The Philosophy of Art: Aesthetics
by Gerard J Kelly
Aesthetics: A Western World View
Can aesthetic judgments be improved or trained? This is a question often asked by the Aesthetic Philosophers. They grind their teeth together, vibrating their ear bones and making pleasant cranium noises as they contemplate this and other equally difficult questions. For me the answer seems obvious, and the answer is, YES! Firstly aesthetic judgments are different than artistic judgments. An Artistic judgment is a criticism or appreciation of a work of art and can be totally subjective, and without any basis. An aesthetic judgment is a criticism or appreciation of any object, or thing without it necessarily having any connection to art. Thus aesthetics is broader in scope than the philosophy of art. It is also broader than the philosophy of beauty, in that it applies to any of the responses we might expect works of art or entertainment to elicit, whether positive or negative. So, a discussion of aesthetics can exclude art, but a discussion of art cannot exclude aesthetics!
Estética: Un mundo occidental Ver
Juicios estéticos pueden ser mejorados o entrenados? Esta es una pregunta hecha a menudo por los Filósofos estéticos. Que rechinan los dientes, haciendo vibrar los huesos del oído y haciendo ruidos cráneo agradables cuando contemplan esta y otras cuestiones igualmente difíciles. Para mí, la respuesta parece obvia, y la respuesta es, sí! En primer lugar los juicios estéticos son diferentes a los juicios artísticos. Un juicio artístico es una crítica o la apreciación de una obra de arte y puede ser totalmente subjetiva, y sin ninguna base. Un juicio estético es una crítica o la apreciación de cualquier objeto o cosa sin que necesariamente tenga alguna relación con el art. Por lo tanto la estética es más amplio que la filosofía del arte. También es más amplia que la filosofía de la belleza, en la que se aplica a cualquiera de las respuestas que podemos esperar obras de arte o de entretenimiento que trate de obtener, ya sea positivo o negativo. Por lo tanto, una discusión de la estética puede excluir el arte, pero una discusión del arte no puede excluir la estética!
How we look at the world around is a learned reaction. We are not innately born with a way of viewing the world about us. We develop a comprehension of what is beautiful based on learned social and environmental factors. Our sense of beauty is essentially a reflection of our life’s influences. This does change as we grow and develop and as we are exposed to a broader spectrum of media and people. It can be changed by our community, ethnical factors, and by our education. It can also be affected by our exposure to other cultures and people.
Judgments of what is or isn’t beautiful are arrived at by a number of learned responses. They are more often than not firstly sensory, secondly emotional, and finally intellectual. Our initial reaction to an object, or person, place, or abstract thing such as music, is without a doubt sensory. It is our only way of assimilating any form of information. If we were deaf, blind, and without any tactile senses, how could our brains interpret the world? It would be definitely very limited and our sense of aesthetics would be much skewed. We would be as the creatures of “Flatland” ( A satirical novel written in 1884 , about a world with only two dimensions), unable to distinguish between a circle and a square, as each presents itself as a single short line. What we view as beautiful is then learned from our environment, and education, and our reaction to things as beautiful or not are at first directly influenced by what we know, and have sensed in the past.
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