Aesthetics - what is it?

As John Keats said in is poem about some Greek crockery, at the end of the fifth and last stanza,

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
[i][b]"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."[/b][/i]

Aesthetics has a lot to do with novelty and opposition; as does the comedic. Laughter is also an expression of some novelty, puzzle solving and what is juxtaposition.

I feel quite strongly that ‘aesthetic pleasure’ stems from our inability to atomize taste in any set way, even though we can make roughshod empirical models based on neural networks and the mean average if cultures.

In a poetic way manner I guess I’d say Aesthetics is search for the hint of a question we occasionally get a glimpse of. And to mention Oscar Wilde again (no apologies fro doing so!) I think he was onto something by putting out the thought of ‘Art’ being ‘useless’ - meaning that it is more of an exploratory exercise than a practical ‘tool-making’ goal.

In a broad stroke, I'd say that aesthetics deals with sensation, form, taste, and art. It's often associated with the study of beauty, but I think that's a rather narrow and constricting definition: one can consider the aesthetics of ugliness no less than the aesthetics of the weird, for instance. When parsed out between the ancient dualism of sensibility and intelligibility, the aesthetic often lies firmly on the side of the sensate (of bodies, feelings, space and time).

Once you get the basic 'feel' for aesthetics, you can start to ask pertinent questions: what is the relation between beauty and truth? (Plato). Or: what is the relation between sensibility and perception? Sensibility and knowledge? Sensibility and politics? What kind of influence does culture have on taste? What is the relation between class and art? How have our approaches to aesthetics changed across history? Can approaching taste from an evolutionary standpoint tell us anything about it?

All sorts of questions.

Quoting StreetlightX

How have our approaches to aesthetics changed across history?

I think I'm focusing on that question at least with the OP.

Though I'm always ready to talk about the persistence of aesthetic abstractions that is mathematics...

Reply to Wallows I don’t understand that question. Our tastes haven’t changed at all because humans are essentially the same now as 2000 or 10,000 yrs ago.

Reply to I like sushi Lmao.

Reply to I like sushi

So, the swastica is really beautiful to most blokes still nowadays?

Reply to Wallows I don’t see what that has to do with the history of human aesthetics. If you go back 1000 years and asked the same question you’d get a different answer - this isn’t due to our aesthetic sensibility though, it is due to the political symbolism.

Some muslims probably find the cross ‘ugly’ whilst christians see ‘beauty’. Either you’re talking about the human approach or you’re talking about something else. It appears to be something else so I asked what exactly. I don’t think our political approach to aesthetics has changed other than by means of propaganda spilling into advertising and such. It’s always been there though. Is that the kind of thing you’re looking at?

Reply to StreetlightX What’s so funny? I’m not saying human society hasn’t changed at all over the last 10,000 odd years, just that we’ve been pretty much immersed in a relatively similar environment - meaning part of collections of interacting social groups.

I wasn’t thinking specifically of any particular symbolism and/or cultural exchange. Just the basics of what it means to regard something in an aesthetic light - I don’t see how it could’ve changed. I’m open to ideas though.

Aesthetics is actually largely seen as philosophy of art. "What is beauty" is a traditional question under aesthetics, but a shit-ton of aesthetics has nothing at all to do with that question, and one can easily work one's entire career as a philosopher with aesthetics as one's area of concentration without ever addressing the idea of beauty.

If you look at some recent articles in aesthetics journals, you'll find things such as:

• "Authenticity, Misunderstanding, and Institutional Responsibility in Contemporary Art"
• "Metaphor-Proof Expressions: A Dimensional Account of the Metaphorical Uninterpretability of Aesthetic Terms"
• "Choose Your Own Adventure: Examining the Fictional Content of Video Games as Interactive Fictions"
• "Sad Songs Say So Much: The Paradoxical Pleasures of Sad Music"

Saying that aesthetics is "philosophy of beauty" is a lot like saying that philosophy is "love of wisdom." There are perspectives from which it makes sense to say both, but they're pretty specific, limited perspectives that don't tell you very much about the activities we actually do as philosophy or aesthetics.

Quoting I like sushi

I don’t think our political approach to aesthetics has changed other than by means of propaganda spilling into advertising and such. It’s always been there though. Is that the kind of thing you’re looking at?

There's a performative contradiction here. If our aesthetic sense of appreciation of art has been steady for some 1000+ years, then how do you explain such examples of the swastica being adored to death in the past, while being reviled with disgust in the present?

Quoting Terrapin Station

Saying that aesthetics is "philosophy of beauty" is a lot like saying that philosophy is "love of wisdom." There are perspectives from which it makes sense to say both, but they're pretty specific, limited perspectives that don't tell you very much about the activities we actually do as philosophy or aesthetics.

So, then how do you ground the concept of beauty? What's the axiology here?

To say something is priceless, means what?

Reply to Wallows

You asked what aesthetics is, and then proceeded to talk about the concept of beauty. I was just clarifying, due to the thread title, that aesthetics is conventionally thought of as "philosophy of art" now (and that's been the case for a long time). It's not "philosophy of beauty," even though there was a tradition of seeing beauty as at least being one of the more important questions in aesthetics.

"Beauty" on my view, and being brief for the moment, because I have to run out, is a term for attraction, non-romantic in the aesthetic case, where on the extreme end of a continuum, the beautiful thing is seen as an ideal exemplar of its type. (Like an ideal exemplar of a mountain, or a symphony, or whatever it might be.)

Re "priceless"--it's a term for something that not only has an extraordinary amount of value to someone--including but not limited to monetary value, but that is irreplaceable. It's a one of a kind, usually that couldn't be reasonably replicated for various reasons. (Including provenance and the significance of the same, including practically, etc.)

Reply to Wallows It is still adored by many. Nothing to do with aesthetics, it’s just a case of symbolic use to express a political/religious idea.

It sounds to me like you’re more concerned with political and religious symbols and how they change historically - I still don’t see where aesthetics fits into your example (other than by some bizarre mathematician’s paper produced for who knows what reason?)

I don’t see how our aesthetic disposition has changed. I don’t see how our approach has changed either. We’re still trying to measure aesthetic value and still failing. I guess science has allowed us to dig a little below the surface but we don’t know much about the judgement of taste other than the point of subjective experience influencing our disposition toward a work of art and/or a choice of decor.

Quoting I like sushi

I don’t see how our aesthetic disposition has changed. I don’t see how our approach has changed either.

How so? What's the trait or constant wrt. to the beauty that allows us to appreciate art over many generations. See what I'm trying to do is discern how much of beauty is socio-cultural and from this idea that something is inherently beautiful.

Reply to Wallows Okay. Thanks for clarifying. I’d have a think about how best to respond - my initial thought is that the question is faulty as we’re unable to measure beauty with any kind of consistent precision so to suggest how much x or y, here or there, will only magnify the inaccuracies.

I’ll speculate away though and get back to you later.

Reply to Wallows Harmony is a quite obvious factor in aesthetic sensibility. This doesn’t necessarily make everything ubiquitous though as harmony works between various different related factors - there isn’t a mere two options as we find in DNA. Even so, degree of symmetry are important as is more chaotic patterning.

Even the term ‘aesthetic’ is pleasing because it both captures a specific idea well enough for us to discuss it at length, yet leaves enough unsaid/unanswered for us to enjoy exploring the nuances embedded within the limits of the topic.

Our personal ‘tastes’ are all based on the same substrates. Our experiences and knowledge vastly flavour/colour our perceptions though - we acquire a certain palette for x or y. As we mature - gain experience and venture forth - we generally find that interest in x and y leads us to appreciate what we previously dismissed. The dance of complexity and simplicity is what aesthetics is all about, yet it is not tangible in a concrete sense - meaning we cannot atomise items of experience and expect them to keep their meaning (a selection of single notes from a tune is nothing to do with the tune).

In sociopolitical landscapes symbolism plays into this a little - advertising by attaching concepts and ideas to abstracted symbols (national flags, logos, simple shortcuts on your electronic device or mathematical signs).

In short NOTHING about ‘beauty’ is sociocultural, so to speak. But our attitudes towards what is and isn’t beautiful can be manipulated by attaching certain ideals and norms to symbols. Symmetry and chaos are ‘beautiful’ in how they contrast in given mediums. Psychological dispositions shape our regard. If you’re more of a free-wheeling explorative type than someone else, then you’re more likely to shy away from rigid structures and strict ‘harmony’. Art, in short, is all about flitting around the edges of the ‘beatific’ and the ‘repulsive’ - the playful exploration of what the limits and triggers of human emotion are within a reasonably ‘safe’ world of imagination (obviously in political manipulations - via propaganda - this can be used to quell uprisings or incite them).

I say it hans’t really changed at all - the ‘approach’ to the item of ‘Aesthetics’ - because the human species has been a political beast since we began to live in large groups who interacted with each other. Our political attitudes and social complexities are going to be essentially the same as they were 10,000 years ago - unless our brains have changed in some manner we’re currently unaware of other than through diet and/or sedentary living (a very fascinating area which I do believe maybe as big a shift in human interacts as the tool of writing). Even so, a rough estimate of 10,000 years is reasonable enough in my book; feel free to give or take a couple thousand years.

Quoting I like sushi

In short NOTHING about ‘beauty’ is sociocultural, so to speak.

That can't be true, can it?

Reply to Wallows If the context is ignored, obviously it isn’t true as a stand-alone statement.

Good art.

Quoting Wallows

In my opinion, there is nothing so tragic as to fail to appreciate beauty. Yet, if it is so paramount to human beings, then what is it?

In the OP two tangentally related questions are raised: What is aesthetics? and What is beauty?

In my own terms, my take:

"La beauté n'est que la promesse du bonheur."
~Stendhal

Aesthetics? I understand as (A) the philosophy of attention - reflective ways of attending (i.e. responding) - to aesthetic - non-instrumental - properties of man-made artifacts, formal constructs (e.g. logic, mathematics, etc) or natural objects (i.e. states-of-affairs, events, etc) and (B) study of criteria (re: taste) for 'hierarchically evaluating' aesthetic properties. In contrast to instrumental properties, which afford satisfaction of ego-directing desires, biases or goals, aesthetic properties afford ego-suspending reveries or ecstasies.

“Blues music is an aesthetic device of confrontation and improvisation, an existential device or vehicle for coping with the ever-changing fortunes of human existence, in a word, entropy, the tendency of everything to become formless. Which is also to say that such music is a device for confronting and acknowledging the harsh fact that the human situation . . . is always awesome and all too often awful . . . But on the other hand, there is the frame of acceptance of the obvious fact that life is always a struggle against destructive forces. ”
~Albert Murray

Beauty? then seems an aesthetic property which functions like a strange attractor to the beholder's attention - mediated by acculturated expectations/archetypes - which the apparent symmetries of the beheld afford (sort of) a path of least attentional effort and thereby an easy (i.e. lower caloric) pleasure-payoff that facilitates repetitious re-engagement and memorization.

[i]"Denn das Schöne ist nichts
als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen,
und wir bewunderen es so, weil es gelassen verschmäht,
uns zu zerstören. Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich."[/i]
~Rainer Maria Rilke

:scream:

What do you think - close? off-base? nonsense? ...

Addendum:

Artworks