite. Indeed, Meier continues that it is by arousing our passions that art achieves its goal of a clear but confused, that is, manifold but densely packed, cognition. For Meier, moving our emotions is not just some small part of the beauty of art, as Baumgarten seems to suggest. Instead, the arousal of our emotions, even ones that considered by themselves should be disagreeable, is the strongest source of the pleasure at which art aims because it is the most intense form of mental activity.
With his connection of the pleasure in experiencing emotions to the pleasure of experiencing mental activity as such he brought Wolffian aesthetics a step closer to contemporary British aesthetics. Meier thereby prepared the way for the tremendous influence that British aesthetics would have in Germany by the end of the s. But while Meier stressed the activity of the mind and Baumgarten argued that aesthetic experience is based in an analogue of reason, not reason itself, neither was quite ready to introduce the idea of the free play of our mental powers as the fundamental source of our pleasure in aesthetic experience.
Baumgarten also at least once characterizes the mental state of aesthetic experience as a form of harmony: That idea would be decisively introduced into German aesthetics only with Kant's unique synthesis of the preceding German tradition with the British tradition.
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Before that was to happen, however, the ideas, emphasized more by Meier although already suggested by Baumgarten, that art aims at arousing our emotions and at the pleasurable activity of the mind, and at the former as an instance of the latter, would be further developed by an intervening generation of German thinkers. Let us now turn to some of those.
In a review of Meier's Extract from the Foundations of all fine Arts and Sciences , Moses Mendelssohn —86 rejected what he took to be the excessively abstract and a priori method of Baumgarten and Meier, writing that:. Just as little as the philosopher can discover the appearances of nature, without examples from experience, merely through a priori inferences, so little can he establish appearances in the beautiful world, if one can thus express oneself, without diligent observations.
The securest path of all, just as in the theory of nature, is this: One must assume certain experiences, explain their ground through an hypothesis, then test this hypothesis against experiences from a quite different species, and only assume those hypotheses to be general principles which have thus held their ground; one must finally seek to explain these principles in the theory of nature through the nature of bodies and motion, but in aesthetics through the nature of the lower powers of our soul.
Review of Meier, pp. He certainly does, but what he aims to do is to show that the perfections that can be realized in aesthetic experience are both more positive and more complicated than those recognized by Baumgarten. Mendelssohn's analysis of the complexity of aesthetic experience places more emphasis on the powers of mind and body involved in such experience than on the objective perfections that art may represent or nature contain.
His account further prepares the ground for the full-blown theory of aesthetic experience as based in a play of our powers that will subsequently be achieved by Kant and Schiller. But in his emphasis on the role of the body as well as the mind in aesthetic experience, Mendelssohn goes beyond his successors. Mendelssohn followed his rabbi from Dessau to Berlin at the age of fourteen. At twenty-one, he became a tutor in the home of a Jewish silk manufacturer, at twenty-five his accountant, subsequently his manager, and finally a partner in the business, in which he would work full-time for the rest of his life.
But by twenty-five Mendelssohn had also mastered not only literary German but Greek, Latin, French, and English as well as a vast range of literature and philosophy in all those languages. He had also become friends with the critic and playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and the writer and publisher Friedrich Nicolai, and begun an active publishing career. In , before he turned twenty-six, Mendelssohn published Philosophical Dialogues on the model of Shaftesbury, On Sentiments , and, with Lessing, Pope, a Metaphysician!
The next year he published Thoughts on Probability and a translation of Rousseau's second discourse On the Origins of Inequality.
From to he collaborated with Lessing and Nicolai on the Library of Fine Sciences and Liberal Arts , for which he wrote two dozen reviews of new works in aesthetics and literature, and from to he contributed nearly one hundred reviews to Nicolai's Letters concerning the newest Literature , discussing works not only in aesthetics and literature but also metaphysics, mathematics, natural science, and politics Gesammelte Schriften , vol. In he published the first edition of his Philosophical Writings , mostly on aesthetics, and in he took first place in a Prussian Academy of Sciences essay competition for an essay on Evidence in Metaphysical Sciences , beating out the entry by Kant.
In , Mendelssohn published Phaedo: His masterpiece Jerusalem, or on Religious Power and Judaism , in which he argued for the civil rights of the Jews by arguing that the state had no right to recognize any religion at all and therefore must allow all religions freedom from interference, was published in In , he returned to philosophy one last time with Morning Lessons , a magisterial summary of his own version of Wolffianism.
By this time, however, he was caught up in a strenuous controversy with the fideist philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi over whether his lifelong friend Lessing had been a Spinozist. In the midst of this controversy he died of a stroke in January, , at the age of fifty-six. Mendelssohn worked within the framework of Wolffian metaphysics and psychology, and thus he accepted the definition of sensible perception as clear but confused cognition.
He accepted Wolff's explanation that pleasure arises in the sensible perception of perfection, but also Baumgarten's transformation of that formula into the explanation of beauty as the perfection of sensible cognition: But Mendelssohn vigorously rejected any interpretation of the Wolffian premise according to which the confusion of sensible perception itself could be the source of our pleasure in it.
Mendelssohn's explicit thesis is that while the parts of an object must be distinct enough to allow one to have a sense of their variety but dense enough to allow one to grasp them together with equilibrium and proportion, it is the latter that is the source of our pleasure. It might seem a stretch to read him as also suggesting that it is the play of the mind back and forth between its perception of the parts and its grasp of the whole that is pleasant.
But he will argue that the exercise of various of our powers, indeed as we are about to see bodily as well as mental powers, is itself a perfection that we enjoy, so this might at least point toward the idea that the source of pleasure in beauty is the free play of the those powers.
While rejecting any interpretation of obscurity or confusion as itself the source of our pleasure in beauty On Sentiments , note h; Philosophical Writings , p. Yet Mendelssohn no more rejects the idea that works of art do arouse our emotions and that they are, at least in many cases, imitations of nature than he rejects the idea that the perception of perfection and the perfection of perception is central to our experience of beauty and other aesthetic properties.
So how does he fit all of these ideas together into his own distinctive theory? Mendelssohn never presented his aesthetic theory in a full-length treatise. We therefore need to supplement what we can glean from this essay with suggestions from On Sentiments and the Rhapsody, or addition to the Letters on Sentiments that he added to his collection. Perfection along any of these axes is a potential source of pleasure in the experience of an object, and the effect of these sources of pleasure can be additive, each increasing our pleasure in the same object.
Mendelssohn's characterization of the intrinsic perfection of objects in nature and thus of the objects depicted in representational art follows in the path already marked out by Wolff: Thus in On Sentiments Mendelssohn writes that we. In the case of natural objects, this order is comprised by both the internal organization of an object to suit its overall goal and the part that the particular object plays in nature as a whole.
Everything capable of being represented to the senses as a perfection could also present an object of beauty. Belonging here are all the perfections of external forms, that is, the lines, surfaces, and bodies and their movements and changes; the harmony of the multiple sounds and colors; the order in the parts of a whole, their similarity, variety, and harmony; their transposition and transformation into other forms; all the capabilities of our soul, all the skills of our body. Even the perfections of our external state under which honor, comfort, and riches are to be understood cannot be excepted from this if they are fit to be represented in a way that is apparent to the senses.
Philosophical Writings , p. When Mendelssohn refers to the capabilities of our soul and the skills of our body here, he is referring to them as objects for depiction or description in a work of art, thus as part of the content of works of art. This is how he fits into his model the representation of human intentions, actions, and responses to them, which are the subject matter of most mimetic art. The next axis of perfection that Mendelssohn considers is the state of our mind in response to perfection or imperfection in a real or represented object. Mendelssohn answers this question this by saying that.
Each individual representation stands in a twofold relation. It is related, at once, to the matter before it as its object of which it is a picture or copy and then to the soul or the thinking subject of which it constitutes a determination. As a determination of the soul, many a representation can have something pleasant about it although, as a picture of the object, it is accompanied by disapproval and a feeling of repugnance.
Rhapsody ; Philosophical Writings , p. Several points about this passage need comment. In relation to the thinking subject, the soul, on the other hand, perceiving and cognizing the features as well as testifying to enjoying them or not constitutes something actual [ Sachliches ] that is posited in the soul, an affirmative determination of the soul. Hence every representation, at least in relation to the subject, as an affirmative predicate of the thinking entity, must have something about it that we like. For even the picture of the deficiency of the object, just like the expression of discontent with it, are not deficiencies on the part of the thinking entity, but rather affirmative and actual determinations of it….
Rhapsody ; Philosophical Writings , pp. It is striking how Mendelssohn writes here in gerundives and infinitives rather than in substantives in order to convey a sense of mental activity: We enjoy that mental activity, even when it is stimulated by the representation of something of which we disapprove, and we enjoy the representation even of something evil as long as our pleasure in the activity of representing is not overwhelmed by disapproval of the object of the representation.
The contrast between perfection or imperfection in the content of a representation and the enjoyable activity of the mind in representing that content is the heart of Mendelssohn's theory, so we can interrupt our catalogue of all four of the axes of perfection that he recognizes for some comments on this contrast.
The first thing to be noticed is that Mendelssohn here emphasizes the engagement of our powers of both knowing and desiring in aesthetic experience, not merely the power of knowing. This gives him room to add an emphasis on our enjoyment of the arousal of our emotions to Baumgarten's emphasis on our enjoyment of the perfection of sensible cognition.
Now, as we saw, Baumgarten in fact made room for this dimension of aesthetic experience in his early Meditations on Poetry , even though he did not take it up again in the Aesthetica , and Meier emphasized it in several of his works. But Mendelssohn adds a crucial point here, leading to a fundamental revision in the significance of artistic imitation: If the objects gets too close to us, if we regard it as a part of us or even as ourselves, the pleasant character of the representation completely disappears, and the relation to the subject immediately becomes an unpleasant relation to us since here subject and object collapse, as it were, into one another.
Thus, contrary to Wolff, Mendelssohn does not suppose that what we enjoy in imitation is accuracy of representation taken to the point of illusion, but rather the room for the experience of our own mental activity that the knowledge that the depicted object is only being imitated allows. In fact, Mendelssohn's analysis of our mixed emotions in the experience of tragedy is even more subtle than this, for a further aspect of it is that our knowledge that we are experiencing represented rather than real people allows us to enjoy sympathy with the perfections of the noble characters who are depicted rather than pity at their weaknesses or at the fate that overcomes them.
But rather than pursuing this, I want to make to make one further point about Mendelssohn's general account of our enjoyment of the engagement of our powers of knowing and desiring. There he says that. One usually divides the faculties of the soul into the faculty of cognition and the faculty of desire, and assigns the sentiment of pleasure and displeasure to the faculty of desire. But it seems to me that between knowing and desiring lies the approving, the assent, the satisfaction of the soul, which is actually quite remote from desire.
We contemplate the beauty of nature and of art, without the least arousal of desire, with gratification and satisfaction. It seems to be a particular mark of beauty that we contemplate it with quiet satisfaction; that it pleases, even if we do not possess it, and that is remote from the urge to possess it. Morgenstunden , Lesson VII, p. Mendelssohns' introduction of a faculty of approval in may have been influential for Kant's elevation of judgment to a faculty on a par with understanding and reason, signaled in his letter of December 25, , to Karl Leonhard Reinhold, a decisive step in the genesis of the third critique.
But as far as Mendelssohn is concerned, his explanation of the faculty of approval shows that his basic theory has not changed. By introducing this faculty, he wants to emphasize that the experience of beauty or other aesthetic qualities is not actual knowledge, nor does it lead to specific desires and actions except perhaps the desire to be able to continue contemplating an object already found to have been beautiful. But what satisfies the faculty of approval is still the activity of the other mental powers. Thus Mendelssohn writes, first with reference to the power of cognition but then with reference to desire as well, that.
We can consider the cognition of the soul in different respects; either in so far as it is true or false, which I call the material aspect in cognition; or in so far as arouses pleasure or displeasure, has as its consequence the approval or disapproval of the soul, and this can be called the formal aspect in cognition. Every concept, in so far as it is merely thinkable, has something that pleases the soul, that occupies its activity, and is thus cognized by it with satisfaction and approval….
In this comparison and in the preference that we give to an object consists the essence of the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the evil, the perfect and the imperfect. What we cognize as the best in this comparison works on our faculty of desire and stimulates it, where it finds no resistance, to activity. This is the side on which the faculty of approval touches demand or desire. Morgenstunden , Lesson VII, pp. Ordinarily, the faculty of cognition aims at truth, and the faculty of desire aims at action. The faculty of approval, however, aims just for the pleasing activity of the other two faculties without their usual results.
The faculty of approval should be distinguished from the faculties of cognition and desire, since it does not aim at the same results they do.
Mendelssohn's explicit introduction of the concept of play here, finally, may be just as influential for the development of Kant's aesthetics as is his insistence that the faculty of approval does not lead to actual knowledge or actual desire. In the Morning Lessons Mendelssohn does not emphasize that the free play of the mind has a pleasing effect on the body, but he does in his earlier writings, so let us now return to this third item in Mendelssohn's catalogue of the axes of perfection in aesthetic experience.
In other words, although as a rationalist metaphysician Mendelssohn maintains the formal distinction between the mind and the body the mind is simple and indivisible, while body is essentially divisible , as a psychologist and aesthetician he nevertheless sees them as in the most intimate interaction, with the perception of harmony by the body infusing the mind with a pleasant sense of harmony that then further stimulates the harmonious condition of the body.
In explaining this source of pleasure, Mendelssohn also makes another revision to the traditional theory that it is resemblance alone that is the source of our pleasure in imitation, because resemblance is easily produced by means far less complex and admirable than all of the faculties that go into artistry—a point that Plato had already made when he had Socrates argue that if it is mere imitation that the artist were after, he could just go around with a mirror Plato, Republic , Book X, d—e:.
All works of art are visible imprints of the artist's abilities which, so to speak, put his entire soul on display and make it known to us. This perfection of spirit arouses an uncommonly greater pleasure than mere similarity, because it is more worthy and far more complex than similarity.
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It is all the more worthy the more that the perfection of rational beings is elevated above the perfection of lifeless things, and also more complex because many abilities of the soul and often diverse skills of the external limbs as well are required for a beautiful imitation.
We find more to admire in a rose by Huysum than in the image that every river can reflect of this queen of the flowers; and the most enchanting landscape in a camera obscura does not charm us as much as it can through the brush of a great landscape painter. Mendelssohn explicitly recognizes the physical skills as well as the mental powers of the artist as among the perfections that we indirectly admire in admiring the work of art; this is another example of his recognition of the close connection between mind and body in spite of their metaphysical distinction.
However, although human artistry may concentrate beauty more than nature does, that hardly means that artistic beauty is in all regards superior to natural beauty. The arbitrary signs could also be called conventional. In fact, Mendelssohn distinguishes between the fine arts and the beautiful sciences, or between beaux arts and belles lettres , on this basis: In the case of rhetoric, moreover, there was a long tradition going back to antiquity of formulating rules for how persuasion can be achieved, and perhaps this made it seem like more of a science than an art to Mendelssohn.
A similar point would be made a century later by the music critic Eduard Hanslick. Mendelssohn next assumes that only hearing and sight can convey natural signs, and then observes that. This leads Mendelssohn to the point that although works of music, dance, and for that matter poetry themselves take place through a succession of moments and can thereby convey a succession of movements, painting and sculpture can represent only a single moment in the history of their objects.
The painter and sculptor must therefore. They must assemble the entire action into a single perspective and divide it up with a great deal of understanding. In this instant everything must be rich in thoughts and so full of meaning that every accompanying concept makes its own contribution to the required meaning.
When we view such a painting [or sculpture] with due attention, our senses are all at once inspired, all the abilities of our soul suddenly enlivened, and the imagination can from the present infer the past and reliably anticipate the future. Mendelssohn's thesis that the visual arts must convey all of their content through their representation of an object at a single moment while other arts can represent movements and actions in, as we would say, real time, would be used as a premise in a famous controversy between his friend Lessing and the renowned historian of ancient art Johann Joachim Winckelmann, to which we will turn in a moment.
But before doing so, we must complete our survey of Mendelssohn's aesthetics with a comment on his discussion of the sublime. Mendelssohn was instrumental in introducing the topic of the sublime into German aesthetics, publishing a lengthy review of Burke's book on the beautiful and the sublime in , just a year after it appeared in England reprinted in Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften , volume 4, pp.
In the latter essay, Mendelssohn makes a number of points that will become central to the subsequent German discussion of the sublime, especially in Kant. But the feeling of awe at immensity does not yet complete the complex experience of the sublime; for that, there must also be an element of admiration at a perfection—for remember that Mendelssohn's project is still to ground all aesthetic experience on the underlying principle of pleasure in perfection.
So the immensity which inspires us with awe must also be interpreted as a manifestation of perfection. Mendelssohn then invokes the same distinction he employed in his discussion of artistry. The immensity which fills us with awe may be either a product of divine artistry, in which case.
What especially pleases us in the case of art, considered as art, is the reference to the spiritual gifts of the artist which make themselves visibly known. If they bear the characteristics of an uncommon genius…then they inspire awe on our part. We may now turn to the famous controversy between Lessing and Winckelmann, built upon Mendelssohn's distinction between the arts of form and the arts of movement. Johann Joachim Winckelmann — , the son of a cobbler from Prussia, studied at Halle and Jena, and became a school teacher.
But at thirty-one he got a position as a librarian for a nobleman in Dresden, and gained access to the court of the Elector of Saxony, home of one of the great art collections of Europe, and also a Catholic court that ultimately gave him access to Rome. He was working on a revision of it when he was murdered in Trieste in June of , while returning to Rome from Vienna, where the Empress Maria Theresa had awarded him a collection of gold and silver medallions. Winckelmann spent his two years in Halle —40 while Baumgarten was still teaching there and Meier was also a student.
But his writing offers no evidence that he knew their works. His History of Ancient Art does cite Du Bos, Batteux, and the essays of Hume, however, and he had clearly absorbed some of the most general ideas of eighteenth-century aesthetics. He shares with Wolff and Batteux the assumption that art derives its beauty from the imitation of nature, and derives the most beauty from the imitation of beauty in nature. Thus he writes that. Art, as an imitator of nature, should always seek out what is natural for the form of beauty, and should avoid, as much as is possible, all that is violent, because even the beauty in life can become displeasing through forced gestures.
However, Winckelmann believes that natural beauty itself lies not merely in the superficial appearance of bodies but, at least in the case of human beauty, is an expression of the thought and character of persons:. Above all things, one is to be attentive to the particular, characteristic thoughts in works of art, which sometimes stand like expensive pearls in a string of inferior ones, and can get lost among them.
Our contemplation should begin with the effects of the understanding as the most worthy part of beauty, and from there should descend to the execution. Winckelmann clearly belongs to the tradition that finds beauty in the truthful representation of the objective perfections of body and mind, rather than in the stimulation of the play of the mental powers of the audience for beauty. His topic is thus in the first instance the imitation of ancient art, not imitation in ancient art. Winckelmann then attributes the excellent of ancient, that is to say Greek, art to three factors: Winckelmann's second point is that the Greek climate and way of life were conducive to the development of art.
He makes the general claim that freedom is conducive to the development of art:. Winckelmann then makes the specific point that freedom from excessive clothing among the Greeks, particularly in their gymnastic and athletic exercises, gave their artists unparalleled opportunity to observe and to learn to represent the beauty of their bodies:.
The Gymnasies, where, sheltered by public modesty, the youths exercised themselves naked, were the schools of art…. Here beautiful nakedness appeared with such a liveliness of expression, such truth and variety of situations, such a noble air of the body, as it would be ridiculous to look for in any hired model of our academies. Winckelmann's reference to expression and nobility here points the way to his last claim, that above all the bodily beauty of the Greeks is an expression of their mental and moral beauty:.
The last and most eminent characteristic of the Greek works is a noble simplicity and sedate grandeur in Gesture and Expression. As the bottom of the sea lies peaceful beneath a foaming surface, a great soul lies sedate beneath the strife of passions in Greek figures. The version of this statue that was unearthed near Naples in and quickly acquired by Pope Julius II for the Vatican, where it has been displayed ever since, is now thought to be a Roman copy of a Pergamese bronze from the second century BCE, and may or may not be the same one described by Pliny Natural History , XXXV.
Winckelmann took it to be a classical Greek work. Be that as it may, Winckelmann writes:. Pangs piercing every muscle, every labouring nerve; pangs which we almost feel ourselves, while we consider—not the face, nor the most expressive parts—only the belly contracted by excruciating pains: The Expression of so great a soul is beyond the force of mere nature. It was in his own mind the artist was to search for the strength of spirit with which he marked his marble.
Greece enjoyed artists and philosophers in the same persons; and the wisdom of more than one Metrodorus directed art, and inspired its figures with more than common souls. The last paragraph of this is somewhat contorted: But his basic point remains: Winckelmann's History of Ancient Art , published nine years after the essay on imitation, reaffirms his general commitment to contemporary aesthetics as well as his particular emphasis on a certain kind of mental condition as the ultimate source of physical beauty.
To general statements on beauty as unity and simplicity History , p. Expression is an imitation of the active and suffering states of our minds and our bodies and of passions as well as deeds…Stillness is the state most proper to beauty, as it is to the sea, and experience shows that the most beautiful beings are of a still and well-mannered nature.
Beneath the brow, the battle between pain and resistance, as if concentrated in this one place, is composed with great wisdom…Thus, where the greatest pain is expressed, the greatest beauty is also to be found. An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry , although not published until , was clearly begun and largely written before the appearance of Winckelmann's History in Lessing, like Mendelssohn born in , was the oldest of thirteen children of a Saxon pastor, and at twelve he entered the monastic school at Meissen; at seventeen he went to Leipzig to study theology, then changed to medicine, and then to the university at Wittenberg.
But at twenty, he left the university and went to Berlin to make a career as a writer. There he quickly met among others Voltaire, at that time employed by Frederick the Great, as well as Mendelssohn. In , Lessing had his great success with the bourgeois tragedy Miss Sara Sampson , which initiated a new direction in the German theater. In , he started collaborating with Mendelssohn and Friedrich Nicolai on the Letters concerning the newest literature. He returned to Berlin again in , but, disappointed in his hopes for the position of Royal Librarian, went to Hamburg in as director of the National Theater.
The program notes he wrote in that capacity became his Hamburg Dramaturgy , his most extended critical work. There he wrote the tragedy Emilia Galotti and his famous plea for religious tolerance in the form of Nathan the Wise , a play inspired by Mendelssohn. In addition to various theological polemics, he also published his Education of the Human Race the year before his death. So he concludes that. Once this has been established, it necessarily follows that whatever else these arts may include must give way completely if not compatible with beauty, and, if compatible, must at least be subordinate to it.
The demands of beauty could not be reconciled with [his] pain in all its disfiguring violence, so it had to be reduced. The scream had to be softened to a sigh, not because screaming betrays an ignoble soul, but because it distorts the features in a disgusting manner. I should prefer that only those be called works of art in which the artist had occasion to show himself as such and in which beauty was his first and ultimate aim.
Lessing does not appeal to any philosophical theory to back up this insistence. Here Lessing at least tacitly invokes the new theory that the play of our mental powers rather than the representation of some form of truth is the fundamental aim of art, or at least visual art.
Lessing continues his argument by turning to the other half of Mendelssohn's theory, that is, to the claim that poetry is an art that can represent a succession of events over time rather than one moment in time. This leads Lessing to a memorable analysis of some examples from Homer: Here his implication is that sight actually constrains the imagination, while non-visual media—in other words, poetry—free the imagination for a wider play with both ideas and emotions.
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This point could also be thought to depend on one of Mendelssohn's ideas, namely his contrast between natural and arbitrary or conventional signs. He wants rather to make the ideas he awakens in us so vivid that at the moment we believe that we feel the real impressions which the objects of these ideas would produce in us.
In this moment of illusion we should cease to be conscious of the means which the poet uses for this purpose, that is, his words. But while emphasizing that the poet aims to create a vivid response in us, in particular a vivid emotional response, Lessing fails to mention Mendelssohn's point that we also need to retain some awareness of the artificiality rather than reality of the artistic depiction of persons and actions in order to maintain the distance necessary to allow us to enjoy the emotions evoked by art rather than being overwhelmed by them into actual suffering.