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Abstract
In the field of aesthetics, a significant shift occurred with the work of Immanuel Kant. Taking the term "aesthetics" from his precursor A.G. Baumgarten, Kant broke with Baumgarten's central assumptions of a continuity between sensibility and reason, and overturned Baumgarten's assertion of a contribution of the sensate to understanding. Baumgarten had proposed aesthetics as a scientia cognitiones sensitivae: a science of sensate thinking occupying itself with that realm of human understanding, which rationalist philosophies, in line with Descartes categories of ideas, disregarded as merely capable of "confused" ideas, and as such of no contribution to understanding. For Baumgarten, on the contrary, "confused" perception works analogous to reason, yet different from it, a paradoxical relation that had been described several decades before by G.W. Leibniz with the figure of the "fold", and aesthetics was meant to precisely account for this epistemological specificity of art and sensate perceptions. This dissertation pursues the echoes of such aesthetics of the fold in two exemplary instances: the writings of Heinrich von Kleist and Herman Melville. Both experiment with perception and knowledge in a most pointed fashion in their short narratives. In six exemplary texts, characters of an unsettling "simplicity" operate in a zone between sensibility and reason that is neither ignorance, nor knowledge. Their peculiar simplicity rather accounts for the implication of the sensate in thinking. Three different "types" are sketched: in "Die Verlobung in St. Domingo" and "Benito Cereno," the attempts to explain in order to grasp and understand a situation; the refraining from consciousness in Michael Kohlhaas's and Billy Budd's affective rebellions; and the lingering before consciousness that Bartleby's and Käthchen of Heilbronn's formulaic speech permits. Simplicity is not a solution to epistemological uncertainty here, or an immediate access to objective truth or true feeling. On the contrary, it operates within epistemological uncertainty. Struck with such an extraordinary simplicity, all characters manage to account for the enfolding of the sensate in thinking, and for the power of "confused" knowledge, making the narratives themselves a literary expression of such knowledge.
