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In this essay I want to address a question I have had for some time: Why is it that Alexander Gottfried Baumgarten, the founder and inventor of the modern philosophical discipline of aesthetics in the mid-eighteenth century, makes reference to the "ground of the soul," the "fundus animae," calling our attention to a basic concept that, as he points out, "many people, even philosophers, ignore nowadays"? Baumgarten writes this in his Metaphysics, the Metaphysica of 1751.1 The very context of the thought, however, is his elaboration of the modern meaning of "aesthetics" as a theory of "sensible cognition." "Aesthetica," Baumgarten states in a famous sentence of his Aesthetica, "est scientia cognitionis sensitivae."-"Aesthetics [...] is the science of sensible cognition."2 Thus, aesthetics is not primarily a realm of knowledge concerned with normative questions of beauty but-and this will be true for Herder as well-with questions of cognition, experience, and sensation; in short, with the "aisthesis" of things and what used to be called "lower gnoseology."
Thus, my question is: How does the notion of the "ground of the soul," something that in fact is a trope of mystical discourse,3 play a role in this new science? How is it that such an eminent notion from the vocabulary of medieval and early modern theology and mysticism returns in the context of one of the most modern questions and quests, namely the understanding of aesthetic experience and sensation? And why is it that Johann Gottfried Herder, who along with Immanuel Kant was arguably one of the "crucial protagonists of the transformation of aesthetics after Baumgarten,"4 returns to this same figure of thought as well, emphasizing a common element in his and Baumgarten's project and giving even more prominence to the very idea of a "ground of the soul"?5
In short, we could say, at this point in the eighteenth century-and quite surprisingly-a mystical trope enters the stage again, seemingly from a different corner, namely the new discourse about aesthetics, and thus challenges us to ask what the use of this figure of thought implies.6 As I will show here, the references to the "ground of the soul" in Baumgarten and Herder are not only of historical interest insofar as they evoke traditions of German mystical thought in the...