Ars analogi rationis
new Relations
between Philosophical Anthropology and Aesthetics(*)
This paper briefly means to prove the significance of the connection between anthropology and aesthetics brought to light thanks to the recent studies of some Italian scholars. These studies concern Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, his sources and his historical period.
First, this movement has contributed to modify the historical idea of aesthetics as philosophy of beautiful and art; such an aesthetics seems indeed to be only a particular field of the researches into the wider field of the aesthetic reality, with all its anthropological branches. So aesthetic science should be considered more as a knowledge and human praxis doctrine, than a specialization of a knowledge concerning the different domains of the artistic culture. This is proved by its same conception during the modern age, when, through the filter of a renewed attention to the arts (especially literary), a new psychology of the faculties of the mind took shape, revealing a pragmatic attention towards man’s behaviour in society too(1).
Second, the idea of history of aesthetics has in this way been enlarged and perhaps taken to a greater exactness. In fact, although a history of aesthetics like the one outlined by W. Tatarkiewicz might seem emblematic of these requirements – as it includes the so called "implicit" aesthetics and is attentive to the different productions of artistic culture –, even in this case we must acknowledge the dependence on a particular idea of aesthetics, essentially tracing back to a philosophy of beautiful and art. This makes it difficult taking into account the recent outcomes of the aesthetic research, on which these lines mean to report.
The period the new reflection on aesthetics and anthropology is concentrating on seems to be mainly placed between XVIIth and XVIIIth century, when several ancient messages – not properly considered either in that time or perhaps still today – merged showing all their effectiveness and significance. It was in that time that the "analogon rationis", the faculty of perceiving indistinctly reality through our sensitively knowledge, began to be discussed in a new way and became one very interesting topic for aesthetics too.
Starting from his Meditationes de cognitione, veritate et ideis, 1684, Leibniz had shown the way, but it was Baumgarten who defined the aesthetics as "ars analogi rationis", identifying the poetical abilities to assemble freely the phantoms of imagination with the indistinct syllogism that the soul can produce, even though anima brutorum.
Baumgarten referred to Wolff’s syntagm "analogum rationis", that Wolff(2) used to define the "exspectatio casuum similium", a cognitive performance able to link facts without distinctly knowing the causes(3) and consequently able to influence animal behaviour, often with pragmatic success.
A first important novelty appearing in the leibnizian-wolffian use of the syntagm "analogon rationis", in comparison with the traditional(4) semantic value of "ratio analogos"(5), consists in outlining the issue of the birth of the intelligible in accordance with the lex continui: the reasoning that is developed by the "exspectatio casuum similium" – as Maurizio Ferraris underlines – provides that the trace of sensation acts simultaneously as a posteriori principle, as a kept trace of what has been perceived, and as a priori principle, since "the association of traces allows a forecast (…) that, even though of an empirical origin, assures an anticipation that mimes the a priori"(6). This means that "you can’t arrive from the analogon to the reason by progression but by means of iteration (reason is nothing but an iteration of analogon, as well as analogon is nothing but an iteration-idealisation of the sensation). … As mediation between sensible and intelligible, imagination is therefore the seat of analogon, according to the principle that the (sensible) trace kept in memory, becomes ideo facto intelligible"(7). The passage from the inferior to the superior knowledge is therefore nothing but an improvement of an activity that has its reason of being in the doubleness of memory: reproductive and productive.
Nevertheless, Baumgarten’s use of analogon rationis is even more distinctive, since he attributes to it the main functions of aesthetic science. The beauty or poetical value of the thoughts (the "repraesentationes" that are signified by the works of art) is identified with their sensitively observable ontological perfection, i. e., observable by means of analogon rationis. Consequently analogon becomes the faculty that governs the judgement on the works of art considered in the modern meaning, that is to say belonging to the dawning system of fine arts. Moreover, as Francesco Piselli – rightful rediscoverer of Baumgarten – has exhaustively proved, the founder of aesthetics had even pointed out that besides the analogy between ratio and analogon rationis there is another analogy between intellectus and facultas fingendi : as intellect moulds conceptions of which it judges the intrinsic nexus by means of ratio, so facultas fingendi moulds fictions of which it judges the nexus by means of analogon rationis(8), which, in this case, is named "IUDICIUM SENSUUM … le goût … Buon Gusto"(9).
By doing this the functions of analogon considerably broaden: the old "exspectatio casuum similium" or "praesagitio sensitiva"(10) is considered as only one of the different functions of Baumgarten’s analogon, and the "facultas fingendi", that now has added to the faculties of inferior knowledge, becomes sort of synecdoche of the analogon itself.
Facultas fingendi has a productive character and has more liberty than the other inferior cognitive faculties: senses and fancy supply the sensitive knowledge only with stuff, without moulding it(11), whereas the faculty called by Baumgarten "poetica"(12) is even able to mould freely new beings, endowed with a considerable percentage of metaphysical perfectio, even though set in the heterocosmic world of fictions, i.e., in the world of the possible. In my opinion this is one of the reasons why art, with its constitutive inventiveness and with its claimed freedom of the artist, will become preferential domain of aesthetics.
In this way the analogon, that had joined issue in the context of a lively debate on a probable intellect and soul of animals, has now become (thanks to its relation with facultas fingendi) the human faculty that governs the artistic production. This means after all that not only the sensitive is included but also the perfection of the sensitive, perfection that the analogon has to judge and that according to Baumgarten has an independent ontological reality: the beauty. Moreover this aesthetic perfection better points out the constitutive freedom of the spiritual monads, freedom grasped now within its constitutive relation with the aivjsqhsi".
Nevertheless the path of the aesthetics of analogon is comparatively short; within half a century the aesthetic science will abandon the wide field of sensitive which Baumgarten had assigned to it (and that still Meier was opening up) because of its concentrating quite exclusively upon art and beautiful. The faculty of analogon by its specialising will leave its place to the taste; aesthetics, once considered as "ars pulchre cogitandi" (Baumgarten)(13), will become first "scientia de pulcro et pulcris philosophice cogitans" (Herder)(14), after "Philosophie der schönen Künste" (Sulzer)(15), "Kritik der ästhetischen Urtheilskraft" (Kant)(16) and finally "Philosophie der Kunst" (Schelling, Hegel). Consequently the psychological and anthropological origin of the XVIIIth century aesthetics will be easily forgotten.
Kant, for example, openly refuses(17) Baumgarten’s aesthetics, most of whose topics leave their place to a pragmatic anthropology having as its matter "was Er [der Mensch] als freihandelndes Wesen aus sich selber macht, oder machen kann und soll"(18) , that is to say all what distinguishes man from animals, not from the physiological point of view but from the cultural one. And this could be the reason why Kant considers the relation between the transcendental sphere and the empirical one(19) – that, as we have seen, had characterised the debate on analogon rationis – only referring to a seat no more officially belonging to the horizon of the aesthetic science(20) (even though with a strange, residual use of the same word "Ästhetik": "transzendentale Ästhetik"). Later on, according to Hegel, the problems concerning analogon will be placed into the systematic sphere of subjective spirit(21) while aesthetics will be transformed in the philosophical container of the questions concerning art. Thus I think that the attempt to incline aesthetics to the wider field of knowledge and praxis according to the baumgartenian original plan could offer new cues both concerning the conception of aesthetics as such and dealing with its historiography(22).