Abstract
Baumgarten understands the project of philosophical aesthetics in two dimensions: as a theory of sensibility and as a theory of art. If both dimensions are connected, the theoretical tradition of the 18th century would call the result philosophical aesthetics. In Baumgarten rhetoric has the function to constitute form. Herder develops a rhetorical theory of sensibility, from which he derives a classification of art forms. Moritz’ aesthetic emerges in an act of negating terms of rhetoric. In Kant the trope of hypotyposis appears in a transcendental function and refers to the aesthetic use of schematism. Schiller aligns his expansion of aesthetics to the political with the ideal of the vir bonus. Early Romanticism articulates a deconstructive rhetoric. Jean Paul tries to define the whole set of aesthetical concepts as mediation of instinct (aisthesis) and consideration (reflection). He gives rhetoric a central place in an aesthetic of difference. The article provides evidence that rhetoric plays a constitutive role within early philosophical aesthetics, but at the same time loses its visibility: rhetoric gets ‘structurally’.
