On: Aesthetics (Part 4)
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THE EXPERIENCE OF ART
Modern discussions about how art is experienced have been dominated by theories devised in the 18th century to describe the experience of beauty. As a consequence of these theories, many philosophers still think of the typical experience of art as distanced, disinterested, or contemplative. This experience is supposed to be different, and removed, from everyday affairs and concerns. A few modern aestheticians, especially John Dewey, have stressed the continuity between aesthetic experience and everyday experience and have claimed for the experience of art a psychologically integrative function.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF BEAUTY
The skepticism about beauty culminated in the Critique of Judgment (1790), Immanuel Kant's contribution to aesthetics. In that work, Kant analyzed the "judgment of taste," that is, the judgment that a thing is beautiful. He asserted that the judgment of beauty is subjective. Before Kant, the common assumption was that "beauty" designated some objective feature of things. Most earlier theories of beauty had held that beauty was a complex relation between parts of a whole. Some philosophers called this relation "harmony."
From the time of
the Greeks, a common assumption was that beauty applied not only, or
primarily, to art, but that it manifested itself in cultural
institutions and moral character as well as in natural and artificial
objects. By the end of the 18th century, however, the range of accepted
beautiful things was becoming more and more restricted to natural
things and artworks.
Whereas theorists of beauty had generally
admitted that the perception of beauty always gives pleasure to the
perceiver, Kant turned the pleasure into the criterion of beauty.
According to Kant, people can judge a thing beautiful only if they take
pleasure of a certain kind in experiencing it. The American philosopher
George Santayana took this subjectivism a step further by declaring
that beauty is the same as pleasure – but pleasure then can be seen as
"objectified" in things. Santayana's work (1896) marked the virtual
end, until recently, of aestheticians' serious theoretical interest in
beauty.
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On: Aesthetics (Part 1)
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THE EXPERIENCE OF ART
Modern discussions about how art is experienced have been dominated by theories devised in the 18th century to describe the experience of beauty. As a consequence of these theories, many philosophers still think of the typical experience of art as distanced, disinterested, or contemplative. This experience is supposed to be different, and removed, from everyday affairs and concerns. A few modern aestheticians, especially John Dewey, have stressed the continuity between aesthetic experience and everyday experience and have claimed for the experience of art a psychologically integrative function.
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| The beauty you see originates here... |
THE PHILOSOPHY OF BEAUTY
The skepticism about beauty culminated in the Critique of Judgment (1790), Immanuel Kant's contribution to aesthetics. In that work, Kant analyzed the "judgment of taste," that is, the judgment that a thing is beautiful. He asserted that the judgment of beauty is subjective. Before Kant, the common assumption was that "beauty" designated some objective feature of things. Most earlier theories of beauty had held that beauty was a complex relation between parts of a whole. Some philosophers called this relation "harmony."
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Related c<log Articles
On: Aesthetics (Part 1)
On: Aesthetics (Part 2)
On: Aesthetics (Part 3)
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