ABSTRACT
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten has long featured in the historiography of aesthetics as a progenitor of concepts, such as aesthetic autonomy, familiar to practitioners of the modern discipline. More recently, as this historiography has faced pressure from scholars trying to understand the British and German eighteenth-century emergence of aesthetic theory in relation to moral, political, theological, and other discourses external to the modern discipline, the ostensibly theological roots of Baumgarten’s aesthetic theory have come under intense scrutiny. This chapter critically examines the ongoing search for these theological roots in German Pietism. By exposing the complexity and ambiguity of the connection between Baumgarten’s concept of good taste and the Pietist concept of spiritual taste, as articulated in the early 1700s by the teachers from whom Baumgarten received his theological training, it reveals difficulties inherent in the search for intellectual roots per se.
