The German Genius

mankind as a whole was Natural Law. 14
    And so, in this way, history gradually acquired a new function—it was to discover how society in the past had developed so that future evolution might be understood. 15
    W HAT K NOWLEDGE I S C ONVEYED BY A RT?
     
    If societies developed over time, what force or forces propelled that change? Natural Law might be operating at some level but the Aufklärer were attracted by the notion that perfection was not a static quality inherent in the nature of things. Instead, they understood that perfection was to be achieved by “the forces of the spirit.” To them, the mind (itself a relatively new concept) was not a merely passive reflector of sensations but “possessed an inherent creative energy…Increasingly, they located the motor element of history in the actions of man’s spirit.” 16
    The “science” of the relationship between experience and creation was called “aesthetics,” a word coined by Alexander Baumgarten in 1739. The link between aesthetics and history was that both disciplines, for the Aufklärer, “assumed the possibility of a leap on to a higher plane of understanding…Perfectibility, genius and the phenomenology of the spirit were the main elements in formulating a more comprehensive theory of historical development.” 17
    Baumgarten, Christian Wolff’s “most brilliant disciple,” was the first to investigate the field he himself identified. What, he asked, was “the type of knowledge conveyed by art?” Baumgarten conceived the view that the senses must be capable of perfection, just as reason was. But he did not think that this perfection corresponded to the way mathematics was perfectible. A picture or a poem was for Baumgarten “a sensuous representation of an image of perfection.” Perfection could be achieved through the act of creation—the perfection of a work of art lying in its unique ability “to weld diverse impressions and confused apperceptions into an individual whole that conjured up a pure image.” 18 Baumgarten was joined by Johann Jakob Bodmer, who argued that poetry (and by implication other forms of art) was a form of truth equal, if not superior, to philosophy (to include what we call science), the more so because it was more closely related to history. This was an important insight because it suggested that the unique and distinctive essence of a nation is best found in its poetic and mythic traditions. 19
    For Bodmer the artist became a Promethean figure, a “wise creator,” whose vision “forces his contemporaries to think and act in a new mould,” someone who epitomizes his own times while attempting to change and improve them. Bodmer also introduced a teleological element: each creation of genius results in an expansion of consciousness, opening the path to the apprehension of a better—more perfect—world, enabling us to transcend the present. 20
    In fact, says Reill, by the 1760s this Leibnizian idea of perfectibility had become one of the central concepts of German aesthetics. Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86) was just one figure who was specific in his claims along these lines. In 1755 he had applied the idea of perfectibility to artistic understanding, claiming that “the healthful, the tasteful, the beautiful, the practical, all pleasures stem from the idea of perfection.” He made a distinction between the perfection of man’s physical nature, which he regarded as more or less complete, and the perfection of his inner nature, which had not yet been achieved: “Alone the inner man is incomplete…men have to work, to work tirelessly for improvement.” Mendelssohn, referred to as the “Jewish Socrates,” argued that there is a special faculty in the soul that functions solely in regard to beauty, enabling man to respond to beauty, to “know” it and recognize it in a way that analysis can never achieve. On this view, it was the soul that predisposed man to higher culture.
    For the aestheticians of the Aufklärung, then, all artistic creation, and by extension all historical creation, is the result of the inborn drive toward perfection, referred to by the German deist philosopher Hermann Reimarus as the notion diretrix . Furthermore, the idea of perfectibility linked all individual creations together. Perfection was defined as “the achievement of a harmony between inner life and outer life,” and that is what a masterpiece was, a harmony between spirit and nature.
    This vision of the creative