Aesthetics as Rightful Heir and Unruly Child of the Eighteenth Century:

A Meta-Aesthetic Reflection

Abstract

Aesthetics is a relative newcomer among the philosophical disciplines. In 1735, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten（1714–62）, a follower of the Leibniz-Wolff tradition, coined the term aesthetica in his dissertation. Approximately seventy years later, in 1804, Jean Paul remarked that nothing swarmed more abundantly in his age than aestheticians. Indeed, aesthetics owed not only its inception but also its remarkable expansion to the eighteenth century. It was a rightful heir of the Enlightenment project that sought to guide and legitimize sensibility in the broad sense, hitherto regarded as a lower faculty in contrast to the intellect as a higher faculty. At the same time, however, by the century’s end, aesthetics had begun to transcend and even repudiate the very framework from which it emerged. The aesthetic was no longer something to be guided toward perfection but was reconceived as constituting the very foundation of human subjectivity. In this respect, aesthetics was also an unruly child of the Enlightenment. This paper undertakes, from a meta-aesthetic standpoint, a chronological examination of the genesis, flourishing, and transformation of aesthetics in the eighteenth century, tracing the discourses of key philosophers within the broader intellectual currents of the period and asking how aesthetics defined itself and the “aesthetic,” what was expected of the discipline, and what new domains of inquiry it opened up.