What aesthetics studies

A word borrowed from Japan

In 1883 a Japanese philosopher and translator, Nakae Chōmin (中江兆民, 1847–1901), was at work on a French book, Eugène Véron’s L’Esthétique, which the Ministry of Education wanted in Japanese. The title was a problem. Japanese had no word for it. Several were tried in Tokyo in those years, among them 善美学, 美妙学, and 審美学. Nakae’s translation, called 維氏美学 (“Véron’s bigaku”), came out in 1883 and 1884, and it helped make the two-character word 美学 stick. It means, literally, “the study of the beautiful.”

The word crossed to China around 1900, as 哲学 (zhéxué, “philosophy”) also did. A reader of Chinese who meets 美学 (měixué) therefore hears “the study of beauty.” But the word it was built to translate did not say beauty at all.

The science of perception

Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, a German philosopher born in Berlin on 17 July 1714, wrote the thesis that named the field. He wrote it at Halle in 1735, when he was about twenty-one, and it was about poems: Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus, “Philosophical Meditations on Some Matters Pertaining to the Poem.” In section 116 he notes that the ancient Greek philosophers and the Church Fathers had always distinguished aisthēta, things perceived, from noēta, things known by the mind. Things known belong to logic. Things perceived, he proposed, belong to a science of their own, which the English translation of 1954 renders as the science of perception, “or aesthetic.”

In 1750 he began a book called Aesthetica and opened it with a definition: the science of sensory cognition (scientia cognitionis sensitivae). Its aim, he wrote, is the perfection of sensory knowing as such, “that is, beauty.” He published a first volume in 1750 and a second in 1758, then stopped. Ill health left the book about a third finished, and he died in 1762, at forty-seven.

So the founder’s word named knowing through the senses, and beauty was its goal. The series this course draws on adds a detail: Greek once had an “inner sense” as well as the five outer ones, Latin lost it, and Baumgarten brought it back. Baumgarten does not say this. The idea of an “internal sense” belongs to British thinkers a decade or two before him, as the next section shows. What the Greek verb does show is that “perceiving” was never confined to the eyes and ears.

Why not study the five senses?

If aesthetics is about perception, why is it not a branch of the study of eyes and ears? The lecture’s answer is that the five outer senses vary from person to person, so there is little to say about them in general, while a person’s inner response to a poem or a painting has something more universal about it. One saying makes the first half of this point: “there is no disputing about tastes.” It is often called ancient. The earliest use that one standard reference cites is a legal text of 1628, so its age is not known.

The British thinkers of the early eighteenth century had a different way of putting it. Shaftesbury, in Characteristicks (1711), said the mind has its own eye and ear, as the body has, and called beauty divine. Francis Hutcheson, in An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), went further. Besides the five outer senses, he argued, we have inner ones, and he named several: a sense of beauty, a moral sense, a sense of honor, and others. Beauty, he wrote, shows up in things with “uniformity amidst variety.” Like an outer sense, the inner one answers at once, without reasoning; unlike an outer sense, it responds only to what the mind has already put together, such as a pattern.

David Hume’s essay “Of the Standard of Taste” (1757) takes the proverb on directly. He grants that it seems to have “the sanction of common sense,” then says there is a kind of common sense that opposes it. Nobody, he writes, could sensibly claim that Ogilby, a minor poet, equals Milton; it would be like calling a molehill as high as Tenerife. And “the same Homer, who pleased at Athens and Rome two thousand years ago, is still admired at Paris and at London.” So taste is not simply private. Hume still insists that “beauty is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.” The puzzle for aesthetics is how something that lives in the mind can still win wide agreement.

Immanuel Kant gave the sharpest version in 1790. A man who says “Canary wine is agreeable” can be corrected: he should say “agreeable to me,” and nobody objects. But with the beautiful, Kant noted, nobody says “beautiful for me.” The person who calls something beautiful, he wrote, “judges not merely for himself, but for all men, and speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things.” This course uses that as a test for what kind of claim is being made. Try it.

A subject you have to feel

The lecture opens with a question that sounds like a riddle: what relation does a field of study have to its own subject? It gives three answers. In the first, study and subject are the same activity. To study Kant’s philosophy you have to philosophize as Kant did, which is why the lecture calls philosophy the hardest field to enter. In the second, they are completely apart. Criminologists do not commit crimes and cancer researchers do not need cancer. In the third, they overlap. A scholar of singing, the lecture says, usually can sing, but a great singer is not necessarily a great scholar of singing. Where does the study of beauty belong? Try sorting a few fields yourself first.

In this course’s reading, aesthetics belongs with the overlapping group, and there are good philosophical reasons. The British philosopher Frank Sibley argued in a 1959 paper, “Aesthetic Concepts,” that words such as unified, balanced, serene, delicate, and tragic cannot be applied by following a rule. In a later paper (probably “Aesthetic and Nonaesthetic,” 1965) he said that people “have to see the grace or unity of a work.” Nobody can be given a checklist that settles whether a melody is plaintive. And Kant, in the Critique of Judgment, held that no proof can decide a judgment of taste: you cannot argue anyone into finding a poem beautiful the way you can argue them into accepting a theorem.

That is the course’s recurring theme. To learn how people judge beauty you need to know the theories, and you also need to have been moved, or bored, by real things. The last lesson returns to what that means in practice, and to the philosophers who did their best work without leaving the study.

Three things to study

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel lectured on the subject at Berlin in 1820–21 and again in 1823, 1826, and 1828–29. His student Heinrich Gustav Hotho published the lectures in 1835, from Hegel’s own manuscript and students’ notes. On the first pages Hegel says that the word “aesthetic,” which comes from the school of Christian Wolff and means the science of sensation or feeling, is “not quite appropriate.” A rival name, Kallistik, the science of the beautiful, will not do either, he says, because the subject is not beauty in general but beauty made by art. He concludes that the proper name is the Philosophy of (Fine) Art, and lets “Aesthetics” stand as the usual label.

So the field’s own history offers three objects: perception, beauty, and art. The lecture’s view, which this course shares, is that they are not rivals but three sides of one subject. Beauty is on the object’s side and perception on the viewer’s. Art is the place where people make things on purpose so that the two will meet.

The field has since collected three ways of taking its subject, three orientations. Paul Guyer’s A History of Modern Aesthetics (Cambridge University Press, 2014), a leading history of the period, sorts the main ideas into three. The first is old: that aesthetic experience is a form of cognition, a way of getting at truth. Two were new in the eighteenth century: that it has an emotional impact, and that it is a pleasurable free play of our mental powers. As one reviewer reads Guyer, those last two were not sharply separated at the time. The lecture gives the three the names cognitive, play, and passion, and they are a handy way to hold the whole field.

A door to something beyond. Plato’s Phaedrus says that beauty alone, among the things we love, comes “shining in clearness through the clearest aperture of sense,” so that it is the one ideal we can actually see. In the Symposium the lover climbs from beautiful bodies to beauty itself, using the lower beauties “as steps only.” Shaftesbury, who wrote that there is “nothing so divine as” beauty, is Guyer’s starting point for the cognitive idea. A modern echo is the physicist Paul Dirac’s remark in Scientific American in 1963 that beauty in the equations matters more than a fit with the data. In that article he tells how Erwin Schrödinger’s first relativistic wave equation did not match the measurements of its day, because electron spin was not yet known. Henri Poincaré, in Science and Method (1908), put the same hunch more plainly: “It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover.” The lecture adds that scientists at the frontier cannot reason their way forward and are led by a sense of what is right. A word of caution comes from the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, whose Lost in Math (2018) argues that the hunt for beauty has misled physics.

Play. Joseph Addison’s essays on “The Pleasures of the Imagination” in The Spectator (nos. 411–421, 21 June to 3 July 1712) started from sight, “the most perfect and most delightful of all our Senses.” Kant’s later idea is that in beauty the imagination and the understanding play freely, without a fixed result. The lecture’s version is this: if you only reason, you float away from the world, and if you only sense, you never think, but imagination holds the two together and keeps them in touch. Friedrich Schiller built on the same thought in 1795, and Lesson 4 returns to him.

Passion. Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) tied beauty to love and the sublime to terror and astonishment. Here the point of art is to move us, and the lecture adds that strong feeling can break through everyday habit.

Did beauty leave?

If aesthetics began as a study of beauty, a puzzle follows: much twentieth-century art seems to turn its back on it. The Dada poet Tristan Tzara wrote in his 1918 manifesto: “A work of art should not be beauty in itself, for beauty is dead.” The American painter Barnett Newman wrote in 1948, in “The Sublime Is Now,” of modern art’s desire to destroy beauty, meaning an inherited Greek ideal that he thought stood between people and something larger. In 1997 the philosopher Richard Shusterman gave the trend a name, “the anaesthetic thrust of this century’s artistic avant-garde,” and argued that aesthetic experience deserved to be rescued rather than abandoned.

The lecture offers a historical explanation. After the wars of the twentieth century, it says, artists had reason to distrust beauty, since a regime could love beautiful art and still do terrible things. The best-known evidence, which comes from before the second war, is in Munich in July 1937. The Nazi government opened its Great German Art Exhibition on 18 July, showing idealized, classical-looking work. The next day it opened “Degenerate Art,” a show of more than 600 modern works that it had confiscated, displayed to be mocked. It drew about two million visitors in Munich on the usual count, more than the official exhibition did (sources differ on its attendance). Whether beauty is complicit in cruelty, and whether those artists were reacting against beauty or against a particular use of it, is the lecture’s interpretation. It is a serious one, and others read the same history differently.

The philosopher Arthur Danto (1924–2013) drew a conclusion that has been widely discussed. In The Abuse of Beauty (2003, from lectures given in 2001), he separated beauty from artistic excellence: a great work of art does not have to be beautiful. He did not say beauty is worthless. His own summary, as one reviewer quotes it, is that beauty is optional in art but not in life.

The lecture shows two works that make the point sharply, and each has a verifiable story. Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) is a tiger shark in a tank of formaldehyde. Charles Saatchi paid for it (the whole work cost about £50,000, of which the shark was £6,000), and in December 2004 it was sold to the collector Steven Cohen, reportedly for about eight million dollars. The shark decayed, and in 2006 it was replaced with a new one. Sam Taylor-Wood’s A Little Death (2002) is a four-minute silent video in which a dead hare, beside a peach on a table, decays at speed. Dutch painters of the seventeenth century made still lifes of dead game and fruit that carried a similar message: all things pass.

Kant noticed the limit more than two centuries earlier. In section 48 of the Critique of Judgment he said that art can beautifully represent furies, diseases, and the devastations of war, but one kind of ugliness cannot be represented without destroying all aesthetic pleasure, the kind that arouses disgust. Hirst and Taylor-Wood test exactly that line. The lecture’s reply is that such works do not leave aesthetics at all. If aesthetics is the study of perception, a work that grips the senses, even by revulsion, is still an aesthetic object. The lecture adds that painful experiences may be the ones we remember longest. This is a reading, but it fits Baumgarten’s definition.

Is “beautiful” a description?

A last puzzle is what the word itself does. Ludwig Wittgenstein lectured on aesthetics at Cambridge in the summer of 1938. We know the lectures from students’ notes, published in 1966. He begins by warning of a trap: “beautiful” is an adjective, so you are inclined to say that the thing has a certain quality, that of being beautiful. People learn such words, he says, “roughly as interjections,” and in real conversations about art, words like “beautiful” and “fine” play hardly any role at all. Critics say “right” and “correct.” The lecture compresses this into a vivid contrast: “the flower is red” describes, while “the flower is beautiful” is closer to “Ah!” That contrast is a popular summary and not Wittgenstein’s own, but it catches the spirit.

The philosopher Crispin Sartwell took another route in Six Names of Beauty (2004): look at what the word means in different traditions. His six are listed below.

• English beauty: the object of longing.
• Hebrew yapha: glow, bloom.
• Sanskrit sundara: something close to holiness.
• Greek to kalon: the ideal.
• Japanese wabi-sabi: humility and imperfection.
• Navajo hozho: health and harmony.

If “beauty” points at different things in different places, then disagreement is not surprising, and the next two lessons ask where the differences come from. The course’s answer is that three layers act on every judgment: the biology we all share, the habits of a culture, and the strategies of one person.