Aesthetics is a philosophy of beauty and expediency

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:44

The very concept of aesthetics came to us from Ancient Greece. When ancient philosophers first thought about various categories and definitions of human activity, they gave this name to reflections on the beautiful and the ugly, as well as the perception of this phenomenon by the senses. Later they began to consider that aesthetics is a special theory about what beauty is. They also thought about what forms it can take, whether it exists in nature or only in creativity. We can say that this doctrine as a discipline originated simultaneously with philosophy and is part of it. The Pythagoreans, "combining algebra and harmony", combined the concepts of beauty and numbers.

Aesthetics is a value. Representations of the ancient world from myth to categorization

Ancient Greek philosophers attached particular importance to the idea of the origin of the world from chaos and its striving for harmony. Therefore, aesthetics belonged to the categories of ontology. So,macro- and microcosm, that is, man and the universe, had to be similar to each other, including in beauty. The mythology of antiquity also corresponded to this picture of the world. Sophists noticed that aesthetic ideas often depend on the person himself and his perception. Therefore, they put aesthetics in a number of value categories that form the foundation of personality. Socrates, on the contrary, suggested that aesthetics is an ethical concept, and immorality is ugly. His ideas were largely developed by Plato, who noted that we receive ideas about the beautiful "from above, as if remembering." They come from the world of the gods. And, finally, in Aristotle we find a whole theory that beauty and creativity require philosophical reflection and scientific definition. He first proposed such a term as "categories of aesthetics", and introduced them into scientific circulation. Aristotle distinguishes the main terms in which the idea of creativity can be expressed: “beautiful”, “sublime”, “ugly”, “base”, “comic”, “tragic”. He also tried to establish links between these categories and their interdependence.

Development of aesthetic teachings in Europe until modern times

During the Middle Ages, especially the early one, the Christianized teaching of Plato dominated that aesthetics comes from God, and therefore it should be “inscribed” in theology and subordinated to him. Thomas Aquinas develops the theory of beauty and expediency in terms of Aristotle. He reflects on how the categories of aesthetics are designed to lead a person to God, andalso how they manifest themselves in the nature He created. During the Renaissance, the latter theory gained great popularity, because the search for harmony in nature with the help of mathematics and its expression by means of images and words became the main method of the philosophy of beauty. This is how the aesthetics of art arose in the definition of the genius Leonardo da Vinci. The 19th century was dominated by three theories that fought among themselves for popularity among the then intellectuals. First of all, this is a romantic concept, which argued that aesthetics is a gift of nature to man, and you just need to be able to hear her voice in order to embody it in your work. Then - Hegelian philosophy, which argued that the theory of beauty is one of the forms of development of the absolute idea, and it has certain historical stages of formation, like morality. And, finally, Kant's ideas that aesthetics is our idea of nature as something that has purpose. This picture is formed in our head, and we ourselves bring it into the world around us. In fact, aesthetics comes from the "realm of freedom" and not from nature. At the end of the 19th century, a crisis began in the traditional directions of the theory of beauty, but this is the subject of a completely different conversation.