Transatlantic Digital Workshop on Ecopoetics

This talk focuses on Alexander G. Baumgarten, who coined the term “aesthetics” in its modern sense and founded aesthetics as a new philosophical discipline around the middle of the eighteenth century. The talk shows that Baumgarten’s foundation of aesthetics involved motives that can be described as “ecological” from a contemporary perspective. It develops this (seemingly anachronistic) thesis with reference to Baumgarten's forgotten eighteenth-century concept of nexus rerum or the “interconnection of things.” In demonstrating the formative influence of this cosmological concept for the conception of Baumgarten’s aesthetic writings, the talk demonstrates an intimate connection between aesthetics and (proto-)ecological thought at the moments of the foundation of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline. Brief references to Baumgarten’s student Meier and the poet B. H. Brockes contextualize Baumgarten’s approach within early-eighteenth-century poetic practice. Indirectly, the new understanding of the emergence of aesthetics develops in this talk opens up a new perspective on the tradition German aesthetic thought more broadly and discovers an ecological undercurrent within aesthetics that has been largely ignored.