Imaginative Freedom and the German Enlightenment

Abstract

ion, definition, and demonstration that reason imposes on cognition.4 Thus the birth of rationalist aesthetics in Baumgarten's philosophy clears the way for a philosophical account of aesthetic judgment in which exemption from the constraints of cognitive judgment is a dominant theme. The movement in German philosophy for the emancipation of beauty from cognition was an echo of what had begun earlier in German literary circles. Bodmer and Breitinger, the so-called Swiss Critics of Zurich, had been critical of the rule-fetishism of the ruling rationalist literary and dramatic theory associated especially with J. C. Gottsched. Gottsched took his task to be the improvement of the German literary niveau, and to that end he rigidly applied rules originally laid down by Horace and Aristotle and adapted by recent French aesthetic theorists such as Boileau. His insistence on a literal application of classicist rules led to such absurd prescriptions as, for instance, banning monologues (Intelligent people are careful not to speak aloud when they are alone.) and asides (It is then as if those present had lost their hearing for this short time.) on the grounds that they were unnatural and improbable. Exclusive emphasis on reasonableness (Verniinftigkeit) and insistence on following specific rules was taken by Gottsched's critics to be a denial of the importance of imagination and of artistic creativity. Bodmer and Breitinger, like Baumgarten, remained rationalists. That is, they did not deny the need for rule-governedness in aesthetic experience and creation, but they believed that the imagination of both artist and critic could and should be free to play a greater role in art and criticism.6 By far the greatest exponent of artistic freedom in Germany, however, was Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. He is perhaps better known for his advocacy of religious freedom and tolerance in such works as Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts and Nathan der Weise, but aesthetic as well as religious freedom was extremely important to Lessing. In terms of his personal philosophical development, the literary arguments came first and, I would argue, helped shape his later works on religion. Lessing, like Bodmer and Breitinger before him, reacted sharply to the excessive rationalism of German literary theory, and his polemics against Gottsched 4 A. G. Baumgarten, Aesthetica (Hildesheim, 1961) sec. 1 and 555-65. Cf. also L. W. Beck, Early German Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), 279-80. 5 Kluge Leute aber pflegen nicht laut zu reden, wenn sie allein sind. and es ware denn, dass die anwesende Person auf eine so kurze Zeit ihr Gehor verloren hitte (J. C. Gottsched, Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst, Ausgewihlte Werke, ed. Joachim Birke and Birgitte Birke [New York, 1973], 353). English translations of Gottsched in this