Aesthetics, in Education

Aesthetics (or esthetics) is a branch of philosophy dealing with the definition of beauty. The word aesthetics was first used by the eighteenth-century German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, who derived it from the Greek aisthanomai, which means “perception by means of the senses.” Aesthetics refers to the whole region of human perception and sensation, in contrast to the domain of conceptual thought. Baumgarten helped establish the study of aesthetics as a separate philosophical field of study, envisioning aesthetics as a label encompassing the study of sensuous cognition. Because of the connection of the arts to perception (the sensuous element in this formulation), aesthetics made the arts its central domain.

However, the perception of artworks is not merely an affair of sensation. Memory, expectation, imagination, emotion, and reason (including narrative reasoning) play key roles as well. Consequently, since its advent, the field of aesthetics has been concerned with the operation of fundamental psychological and cognitive processes, especially in relation to the arts. Aesthetics is born of the recognition that the world of [Page 33]perception and experience cannot simply be derived from abstract universal laws, but demands its own appropriate discourse and displays its own inner logic.

As aesthetics is now understood, it consists of two parts: the philosophy of art and the philosophy of the aesthetic experience and character of objects or phenomena that are not art. Non-art items include both artifacts that possess aspects susceptible of aesthetic appreciation and phenomena that lack any traces of human design in virtue of being products of nature, not humanity. The relationship of the two sides of aesthetics may be explained in two possible ways.

First is that the philosophy of art is basic, since the aesthetic appreciation of anything that is not art is the appreciation of it as if it were art. Aesthetic appreciation of nature is essentially informed by ideas intrinsic to the appreciation of art, such as style, reference, and the expression of psychological states. For extrinsic ideas to be aesthetic, or for one to delight in the beauty of a flower, it is unnecessary for one to imagine natural objects as being works of art. One's appreciation of them is determined by their lack of features specific to works of art and perhaps also by their possession of features available only to aspects of nature. Second is that there is a unitary notion of the aesthetic that applies to both art and non-art; this notion defines the idea of aesthetic appreciation as disinterested delight in the immediately perceptible properties of an object for their own sake; and artistic appreciation is just aesthetic appreciation of works of art. But neither of these possibilities is plausible.

A more acceptable view represents the two parts of aesthetics as being related to each other in a looser fashion, each part exhibiting variety in itself, the two being united by a number of common issues or counterpart problems, but nevertheless manifesting considerable differences in virtue of the topics that are specific to them. In fact, although some issues are common to the two parts, many are specific to the philosophy of art and a few specific to the aesthetics of non-art objects.

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