Georg Friedrich Meier´s “Theoretical Doctrine of the Emotions” (1744) deserves particular recognition for the emphasis on the arousal of emotions in the context of the formation period of the discipline of “aesthetics”. According to the recognized Kant-Scholar Paul Guyer, Meier managed it by connecting the “austere” aesthetics of Wolff and Baumgarten with the “passionate” aesthetics of the French Abbé Du Bos. By connecting the pleasure in experiencing emotions with the pleasure of experiencing mental activity as such, Meier brought Wolffian aesthetics a step closer to contemporary British aesthetics, thereby preparing the way “for the tremendous influence that British aesthetics would have in Germany by the end of the 1750s”. In contrast to Guyer, Frederick C. Beiser chose to read the history of human faculties and the gradual “emotional turn” throughout the 18th Century with a different, rather Kant-critical perspective. Both contemporary philosophers represent a long historiography of taste – a central concept of the 18th Century, in which the role and meaning of emotions (not only) in the context of arts had been developed.
The paper will discuss the becoming of the aesthetical subject by displaying the necessary conceptual and historical prerequisites for informed discussions about taste, emotions and critical appreciation of the perceptual realm. It will take the European perspective(s) into account, including those from Halle, Edinburgh, Naples, Copenhagen, Paris and London, and it will underline the relevance of the historical discourse related to the taste and emotions as generators of the then nearly simultaneously originated disciplines of aesthetics, epistemology, religion-philosophy, social sciences, psychology, literary criticism, literary studies, art philosophy, art history, theater studies, cultural studies, anthropology.