The Research Of Leibniz’s Aesthetics Theory

Bernard Basanquet said that leibniz’s works bears the roots which makes Alexander Gottliel Baumgarten the founder of Aesthetics. Leibniz is the grandfather of the German Aesthetics, no matter whether Wolf or Baumgarten is it’s father. It is Leibniz who lay the phycological, epistemological foundation of it, and then German Aesthetics develops along it.Leibniz conceives the world in the principle of Beauty, which means variety in unity. Not only the substance unit’monads’is defined as a power of uniting many in one organic unity, but the world is also conceived as a great poem, which is a harmony with order in individuals. The Aesthetics dimension is critical for Leibniz’s metaphysics, ethics and theology.In the seventeenth century, rationality is highly valued and it is Descartes’s mathematics method and cognition rationalism that bring about the impoverishment of the fullness of the reality. Factors that cannot be abstracted into the general principle will be excluded. Descartes explained that he repels perceptional cognition is because he thinks perceptional knowledge is consisted in value judgment, therefore it is only subjective instead of methodical. After Descartes’s declaration, it is generally claimed that the power of sensorial knowledge is much too weak to be taken into account. It is until Leibniz who claims that aesthetic knowledge is also cognitive and aesthetics experience is a cognitive state that take the first step from pure mathematics cognition. From the other hand, Protestant theology, or Calvinist puritan theology banished the aesthetic aspect of life and it is one of Leibniz’s contribution to protect the heritage of Plato and insist the continuity from the faculty of sensation to the capacity of rationality,so as to verify the validity of Aesthetics.The fundamental principle of Leibniz’s Aesthetics theory is the sufficient principle, and it means that one aesthetics judgment has, or should have a sufficient reason. The system of Leibniz is supported by two principles of truth:the necessary truth and contingent truth. The former complies to law of contradiction while the latter does not. The necessary truth is the basic law of the scientific world, whereas the sufficient reason principle and the contingent truth is the basic law of the life world. The latter propose a spirit of careful consideration and discussion, to balance and weight the "covenance" of a principle or rule, which is referring to the existence and meaning of life to consider a normative dimension of the value of cherishing a belief. In this meaning, the sufficient reason of aesthetics judgment is a kind of principle like that.Aesthetics judgment not only refers to the state of the subject, but also bears objective contents, and the pleasure from aesthetics experience is from the perception of confusedly cognized perfection in the object. Therefore, the aesthetics judgment is a cognitive state and so it can be right or wrong. For Leibniz, the claim that an aesthetics judgment is completely arbitrary and merely concerns personal likeness a premature surrender to ignorance. Just like for will, a act which we cannot give any reason is impossible, and a complete personal preference is also impossible.Leibniz insists that the core concept and critical problem of Aesthetics is "Beauty", which consists in the perception of perfection; perfection consists in harmony and harmony is variety in unity. The judgment of taste and artistic creation complies to principles which philosophers and theorists explored and systematized. All the principles here can be reduced to the first principle:truth, goodness and beauty is a trinitarian, and are different reflections of the same value, that is perfection.Leibniz put the aesthetics experience into the frame of epistemology, and explicitly explored the theory of confused and minute perceptions, which proclaims the general trustworthiness of perception. The coarse aspect of our organ, especially the five senses, has a power to unite the minute perception into one explicit unity, and this is the premise of our aesthetics thinking.Leibniz make an analogy between the work of God and the work of the artists, using the creation of the artists as metaphor to signal the creation of the God. He conceives imagination as an original creative capability, which goes beyond rules and applying mechanically to principles. In that sense, an art work is both original and intelligible, which is an organic unity or a complete unit. We human beings, as half-rational creatures, have sufficient reason and creative capacity. God created the harmony world in order from variety, and artists create artistic works as variety in unity.The influence of Leibniz’s legacy is far reaching, such as the enormous implications on Baumgarten, Kant and Ludwig Feuerbach, on the will philosophers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Phenomenologists Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Analytic Philosophers such as Russel and Peter Strawson, and on the intuitionists such as Benedetto Croce and moral philosopher John Rawls and Robert Nozick. However, concerning to Aesthetics, Leibniz’s greatest contribution is his legacy on the Aesthetics Rationalists in German traditional Aesthetics, including Wolf, Johann Christoph Gottsched, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, and Winckelmann, Mendelssohn, Doris May Lessing.