Aesthetics — From Greek aísthēsis (sense perception). The branch of philosophy investigating the nature of beauty, art, and sensory experience, as well as the criteria of the judgement of taste. The term was introduced by Alexander Baumgarten in 1735 (Meditationes philosophicae) and developed in his Aesthetica (1750), which defined the discipline as the “science of sensory cognition” — a knowledge of the lower faculties, parallel to logic, which governs the higher ones. Reflection on beauty, however, is far older: Plato (Hippias Major, Symposium) conceives it as a transcendent idea, and Aristotle (Poetics) analyses tragedy and mimesis. Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) is the founding landmark of modern aesthetics: the judgement of taste is universally valid without a concept, for the beautiful pleases disinterestedly and exhibits “purposiveness without purpose,” thereby distinguishing itself from the merely agreeable and from the sublime. Hegel integrates aesthetics into the dialectical system, defining art as the sensory manifestation of the Idea. In the twentieth century, Adorno (Aesthetic Theory) redefines the artwork as the determinate negation of administered reality, while Heidegger (The Origin of the Work of Art) conceives it as an event of truth (alētheia). Aesthetics is closely bound up with the philosophy of art — which some distinguish by its focus on works rather than on sensory experience in general — and with the notion of taste, the faculty of discerning beauty whose status, between the subjective and the universal, remains the central problem of the discipline.
← Glossary