It may be December, but we’ve still had temperatures north of 70 down here. That translates to humidity and warm nights, as well, and so at 3am I had to turn the bedroom ceiling fan on ‘high’. I wanted to sleep in late, though it was a weekday, but while I feared an unproductive, unmotivated day, a chance discovery led to the opposite result.
Yesterday I came across a book I hadn’t yet heard of, Moses Mendelssohn’s Metaphysics and Aesthetics (Springer), edited by Reinier Munk. It’s a collection of papers/presentations prepared for publication, and as I’m working on my ‘psychology’ chapter, which includes material on Mendelssohn, I felt the need to check it out.
The fact is that until recently Mendelssohn was at best and afterthought bunched together with Lessing, who plays a much larger role for me (but primarily in the ‘poetics’ chapter … and a little bit here or in ‘philosophy’ because of his work on ‘disgust’). But as Ursula Goldenbaum argues in “Mendelssohn’s Spinozistic Alternative to Baumgarten’s Pietist Project of Aesthetics,” Mendelssohn is arguebaly the interesting mid-century thinker, who combines an outsider status (as a Berlin Jew) with philosophical sophistication and sensitivity when it came to aesthetic/poetic judgment. Figures like Kant had the second, and Lessing clearly had the last, but only in a few figures, like Mendelssohn, do we have such a nice synthesis.
Even better for me, Goldenbaum argues rather convincingly that Mendelssohn — not Baumgarten — is, in a way, the true heir to Wolff’s ‘rationalistic’ system, especially as it regards aesthetics, and that while Baumgarten was paving the way for irrationalism, in Mendelssohn we have an integrative approach that refuses to throw out the metaphorical baby with the bath water. Mendelssohn appropriated and employed Spinoza’s theory of affects and ‘mixed emotions’ (see also: Paul Guyer’s preceeding essay, “Mendelssohn’s Theory of Mixed Sentiments”), and in the way he was truly interested in (a) the senses and (b) human psychology Mendelssohn seems to offer me a great deal to aid in my analysis of analogy in 18th-century aesthetics.
The work on mixed emotions/sentiments may almost be a ‘doctrine of the mean’ for emotions, for example. The three kinds of pleasure Mendelssohn treats — the first merely/purely sensual, the last more intellectual, the middle what we might term ‘beauty’ as an appraisal of unity in the manifold — may likewise locate ‘the beautiful’ as a sort of ‘mean’. It’s also fascinating to compare and contrast Mendelssohn and Kant, both how the latter in his critical period transformed the former’s notions and how the former informed the latter during his early period.
And in Spinoza we had a matter of the beautiful that I’ve dealt with before, a matter applies both to Leibniz and to Kant, to the latter as a kind of more empirical matter and to the former as a potential smoothing-of-the-edges. In Leibniz, building on Descartes, we have truth as dealing with “clear and distinct” concepts; by the time we get to Baumgarten we have logic and truth over with clear and distinct, but the “clear but confused” is a matter for aesthetics and “probability” (the German being “Wahrscheinlichkeit,” literally “the appearance of truth” (truth = Wahrheit, true = wahr). One way to ‘smooth’ and simplify the Cartesian model is to see “distinct / confused” as analogous to “clear / obscure” but applied to the level of parts, not the whole. That is: clear means we perceive the whole; clear and distinct means we perceive the whole clearly and the parts likewise clearly. Clear but confused means we perceive the whole clearly, but while we know the parts are there, we cannot separate and identify/define them … they are obscure in a way. Leibniz offers more levels beyond distinct, such as adequate vs. inadequate, and so on. So the suggestion would be to imagine “zooming in” (or out) and considering the object not as some fixed object in space-time separate from us, but merely as an object of knowledge-perception before us, and how do we perceive the parts-whole relationship?
Take skin into consideration. What does it mean to say so-and-so has ‘beautiful skin’? We need to be able to perceive their skin clearly. If we are too far away, their skin is fuzzy. How would we distinguish their features, their skin from a shirt or the wallpaper behind them? Who would trust you if you said that a person a hundred feet away, whom you’d never met/seen before, had beautiful skin? What would you be able to label ‘beautiful’ about it? But at the right distance — a few feet, a few yards, perhaps even up close, romantically, a few inches away — you’d notice the interplay of freckles, or perhaps how smooth his or her skin was, how soft or silky it appeared, maybe how the folds of wrinkles provided character or reminded you of weathered sandstone. But then you get to get even closer: you observe this person’s skin under a magnifying lens and you can’t avoid the blemishes, the imperfections, an ingrown hair, flakes of dead skin, the oils and pits and so on. When the skin is the ‘whole’ and perceived clearly but confusedly, you might find beauty, but when it’s clear, the parts are clear, the parts’ parts and so on … and it’s too much detail, you have greater knowledge, but you wouldn’t say so-and-so’s *skin* (as a whole) was beautiful.
It’s an example I’ve used in some form or another for years. It’s something obvious to connect with Leibniz and his Cartesian model. As regard Kant, he points out that in the apprehension of the beautiful there is something that keeps our attention, and that implies a relationship between spectator and that which is viewed, at a certain distance, but not too far away, yet not too close. But back to Mendelssohn: the example of “skin” used above was actually used, referencing instead a “hand,” by Spinoza, so Goldenbaum.
I worked on this material into the afternoon. Later in the day Ms. S. and I watched first an episode of ‘The X-Files’ (season 1: “Lazarus”), and then the most recent episode of ‘Elementary,’ which — spoiler alert! — followed procedural formula to a T: the responsible party was the first option presented to us, in this case the victim himself, who arranged his own murder. When the formula operates like this, the it’s not a “Whodunit?” but rather a “Howdunit?” (or even “Whydunit”) … and that provided an interesting 3/4 hour of television, so I can’t complain.
