Esthetic

Aesthetics (from the Greek αισθητικός, aisthetikós, «susceptible to be perceived by the senses» and this from αισθάνεσθαι, aisthánesthai, «to perceive») is the branch of philosophy that studies the essence and the perception of beauty and art.

Some authors define aesthetics more broadly, as the study of aesthetic experiences and aesthetic judgments in general, and not just those related to beauty. When we judge something as "beautiful", "ugly", "sublime" or "elegant" (to give some examples), we are making aesthetic judgments, which in turn express aesthetic experiences. Aesthetics is the domain of philosophy, studying art and qualities such as beauty; it is also the study of these experiences and judgments that occur every day in the activities we carry out, producing sensations and emotions, whether positive or negative in our person. Aesthetics seeks the reason for some issues, for example, why an object, painting or sculpture is not attractive to viewers; Therefore, art is related to aesthetics since it seeks to generate sensations through an expression.

In another sense, aesthetics is the study of perception in general, whether sensory or more broadly understood. These research fields may coincide, although they are not necessarily the same.

Aesthetics studies the broadest and most extensive histories of Elizabethan knowledge, as well as the different forms of art. Aesthetics, thus defined, is the field of philosophy that studies art and its qualities, such as beauty, eminence, ugly or dissonance. It is the branch of philosophy that studies the origin of pure feeling and its manifestation, which is art, it can be said that it is science whose primary object is reflection on the problems of art, aesthetics philosophically analyzes the values that in it they are contained.

Since in 1750 (in its first edition) and 1758 (second published edition) Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten used the word «aesthetics» as 'science of the beautiful, to which is added a study of the essence of art, of its relations with beauty and other values'. Some authors have tried to replace it with another name: «calology», which according to its etymology means science of beauty (kalos, 'beautiful').

Since aesthetics is also a philosophical reflection on art, one of its problems will be the value contained in art; and although a varied number of sciences can deal with the work of art, only aesthetics philosophically analyzes the values that are contained in it. On the other hand, philosophers like Mario Bunge consider that aesthetics is not a discipline. In addition, Elena Oliveras, trained in both the philosophical and artistic fields, defines the concept of aesthetics as the mark of Modernity of her moment in history where its birth takes place, where the principle of subjectivity is inaugurated.

History

This section is an extract of History of aesthetics.[chuckles]edit]

The Birth of VenusSandro Botticelli, an archetypal example of classical beauty.

The five sensesHans Makart.

The Vitruvian manLeonardo da Vinci's study of proportions in the human body.

The history of aesthetics is a discipline of the social sciences that studies the evolution of aesthetic ideas over time. The aesthetic is the branch of philosophy that is responsible for studying the way in which the human being interprets the sensory stimuli he receives from the surrounding world, giving rise to sensitive knowledge, acquired through the senses. Among the various objects of study of aesthetics are beauty or judgments of taste, as well as the different ways of interpreting them by the human being. Therefore, aesthetics are intimately linked to art and the study of art history, analyzing the various styles and artistic periods according to the various aesthetic components found in them. It is often called aesthetics as a "philosophy of art".

The term aesthetic comes from the Greek α delσθις (aísthêsis“sensation”. It was introduced by the German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in his work Philosophical Reflections on Poetry (1735), and later in his Aesthetica (1750). Thus, the history of aesthetics, rigorously speaking, would begin with Baumgarten in the eighteenth century, especially with the systematization of this discipline by Immanuel Kant. However, the concept is applicable to studies on the subject by previous philosophers, especially from classical Greece. It should be noted, for example, that the ancient Greeks had a word comparable to the current concept of aesthetics, which was φιλοκαλία (filocalía), "love to beauty". It could be said that in Greece aesthetics were born as a concept, while with Baumgarten it became a branch of philosophy.

The aesthetic is a philosophical reflection that is made on artistic and natural objects, and that produces an "esthetic judgment". Sensory perception, once analyzed by human intelligence, produces ideas, which are abstractions of the mind, and which can be objective or subjective. These ideas provoke judgments, by relating sensory elements; in turn, the relation of judgments is reasoning. The aim of aesthetics is to analyze the reasoning produced by these judgement relationships. On the other hand, ideas evolve over time, adapting to the cultural currents of each time. Consequently, such evolution is also the object of study of the history of aesthetics.

Aesthetic relationship of the human being with the world

The walker on the sea of cloudsCaspar David Friedrich, is a prototypical representation of the sublime.

Human beings have maintained and maintain various relationships with the world. Their attitude towards reality, the needs they try to satisfy and the way to satisfy them are also diverse. Those relationships include:

1. La theoretical and cognitive relationship with which they approach reality to understand it.
2. La practical-productive relationship with which they materially intervene with nature and transform it by producing, with their work, objects that satisfy certain vital needs: feeding, dressing, waving, defending, communicating, transporting, etc.
3. La practical-utilitarian relationship in which they use or consume these objects. The diverse relationships of the human being with the world are not unfolded parallel to history. Their mutual link, as well as the place they occupy or the level that reaches within the whole social, vary according to certain historical and social conditions. These conditions also explain the main or subordinate role that plays a certain relationship; economic, political, religious, etc., at a time or society. Relationships are more important than others in a given historical-social phase.

Aesthetics in philosophy

Many thinkers have been interested in art and its meaning:

• Plato, quote at Eggers Lan, Conrado: The sun, the line and the cave.
  • “—We also say that there is something Bello-en-si and Good-en-si [...] and we call each one “that which is”.
  • «[...] We read the following passage from Republic VI, 507b: [...] “—We also say that there is something Bello-en-si and Good-in-yes and, analogously, about all those things we postulated as multiple, we postulate them as being a unit, according to a unique Idea, and we call each one ‘what is’.”
• Matthew Calle Vera: the beauty: "[...] since the beauty — whether animal or anything else composed of some — should not only have its parts ordered but also with a certain magnitude and not the size — because the beauty consists of magnitude and order —, [...] as in bodies and animals it is, without doubt, necessary a magnitude, more visible all of it, in a similar way, plots and arguments must have such magnitude that it is easily retenible by the memory".
• Bonaventure of Trust: Itinerary of the Mind to God
  • "Considering proportionality in its concept of form, it is called beauty, beauty and delight do not exist without a certain proportion; and this is primarily the number".
• Denis Diderot: Research on Origin and Nature of the Beautiful.

There are two ways of beauty:

• The beauty outside one: it is all that contains in itself the power to evoke in understanding the idea of relationships. Here the concept of Order is clearly seen.
• The beautiful in relation to one: everything that causes the previous idea. It has two ways: the real beautiful, and the beautiful perceived. There is no absolute beauty. It is not a sentimental matter: "The indetermination of these relationships, the ease of grasping them and the pleasure that accompanies their perception, are those who create the illusion that the beauty was more a sentimental than a rational matter." "Situate beauty in the perception of relationships, and you will have the history of their progress from the birth of the world to this day."
• “The soul has the power to unite the ideas that he has received separately,...”.
• Immanuel Kant: Criticism of judgment: "To discern whether something is beautiful or not, we refer to representation, not by understanding the object with a view to knowledge, but by imagination (maybe united to understanding) to the subject and to the feeling of liking or dislike experienced by him."

The aesthetic: it is not based on concepts, it cannot be measured: «There cannot be any objective rule of taste that determines by concepts what is beautiful, since every judgment from this source is aesthetic, that is to say, that its determining motive is the feeling of the subject and not a concept of the object. There is no science but criticism of the beautiful. The sensory sensation is incommunicable. Communication comes from the common (or ordinary) to all.

• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: The beauty of the form in nature is presented successively as: (1) Regularity; (2) symmetry and conformity; (3) harmony. Beauty is the idea of the beautiful: “... the quantity governs the determination of the purely external form, while on the contrary, quality determines what the thing itself and its inner essence,... to the extent both are combined”.
• Arthur Schopenhauer: The world as will and representation. "The beauty therefore consists of the faithful and accurate representation of the will in general, with the help of its phenomenon in space alone, while grace consists of the proper representation of the will with the help of its phenomenon in time..." (See Theesthetics of Arthur Schopenhauer).
• Martin Heidegger: The origin of the work of art. The beauty rests in the form, but only because the form has been augmented one day from being like the entity of the entity. Form and content, is form and matter, rational and irrational, subject and object. Here form is interpreted as Order and Class of Matter. Difference between art and beauty: the first belongs to the Logic and the second to the Aesthetics.
• Bertrand Russell: It refers to the analysis of matter. poses several divisions of events: physical, and those with different laws each in itself:
  • Fixed (the "fixed movements");
  • Ritmos (recurrent processes);
  • Trans - actions (transition of quanta in which the energy passes from system);
  • Fijos with rhythms vs. laws of harmony.
• Edmund Husserl: The Paris Conferences. The transcendental theory of perception consists of the intentional analysis of perception, the transcendental theory of memory and intuitions, the transcendental theory of judgment, the transcendental theory of will, etc.

Different authors refer to the methodology of studying art and beauty. Here are contemporary authors and works (with the exception of Aristotle) who study aesthetics and art, and a hint of their ideology:

• Nicolas Rashevsky: Progress and applications of mathematical biology.

Given neurophysiological models of the discrimination of afferent stimuli, we proceed to make a hypothetical brain model called the «center of aesthetic sensation». A mathematical analysis is developed in this regard, and multiple experimental laboratory results are observed that are confirmatory.

• Omar Calabrese: The language of art. Jakobson tries to combine humanistic study with modern scientific theories, especially that of informational aesthetics. Mathematization of the Aesthetics is presented as a form of expression.
• Moles: Theory of Information in aesthetic perception. Consider Moles an exact aesthetic based on mathematical aspects of the theory of information and cybernetics. It is understood here that the conception of the outside world depends on the knowledge of our perceptive processes. This author works on visual and hearing messages. The aesthetic information you study is subject to the order of the probability of its encoding.
• Bense: Aesthetica defines art as an intervention of intelligent beings on aesthetic situations, that is, that every physical reality is support of an aesthetic reality founded on a communication process.
• Nake: It has an accurate and abstract definition of aesthetics that defines its two forms analytics and generation. Its pillars have been the semiotic of Peirce and Morris, the authors Shannon and Weaver in the theory of information, the cybernetics of Wiener, the gossip of Ehrenfels, and the impulse of mathematical aesthetics in Birkhoff.
• Arnheim: Art and Entropy. It takes into account the analytical theories of art based on the exact sciences (cybernetics, mathematics, theoretical physics and information theory). It points to a unifying way of theorizing all aspects of cultural life. Its fundamental formula is computer entropy, connecting in this way with the second principle of thermodynamics and framing a statistics of physical reality. Arnheim, to theorize the considerations of the information to aesthetic activities, to better study the concepts of interwoven order and disorder, and to verify its consequences in the notion of structure. The obvious consequence is that art escapes any "accurate" foresight and regulation attempts.
• Umberto Eco: Shows how some applications of information theory to aesthetic objects can be resumed and grouped in the picture of a general semiotic.
• Volli: The science of art. With similar contents to Eco's work, it adds mathematical concepts to cybernetics. It recognizes an application to both cultural domains: the humanistic and the scientific. It does not attempt to encompass the scientific analysis of art within a semiotic of art itself, but seeks interdisciplinaryity with cybernetics, information, linguistics and logic.

20th century

The art of the XX century is a reaction against the traditional concept of beauty. Some theorists (Hal Foster) even go so far as to describe modern art as "unsightly".

Evolutions such as the appearance of photography, capable of reproducing its model with absolute fidelity, or the mechanical means of reproducing works, which introduced them into the set of consumer goods in our society, meant at the beginning of the century XX a true upheaval for artistic theory and practice. Thus, not only the field of study of Aesthetics but also the field of work of art itself is oriented towards a very deep self-reflexive current that has marked all the art of the twentieth century: «what is art?», «Who defines what is art?". Dada used collage to show its fragmented nature; Joseph Beuys (and in general the entire European povera current) used materials such as logs, bones and sticks for his work, traditionally “ugly” elements; the minimalists would use steel to highlight the industrial nature of art, while Andy Warhol would try it through screen printing. Some would even get rid of the finished work entirely to focus solely on the process itself. In the 1960s, Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell began to use televisions or video monitors to create their works.

Unsightly

The horrendous, grotesque and disconcerting, the atrociously shocking, can also be beautiful. The representation of torture or inhumane supplication can be beautiful? (Laocoonte). Can you get pleasure, even sexual enjoyment of other pain or even your own?

Marquis de Sade, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.

This aesthetic reflection and its application in works of art appears with the pre-romanticism of the XVIII century and is accentuated with the 19th century romanticism. Edgar Allan Poe demonstrates how the main objective of art is to provoke an emotional reaction in the recipient. What is truly important is not what the author feels, but what he makes the recipient of his work feel, who must be conditioned so that his imagination is the one that builds the message that the work transmits, without the need for the author to do so. express directly, if the work really has only one meaning or only the objective that the receiver imagines, not only poems with a sinister setting, but also grotesque scenes, from sadistic crimes to the most dismaying terror. Contemporary art did not primarily seek serene or picturesque beauty, but also the repulsive or melancholic, and provoke anxiety or other intense sensations, as in Edvard Munch's The Scream and in movements such as Expressionism and Surrealism.. Empty art is rejected, which does not seek an emotion in the receiver, be it a reflection or a feeling, including anguish or fear.

Another way of understanding anti-aesthetics is the rejection of the established aesthetics, understanding this as fashion or personal image.