ABSTRACT
Not long ago, I came across a book entitled The Baumgarten Corruption: From Sense to Nonsense in Art and Philosophy, a good part of which is given over to discussion of the importance of Wittgenstein in modern philosophy. “Corruption” is always an interesting topic, but at the time, newspaper and television reports were full of talk about “corporate” and “government corruption,” which made the book sound all the more intriguing. I was not disappointed when the fi rst sentence perfectly followed from the spirited title of the book: “Alexander Baumgarten corrupted the Greek word for sensible when he used it in the philosophical discourse on ‘taste’” (Dixon 1995, 1). According to Robert Dixon, the corruption of “Art and Philosophy” began during the Enlightenment, in fact, right in the middle of the century of Shaftesbury, Hume, Hamann, Herder, Smith, Kant, and all the other luminaries of the eighteenth century. As a result of this single error, “the word aesthetic came to be misapplied in modern languages.” Furthermore, had this one mistake been limited to valuations of art objects, probably there would have been no signifi cant philosophical impact, and therefore no need for Dixon, or anyone else, to complain. But the impact was not so limited, and Dixon does complain about the way in which the “Baumgarten Corruption” fi xed matters in such a way that academic discussion of philosophy, as well as of art, “might be largely explained as displaced religiosity.” Indeed, as a result of “this philosophical mistake,” intellectual corruption cannot be isolated-even today-to one domain of philosophical discourse, or even to only a few philosophers. All of society is permeated by this one mistake: “It colonises the educated mind and is enshrined in public policy and public-funded infrastructure. In other words, it has become a philosophical problem of ‘cultural production’” (1).
