El Sentido Interno, Tópica Natural de la Invención en A. G. Baumgarten

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to examine Baumgarten’s proposal - Aesthetica §140; analyzing the catalogue of the sensitive faculties of the human mind as well as the Topics of artistic production. Certainly, this would be equivalent to the conversion of the aesthetic subject and the artist natural talent into beauty and art criteria. This does not imply, however, reducing the latter to mere expressive subjectivity of feeling and emotion. Contrary, Baumgarten is still thinking that art and beauty are subject to rules; only those rules are based on the human psyche nature and, the rather peculiar function of her own cognitive abilities. Such conviction encourages his idea of an artistic creation founded up on Natural Topics; which is based on the “Empirie Psychology of the Moderns”. This article considers the presumption that the philosophical elaboration of that idea implies an historical rising of internal sense; both, as an authentic art’s abode and, as a supreme cognitive resource thanks to his conception in terms of “analogon rationis”. On the other hand, this article shows that Baumgarten did not develop the Psychological Topics of invention on his Aesthetica (1750-58); rather he developed the Psychological Topics from his first poetological writing - Meditationes de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (1735).