aesthetics

aesthetics (ĕsthĕt`ĭks), the branch of philosophy that is concerned with the nature of art and the criteria of artistic judgment. The classical conception of art as the imitation of nature was formulated by Plato and developed by Aristotle in his Poetics, while modern thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, F. W. Schelling, Benedetto Croce, and Ernst Cassirer have emphasized the creative and symbolic aspects of art. The major problem in aesthetics concerns the nature of the beautiful. Generally speaking there are two basic approaches to the problem of beauty—the objective, which asserts that beauty inheres in the object and that judgments concerning it may have objective validity, and the subjective, which tends to identify the beautiful with that which pleases the observer. Outstanding defenders of the objective position were Plato, Aristotle, and G. E. Lessing, and of the subjective position, Edmund Burke and David Hume. In his Critique of Judgment, Kant mediated between the two tendencies by showing that aesthetic judgment has universal validity despite its subjective nature. Among the modern philosophers interested in aesthetics, the most important are Croce, R. G. Collingwood, Cassirer, and John Dewey.

Bibliography

See K. E. Gilbert and H. Kuhn, A History of Esthetics (rev. ed. 1953, repr. 1972); M. C. Beardsley, Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present (1965); H. Osborne, Aesthetics and Art Theory (1970); G. Dickie, Aesthetics: An Introduction (1971); A. C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (1986); D. Sumner, The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (1987).

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aesthetics

Philosophical study of the qualities that make something an object of aesthetic interest and of the nature of aesthetic value and judgment. It encompasses the philosophy of art, which is chiefly concerned with the nature and value of art and the principles by which it should be interpreted and evaluated. Three broad approaches to the subject have been taken, each distinguished by the types of questions it treats as foremost: (1) the study of aesthetic concepts, often specifically through the examination of uses of aesthetic language; (2) the study of the states of mind—responses, attitudes, emotions—held to be involved in aesthetic experience; and (3) the study of objects deemed aesthetically interesting, with a view to determining what about them makes them so. Seminal works in the field include the Symposium of Plato; the Rhetoric of Aristotle; Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), by Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746); “Of the Standard of Taste” (in Four Dissertations [1757]), by David Hume; On the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), by Edmund Burke; Critique of Judgment (1790), by Immanuel Kant; The Sense of Beauty (1896), by George Santayana; The Psychology of Imagination (1948), by Jean-Paul Sartre; and two works by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief (1966) and Culture and Value (1977).