Aesthetics and Enlightenment

Baumgarten, "Reflections on Poetry" (1760): Essay strives to identify, define, categorize key relationships between philosophy and poetry. Examples from "classical" literature or antiquity are listed as ideals, models, determiners. Sensation is critical and generally combined with notions of clarity, the importance of appropriate/adequate/pleasing/well-received presentation (a "how-to" for embodying, manifesting an aesthetic?). The essay also emphasizes the interconnectedness of many relationships, and expresses a preference for text over image.

Shared knowledge/shared values with audience: Greeks are the still the gold standard for a life well-lived. There is recognized tension between "philosophy" (rationality, reason) and "poetry" (pleasure derived from ancient texts or "poetic cognition").

The shift in knowledge/values Baumgarten may be trying to establish: The mind/body split is keeping us from achieving a full understanding of human experience. Human understanding should embrace perceptions developed through personal sensation in addition to rational (merely cerebral) explorations of experience, whether we are in pursuit of the mortal, or the immortal. These classifications are offered by Baumgarten as a way to balance or harness human sensations or provide an acceptable kind of temperance for "wild" passions, particularly for a skeptical audience that may resist an impulse to let go of "rationality" as a primary tool for evaluating human experience.

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Schiller, "Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man" (1794): Series of letters (to Goethe?) examining how art mediates human experience to help achieve personal and social harmony. Art, as a pursuit of beauty, becomes an aesthetic that unifies (tempers, balances) inherent contradictions or tensions in human nature between sensation/desire/material impulses/feeling and rationality/formal impulses/thought. This reconciliation can produce a state or experience discovered through play (our inherent play drive) which is "outside of time" or extra-temporal (transcendent?) and liberatory.

Shared knowledge/values with audience: Antiquity as an ideal, a time of "glorious humanity." We have "fallen": we are not close to this distant Greek ideal, we lack social harmony and an authentic capacity to enjoy human experience. Questions related to immortality are irrelevant because they don't address the fact that the here and now is pretty awful.

The shift Schiller is trying to produce: life can be better, we can put our differences aside as we work toward this natural balance, this new pursuit will also provide us with more personal Freedom and a brief escape from the contemporary world.

What socio-historical connections can we make to Schiller's "wounds" of modern humanity and the "machinery of the states" on page 7? How are class, gender operating within these two texts?