Note: the following has been abstracted from the Grolier Encyclopedia.

Aesthetics

Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy that aims to establish the general principles of art and beauty. It can be divided into the philosophy of art and the philosophy of beauty. Although some philosophers have considered one of these a subdivision of the other, the philosophies of art and beauty are essentially different. The philosophy of beauty recognizes aesthetic phenomena outside of art, as in nature or in nonartistic cultural phenomena such as morality, science, or mathematics; it is concerned with art only insofar as art is beautiful. The history of the arts in the West, however, has made it increasingly clear that there is much more to art than beauty and that art often has little or nothing to do with beauty. Until the 18th century, the philosophy of beauty was generally given more attention than the philosophy of art. Since that time, aestheticians have devoted more energy to the philosophy of art.

Philosophy of Art:

• Metaphysics of Art
• Experience of Art
• Judgements and Interpretations
• Production of Art
• Definition of Art
• Philosophy of Beauty

Metaphysics of Art:

Aestheticians ask two main questions about the metaphysics of art: (1) What is the ontological status of works of art, or what kind of entity is a work of art? (2) What access, if any, does art give the viewer or hearer to reality, or what kind of knowledge, if any, does art yield? The first question arises, in part, because some works of art, such as sculptures, are much like ordinary physical objects; others, such as paintings, have aspects that suggest that not all works of art can be merely physical objects. A painting, for example, is typically flat, but it can represent spatial depth; and what the painting represents often seems more relevant aesthetically than its physical dimensions. To some aestheticians, the representational character seems to be what is essential to a painting as a work of art. Some philosophers have therefore concluded that works of art are mental entities of some sort, because it is mental entities, such as visions and dreams, that are typically representational. Other philosophers, who have noticed that artists can and do express some of their own attitudes, emotions, and personality traits in their art, have concluded that art works belong in a category with nonverbal communications rather than with physical objects.

A different line of thought suggests that works of art are not like objects even on a first impression. For example, the score of a symphony is not the same as the symphony. The score is a set of directions for playing the music, but the musical work can exist even if no one ever plays the score. Considerations such as these have led many philosophers to say that works of art exist only in the minds of their creators and of their hearers, viewers, or readers.

The question whether art can provide knowledge of, or insight into, reality is as old as philosophy itself. Plato argued in The Republic that art has the power to represent only the appearances of reality. According to this theory, a painter reproduces (imitates) a subject on canvas. The counterposition, that art can yield insight into the real, is commonly held by modern philosophers, artists, and critics. Many critics, in fact, allege that art offers a special, nondiscursive, and intuitive knowledge of reality that science and philosophy cannot achieve.

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, 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.

Judgments and Interpretations

The study of critics' judgments and interpretations of art tries to specify the kind of reasoning involved in such opinions. One question is whether evaluative judgments can be backed by strictly deductive reasoning based on premises descriptive of the art-work.

A radical position on this issue is that evaluative judgments are merely expressions of preference and thus cannot be considered either true or false. With respect to critical interpretations of a work, as distinct from evaluations, a basic question is whether conflicts over interpretations of a work can be definitively settled by facts about the work, or whether more than one incompatible but reasonable interpretation of the same work is possible. A related concern is what the criteria of relevance are for justifying an interpretation or evaluation. Some aestheticians in this century, for example, have argued that appeals to the artist's intentions about a work are never relevant in such contexts.

Production of Art

Philosophical speculation about the production of art centers primarily on the following questions: What is the role of genius, or innate ability, in artistic production? What is the meaning of creativity? How do the conditions for producing fine art differ from those for producing crafts? On the last issue, ancient and medieval philosophers assumed the same model for producing fine art and crafts; they had no conception that the two are distinct. The present distinction between the two emerged in Western culture after the Renaissance; nearly all aestheticians now assume that something is unique about producing fine and especially great art.

Definition of Art

Attempts to define art generally aim at establishing a set of characteristics applicable to all fine arts as well as the differences that set them apart. By the middle of the 20th century, aestheticians had not agreed upon a definition of art, and a skeptical position became popular, holding that it is impossible in principle to define art. This skepticism has an interesting parallel in the 18th century when, after many unsuccessful attempts to define beauty, most philosophers agreed that beauty could not be defined in terms of the qualities shared by all beautiful objects.

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.