Johann Jakob Breitinger: Critical poetry (1740)

In the previous post I mentioned the conflict, which Gottsched had with the Swiss aestheticians Bodmer and Breitinger. In retrospect, this conflict was less to do with completely different notions of aesthetics and more to do with different emphasis: Gottsched was more keen to hold on to the principle of the imitation of nature and clear rules derived from this principle, while Bodmer and Breitinger thought wonder to be the essential element of aesthetic feeling. While previously we saw Bodmer's practical application of their notion of aesthetics, Breitinger's Critische Dichtkunst presents its basic theory.

One must at first note that despite Breitinger's animosity with Gottsched, he doesn't wonder too far from tenets of Wolffian philosophy. Thus, we hear philosophy or ”worldly wisdom” defined as a science of all things, in so far as humans are capable of knowing the ground of their possibility and actuality.

What Breitinger wants to modify in Wolff's philosophy is to add rhetoric and poetry as its parts. His justification is based purely on utilitarian grounds. While philosophy is based on intricate scientific reasoning, most people simply cannot follow it and they have to be educated by other needs, that is, with the help of rhetoric and poetry.

Furthermore, Breitinger also accepts the suggestion that poetry is imitation of nature. That is not to say that poetry would be just a retelling of what happens in world around us, somewhat like history. Instead, poetry should arouse a feeling of truth in its reader through sensuous images. In this sense, poetry resembles painting, which also tries to imitate nature by creating a semblance of truth in its watcher. Yet, painting affects us more forcefully, while poetry has the advantage in being able to use material from all senses, which is just recollected by hearing certain words.

Since Breitinger accepts the idea that the actual world is the best of all possible worlds, he is bound to accept that imitated natural things can be regarded good. Yet, Breitinger finds a certain difference – while the goodness of the actual world is intrinsic to it, goodness of poems lies in them being good imitations. Thus, one can have a good poem, even if its topic falls short of complete perfection.

As it was habit with Gottsched and Bodmer, Breitinger extends the notion of imitation from the actual to all possible worlds, and just like Bodmer, he extends it quite far, to improbable possibilities, in which animals and plants speak and all sorts of allegorical abstractions exist. Indeed, such fables are one end of poetic works, in which wondrous rules over probability. Still, even they have some share of probability, since human mind has the tendency to antropomorphise natural things and especially animals.

In general, Breitinger sees all poetic works balancing between wonder and probability. Too much of wonder and a poem loses its credibility. Then again, too little of wonder and a reader won't have any interest on the poem. Most of the art of poetics deals then with various ways to enhance both wonder and probability. Thus, even when describing quite ordinary things, poet can highlight some of their more extraordinary properties or show them in an unexpected light. Similarly, one must make e.g. actions and speeches of a person seem like they would flow naturally out of the character of the person.

I will not go further into the petty details of the conflict between Gottsched and Breitinger/Bodmer-duo, and hence, this will be last we'll hear of any of them. Next time, I shall look at a completely different discipline, namely, jurisprudence.

Bodmer: Critical inquiry on wondrous in poetry (1740)

It is always refreshing to see a philosopher reconsider his old ideas and to move away from positions he held earlier. This appears to be case with Bodmer, whose earlier work showed clear influences of Wolffian philosophy and regarded imitation as the basic principle of good poetry. By the time of writing his Critische Abhandlung von dem Wunderbaren in der Poesie und dessen Verbindung mit dem Wahrscheinlichen, Bodmer appears to have changed his opinion quite radically – art need not be limited by correspondence with actual objects, because in addition to actual world, poems can deal also with other possible worlds.

The topic of Bodmer's work is John Milton's Paradise Lost, a poem about the rebellion of Satan against God and of the fall of the first human beings from the grace. A number of French critics had attacked the book, notably because it had tried to overreach the limit of what is humanly imaginable and to describe things no human being could have ever witnessed. A good example is provided by the angels. Critics had complained that these are actually immaterial entities, but Milton describes them as having flesh and blood. When it comes to fallen angels, he even suggests they can feel bodily pain. Bodmer notes that Milton is just following an age-old tradition – even Homeric gods had a body, were bodily exhausted etc. Furthermore, he notes that a poet can refrain from literal imitation, if a powerful allegory demands it.

Even further in his dismissal of the principle of imitation Bodmer goes when he speaks of Milton's use of such entities like Death and Sin. The French critics had complained that these characters felt quite shadowy and that their presence in the poem mad the whole thing look quite improbable. Bodmer notes that a poet need not restrict oneself to mere probabilities, when the whole range of possibilities is available for him – and who can tell what wonders lie in the immaterial world?

Bodmer's aesthetical bent drives him then toward extending the range of what can be recounted in a work of fiction – not just probabilities, but also possibilities. This attack against very restricted theories of imitation is not the only philosophically interesting theme Bodmer considers. For instance, he notes that when Milton describes Satan as having momentary relief from pain, the poet is just telling the truth, since an infinite amount of pain is impossible for a limited entity, which even an angel must be. Or, when critics express puzzlement that Adam could know concepts of negative emotions, when all he had thus far had were positive emotions, Bodmer notes that Adam could well have abstracted the concept of a negative emotion from his experience of positive emotions – it wouldn't have been a distinct concept, but it would still have been a concept. Yet, the main aesthetic innovation of the work is just this attack on imitation as the sole principle of poetry.

Although Bodmer speaks of French critics, another probable target of his attack is Gottschedian school of aesthetics, in which naturalness was seen as the central element of poetry – so central that even operas were thought to be bad poetry, because people singing all the time is just artificial construct. Indeed, Bodmer's work can be seen as an integral part of his conflict with Gottsched, which was an important source of controversy in the 1740s. We shall have occasion to speak about this controversy with the next book, which was written by Johann Jakob Breitinger, an ally of Bodmer.

Baumgarten: Chorographic dissertation, evolving notions of superior and inferior, ascending and descending, which occur in sacred chorography and Uninsignificant philosophical meditations concerning poems (1735)

Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, 1714 - 1762

When Wolff left his post in Halle because of the atheism controversy, a philosophical vacuum was all that left. Around the end of 1730s this vacuum was finally filled by a new eminent figure, Alexander Baumgarten. It is two early pieces of Baumgarten I am looking at in this post.

The first of these works, Dissertatio chorographica, Notiones superi et inferi, indeque adscensus et descensus, in chorographiis sacris occurentes, evolvens does not deserve a careful study, because it is mainly of historical worth as Baumgarten's dissertation. It is not so much a philosophical, but a theological study of the presence of notions like superior and inferior or ascend and descend in the Bible. Baumgarten's main point is that while the words have a literal meaning of higher and lower or moving to a higher place and moving to a lower place, the words are also used in a figurative sense: superior is not just physically higher place, but better, just like Heaven is superior to Earth and Earth superior to Hell.

Somewhat more interesting is Baumgarten's work on poetry, Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus, especially as Baumgarten was later known as the instigator of aesthetical studies – indeed, the word aesthetics itself is already used in this early work. Baumgarten shows his clear Wolffian heritage especially in his manner of carefully defining all the terms he uses in his discussion. Thus, we hear that oration, for instance, is a series of sounds which are connected with some significance – ”Peter picked a pickled penny” is so an oration, because it consists of certain combinations of sounds that have a meaning. As these combinations or words have representations as their significance, orations reveal certain connections between representations.

In poetry, then, the words signify usually sensuous representations, that is, representations belonging to what in Wolffian psychology is taken as an inferior faculty of representation. Of course, even quite prosaic sentences fall under that description – ”Cat is sitting on a mat” is not a true poem, but it still refers to sensitive representations of things like cat, Poetry is differentiated from such sensitive representations by being more perfect – perfection means here especially that poems reveal more connections between various sensuous representations.

This rather summarised ideal of a poem leads then to various principles of a good poem – these principles or rules then constitute poetics. Poems themselves, like all orations, contain three distinct features: the words themselves as mere sounds, the significance of the words or representations and their connections. Starting with the first feature, the words as mere sounds are important only as producing sensuous pleasure – thus, poems are expected to have pleasing rhythm and soothing melody.

Most of Baumgarten's rules concern representations or their connections. Thus, we hear Baumgarten pronouncing that representations occasioned by poems must be more vivid than other orations. Thus, these representations must feature as many aspects of the topic of the poem as possible. Indeed, the height of poetic perfection is to characterise a complete, living individual in her full personality.

A somewhat striking consequence of the demand of vivacity or clarity of representations occasioned by poetry is that an attempt to go too much into the realm of fantasy leads to less poetic verses – after all, mere imaginations seem less vivid than things that we could actually sense. Mere utopias and impossibilities are not poetic at all, although internal consistency and coherence might help (thus, Tolkien's well structured world might still deserve the name of poetry). Instead of fantasy, the kernel of poetic lies according to Baumgarten in metaphors, which show deep and unnoticable connections between different representations.

So much for Baumgarten's first writings. Next time I'll return to Wolff's opponents.

Attempt at a critical art of poetry (1730)

We have already witnessed an uprising of a Wolffian school, particularly in the guise of two followers of Wolff, Thümmig and Bilfinger, but now a second generation of Wolffians starts to appear on the scene of German philosophy. Johann Christoph Gottsched had already studied Thümmig's summarised rendering of Wolff's ideas and would himself write another text book of philosophy later in 1730s. Yet, his primary achievements on the field of philosophy was the introduction of aesthetical questions to German philosophy in the shape of a widely distributed book, Versuch einer critischen Dichtkunst.

Gottsched (1700-1766)

As the name of the work reveals, its topic is the art of poetry and particularly the possibility of evaluating poetic works through philosophical principles. As we shall see again when considering Gottsched's text book on general philosophy, he was quite fond of beginning with historical discussions and especially with speculations on times before reliable written histories. Thus, he suggests that poetry is the second eldest art, preceded only by music, which also was a natural ingredient in the first works of poetry, which were sang and not read.

At first poems were made quite freely, Gottsched continues, but experience made it clear that even poetry must have some rules – he explicitly mentions Aristotle and Horace as masters in this field. Every art, Gottsched suggests, strives to imitate nature – painting does it with images and music with sounds, but poetry can use full field of all sensations, or at least our mental recollections of such sensations. Just like every other art, poetry must then strive for naturalness, Gottsched concludes.

Mere description of natural entities is still not poetry, according to Gottsched, or at least it occupies only the lowest rung. A slightly more adequate type imitates the speech patterns of certain persons – this is especially true of dramatic works. Yet, the real meat of poetry lies in fables or story telling – a good poem tells of activities of people, either of the common folk, as in comedies, or of the noble and mighty, as in tragedies or in epics, which Gottsched evaluates as the highest form of poetry, recounting an event important to the fate of a whole nation. It is clear without saying that Gottsched insists each story to have a moral – the aim of poetry is to make people better.

Gottsched accepts the Wolffian idea that stories present, as it were, events in other possible worlds and thus might not follow rules of the actual world – a story might have, for instance, talking animals as characters. Still, naturalness is an important standard for good poetry: improbable events usually hinder the enjoyment of a poem, Gottsched says. Of course, what seems probable depends on the level of education. We cannot therefore disparage Greeks for using divinities and other mythical entities as characters, but in the modern world any use of magical effects would seem incredible, Gottsched concludes.

Even if Gottsched strives for naturalism, when it comes to stories, he does not insist on using a natural style in poems. Indeed, he goes even so far as to suggest that too naturalist style might turn into banalities, which are against morality. In fact, poetic style is characterised by certain wittiness, which combines seemingly distant ideas in a manner that is rare in a straightforward historical telling of events: thus, while a historical work describing a battle would just recount all the events, a poem about the same battle might e.g. use some suggestive similes making more philosophical points about the nature of warfare.

A good poet is then one who can discover new and surprising connections between apparently quite disparate topics. Yet, this is still not enough, Gottsched says. An uneducated natural poet does not know about the rules of good poetry and therefore might well fail to have a proper taste and be lured by bad novels. Even if she manages to gain skills required for good poetry, she might still lack the basic ethical education, which is an essential requirement for educational poetry.

Judging just by these general directives, one might concur with Egon Friedell that Gottsched was a bit uptight in his aesthetic views. This impression is amply confirmed by his actual reviews of certain well known poets. Shakespeare's Julius Caesar has some delightful moments, Gottsched admits, but it has one great fault – the events of the play last longer than one day, which makes the whole thing seem quite improbable, as what audience sees happens only within few hours (I believe Gottsched is just one of those persons with no ability for suspension of disbelief). And Molière is also witty author, but he sometimes uses characters reminiscent of commedia dell'arte and especially that awfully unbelievable magical trickster, the Harlequin. Besides, many of his plays fail to have a proper moral.

But truly vehement criticism Gottsched lays upon opera, which he calls the most absurd invention of human understanding. This form of art Gottsched considers to follow the sad tendency of modern forms of poetry that they let the music control the substance of the poem too much. Indeed, even the very notion of opera shows its absurdity, because the idea of people singing all the time is just too incredible to believe. True, the music can be divine, but the stories used are from the worst kinds of books, featuring all sorts of unlikely events, magic and wondrous things, making it all seem like a tale out of another planet. But what is definitely worst is the complete absence of morals that operas appear to endorse. As a life-long fan of Wagner I cannot but wonder what Gottsched would have had to say about the overtly mythological story of Nibelungen.

GOTTSCHED: Dragons? No way!

It is not that Gottsched sees no justification for the existence of opera – it can serve as an amusement of princes and nobles, serving to ease their life of constant toil over state welfare. Even here Gottsched recommends replacing opera with ballet, which at least reveals the gentle grace of human anatomy. After all these remarks, one cannot fail to see the irony that a person attempting to find universal rules of good poetry can epitomise so well the essential relativism of aesthetic judgements.

So much for Gottsched's aesthetics, next I shall return to Wolff with yet another part of his Latin works.

Reasonable thoughts and judgements on eloquence: Of influence and use of imagination for improvement of taste or detailed study of all sorts of writings (1727)

We have finally reached a time, when Wolffians are not just content to explicate what their master said and defend his views from attacks, but also attempt to develop his ideas to their own direction. It was aesthetics, a matter that Wolff himself had left almost completely unnoticed, which was the first new field to be tackled by German philosophers.

Johann Jakob Bodmer's appreciation of Wolff is evident even from the name of his planned book series on poetry, Vernünfftige Gedancken und Urtheile von den Beredsamkeit. The series was meant to study the topic from various angles, and while the first book, Von dem Einfluss und Gebrauche der Einbildungs-Krafft; Zur Ausbesserung des Geschmackes: Oder Genaue Untersuchung Aller Arten Bescreihbungen, concentrated on imagination, the later books were meant to consider e.g. wit, taste and sublime. As far as I know, the first book of the projected series was also the only one ever written.

Bodmer in his old age

The Wolffian leanings of Bodmer are especially revealed by his attempt to situate aesthetics within the context of Wolffian cosmotheology. World was meant by God as something to be studied by rational entities, that is, human beings were meant to investigate the works of nature and thus see the glory of its Creator. The first means by which humans get in contact with world are senses, but with these we can merely come to know what is directly before us.

What is at least required for a more complex knowledge is the capacity of imagination, which at that time meant not just a capacity for creativity, but referred to all mental activities in which the object is not necessarily present to our senses – the object may then well be something that has existed and that we are only recollecting. Indeed, it is not complete fictions imagination should try to convey, but real things that do not happen to be present to our senses at the moment.

Art, for Bodmer, is then a matter of imitation – rather conservative view from modern perspective. Among the different types of artists, poet then ranks higher in Bodmer's view than painter or sculptor. While fine arts in general are based on visual sensations, to which in sculpture tactile sensations are added, poetic descriptions can use the whole range of sensations and emotions to convey the likeness of an object. Poet should even be master of all arts and skills, knowing everything from anything, Bodmer concludes.

Bodmer's criterion for good art and especially good poetry is then its capacity to evoke realistic ideas of things it describes. The majority of the book presents then examples of poetry, evaluated with this criterion. It seems clear that Bodmer is clearly wanting in decent German poetic works: when one has to elevate Brockes, rather repetitive writer of poems evoking teleological reasoning over and over again, as an example of what Germans can do at their best. Bodmer himself has to confess that while German language has evocative vocabulary for describing nature, in affairs of culture one must turn to Latin, Italian and French poets - especially Pierre Corneille appears to have been a favourite of Bodmer's.

While then especially many of the German works quoted by Bodmer feel rather artificial, Bodmer's own evaluations seem also rather misplaced. We might think it rather trite, if a writer compares lips of a woman to Red Sea, but it feels somewhat strange to condemn the lines containing this comparison, because Red Sea isn't actually red at all. Yet, it falls perfectly in line with Bodmer's naturalistic ideal of poetry. Thus, he is often disparaging unnecessary use of wit and prefers writings that reveal actual experience of things described. In case of human emotions, he praises writers who have clearly, for instance, suffered the sorrow of a lost wife.

Red Sea, not that red actually

When giving guide lines for poems describing human behaviour, Bodmer also touches on some quaint philosophical notions. Physiognomy or the idea of the character of a person showing through one's appearance is familiaralready from Wolff's writings and Bodmer himself mentions Wolff as a great source for future poets for finding good descriptions of the external effects of human emotions. Another rather old-fashioned idea is the notion of national characteristics determined partly by natural environment, partly by mores and customs of the nation – this is probably something that we will see in more detail with later German philosophers.

So much for Bodmerian aesthetics for now, next it is finally time to begin Wolff's Latin works.

Barthold Heinrich Brockes: Earthly delight in God, consisting of various poems taken from nature and ethics, together with an addendum containing some relevant translations of French fables of Mr. de la Motte (1721)

At the very beginning of my blog I expressly noted that I should avoid works of fiction and poetry, because I felt I would have little to say about such manners. Yet, I also admitted that in some case I surely had to do it, if the thinker in question had written mainly fictional works – no matter how inconsequential the thinker might seem.

Barthold Heinrich Brockes is probably not the most important German thinker of his time. He was educated in the Thomasian school of philosophy, but unlike the other Thomasians we have met so far, he wasn't an ardent enemy of Wolffians. Instead, Brockes could be best described as a thinker of Aufklärung, or German enlightenment, and hence, his inclusion in the blog broadens our view of German philosophical culture in early 18^th century.

When one hears of enlightenment, one is bound to think of Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau and others rather radical thinkers, who at least influenced the later revolutionists in France. But the German enlightenment was never so radical and most of the times it was never as critical of church as French enlighteners were. Instead, German enlightenment was all about the education of mankind – and in this case, education was meant to include also moral instruction. We have already seen such tendencies in Wolff, particularly in his insistence that all art must serve the use of upholding morality in state.

Now, the work of Brockes is almost a paradigmatic example of Wolff's suggestion. Brockes was known as a translator, and even the book Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott bestehend in verschiedenen aus der natur und Sitten-Lehre hergenommenen Gedichten, nebst einem Anhange etlicher hieher gehörigen Uebersetzungen von Hrn. de la Motte Französisch. Fabeln contains, as the title says, translations of few French fables. Furthermore, Brockes himself was a poet, and the book I have been reading now is also a book of poetry.

Brockes' place in the history of German literature is far from glorious, which one wouldn't believe from reading the preface that praises the talents of Brockes both as a translator and as a poet. What is interesting is the explanation what makes Brockes a poet among poets. Apparently the author has not only the imagination required for creating dazzling images, but also the understanding required for making his poems well ordered and something more than just incomprehensible mess. This interplay of imagination and understanding was more generally held to be a precondition of good poetry and art. Something similar can be seen even seen in Kant's notion of beauty as caused by the free play of faculties, although there it is more about experiencing than creating beauty.

I shall briefly describe one exemplary piece of this poet-to-be. The poem with the ominous title ”the world” begins with the image of people watching the world, as it were, through the wrong end of the telescope: everything looks much smaller than it really is. For instance, a businessman sees nothing but profits and losses, while a doctor sees nothing else but illness and cures. Even philosopher fairs badly, because he sees nothing else but planets circling around the sun – Brockes is probably thinking of works like Newton's natural philosophy. Among these failed attempts to understand the world, there is one who does it right – the dreamer who sees God in all phenomena of nature.

This exemplary poem shows already Brockes' fascination with nature. Most of his poems simply describe some natural event, like the awakening of animals in spring, thunderstorm or sun. But nature is not described in these poems as an entity deserving an independent account. Instead, the worth of all these events is that they reveal the power of God – the nature is a piece of art and behind this art there must be some artist.

In a sense, Brockes' poetry is nothing more than constant use of teleological argumentation deducing from the perfection of natural objects the existence of their creator. Yet, it is not any arguments, but the sentiment behind this statement that is important. To find perfection in the colour of grass and in rain falling from the sky, and not just any perfection, but a feeling of divine serenity and splendour – this is what Brockes is trying to convey. The enjoyment of nature was even an international phenomenon during 18^th century, and in Germany it finally culminated with the pantheistic tendencies of romantic school, in which God and nature were often regarded as opposed, but still related poles.

One may feel that such a pantheistic appreciation of nature is far from theistic delight with nature, yet, at least this underlying feeling of the divinity of natur is shared by both alike. For a pantheist the splendour of nature is a part of the nature, while for a theist the perfection must originate somewhere beyond nature. The official credo at the time was theistic, both in Wolffian and Thomasian schools, latter of which will be my topic next time.