Concepts of Beauty, Art, and Aesthetics
Defining Beauty
Virtue of the nature and works of art and literature, which causes our enjoyment and thus attraction and love for such property.
The ancient Greeks wrote of a number of features of beauty: light, symmetry, proportion, and persuasive power.
Plato reflects on beauty in several works, seeking its definition, the idea of beauty, and “objective beauty of love.”
Kant indicates values in judgments about beauty and taste, classifying their types: pleasant, beautiful, and selfless pleasure. He distinguished between free beauty and adherent beauty.
Art Definition
Ability and disinterested expression of the human person through plastic and linguistic resources, implementing certain technical rules, which cause psychological changes and spiritual enrichment.
From the Renaissance, the arts began to be studied, and the artist was differentiated by their freedom and dignity.
Kant describes the genius as the creator of works of art.
Schopenhauer points to art as a means of liberation from desire through disinterested contemplation.
The fine arts, which were differentiated, include:
- Dance
- Painting
- Architecture
- Poetry
- Music
- Gardening
- Sculpture
Aesthetics Definition
Etymologically, it means “what is perceived by the senses.”
It is the part of philosophy that reflects on and explores the perception of natural and artistic beauty. It addresses problems concerning objective versus subjective beauty, and beauty versus the sublime.
Baumgarten points out that aesthetics does not have clear ideas.
In the aesthetic experience, there are three types:
- The viewer (who admires the work)
- The creator (who expresses emotion)
- The critic (who ponders the meaning and compares)
The bourgeois division of labor and the creation of museums contributed to the development of aesthetics.
Kant on Aesthetics
In the Critique of Judgment, Kant discussed the ability to make aesthetic judgments and presented his critique.
He describes taste as the ability to judge what is beautiful without producing knowledge. He classifies taste into pleasant (interested) and beautiful (disinterested).
Also in his book, he explains the universality of taste in relation to communication and subjectivity.
He added that the beautiful is a disinterested pleasure and distinguishes between free beauty and adherent beauty.
He talks of genius as a creator of fine art who applies the rules of art, characterized by creative imagination coupled with understanding.
Kant discusses the sublime, explaining that its source lies in the fear of the terrible. He distinguishes between the mathematical sublime and the dynamic sublime.
He exposes the difference between the sublime, which involves a conflict between sensitivity and reason, and the beautiful, which involves harmony between sensitivity and reason.
Schopenhauer’s Philosophy
His philosophy is characterized by pessimism.
He argues that the essence of the world is desire and the will to live, which leads to suffering and frustration.
The path to liberation from desire is art, where beauty is contemplated selflessly, conveying strength and elevation above the world.
The genius possesses presumed superior knowledge, which is released from desire and used to create art that expresses feelings.
This genius has some characteristics:
- Intuition (immediate knowledge; the genius knows the world intuitively)
- Imagination (extended vision of the spirit)
- Melancholy (sadness from the knowledge of human suffering)
- Infantilism (a liberal mental state)
- Madness (irrational passions that inspire)
- A Critical Outlook (contemplation of life, striving for ideas)
The ideas perceived by genius are degrees of the Will.
Nietzsche on Greek Tragedy
Nietzsche discusses Greek classicism in its entirety.
He was influenced by Schopenhauer and Wagner.
He identifies two fundamental drives in Greek culture: the Dionysian (representing the chaotic nature of life, darkness, tragedy) and the Apollonian (representing beauty, reason, light, art, the inventor of poetry and music).
Tragedy, as exemplified by Sophocles and Aeschylus, maintained a harmony between the Dionysian and the Apollonian.
Its decline, driven by Euripides, led to the elimination of this balance.