Aesthetics is a modern term. It entered our philosophical vocabulary in the eighteenth century. The term is usually credited to the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten. Baumgarten was a part of the continental philosophical movement know as rationalism. The rationalists tried to reconcile experience and science with an overarching rational principle that assured order and certainty. Baumgarten task was to fit the immediate experiences of sense into that rationalist scheme. He coined the word “aesthetics” for the independent realm of feeling that had its own reasons and science. Immanuel Kant adopted the term and made it central to our philosophical vocabulary. The term “aesthetics” captures perfectly an area of feeling, the peculiar pleasures of art and nature that are studied and valued for their own sake. For both rationalist and empiricist, experience became fundamental to the ability to know anything. Since aesthetics appealed directly to sense, it also could be understood as a new form of knowledge.
What is aesthetics?
One way to answer the question is to pay attention to the development of the discipline through key text in its history.
Classical Aesthetics:
Plato
Plato explored two fundamental aspects of imitation in Book X of the Republic. The first topic concerns the nature of imitation itself.
Plato approached this point analytically and logically.
The analysis of imitation as a concept results in a threefold distinction in reality. The singular form is original, so whatever follows from it is imitation. But “imitation” itself requires a distinction. Given the existence of anything, an observer can discern both its unity or commonality as a type or kind of thing, and its diversity as a multiple instances of that thing. Each bed and tree is at least numerically distinct. Yet all beds are identifiable as beds and are different from trees. Logically, Plato argues, there must be a single ideal form that accounts for the unity. Try to imagine two such forms. This argument assigns priority to the single form, which must come first logically.
The bed that can be slept in differs from the bed made by holding up a mirror. So if the actual beds are imitations, then images and pictures in turn imitate them. Images and pictures are only imitations of imitations. But the concept of imitation that has emerged is dialectical. “Dialectical” means that we know something in relation to something else; the term designates the relation. The chair in which I sit is at once an imitation in relation to its form and an original in relation to a picture. When the term “imitation” is applied to some thing, it establishes a hierarchy of forms. Within that concrete world, a secondary class of objects depends on already existing things and thus forms a class of imitations of imitations.
Plato distinguished in a fundamental way between appearance and reality. The reality that he is exploring at this point is between the first- and second-order imitations. Second-order imitations appear to be like first-order imitations and may even be taken for them. Classical literature is full of stories of paintings so like their subjects that they deceive animals and even other painters. Such effects are obviously only one mode of painting, but they illustrate in the strongest way the inherent deception involved in making one thing in an imitative relation with another. Once a fundamental hierarchy is established, the more levels of imitation that intervene, the farther the last imitation is from the original.
Medieval:
With the decline of the Roman empire in the early Middle Ages, art and speculation about it became even more localized in particular institutions. We must always be careful not to project our concepts of “art” and “aesthetic feeling” back onto cultural situations where those concepts and practices did not exist. Art flourished, but it belonged to the church, the court, and special civic institutions. Artist practiced a craft or were scholars, monks, or traveling poets. Philosophical treatments of art are found in the context of theology and mystical writings. A medieval “aesthetic” exists in continuity with its classical roots. It is built on harmony and proportion, a love of color and form, and a deep sense that symbols project significance beyond their individual appearance.
Neo-Platonism continued to be influential in a Christianized form through the Middle Ages. It was transmitted through two primary sources and a multitude of influences and unacknowledged references. The two most important sources were the writings of Augustine of Hippo (354-430) and the sixth-century Syrian monk whose work was taken to be by Paul’s disciple Dionysius the Areopagite. Augustine incorporated many Platonic elements in his theology. In particular, he was able to use the neo-Platonic concept of spiritual being to solve the problems about the existence of evil and the incorporeal nature of God. In aesthetics, this concept made available the hierarchical movement, which found harmony in the whole universe and beauty as its object. Pseudo-Dionysius presented parts of earlier neo-Platonists directly in the guise of Christian doctrine. Divine names and a form of dialectical negation opened the hierarchy to speculation. Both Augustine and pseudo-Dionysius distrusted beauty itself, however. It was too pagan. Christian writers throughout the Middle Ages struggled with the competing claims of beauty as the highest value and the tendency of asceticism to distrust anything that was too sensual. Only medieval mysticism was able truly to embrace both at once.
Later medieval philosophers and theologians reintroduced Aristotle’s criticisms of Plato. Neo-Platonism remained influential, but it took more concrete, individualistic forms in response to Aristotle’s unification of form and sense.
Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Centuries:
Between the 16th and 17th centuries a decisive shift in the theoretical principles applied to aesthetics. New artistic practices such as the use of perspective and attention to human form, which developed in the earlier Renaissance, demanded new theories. The Social and cultural role of art shifted. Patronage passed from church and court to middle-class city dwellers and independent landowners. The new aristocracy and the rising middle-class had money to spend, leisure time, and a high level of literacy. New art forms appeared. The invention of printing created an audience and an insatiable demand for writers to supply new tastes not just for poetry and fiction, but also for comment and criticism. Literature, in particular, saw the rise of a new form of fiction, the novel, in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The metaphysics of Aristotle and neo-Platonic theories of knowledge and reality made the empirical world only a first stage to a higher, spiritual understanding. The 17th and 18th centuries marked a shift away from neo-Platonism and medieval scholastic theories. Perhaps the most important element in this shift was the new science of Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. The rise of the new science created a different standard, empirical evidence, and a new focus of attention, the individual experience of an observer. In philosophy, both the empiricist, led by John Lock, and the rationalist, led by Gottfried Leibniz and Rene Descartes, agreed in turning inward to the individual mind as the arbiter of knowledge.
Modern aesthetics is, first of all, aesthetics of individual experiences of discrete objects. Observers have experiences through their senses. So thinkers such as Anthony Ashley Cooper turned to an aesthetic sense as the source of aesthetic experience. The five ordinary senses were supplemented by the postulation of a sense of beauty and a moral sense that responds to aesthetic and moral qualities in what is observed. In its early forms, claims for the existence of an aesthetic and moral sense were tentative. Neo-Platonic language about order, harmony, and beauty continued to be the more common mode of description of the experience of art, beauty, and the good. Increasingly that language was turned to more individualistic purposes.
The model for aesthetic sense is not the eye, as usually was the case in the classic world, but the tongue. Taste was transformed into an aesthetic term; foremost among the reasons for this shift is the analogy that taste offers for the diversity, privacy, and immediacy of the kinds of experience that art and beauty produce.
Nineteenth-century:
Twentieth-Century:
Key Terms:
Art: in the classical world art was seldom mere entertainment in our contemporary, escapist sense. Even art that was to be looked at served a function; it commemorated events and brought honor and prestige to its owners and patrons. Works of art were not valued “for themselves” in the way that our museum-culture promotes. Drama, even in its comic and satiric modes, was a part of cultural and religious festivals. Sculpture and painting provided memorials for the dead and images for the gods.
The word “art” implies not only the kind of things that we classify as art; it also implies craft—knowledge of how to do or make something.
Many of the interesting comments on art by classical writers are from the practical standpoint of how to make something that works the way it is supposed to work. This perspective is particularly true of rhetorical works. The art of speaking was a preeminent professional skill in a world without printing. The law, church, court, and tradition all depended on oral performance and rhetorical persuasion. Classical writers studied and employed a detailed array of technical devices. The link between persuasion and aesthetics is often very close.
Beauty: in the classical world beauty is a value closely linked with truth and the good. Beauty is not understood simply as an emotion. Beauty is understood as a property of the highest forms of being in the world. It is associated with harmony and order. When classical writers sought to understand the order of the world, they would include beauty in their investigations. They believed that beauty informed the intellect as well as the senses. Beauty must be a topic for consideration for anyone who seeks to understand the place of human beings in the cosmos.
Beauty was even more important than art to classic philosophers. Different standards and ideals of beauty prevail in different cultures. The particular natural and artistic forms that are pleasing to me and the way I describe them need not be the same as they were to the citizens of Athens in the fifth century B.C.E. Some emotional responses seem to be very widespread. But the pleasure I take in a sunset or a landscape provides a shared link across cultural boundaries and temporal distances. We are not so different that we do not understand and respond in similar ways. The greatest difference is in the concepts we use to describe our responses.
Forms of decoration: served to link everyday life to the fabric of myth
Pleasure: like myth provides a shared link across cultural boundaries and temporal Distance
Myth: purpose of, to impregnate belief systems; to integrate the human into the natural world; to give meaning;
| Last Updated: 10/19/22 |