Baumgarten

His views departed from those of the philosophers of the previous generation such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) or his disciple, Christian Wolff (1679-1754), who held that the difference between sensation and thought is that the latter is lucid whilst the former is confused, and that sense perception cannot be made lucid without transforming it into thought (and, by implication, into systematic discourse). In other words, as a 'lower' form of cognition, sensation was taken to be but a primitive or preliminary stage of the same knowledge that was imagined to be represented most clearly in rational or logical thought. Baumgarten argued against this hierarchy of modes of thought, and went on to consider what the nature of beauty and of fine art might be within the framework of a non-hierarchized cognition.

Several things were at stake here, not least of which was the canonical idea of art's function being that of 'imitating nature'—a paradigm that underlay attitudes toward art down to and including Baumgarten's contemporary, Winckelmann. To perceive beauty, in Baumgarten's terms, was to perceive perfection both in things and in people (the latter constituting moral perfection). We conceive of this beauty not rationally but by taste—by which was meant extremely clear sense perception. In these terms, the fine arts were analogous to fine sciences: their aim was not to 'imitate' nature (even its most perfect examples) but rather to create perfect wholes out of indistinct images made extremely clear; in short, to create sensory knowledge. One of the results of these innovations was the idea that sense perception could be perfected without turning it into logical or rational thought. The idea that sensual knowledge could have its own perfection—and further, that an aesthetic judgment about beauty or beautiful objects could have a validity for persons other than the individual making it—became the cornerstone of aesthetic philosophy as it was to develop in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and provided the foundation and immediate background for the Critique of Judgement by Immanuel Kant.