  Finally, we must ask about the moral and religious implications of Wolff’s contributions to aesthetics. As we have seen, Wolff equates perfection, which is the object of pleasure in all contexts including those subsequently labeled aesthetic, with an objective sense of truth. However, and in this regard most unlike the German aestheticians of the next several generations who are so strongly influenced by him in other regards, he has nothing to say about the arts that are typically paradigmatic for those who ground their aesthetics on the notion of truth rather than that of play, namely literature, especially poetry and drama. Thus he does not consider the paradox of tragedy, formulated by Du Bos and then discussed by virtually every other eighteenth-century writer on literature, nor does he emphasize the moral benefits of uplifting literature, as so many others do. Indeed, he has nothing explicit to say about the moral benefits of aesthetic experience, nor does he directly consider the religious significance of such experience in any of his discussions of it. Nevertheless, it is clear that aesthetic experience does have religious significance for Wolff, because his philosophy culminates in a religious teleology. For Wolff, the most perfect and therefore most orderly of all possible worlds exists for a reason, namely to mirror the perfection of God, and sentient and cognizant beings such as ourselves exist for a reason, namely to recognize and admire the perfection of God that is mirrored in the perfection of things in the world and of the world as a whole. The perfection that is added to the natural world through human artistry is also part of the perfection of the world that emanates from and mirrors the perfection of God. Thus, in admiring the perfection of art we are performing part of our larger function in the world, namely admiring the perfection of God. Wolff states the premise of his teleology quite clearly in a work devoted entirely to that subject, the Rational Thoughts on the Aims of Natural Things, or “German teleology.” There he declares that