Baumgarten’s Diet: Physical Exercise, Health, and Beauty

Abstract

In this paper, I intend to analyze Baumgarten’s position about the dietetic care of the body in its relation to nascent aesthetics, with special regard to the problem of physical exercise. On the one hand, I will show that physical exercise can acquire aesthetic value with the example of the somatic fine arts. On the other hand, I will demonstrate that dietetics is also seminal for the emergence of every act of beautiful thinking. Eventually, I will bring to the fore the dietetic potential of beauty itself. In this way, it will be possible to better appraise the constitutive link between health and beauty in the founding of aesthetics as an independent branch of philosophy.