The essay deals with the role and development of organicistic ideas and concepts of aesthetic production aesthetics in the 18th Century. It reconstructs und compares the structural arguments which constitute those concepts in texts of Christian Blanckenburg, Johann Georg Sulzer, Christoph Martin Wieland, Johann Gottfried Herder, Karl Philipp Moritz, Friedrich Schiller und Johann Wolfgang Goethe. As a result it presents different models of production aesthetics in connection to the organism: the artist (e.g. as genius) can be viewed as an alter ego of the Creator; or the work of art itself can be viewed as microcosm, which mirrors the laws of nature on a smaller scale. Finally the making of a work of art can be considered analogous to organicistic processes in nature. Schiller’s idea of the “lebendige Gestalt” and Goethe's idea of morphology both demonstrate, how holistic concepts of the natural organism inform production aesthetics.
