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).