Diotima's Children: German Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing

by Frederick C. Beiser

Diotima's Children is a re-examination of the rationalist tradition of aesthetics which prevailed in Germany in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century. It is partly an historical survey of the central figures and themes of this tradition But it is also a philosophical defense of some of its leading ideas, viz., that beauty plays an integral role in life, that aesthetic pleasure is the perception of perfection, that aesthetic rules are inevitable and valuable. It shows that the criticisms of Kant and Nietzsche of this tradition are largely unfounded. The rationalist tradition deserves re-examination because it is of great historical significance, marking the beginning of modern aesthetics, art criticism, and art history.

Genres: Philosophy

306 pages, Paperback

First published October 29, 2009

About the author

Frederick C. Beiser, one of the leading scholars of German Idealism, is a Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University. Prior to joining Syracuse, he was a member of the faculty at Indiana University, Bloomington where he received a 1999-2000 NEH Faculty Fellowship. He has also taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Harvard and Yale University. Beiser earned his DPhil. degree from Oxford University under the direction of Charles Taylor and Isaiah Berlin.

Beiser's first book, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Harvard, 1987) was widely influential in revising the commonly held, but notorious accounts of German Idealism. In this book, Beiser sought to reconstruct the background of German Idealism through the narration of the story of the Spinoza or Pantheism controversy. Consequently, a great many figures, whose importance was hardly recognized by the English speaking philosophers, were given their proper due.
Beiser has also written on the German Romantics and 19th century British philosophy.

Reviews

[Jacob Ritz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another missed opportunity in the history of (the history of) philosophy — Beiser's title should have been: Diotima, Diotima: A young girl's strange, erotic journey from Leibniz to Lessing...

But on a more serious note, this book is simply excellent. It resurrects the pre-Kantian tradition of aesthetic rationalism by emphasising the subtlety of its arguments against two famous caricatures.

First, Beiser responds to Kant's arguments in the Kritik der Urteilskraft that are implicitly directed against the rationalists. In short, Kant claims 1. that a work's conformity to rules cannot demonstrate that it is beautiful. Rather, the pleasure afforded by an artwork is the ultimate measure of its value; and 2. that aesthetic pleasure is irreducible to concepts. Against the first argument, Beiser shows (throughout the book) that the rationalists do not simply ignore pleasure for rules. While pleasure remains a basic measure of the success of art for the rationalists, rules still account for how this pleasure arises. The centrality of pleasure in art by no means abrogates the need (and reality) of rules for the creation and consumption of art objects. Against the second argument, the irreducibility of art to concepts does not mean that there are no rules to describe its production or appreciation.

Additionally, Beiser counters Kant's critique that art does not involve perfection (which Kant identifies with intrinsic objective purposiveness), because, according to Kant, the concept of purpose is not inherent to an object of art. This misunderstands the concept of perfection in aesthetic rationalism by reading Leibniz's teleology into Wolff's and Baumgarten's aesthetics. The aesthetic rationalist concept of perfection is a weaker concept than that of objective purposiveness, as it simply denotes a formal or structural feature of an object: the notion of harmony or unity-in-variety. According to the rationalists, this uniting of many into one is due to some sufficient reason, which by no means has to be a final cause pace Kant. It does not follow, therefore, that the rationalists' notion of perfection conflicts with the strictures of critical philosophy (given that perfection is not inherently teleological), despite the fundamental role that Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason plays across the whole tradition. Yet, in keeping with the Platonic tradition and against Kantian philosophy, the aesthetic rationalists maintain that reason is irreducible to its discursive dimension, for there is an intuitive aspect of reason through which we grasp the intelligible. Most significantly, this contradicts Kant's rigid separation of cognitive and aesthetic judgements. For the rationalists, pleasure is a cognition, which is the intuition of perfection, or unity-in-variety. This undermines the division of labour that Kant institutes between the understanding and sensibility, and between knowing and making (a critique taken up by Schiller and Dewey later on). Art does not correspond to a lesser form of knowledge, but rather it is an active part of our cognitive powers. In a broader historical sense, this is the revenge of the spirit of Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus against Kant's marginalisation of art in the tradition of Plato's Republic. This also accounts for the decline of the status of beauty in contemporary aesthetics. Because Kant associates the beautiful with disinterested pleasure, he divorces beauty from its erotic dimension. By contrast, the great strength of the rationalists' "aesthetic Socratism...is that it recognizes the profound importance of the erotic...Once beauty is severed from the energies of life itself, its irrelevance is ensured." (p. 22)

Second, Beiser responds to Nietzsche's arguments in Die Geburt der Tragödie. Put simply, Nietzsche critiques the rationalists for ignoring the Dionysian aspect of art. Beiser emphasises the questionable philosophical assumptions behind this notion (the separation of things-in-themselves and appearances that Nietzsche inherits from Schopenhauer, an assumption that the aesthetic rationalists do not share), and thus demonstrates that, like Kant, Nietzsche is begging the question.
Further, Beiser juxtaposes Nietzsche's Dionysus with the aesthetic rationalists' Diotima, whose teachings emphasise that desire as a form of love is directed towards the eternal, revealing an erotic dimension that is apparently missing from Nietzsche's Dionysian view. This critique becomes most interesting in Beiser's discussion of Winckelmann's neo-classicism (Chapter 6). Nietzsche criticises Winckelmann for his inability (along with the other aesthetic rationalists) to appreciate the orgiastic dimension of Greek art, and so Winckelmann ultimately fails to appreciate Greek culture. In a brilliant riposte, Beiser clarifies how Winckelmann's homosexuality inspired his idealised interpretation of Greek culture. Ironically, it is Nietzsche who did not appreciate the orgiastic aspect of Greek culture. Due to his failure to understand the significance of the homosexually erotic in Greek cultural life, Nietzsche identifies the Dionysian with the procreative and fertile.

Regardless of the effective historical defeat that aesthetic rationalism suffered at the hands of Kant and Nietzsche, Beiser reveals the insufficiency of their criticisms and the enduring value of aesthetic rationalism in our era dominated by relativist and postmodernist clichés. Both Kant and Nietzsche underestimate and undermine the erotic dimension in aesthetic rationalism, thereby foreclosing the possibility of an enriched notion of beauty. We can thus already locate the return to Plato's Phaedrus and Symposium, as in Schiller and the Frühromantiker, across the breadth of the aesthetic rationalist tradition. And I have only touched on a few of the insights that this book provides.

[Mephistopheles · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5