Rationalist cosmologies and Leibniz’s objective aesthetics

Abstract

This paper explains how Leibniz's theological and cosmological views, as well as his criticism to the positions held by Descartes and Spinoza on those topics, entail an account for a radically objective conception of beauty. After introducing, in the first section, the place of aesthetics in the philosophical systems of the rationalists, the second section focuses on showing Leibniz's own definition of beauty and establishing a criterion of aesthetic objectivity based on arguments and ideas from contemporary aesthetics and the history of philosophy. In the third section, I examine Leibniz's argument against Cartesian voluntarism and Spinoza's subjectivism in relation to the notion of beauty. In the fourth, I evaluate whether Leibniz's ontological proposal on beauty is compatible with the definition of objectivity developed in the second section. I conclude that Leibnizian cosmology and metaphysics posits that beauty must be independent of any subjective corroboration, since the beauty of things is logically prior even to their existence, which results in an autonomous and objective conception of beauty.