ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the distinction between natural and artificial signs made prominent by Moses Mendelssohn but going back to Augustine and even to Plato's Cratylus, was often at the heart of discussion. Mendelssohn's theory is thus as sophisticated a theory of response to art in general and to the literary art of tragedy in particular as can be found in eighteenth-century aesthetics. The distinctive character of literature is explicitly thematized in the comparison of the sources of beauty and emotional impact in poetry and painting in which many authors indulged, some also including music or even other arts in their comparison as well. Immanuel Kant's effort to keep "charm and emotion" out of the experience of art was thus a protest against the prevailing view of the aim of the arts in general and of literature in particular in the eighteenth century.
