It would become a central theme of German Enlightenment aesthetics that even if people know the general truths of morality in some abstract way, the arts can make those truths concrete, alive, and effective for them in a way that nothing else can. The Critical Poetics opens with a brief history of poetry rather than with a statement of theoretical principles, but its first chapter concludes with a similar suggestion that the point of poetry is to make moral truths alive through their presentation in a form accessible to our senses: “The arousal of affects is…much livelier” in tragedy and comedy than anywhere else,