Frauke Berndt Facing Poetry Paradigms Literature and the Human Sciences Edited by Rüdiger Campe ‧ Paul Fleming Editorial Board Eva Geulen ‧ Rüdiger Görner ‧ Barbara Hahn Daniel Heller-Roazen ‧ Helmut Müller-Sievers William Rasch ‧ Joseph Vogl ‧ Elisabeth Weber Volume 12 Frauke Berndt Facing Poetry Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Theory of Literature Translated by Anthony Mahler With an afterword by Gabriel Trop and English translations from the Aesthetica by Maya Maskarinec and Alexandre Roberts The prepress of this publication was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. ISBN 978-3-11-062331-4 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-062451-9 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-062348-2 ISSN 2195-2205 DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110624519 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. For details go to https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Library of Congress Control Number: 2020910024 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2020 Frauke Berndt, published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Dieter Asmus, Parzival-Zyklus / “Artus reitet,” 2011. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com Formyfriends Acknowledgements This book is embedded in my research group ETHOS: EthicalPractices in Aesthetic Theoriesofthe EighteenthCentury,which is generously funded by theSwiss National ScienceFoundation. Itspublication wouldnot have been possible with- outAnthony Mahler.Intranslating andworking on themanuscript with me,he always made me feel better understood than Iunderstandmyself. Iamextremely gratefultohim andwillsorelymissour intensediscussions.Healsotranslatedthe quoted paragraphs from Baumgarten’s Kollegium über die Ästhetik and Philoso- phischeBriefe von Aletheophilus. The translations from the Aesthetica and the Ethica philosophica are by Maya Maskarinec and Alexandre Roberts, whose ef- forts to translate Baumgarten’saesthetics into English are admirable. Zoe Zobrist’sprudent and meticulous management of the entire paratextual appara- tus has been indispensable, as has been AlexandraLüthi’ssupport.Alastair Matthews did the copy editing with great care. Dorothea vonMücke’sand Sebas- tian Meixner’sencouragingsupport,constructive criticism, and lucid interpretive suggestions helped me navigate my waythrough Baumgarten’scomplex thought. In his afterword, Gabriel Trop broughtclarity to certain issuesthatmyown dis- cussion had left somewhat obscure. Last but by no means least,Iwish to thank Rüdiger Campe and Paul Flemingfor providingthis book ahome in the Paradigms series; Manuela Gerlof and Anja-Simone Michalskifrom De Gruyter for their loyalty,eveninthese market-orientedtimes, to the untrendyeighteenth century;Stella Diedrich and Antonia Mittelbach for their steadyguidance through the publicationprocess. Ihope that Facing Poetry will contributetoanappreciation of Baumgarten’s work as the articulation of atheory of literature unparalleled in its depth and precision. Zurich Spring2020 OpenAccess. ©2020Frauke Berndt, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the CreativeCommons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110624519-001 Contents Introduction 1 Methodology 8 . Ambiguity 8 . Analogy 15 . Etymology 21 Epistemology 28 . Psychology 28 .. Cognition 28 .. Desire 33 . Rhetoric 41 . Semiotics 49 . Poetics 55 .. Complexity 55 .. Opacity 65 .. Performativity 75 Metaphysics 87 . The Beautiful 87 .. Perfection 87 .. Truth 96 .. Twilight 102 . The Real 109 .. Materiality 109 .. Formlessness 114 Narratology 120 . Prose 120 . Narrativity 126 .. Sequentiality 126 .. Mediation 133 . Fictionality 141 .. Possibility 141 .. Probability 149 .. Accessibility 157 X Contents Ethics 167 . Anthropology 167 . Practices 173 .. Exercise 173 .. Wonder 180 .. Melancholy 187 . Traces 194 .. Ethopoeia 194 .. Parrhesia 200 .. Dubitatio 208 Conclusion 214 Afterword 216 Works Cited 222 . A. G. Baumgarten 222 . PrimarySources 223 . SecondarySources 226 Index 236 1Introduction Qu’est-ceque la littérature? Jean-Paul Sartre posed this question in Les temps modernes in 1948.¹ Twohundred years earlier,Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten had provided what remains alargely neglected answer: “LITERATURE is perfect sensate discourse” (MED §9;Oratio sensitivaperfecta est POEMA). This definition lays the foundation for Baumgarten’sphilosophical approach to literature, which is what this book is about.With constant and open-minded attention to concrete literarytexts –“facing poetry,” so to say – Baumgarten presents this definition as the resultofaradical conceptualization of literature: Iintend to demonstrate that manyconsequences can be derivedfromasingle concept of literaturewhich has long agobeen impressed on the mind, and long sincedeclared hun- dreds of times to be acceptable, but not onceproved. Ut enim ex una, quae dudummentehaeserat,poematis notione probari plurima dicta iam centies, vix semel probata posse demonstrarem. (MED,[preface], 4)² In intellectual history,Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, who was born on July 17, 1714,inBerlin and died on May27, 1762,inFrankfurt an der Oder,isknown as the last prominent representative of Wolffian scholasticphilosophy. He worked in an agewhen every great philosopher soughttopublish auniversalsystem of philos- ophy, spanning all the disciplines. Baumgarten’spublications reflectthis objec- tive with his oftenenormous monographs on aesthetics,metaphysics,ethics, ju- risprudence, and epistemology.His aesthetics thus belongstoaholistic philosophical system, and it must be considered from such aperspective.But it is his aesthetics – which he initiated with his 1735 master’sthesis, entitled Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus,and extended with the two volumes of his Aesthetica,publishedin1750and 1758 – for which he is best known. With these works,heestablished the modern discourse of aesthetics and gave the discipline its name. Intellectual history has thus par- ticularlysought to determine whereBaumgartenfits in the development of major facets of modern aesthetic philosophy, such as the autonomyofart,the univer- sality of aesthetic judgments, and the subjectivity of aesthetic experience. My studyaims to intervene in the traditionalunderstanding of his aesthetics by out- lining how it developed the first modern theory of literatureand discovered the Jean-Paul Sartre, “Qu’est-ceque la littérature?,” pts. I–VI, Les Temps Modernes 17 (février 1947): 769 – 805;18(mars 1947): 961–988;19(avril 1947): 1194–1218;20(mai 1947): 1410 – 1439;21(juin1947): 1607–1641; 22 (juliette 1947): 7–114. Iheretranslate “poema” not as “apoem,” but as “literature.” See 2.1Ambiguity;5.1 Prose. OpenAccess. ©2020Frauke Berndt, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the CreativeCommons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110624519-002 2 1Introduction central relevance of literature to philosophy. In brief, Iwant to show that as the “science of everything that is sensate” (KOLL §1;Wissenschaft vonallem, was sinnlich ist), Baumgarten’saesthetics is actuallyascience of literature. Baumgartendid not set out to demonstrate the value of literature to philos- ophy. But in workingonhis philosophical writingsand lectures,heended up an- alyzing, synthesizing,and contextualizing literature. It thereby became clear to him that aesthetics demands asensate realization; or put differently, aesthetics is always an embodied philosophy. In anycase, his aesthetics does not deal with literatureasbelles lettresorasamoral institution but rather as an epistemic ob- ject.Through his philosophicalwork, he discovers literature’sown unique ca- pacity to address philosophicalproblems.Although Baumgarten was aphiloso- pher and not aliterary critic, he was able to tackle his philosophicalproject only because he approached it as aliterarytheoristavant la lettre.His aesthetics is thus formativefor away of thinkingabout literature that would coalescein the comingcenturies,beginning in particularwith Friedrich Schlegel, who mo- bilizedthe concept of theory against the poetological tradition and wasthe first to programmaticallycall his poetics atheory.But no laterliterarytheorist would ever again match Baumgarten’sholistic view. Despite the scope and significance of his work on aesthetics, his insights into “the logic without thorns” (KOLL §1;lalogique sans épines) – amoniker for aesthetics thathequotes from Dominique Bouhours³ – werequicklysuper- seded by Immanuel Kant.⁴ GeorgWilhelm Friedrich Hegel does not even men- tion Baumgarten, and the European Romanticswereutterlyuninterested in his scholastic philosophywith its hundreds of numbered paragraphs in indigestible Latin.⁵ Baumgarten’saesthetics was thus relegated to oblivion, and his theory of literatureremains undiscovered, waiting to take its rightful place in intellectual history.This oversight is basedonasimple misunderstanding of the role litera- ture plays in his philosophicalproject.Literature was always at the heart of Baumgarten’stheoretical interests, beginning with his 1735 master’sthesis. Both his Meditationes and the later Aesthetica largely draw on literaryexamples, See DominiqueBouhours, La manièredebien penser dans les ouvrages d’esprit (Paris:Veuve de S. Mabre-Cramoisy,1688;facsimile,