Baumgarten's AESTHETICS🏫Prof.SUMIOKA's advanced philosophy class

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Baumgarten’s AESTHETICS

Although it is famous as the founder of aesthetics, few people understand its contents. This is probably because it was a large work written in Latin, in addition, it was unfinished.

Descartes believed images in the mind are more real than things in the external world. Despite the era of natural history in the 18th Century, Baumgarten considered them. Namely, his AESTHETICS does not discuss the beauty of nature or art, but questions the structure of Sensibility.

However, unlike the distinct concepts of Reason, images of Sensibility are so ambiguous that traditional Logic Theory cannot be applied to them. Therefore, instead of truth and falsehood, he takes as its standard the perfect harmony of mixture (consensus) or aesthetic impressivity and incorporates traditional Rhetoric Theory.

The mixture consists in three layers: material and image, arrangement of images, and image and expression; furthermore, the relationship between the persons (artists) who invent and express them and their images is also asked. In each of these, by satisfying the six qualities of fertility, greatness, truth, clarity, evidence, and vitality, the mixture of images becomes perfect.

However, his AESTHETICS was left unfinished only with the Invention Theory where the relationship between materials and images was discussed, so it lacks not only the Arranging Theory and the Expressing Theory, but even the last chapter of Invention Theory on the vitality of images. However, from the perspective of his overall plan, the image that the artists get should be after that expressed as a work of art, with the vitality of the image, the image would be reproduced in the audience again, and it would nurture their humanity.

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