Mikeshina L.A. Making of a Discipline in the Humanities in the Epoch of Enlightenment

Abstract: The paper follows E. Cassirer’s exemplary study (Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 1932) of classical aesthetics making in the 18th century as a kind of a pattern, a model of forming of a branch in the humanities. Philosophical experience of that time is valuable and interesting because it had been formed before the emergence of positivism and the specific “matrix” that became later a notorious concept of science and “the unified scientific method”. During the Enlightenment the priority of rational knowledge is being established and the humanities, aesthetics in particular, do not loose their value as an independent, special type of scholarship. This considerably enriches the category of “subject” in the theory of cognition where it is for ages considered as an utmost abstraction — the transcendental subject — the main condition of true knowledge. Classical aesthetics aim to turn the very sensory into an object deserving cognition along with rational knowledge. This lays the foundations of knowledge in the humanities as an independent type of learning which has its own ontology and, as a consequence, its own principles, methods, methodology, philosophical premises and history. First of all, it is an interpretation of a special role and the nature of subject and object as abstractions of another level, a philosophic-empirical one, where they are presented in cultural, historical and social contexts, in the system of values and social norms. Cassirer’s views are under scrutiny to see how he treats ideas of N. Boileau-Despréaux, J. Goethe, Voltaire, D. Diderot, G. Lessing, I. Kant, A. Shaftesbury, and also an explanation of systematic aesthetics by A. Baumgarten who turns to G. Leibniz’s and Ch. Wolff’s ideas.

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