Invention of the Affect: Literature and history

Abstract

At the beginning of the 18th century, a debate emerged between Gottsched and the so-called Swiss. In order to design possible worlds, the former relied on reason, while the latter emphasized ‘the pleasures of the imagination.’ The Swiss insisted that the logic of poetry and imagination accomplishes something that mathematical logic, experimentation, and observation can no longer provide. This controversy in the Early Enlightenment revealed an emerging dimension of the human mind. On the basis of the conventionalized language of representation, humans’ horizons of time and space expanded drastically, just as all the functions of the mind—one of which is emotion—have evolved based on the homeostasis of the body, cultivating ever newer dimensions in the history of the human mind; a specific case arose from this foundation at a certain historical point as the negation of all conventional language: aesthetic subjectivity. Only when imagination and emotion work together in an educated, sophisticated way may the human mind long for—beyond the biological condition—precious ends.