Ancient aesthetics

Paleolithic handprint from
Pech Merle cave

Presumably, human beings have reflected on their creativity from the beginning. Our species, Homo sapiens, emerged in Africa about 200,000 years ago, and the first signs of ‘aesthetic’ activity known to archaeology follow around 125-100,000 years ago in the form of notched bones, use of red ochre (a soft stone), and ritual burials. Gradually we began to produce unambiguous art objects, beginning with the incised red ochre blocks and shell necklaces found at sites like Blombos Cave in South Africa, and eventually flowering into the sculpture, musical instruments and rock art of the Upper Paleolithic (i.e. the last phase of the Old Stone Age). By at least 40,000 years ago, artists were discovering basic forms still familiar today: painting, textiles, music, ceramics, engraving, jewellery, architecture and sculpture.

These prehistoric people, though non-literate, were not knuckle-dragging ‘cavemen’ but intelligent and anatomically modern humans, like us. We can only speculate about what ideas they may have had on creativity, art objects and aesthetic experience. It is unlikely they had a theoretical conception of ‘art’ as such, as this distinction emerged much later. But in ways now forgotten our ancestors must have observed their own practices such as painting, dancing, singing, weaving and sculpting, and wondered what they were, and why they did them.

Early civilisation

Around 11,000 years ago the Old Stone Age was succeeded by the New, known as the Neolithic – a revolutionary change signalled by the rise of agriculture and the domestication of animals. The Neolithic world sowed the seeds of many early civilisations, the first of which – the Sumerians in Mesopotamia and the Egyptians in north Africa – lay in the ‘Fertile Crescent’, an immense green arc stretching from the Middle East to the Nile. The invention of writing in those regions launched the age of history.

The Bronze Age social surplus grew big enough to fund, beside the more everyday art like pottery, the creation of monumental buildings, ceremonies and artworks.

Strictly speaking, these creations are a waste of resources. When we leave aside the cultural or religious claims we make for them, a pyramid is just a heap of stones in a field; a sculpture of a god is just a piece of rock bashed into a form; a burial ritual, however elaborate and expensive, has no significance for the person being buried, who is after all dead. Why spend so much time and energy on these strange practices? And why do only human beings do it? Thoughtful people in this age, too, must have puzzled over such things, just as early astronomers and priests puzzled over the stars in the sky, or the nature of sun and moon, day and night, life and death.

However, we have inherited no philosophy of art from the early civilisations. The Egyptians did not even have a word for ‘art’ as we understand it. They had words for various forms – ‘stela’, ‘statue’ and so on – but their conception was much broader, and nearer to what we call ‘craft’. The Egyptians seem to have judged their cultural products in terms of durability, quality of craftsmanship and splendour rather than as ‘art objects’ as such. As Monroe C. Beardsley observes in his history of aesthetics:

In tens of thousands of inscriptions in which these masters are praised, by themselves or others, it is never the beauty of their works, but only strength and everlastingness or richness and lavishness of metal that are cited.¹

The lack of theory is not because of intellectual poverty. The succession of Mesopotamian empires and Egyptian dynasties sustained, for thousands of years, a magnificent culture of literature, architecture, theology, mathematics, astronomy and often spectacular art.

The Greeks, normally lauded as the first philosophers, are said to have learnt a great deal from the sages of Egypt. There is various evidence of this from ancient writers. In the 1st century BCE the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus wrote a grand history known in Latin as the Bibliotheca historica (Library of History), much of which survives. In its first book he reports that Greeks “who have won fame for their wisdom and learning” visited Egypt for education. Such eminent figures as the poet Homer, the statesman Solon of Athens, the mathematician Pythagoras, and the philosophers Plato and Democritus were among the visitors. The priests of Egypt argued that “the things for which they were admired among the Greeks were transferred from Egypt” (Book I, 96). Diodorus is not necessarily reliable, and perhaps those priests aren’t either, but there is other evidence that Egypt was regarded as a highly respected centre of learning by the Greeks. For example, in the 3rd century CE Diogenes Laertius recorded in his Lives of the Philosophers that Thales of Miletus, regarded as the first Greek philosopher, “learnt geometry from the Egyptians” (Book I, Chapter 1). Whatever the facts about precisely who travelled there and when, the Greeks seem to have been comfortable acknowledging a cultural debt to their north African mentors.

Not only could the Egyptians boast an advanced intellectual tradition, their artistic work is second to none. Think of the rich colours, the bustling wooden models of peasants at work, the stunning birds from the tomb of Nebamun, the grandiose architecture of Karnak, or the serenity of Thutmose’s perfectly modelled Nefertiti.

Why then did the ancient Egyptians leave us no evidence of a philosophy of art or beauty? Whereas Greece produced Pythagoras’s study of music, Polykleitos’s treatise on proportion, Plato’s Ion, Republic and Symposium, and Aristotle’s Poetics, the Egyptians seem to have taken no interest in aesthetic questions. This may in part be a misfortune of archaeology, but the absence of an aesthetics amongst their vast cultural inheritance is striking.

The answer I think is two-fold. Firstly, the historical context was not ripe for philosophical thought as we understand it today. I’ll come back to that at the end. The other answer is that they did in fact leave an aesthetics, spoken to us through the art objects themselves.

Take an example of their two-dimensional visual art. The painting below is from the tomb of an official named Nakht. Ancient Egypt’s art was functional, often serving, as in this case, funerary or religious purposes. The function of this work is to win a prosperous existence for the family in death, as they had enjoyed in life.

Painting from the Tomb of Nakht, c.1400 BCE. Nakht and his wife Tawy (left) are shown enjoying the products of the fields. At the top right we see the family on a hunt. Source: Osirisnet.net

The artist shows little interest in perspective, preferring flat colours and shapes. The action is arranged into bands or ‘registers’ divided by straight lines, making a very schematic composition. Within this scheme, the portrayal of people and events follows strict rules. Here are a few:

1. Men were painted red, women yellow; gods were sometimes painted in symbolic colours like black and green.
2. The figures are stylised to capture each element from the angle at which its appearance is most typical. The eye is seen as if from the front, even though the head is normally shown in profile. Similarly, the chest is frontal but the limbs are shown from the side, where their articulation is most clear. The shape of a foot is much clearer in a side view, too.
3. The relative size of the figures obeys a scale where the more important a person was, the larger they were. Compare the size of Nakht and Tawy with the peasants bearing goods.
4. When drawing the figure, the Egyptians developed a canon of proportions based upon a grid system about 19 squares high. One of these grids, from the Tomb of Ramose, has survived because the tomb was left unfinished, giving us a rare insight into how the artists worked. In the illustration below, I’ve applied a grid to one of the peasants from TT52:



The figure had to fit into this scheme, however unnatural it looked.

In short, the art is functional, schematic, and highly conventional. The rules are not immune to variation, and artists found ways to avoid monotony. But the same canon of style, developed during the Old Kingdom, continued to be used almost without interruption until the gradual breakdown of the traditional culture following the invasions of Alexander and the Romans. It is an approach to art that is different to ours. The historian of aesthetics, Władysław Tatarkiewicz, observed:

To judge by the surviving examples, they did not attach great importance to the representation of reality, to the expression of feelings or to giving pleasure to spectators. They linked their art to religion and the next world rather than with the world about them. They sought to embody in their works the essence of things rather than their appearance.²

Why was this?

The Egyptians were not incapable of realism: if you have doubts, see their portrait busts, or their exquisite paintings of animals. No, they worked this way because they had an aesthetic. What ancient Egyptian art speaks of is a desire for strict order. Someone’s place in the social hierarchy is always explicit, and the mode of representation remains roughly the same across the culture, regardless of time and place, creating a extraordinary sense of continuity, necessity, and eternity.

Think of the changes wrought by the Neolithic Revolution. The earliest human societies were small bands of hunters and gatherers, roaming the landscape in search of food and owning only what they could carry. Living hand to mouth, they would have shared their resources more or less equally. Settled Neolithic and Bronze Age farmers with crops and animals, on the other hand, depended upon stability from politics and predictability from nature. In a mythopoeic age, weather, disease and other dangers were believed to be arbitrated by gods, and people looked to organised religion to keep them on good terms with the divine. The new wealth of the agricultural revolution was swallowed by the priesthood and aristocracy as a reward for providing stability – they were the ones who sponsored major artworks, and in them they affirmed their class structure and system of belief.

Civilisation also encouraged new kinds of thought. The socialisation of labour and the development of regional markets of exchange required standardised measurements and more complex mathematics; as families permanently settled land they needed new concepts of property and law. The practical needs of a changing society demanded a turn towards systematisation and abstraction.

These, in brief, are persuasive reasons why the art of the early civilisations tended to be schematic and monumental. The Egyptians had no philosophy of art, but, just like us, they had a way of thinking that heavily influenced how they represented the world in the objects they made. Although their art is sometimes considered too stiff and static for modern taste, these were precisely the qualities that best communicated their preoccupation with order and eternity. Fulfilling that role was more important than questions about beauty – which is why they were ready to spend great labour and resources on superb work only to bury it in subterranean darkness where it would never be seen.

This brings us back to the question of philosophical thought. The early civilisations laid the foundation stone for the emergence of philosophy, including aesthetics. New needs give birth to new thoughts and new forms, which build upon the existing corpus of ideas but transform it. However splendid a culture’s art, a sophisticated body of theory does not necessarily follow: there is no Aristotle or Aquinas of the Renaissance. The Mesopotamians and Egyptians seem to have had no use for philosophical reflection as we know it, let alone aesthetic theories, therefore they did not conceive of that kind of thought. Just as it was not possible to create bronze statues until innovations in metallurgy enabled ancient cultures to extract tin and copper ores and combine them into an alloy, it was not possible to devise philosophy as we now understand it until ancient thought received an adrenaline shot from the individualism fostered by Greek democracy.

Once the Greeks had ‘discovered’ the concept of reflecting upon art and beauty, the cat was out of the bag, but someone had to do it first. It wasn’t because the Greeks were cleverer than their neighbours. It was simply that in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, the conditions for this specific step were not yet ripe. The lack of a conscious theory of art, however, in no way impaired their ability as artists. As usual, the artists lead and the theorists follow.


Notes

1. Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: From the Classical World to the Present (1966). Beardsley notes the Egyptians’ lack of a philosophy of art and moves quickly on to the Greeks, but in my view there is more to say.
2. Władysław Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics, Volume 1 (1970).

Timeline of ancient aesthetics

Rider, Attic red-figured cup,
middle of 5th century BC.

A few notes on significant developments in aesthetics and theory of art from the earliest times to the late Classical period (c. 3rd century). I will add further entries as they occur to me. Please note this is predominantly a timeline of Western theory, as I cannot do justice to other traditions.

Prehistory

The reflections of Paleolithic and Neolithic cultures on beauty and the production of art, if any, are unknown, beyond what little we can deduce from the objects themselves and their contexts.

Early civilisations: Mesopotamia, Egypt

No philosophy of art or of beauty has survived from the ancient civilisations. Cultural products are praised in terms of their magnificence of materials and quality of workmanship, not in terms of an autonomous notion of ‘beauty’ as we understand it today.

Artistic representation in ancient Egyptian art usually conformed to highly stylised principles that flowed from a belief in an unchanging social and cosmic order. Despite their apparent lack of a philosophy of art, the Egyptians belong in any history of Western aesthetics, as many thinkers from ancient Greece travelled to north Africa to learn mathematics and other wisdom from this venerable and deeply respected civilisation.

The Greeks

The ancient Greek philosophers were the first to reflect upon (what we would call) aesthetic questions. The Greeks thought beauty was objective: objects were beautiful in and of themselves. Art is a kind of technē, i.e. a craft or skill, especially the knowledge (‘know-how’) associated with making things.

8th century BCE

Homer: The Iliad

• Originally an oral composition. 8th century BCE is the rough date for the written version.
• Opens with an appeal to the Muse. This is the first known theory of artistic creation: a god speaks through the poet.
• In History of Aesthetic (1892) Bernard Bosanquet points to the famous passage describing the shield of Achilles where Homer remarks ‘that was a marvellous piece of work!’ Bosanquet calls this ‘one of the earliest aesthetic judgements that Western literature contains’ (p12).

8th–7th century BCE

Hesiod: Theogeny

• Again gods speak through the poet. In the opening lines Hesiod claims to commune with the Muses on Mount Helicon, and they breathe his poetry into him: ‘And one day they taught Hesiod glorious song.’
• The Muses comment: ‘we know how to speak many false things as though they were true; but we know, when we will, to utter true things.’ This is an interesting critical judgement on the nature of poetry.

6th century BCE

Pythagoras and his school

Pythagoras (or at least his school) devised a theory of music based on mathematics and exerted a strong influence on Plato. Everything in the world, including beauty, could be explained in terms of numbers and the relationships between them.

Early theorists

Beardsley: ‘In the latter part of the 6th century, and increasingly in the 5th century, the more self-consciously theoretical masters of various crafts and arts began to think about the principles on which they worked, and to write them down.’ These were probably works of criticism on particular art forms, such as poetry and music, rather than of aesthetics.

5th century BCE

Xenophanes, Heraclitus and Pindar

Scattered surviving comments, such as Xenophanes’ criticism of Homer and Hesiod’s portrayal of the gods, or Pindar’s remarks on poetry and poets, are arguably our earliest examples of literary criticism.

Aristophanes

Comic playwright whose plays sometimes contain criticism, e.g. of Euripides’ plays.

Polykleitos

Sculptor who wrote Canon, the most renowned ancient treatise on art, now sadly lost. Polykleitos made an accompanying statue, also called Canon, to exemplify his theory in practice – this probably closely resembled the Doryphoros or Spear-bearer, of which copies survive. The treatise discussed ideal mathematical proportions for the parts of the human body, and argued that statues of the human figure should achieve beauty and the good by striking a balance between the relaxed and tensed body parts and the directions in which the parts move.

c.380 BCE

Plato

Plato addresses aesthetic and art-theoretical issues in several of his dialogues. Here are three of particular interest.

The Republic

• Discusses what role poets should have in the ideal state: especially Books III and X.
• Coins the image of “holding a mirror to nature.”
• Art has a powerful emotional impact; is thus dangerous.
• Poets create mere imitations of imitations – copies of a world that is itself already a poor copy of ideal Forms – and therefore have no real knowledge or authority. 
• Poets should (mostly) be banned from the ideal Republic. But Plato issues a challenge at the end, inviting defences of the poets to justify letting them back in.

Ion

• Do critics have knowledge of their craft, or are they inspired by the gods, i.e. have no agency? Plato concludes the latter. There is no techne of criticism.
• Extends theory of divine inspiration to (good) poetry.

The Symposium

• c.385-370 BCE. Through the character Diotima of Mantinea, Plato offers a theory of absolute beauty that may be revealed to the pederast who makes a series of steps towards knowledge of the true, good and beautiful Forms.
• The object of Love is to bring forth works in beauty: wisdom, virtue, laws, but also art, e.g. the poetry of Homer and Hesiod.

Plato thought beautiful objects incorporated proportion, harmony and unity among their parts. He formulated the theory of mimesis or imitation. As art is twice removed from the Forms, Plato is sceptical of art’s epistemological and cognitive value: artists don’t know the truth and merely make copies of copies. There is no techne of criticism or of poetry: good instances of either come through divine inspiration.

c.350 BCE

Aristotle: Poetics

This is Aristotle’s only surviving work on art, though he wrote others.

• Defends poetry against Plato.
• More positive about mimesis and art’s cognitive value. Our love of imitation flows from a desire for knowledge and harmony.
• Articulated what later became, with some distortion, the ‘three unities’; contributed to later theories of ‘decorum’.
• Aristotle asks, why do we enjoy the fearful emotions of tragedy? Because evoking pity and fear purges the emotions. This notion (katharsis) is not entirely clear and has been much-debated since.

Ancient Greek philosophers were the first to define some of the most important concepts in aesthetics and the philosophy of art. They are thus effectively the founders of aesthetics, though the discipline was not formally established until much later. Their notions, such as divine inspiration, mimesis, absolute beauty and catharsis have played a role in aesthetics ever since.

Romans

The Romans had a fascination with Greek art and culture, although their own intellectual contribution is less significant.

c.15 BCE

Horace: Ars Poetica

• The poet Horace’s advice on how to write great poetry, written in verse. The poem lays down a body of advice for ‘decorum’ – what is suitable in good poetry – which later become the foundation of Neoclassical art theory. 
  
• Introduces a number of famous critical and literary terms, such as ‘in media res’ = ‘in the middle of things’ and the ‘purple patch’.
• These included ut pictura poesis, a Latin phrase meaning ‘as is painting so is poetry.’ Horace simply meant that imaginative writing deserved the same critical respect as painting in Roman culture. Later theorists have taken up the phrase in various ways. 

Late Classical

1st century CE

Longinus: On the Sublime

An important late Classical contribution. ‘Longinus’, whose identity is uncertain, asks what makes for greatness in writing? He studies the nature of the sublime (greatness, excellence) and how to achieve it, and the role of the writer, as well as criticising some contemporary literature.

• Poetry is the highest kind of philosophy.
• He laments the literary standards of his own Roman age.
• Longinus’ work made no impact until the 17th and 18th centuries, whereupon he influences the theories of sublime of Burke and then Kant.

Paul of Tarsus

Paul, or St Paul, wrote much of the New Testament. His contribution to art theory is his literary critical way of reading the Old Testament. The Hebrew Bible contains no explicit references to Jesus, so Paul was keen to try and reconcile it with the Christian New Testament by claiming foreshadowings of Jesus in a method known as typology. In this view, many of the people, events and symbols of the Old Testament were significant not only in themselves, but as types or figures of things to be revealed later.

4th-3rd centuries CE

The end phase of the Classical era saw the flourishing of the Neoplatonist school (key figures Proclus, Plotinus), which was highly influential on Western medieval philosophy. The Neoplatonists sought to uphold the philosophical tradition of Plato and explore its questions more deeply. Theirs was an idealist philosophy: consciousness is prior to the physical realm that most of us think of as reality.

c.250-70

Plotinus: On Beauty (from 1st Ennead) 

Plotinus advanced Plato’s view (cf. The Symposium) that the origin of beauty was a perfect Form of beauty, and added his own contributions. For Plotinus, beauty is formal unity. He departs from Plato by granting the arts more respect. The arts ‘do not simply imitate what is seen by the eye but refer back to the principles of nature... Arts produce many things not by means of copying, but from themselves. In order to create a perfect whole, they add what is lacking, because arts contain beauty themselves’ (IEP). 

Main sources

Bernard Bosanquet, History of Aesthetic (1892)
Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present: A Short History (1966)
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
 

What is aesthetics?

Illustration by Jeff Searle

Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy that seeks to understand the nature of art, taste and beauty. It is closely related to the philosophy of art. We may draw a distinction between the two, arguing that aesthetics is the study of beauty rather than art alone: after all, we can experience beauty in non-art, such as the natural world. But the questions raised by aesthetics and by the philosophy of art are in practice inseparable, and the latter is usually considered a branch of aesthetics. It is valid to recognise a distinction between aesthetic and artistic judgements, but it’s difficult to assess the beauty of an artwork without addressing broader questions of why we experience beauty at all, or how beauty in works of art relates to beauty in non-art such as the natural world... or of course whether such a thing as ‘beauty’ even exists.

Similarly, aesthetics and the philosophy of art are distinct from, yet related to, other overlapping disciplines such as art criticism and art history. 

The word ‘aesthetics’ was first given its modern sense in 1735 by Alexander Baumgarten¹, a German philosopher little known outside of aesthetics. Baumgarten wrote in Latin, academia’s common language at the time, but the term’s origins lie in the Greek verb αισθάνομαι or aisthanomai, which means ‘to perceive’, with either the understanding or the bodily senses. (The noun is aisthesis. Its opposite form, ‘anaesthetic’, refers to the numbing of sensation.) This reflects Baumgarten’s interest in the arts as a means of acquiring empirical knowledge through the senses: he later defined his word aestheticae as the ‘science of sensitive perception’. Across the years the meaning of this word has, like the meaning of all words, shifted according to the standpoint of the user.

However it’s fair to say that aesthetics tries to answer questions about aesthetic objects, whether natural or human-made, aesthetic experience, i.e. our sensing of and response to those objects, and aesthetic judgement, i.e. the ways we evaluate those objects and experiences. It studies the creation and interpretation of works of art, the attitudes and sensibilities of the human beholder, and wider issues such as how the creation and treatment of art is mediated by history, or by cultural structures such as the art market, or museums and galleries.

There is no ‘official’ way to define how branches of philosophy relate to one another, and aesthetics can be tricky to place. Thanks to its interest in evaluation, it is sometimes considered to fall under a larger branch of philosophy concerned with values and value judgements (known as axiology).



Others might disagree and put aesthetics as one of the main branches of philosophy. It doesn’t really matter. There are many overlaps between different branches of thought, and for aesthetics more than most, as I’ll look at shortly.

The questions of aesthetics

The problems of art and beauty raise an enormous number of questions.

The nature of beauty is one of the main concerns of aesthetics. Assuming we agree that it exists, what sort of experience is it? Are our judgements of beauty objective or subjective, or both? Why do we tend to find some things beautiful and not others? Why do we find beauty in human-made objects like artworks as well as in non-human-made objects found in Nature? What do they have in common?

Then there is what we might think of as the epistemology of art, i.e. art as a means of learning, of acquiring knowledge about the world. Can art tell us the truth about the world? What is the relationship between an artist, a work of art, and the world it portrays?

Take the work of art itself. What is art? How is a work of art different from other objects? What makes some works of art ‘better’ or more successful than others?

Or there is the artist him- or herself. Does our creativity come from gods or from ourselves? Must an artist be an ‘inspired genius’ or can artistic skill be learned? If both, what is the balance between them and how do they relate?

There is also the role of art within society. Is it useful? Is it glorified entertainment? Is it appropriate to enlist it for politics, or as a means of instruction? Is it moral – does it make us better people? Do works of art have an embedded, eternal meaning or are they historical objects? Do their meanings change? How do social forces define what art is, and our attitudes to it? How does society present art to us, e.g. through institutions such as galleries or aesthetics courses?

There are plenty more questions we might list. What emerges is that aesthetics is more than a pretty, intellectual past-time. It touches on some of the most profound questions about human beings and our relationship with the world. Our aesthetic ideas flow naturally from our (often-unconscious) assumptions about religion, nature and ourselves.

Traditionally, aesthetics has not been taken quite as seriously as certain other branches of philosophy, such as logic or ethics. But this attitude is short-sighted. To understand ‘art, taste and beauty’, we must study archaeology and paleoanthropology, psychology and sociology, economics and politics; we have to understand the origins and nature of our consciousness and neurobiology; of our relationship to the external world and how reliably we can know it through our senses; of our use of symbols and language. We have to study how art has changed over time and across cultures and try to understand how historical forces shape the production of art and the role of artists. Only by grasping the totality of our human experience and action in the world can we form the best possible theory of art and beauty.

Origins and development

Aesthetic thought has a venerable history, going back approximately 2500 years. We have inherited no literature of art appreciation or philosophy of art from the early civilisations of Mesopotamia and Egypt. It is usual and reasonable to say that it begins, in the Western tradition, with the ancient Greeks. At roughly the same time, China was developing its own tradition, especially in the writings of Confucius.

It was with the birth of philosophy in ancient Greece in the 6th-4th centuries BCE that the West, at least, began to ask and debate questions we would recognise as aesthetic. Sticklers like to reserve the term ‘aesthetics’ for theories from the last two or three centuries when the discipline was formally identified. But the Greek philosopher Plato was effectively the founder of aesthetics, defining some of its most basic questions – imitation, beauty, the role of the artist – in terms that were influential for centuries. He was highly critical of the value of the arts, and in his dialogue The Republic (c.380 BCE) famously recommended that (most) poets should be excluded from his ideal state. However, as a fine literary artist himself, he closed the work with an appeal to his successors: to make a case for why the poets deserved to be reinstated. The subsequent history of aesthetics could be seen as a response to this challenge. His own pupil Aristotle was the first to respond, countering his teacher’s disapproval with a more positive view of the arts. There would be many more defenders.

Plato’s ideas were seeds that flowered again and again in the Western imagination. Neo-Platonism, most notably in the writings of Plotinus, kept classical ideas alive. The early Church fathers adapted Neo-Platonism to Christianity, and it thus retained its influence throughout the Middle Ages. Even during the European Renaissance, Neo-Platonism continued to define how philosophers and artists conceived of creativity; when Michelangelo carved a body emerging from stone, he had in mind a sense of pre-existing forms whose lineage went back to Plato.

The Renaissance, however, signalled new forms of society and thought. The nascent bourgeoisie began to challenge feudal social structures and ideas, and by the 17th century Enlightenment thinkers, influenced by materialism and individualism, began to wrestle with aesthetic questions in new ways. Theories of beauty, for example in the work of Hume and Kant, shifted from objective (beauty lies in the object) to subjective (beauty is experienced by the beholder). This is when the foundations of modern aesthetics were laid – above all by Kant – and Baumgarten’s new term entered the language. Aesthetics has been constantly rethought ever since. The latest innovation has been the mixing of aesthetics with cognitive science to give us neuroaesthetics: relating art and beauty to the study of the brain.

Clearly, the way we think about art and beauty is heavily conditioned by history. Every culture lives, as Arthur Danto has observed², in an atmosphere of ideas that conditions how we make and theorise art. The earliest writers, such as Homer and Hesiod, explicitly appeal to a Muse, a god, through whom their creativity flows. In the Middle Ages, beauty was often linked to goodness and emanated from God. From the Renaissance and into the 18th century, capitalism shifted the focus from the spiritual heavens to the material Earth, from an objective God to the subjective individual. This does not mean that thinkers from earlier eras got everything wrong or that every insight is by nature unreliable and relativistic; it means that every phase of aesthetics has approached the problem from different perspectives. Some will have lasting value, others little or none. The study of human beings’ aesthetic and artistic action is maddening and elusive, partly because subjectivity plays so large a part, and partly because it touches on so many aspects of our being: our biology, our societies, our consciousness, our beliefs. The relentless unfurling of history, by revealing multiple ways of being human and being creative, has given us an abundance of insights into what is going on. If we draw the most plausible of those insights together, perhaps we can build a robust theory of art.

Don’t be intimidated

Studying aesthetics with any seriousness means reading some difficult texts. Whether you like it or not, you will have to engage with works like Kant’s Critique of Judgement, Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, and Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art. Texts like these, at first encounter, may appear to have descended from another planet. Some texts are difficult simply because they deal with difficult subject matter. Others are difficult because of self-indulgence. (Postmodernists are notorious for this.) You might get angry at the apparent arrogance of writers who cannot or will not write their ideas in a more concise and clear way. You may even wonder, after reading professional aestheticians who seem to understand philosophical issues that you find perplexing, if you are smart enough to keep up.

Start with this instead.

There is no need to be intimidated. A lot of aesthetic and art critical writings – such as Hume’s Of The Standard of Taste, Danto’s The Artworld, or Berger’s Ways of Seeing – are readable and enjoyable.

As for academics, no one slips from the womb brilliantly quoting Kant. If experts have an enviable command of their subject, it follows from being immersed in the texts for many years and studying them for a living. How much time you invest depends on where exactly you want to go with aesthetics: not everyone with an interest in art and/or beauty expects to end up teaching at Cambridge or Yale. If you have a clear direction and goal, and put in the time and effort, you can learn any new skill to the extent that suits you. People who understand a philosopher like Deleuze – assuming they really do, which isn’t a given – aren’t all geniuses, they have just put in the time. The good thing about aesthetics is that you can enjoy some wonderful art on the way.

It is surely worth the effort. Art is something no other species bothers with; beauty is, as far as we can tell, something that no other species experiences. Studying aesthetics is about more than taking an interest in art – it is to explore humanity itself. 


Notes

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetics-18th-german/ 
2. Arthur Danto, The Artworld (1964).