exclusively concerned. In fact, the work in which he first used the term
aesthetikwas his Reflections on Poetry. That treatise aimed mainly to
persuade his fellow rationalist philosophers that questions regarding the
nature of art were as worthy of their attention as the more abstract spheres
of thought with which they had previously concerned themselves.
Baumgarten was thus ahead of his contemporaries in understanding that
the arts constitute a distinctive and significant realm of “sensuous cogni-
tion,” in which emotion also plays an important part. As indicated by an
in-depth study of how the arts were viewed by ancient Greek philoso-
phers, however, his ideas had clear precedents in antiquity.^7
Baumgarten’s view of the cognitive function of art was largely shared
by his younger contemporary Immanuel Kant. Yet Kant has long been
mistakenly associated with formalist theories, which attempt to divorce
art from cognitive considerations and have played a regrettable part in
the legitimization of abstract painting and sculpture, among the earliest
and most influential of the avant-garde inventions.^8 Contrary to mis-
taken accounts of his aesthetic philosophy, Kant unequivocally states (in
the sections of his Critique of Judgementfocusing on the “fine arts”—
as contrasted with more frequently quoted passages dealing with the
aesthetics of nature) that the value of an art work depends on its pre-
senting what he terms “aesthetical Ideas.” He explains:[B]y an aesthetical Idea I understand that representation of the Imagination
which... cannot be completely compassed and made intelligible by lan-
guage.... [I]t is the counterpart (pendant) of a rational Idea....
The Imagination (as a productive faculty of cognition) is very powerful
in creating another nature, as it were, out of the material that actual nature
gives it... , and by it we remould experience, always indeed in accordance
with analogical laws....
Such representations of the Imagination we may call Ideas, partly
because they at least strive after something which lies beyond the bounds of
experience, and so seek to approximate to a presentation of concepts of
Reason (intellectual Ideas), thus giving to the latter the appearance of objec-
tive reality.^9What Kant seems to be saying here is that the arts present perceptual
embodiments of important ideas—not only ideas about existential expe-
rience, such as death, envy, love, and fame, but also imaginative con-
ceptions of other-worldly things, such as heaven and hell, as he goes on
to explain. In all cases, he implies, the products of the artist’s imagina-
tion are essentially mimetic, for they resemble to some degree the
appearance of nature, or (to borrow his term) “objective reality.” As he40 Michelle Marder Kamhi