Aesthetics

Aesthetics in its core deals with the nature of beauty, taste and art.  It involves the appreciation and creation of beauty. It is determined in studying the sensori-emotional values which can be called the judgments of taste and sentiment. It is referred to a critical reflection on culture, nature and art by scholars in the field. Aesthetics which is basically a branch of philosophy is connected axiology and philosophy of art. Studying aesthetics guarantees a new way of perceiving the world.

In 1735 Alexander Baumgarten coined the term aesthetics in German. This term was derived from Greek which meal I perceive, feel, or sense. It is our ability to distinguish things determines the judgments of aesthetic value. Aesthetics involves in the experimentation of our response to a phenomenon or an object.

In 1790 Immanuel Kant agrees to the concept that everyone has his own taste but he argues that if someone is proclaiming that something is beautiful then he is not judging for himself alone he is judging for everyone since he needs also some likening from others. So the case of “beauty” is different from mere agreeableness.

David Hume in his description about the delicacy of taste he tells that the delicacy of taste is just the ability to point the ingredients in a composition and it is also our sensitivity to pleasure and pain. Thus he has linked the capacity for pleasure to sensory discrimination.

Basically, there are two concepts of value in the viewer interpretations of beauty. They are aesthetics and taste. Researchers have categorized taste as a result of awareness and education of elite cultural where aesthetics is categorized as the philosophical notion of beauty. This has concluded that taste can be learned and it differs on the basis of cultural background, class and education. Kant has told that beauty is universal and objective which makes certain things beautiful to everyone. Though there are sayings like “Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder”, certain things are beautiful to everyone. The individual interpretations and the cultural specifics have become the base for beauty instead of the innate qualities in the contemporary view.

In attempting to answer the question, “What is Art?” there have been several interpretations. Tolstoy defined that "Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them."

Questions:

• What is the meaning for the word “Aesthetics”?
• What is Tolstoy’s definition of Art?