Whether aesthetics focuses on the one or the other varies with the time and place. As a philosophical discipline, aesthetics has centered around understanding beauty in art and in nature. 2 Animal behavior in courting often exhibits what we consider aesthetic attributes similar to those w (.)ĥ First, however, let us consider more deliberately the various domains of aesthetics.While the meaning of aesthetics has since then become both vaguely generalized to signify something whose appearance is attractive and pleasing, its original philosophical meaning led to aesthetics becoming a technical discipline of philosophy with its imponderables of definition and ontology.
Alexander Baumgarten kept close to the original Greek meaning when, in the mid-eighteenth century, he first defined aesthetics as “the science of sensory knowledge directed toward beauty” and regarded art as “the perfection of sensory awareness” (Baumgarten, 1750). The term “aesthetics” is a transliteration of the Greek aisthēsis, which means perception by the senses. The domains of aestheticsĤ The key to understanding the aesthetic lies, I believe, in the etymology of that word. What do these domains of experience have in common? Is there something that all these modes of experience share in considering them aesthetic? This is the challenging question for aesthetics in our time.
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For their concerns now include not only art and the beauty of nature but the full range of life experience, as well, and this has given aesthetics increased significance and has produced greater confusion.
It also must account for the range of aesthetic perception into the oneiric, the bizarre, and the terrible, while the social and political significance of aesthetic values has led to the recognition of a wide range of such values, not all of them positive.ģ These challenges to aesthetic understanding have made the task of scholars both more important and more difficult. But not only does an enlarged range of aesthetic appreciation recognize beauties beyond the arts. Traditional accounts of aesthetic appreciation are inadequate to identify and illuminate the perceptual satisfactions that these new applications evoke. Moreover, the growing awareness of other cultures and their traditions of aesthetic satisfaction have forced our thinking to expand into still other dimensions.Ģ Expanding the scope of aesthetics raises challenging questions about the experience of appreciation. The understanding of environment itself has grown to include not only the scenic landscape but the urban landscape and the industrial landscape, including their negative aspects. More recently, aesthetics has been applied to still other domains of experience, such as the aesthetics of everyday life, the aesthetics of food, the aesthetics of community, political aesthetics, and still others (Light & Smith, 2005 Saito, 2007 Mandoki, 2007 Leddy, 2012 Sartwell, 2010 Berleant, 2010). The application of aesthetic values to environment is one instance of this expansion, and environmental aesthetics has emerged as an important part of the enlarged scope of aesthetics 1. Over the past several decades, however, the arts and aesthetic practices have continued the direction of the past century in expanding their domain still more rapidly. When philosophers speak of aesthetics as a scholarly discipline, they usually associate it with the philosophy of art and the special value that the arts and nature possess. Other imp (.)ġ It is common to think of aesthetics as a theory that accounts for the beauty or the pleasing quality of things. 1 A large literature has grown in environmental aesthetics.
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