- What is aesthetics?
- History and etymology
- Aesthetics as a philosophical discipline
- Aesthetic periods according to the idea of beauty
- aesthetic qualities
- Relationship between aesthetics and art
We explain what aesthetics is, its characteristics throughout history and its relationship with art. In addition, the aesthetic qualities.
What is aesthetics?
Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy that is dedicated to studying the art and its relationship with beauty, both in its essence (what it is), and in its perception (where is it located). The latter includes other types of aspects such as aesthetic experience or aesthetic judgement. When we value a artwork as beautiful or sublime, for example, we make use of our ability to make an aesthetic judgment.
Even though aesthetics is not thought of as a "science of the beautiful" in contemporary philosophy, its origin and history are intertwined with this aesthetic category, as well as with the sublime.
History and etymology
The word aesthetic comes from the Latin aestheticus and this from the Greek αἰσθητική (aisthetiké). Both indicate a relationship with the senses and that is why it is used esthetic to name the knowledge that is perceived through sensitivity. So this discipline can be understood as the philosophy of perception in general.
The first to think about the aesthetic was the Greek philosopher Plato (c. 427-347 BC), particularly in three of his dialogues: hippias elder (about the beauty of bodies), Phaedrus (on the beauty of souls) and The banquet (about beauty in general). In them there is a search for a universal concept of beauty, which tends to the notions of proportion, harmony and splendor.
Throughout the history of philosophy, the concept of beauty has been changing. This feature has intrigued the human being, who has art as a tool to think and produce the beautiful, in addition to the natural beauty of the world.
The classical notions of antiquity, which made the good, the beautiful and the true coincide, gradually gave way to more complex senses of the aesthetic. During the medieval, for example, the beautiful was thought from the moral, While in the Renaissance it turned to a concept of beauty as an ideal of forms and proportions. Modernity, for its part, thought of an idea of beauty assimilated not to the object but to the artist's eye. Today beauty is thought of in different ways, either as something that escapes or is opposed to utilitarianism, as something useless, as a prey to subjectivity or even as totally non-existent. There are many ways of thinking about what beauty is or if there is such a thing as beauty itself. The task of aesthetics is to consider these points of view and make them dialogue in the best possible way.
Aesthetics as a philosophical discipline
Although the history of aesthetics is vast and complex, it was not until the eighteenth century —with the publication of the Criticism of the trial, by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant—which was thought of as a strictly philosophical discipline. Much of his work revolves around saying what taste is, beyond beauty or the sublime.
The word esthetic, used to refer to the "science of the beautiful", was first used in 1750 by Alexanger Baumgarten. Edmund Burke, an Irish philosopher, was also concerned with thinking about the categories of the beautiful and the sublime. However, the first to give theoretical form to the judgments of the beautiful and the sublime in a systematic way was I. Kant. In The critique of the trial he explains and reflects on the meaning of judgment, its origin and the reason why something seems beautiful or sublime to us. As a general idea, the faculty of judging is considered to be an intermediary between understanding and reason.It is through the use of judgment that we can suspend our knowledge of objects and experience the wonder that their form arouses in us.
Aesthetics arises as a result of the Enlightenment (18th century) and the Enlightenment century (19th century), as Kant called them. The Enlightenment was divided between empiricists and transcendentals. The empiricist, from the hand of Burke, was the one closest to the culture of the salons. The Kantian illustration, on the other hand, thought of aesthetics from the categories of the universal and aesthetic judgment as law.
The Kantian difference between the beautiful and the sublime is in the type of pleasure that things awaken in us:
- The beautiful is what drives us to life and can be united with charm and imagination. It is a kind of positive pleasure.
- The sublime is a pleasure that is born indirectly thanks to the suspension of our vital faculties. It is a negative pleasure, even though it remains a form of pleasure.
The Enlightenment centuries and the works of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant were followed by other philosophers, thinkers, and schools. Authors such as Schlegel, Schelling and Fitche introduced and promoted the concepts of taste, interest Y beauty with ideas such as the aesthetic appetite and the desire for novelty. The same thing happened with the works of Nietzsche, Hegel and Heidegger, for example, and Benjamin, Adorno or Derrida.
The history of aesthetics is a history in constant construction, whose discussions remain current beyond the period in which it finds itself.
Aesthetic periods according to the idea of beauty
The idea of beauty changes from one era to another. What today we consider beautiful or pleasant, in other times has been considered ugly, mundane or incomprehensible.
In a general overview, we can distinguish four great periods of beauty: classical, medieval, modern and contemporary.This classification should be understood as an idea of what is beautiful and visually valued, especially in art, throughout the different periods of history. humanity.
- The classic aesthetic. The idea of beauty Ancient Greece and of the Romans it is the foundation of future notions of the beautiful in the West. For them, the beautiful, the good and the true were one thing, and their nature had to do with measure, harmony, Justice and adaptation to the ideal of an era.
- medieval aesthetics. The Middle Ages was a mostly religious time in the West, in which Christian thought prevailed over others. Thus, the concept of beauty had to do with the values fundamental Christians: faith in God, sacrifice, passion and purity, that is, with morals more than with appearances.
- The modern aesthetic. The Renaissance broke with the Christian tradition and claimed the classical within the framework of the ideas of the humanism and the Illustration, for those who thought of reason as a central concept. The ideas of beauty of the time were attributed to the planned, the structured, the symmetrical and the harmonic. Beauty was thought from perfection and order, without giving space to extravagance or disproportion.
- contemporary aesthetics. In recent times, many of the traditional ideas about beauty have been questioned in line with other ways of thinking about beauty. reality and the culture. For example, evolutionism, psychoanalysis, Marxism or the philosophical schools nihilists. The beautiful was subjected to a process of dispersion that allowed the emergence of abstract art, the conceptual beauty and the beauty of the meaning of things, rather than compliance with a canon that distinguished between the aesthetic and the mundane. On many occasions, in fact, the horrible, the everyday and the incomprehensible have been proposed as models of the beautiful.
aesthetic qualities
Aesthetic qualities are elements that make an object or work of art valuable.
The aesthetic qualities must be able to be perceived by the viewer: the aesthetic is what gives us pleasure when we perceive, in a broad sense, an object.
In that sense, there are three different types of aesthetic qualities:
- sensory qualities. They make an object pleasing to the senses (for example, its texture, its colors, its brightness or its timbre). These qualities are perceived through the senses and, depending on who experiences them, the pleasure they produce varies. For example, the notes of a musical melody are sensory qualities that produce pleasure when perceived.
- formal qualities. They have to do with the way in which the elements that compose it are combined in the object, or the relationship that can be perceived between them. For example, the combination of the words that make a poem they are formal qualities that can produce pleasure.
- vital qualities. They refer to the existential or experiential content of an object, that is, to the ideas that it evokes, the feelings that it transmits or the experiences that it recovers. These qualities do not reside in the object itself, but can be reached by the observer through it. Those objects that can evoke more meanings occupy a privileged place with respect to the others.
Relationship between aesthetics and art
Aesthetics has its philosophical origin in the question of beauty. For two thousand years, the question of beauty, in general terms, existed outside of art.
Only in the 18th century, with the rise of Enlightenment culture and philosophy, did aesthetics become a philosophical discipline per se. For the cultural canon, those who could appreciate the beauty of an object were those who possessed culture, taste and the possibility of deciding what was beautiful and what was not.This gave way to a new cultural figure: the figure of the critic. With him appeared new relations between the artist, the work and the public.
The question about taste led to the question about the work and, from there, to the question about art in general. What is art and what is specific to the work are questions whose presence gained relative importance towards the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. It has even been questioned that art ever existed.
Throughout the 20th century, the aesthetic field was extended not only to paint but also to the literature, the poetry, the music and the architecture. Even though for some thinkers it is impossible to say what makes a work a work, the contemporary world is already the scene of aesthetic discussion par excellence: is it still possible to talk about art?