German Writers
We may pass by the few thoughts on the subject to be found among medieval writers and turn to modern theories, beginning with those of German writers as the most numerous and most elaborately set forth. The best of the Germans who attempted to develop an aesthetic theory as part of a system of philosophy was Baumgarten (Aesthetica). Adopting the Leibniz-Wolffian theory of knowledge, he sought to complete it by setting over against the clear scientific or "logical" knowledge of the understanding, the confused knowledge of the senses, to which (as we have seen) he gave the name "aesthetic". Beauty with him thus corresponds with perfect sense-knowledge. Baumgarten is clearly an intellectualist in aesthetics, reducing taste to an intellectual act and ignoring the element of feeling. The details of his aesthetics are mostly unimportant. Arguing from Leibniz's theory of the world as the best possible, Baumgarten concluded that nature is the highest embodiment of beauty, and that art must seek its supreme function in the strictest possible imitation of nature.
Read more about this topic: History Of Aesthetics Before The 20th Century
Famous quotes containing the words german and/or writers:
“She had exactly the German way: whatever was in her mind to be delivered, whether a mere remark, or a sermon, or a cyclopedia, or the history of a war, she would get it into a single sentence or die. Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of the Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)