Understanding aesthetics and its importance and the underlying theories explaining the term

Introduction to the subject, Introduction to the western aesthetics and Indian Aesthetics.

Relating the spaces, surfaces and interior designing with Aesthetics For this, a study of the
relation between the traditions of Architecture and aesthetics, Understanding the concept of
Critical Judgment.
1. Definition of aesthetics

2. Aesthetic Concepts

3. Aesthetic Value

4. Aesthetic Attitudes

5. Intentions

6. Definitions of Art

7. Expression

8. Representation

9. Art Objects
Aesthetics Definition
AESTHETICS

The term aesthetics comes from the Greek "aisthetike" and was coined by the
philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in 1735 to mean "the science of how things
are known via the senses.

Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy that is concerned with the nature of art and the
criteria of artistic judgment.

Aesthetics may be defined narrowly as the theory of beauty, or more broadly as that
together with the philosophy of art.

The traditional interest in beauty itself broadened, in the eighteenth century, to include
the sublime, and since 1950 or so the number of pure aesthetic concepts discussed in the
literature has expanded even more.
Today the word "aesthetics" may mean:

(1)the study of the aesthetic (all the aesthetic phenomena);

(2)the study of perception (of such phenomena); and

(3)the study of art (as a specific expression of what is perceived as aesthetic)

The major problem in aesthetics concerns the nature of the beautiful. Generally speaking there are
two basic approaches to the problem of beauty:

The objective approach asserts that beauty inheres in the object and that judgments concerning it
may have objective validity.

The subjective approach tends to identify the beautiful with that which pleases the observer.
Aesthetic Concepts
AESTHETIC CONCEPT

The aesthetic concept which came to be more appreciated in 18th century period was associated with
this, namely sublimate, which Edmund Burke theorized about in his

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.

The sublime was connected more with pain than pure pleasure,

According to Burke, since threats to self-preservation were involved, as on the high seas, and lonely
moors, with the devilish humans and dramatic passions that artists and writers were about to portray.

But in these circumstances, of course, it is still delightful horror, as Burke appreciated, since one is
insulated by the fictionalise of the work in question from any real danger.
Sublime and beautiful are only two amongst the many terms which may be used to describe our
aesthetic experiences. Clearly there are ridiculous and ugly, for a start, as well.

But the more discriminating will have no difficulty also finding something maybe fine, or lovely rather
than awful or hideous, and exquisite or superb rather than gross or foul.

The term "aesthetic" has come to be used to designate, among other things,

a kind of object, ( concept of the aesthetic can be seen as the history of the development
of the immediacy and disinterest theses)

a kind of judgment,

a kind of attitude,

a kind of experience, and

a kind of value.
AESTHETIC VALUE
There is a famous curve, for instance, obtained by the nineteenth century psychologist Wilhelm Wundt,
which shows how human arousal is quite generally related to complexity of stimulus.

We are bored by the simple, become sated, even over-anxious, by the increasingly complex, while in
between there is a region of greatest pleasure.

The dimension of complexity is only one objective measure of worth which has been proposed in this way.

Thus it is now known, for instance, that judgments of facial beauty in humans are a matter of averageness
and symmetry.
Uniformity in variety always makes an object beautiful.
Francis Hutcheson
Joseph Margolis maintained a Robust Relativism.

Thus he wanted to say that

aptness,
partiality, and
non-cognitivism
characterize art appreciation,

rather than
truth,
universality, and
knowledge.

He defended this with respect to aesthetic concepts, critical judgments of value, and literary
interpretations in particular, saying, more generally, that works of art were culturally emergent
entities not directly accessible, because of this, to any faculty resembling sense perception. The main
debate over aesthetic value, indeed, concerns social and political matters, and the seemingly inevitable
partiality of different points of view.
AESTHETIC ATTITUDES
Edward Bullough, writing in 1912, would have called disinterested attention a distanced attitude, but he
used this latter term to generate a much fuller and more detailed appreciation of the whole spectrum of
attitudes which might be taken to artworks.

The spectrum stretched from people who over-distance to people who under-distance.

People who over-distance are, for instance, critics who merely look at the technicalities and craftwork of
a production, missing any emotional involvement with what it is about.

Bullough contrasted this attitude with what he called under-distancing, where one might get too gripped
by the content.
Art is not the only object to draw interest of this pleasurable kind: hobbies and travel are further
examples, and sport yet another.

In particular, the broadening of the aesthetic tradition in recent years has led theorists to give more
attention to sport.

David Best, for instance, writing on sport and its likeness to art, highlighted how close sport is to the
purely aesthetic.

But he wanted to limit sport to this, and insisted it had no relevance to ethics. Best saw art forms as
distinguished expressly by their having the capacity to comment on life situations, and hence bring in
moral considerations.

No sport had this further capacity, he thought, although the enjoyment of many sports may
undoubtedly be aesthetic.
But many art formsperhaps more clearly called craft-forms as a result also do not comment on life
situations overmuch, for example, dcor, abstract painting, and non-narrative ballet.

And there are many sports which are pre-eminently seen in moral, character-building terms, for
example, mountaineering, and the various combat sports (like boxing and wrestling).

Perhaps the resolution comes through noting the division Best himself provides within sport-forms,
between, on the one hand, task or non-purposive sports like gymnastics, diving, and synchronized
swimming, which are the ones he claims are aesthetic, and on the other hand the achievement, or
purposive sports, like those combat sports above.

Task sports have less art in them, since they are not as creative as the purposive ones.
INTENTIONS

The traditional form of art criticism was biographical and sociological, taking into account the conceptions
of the artist and the history of the traditions within which the artist worked.

But in the twentieth century a different, more scientific and a historical form of literary criticism grew
up in the United States and Britain:

The New Criticism.

Like the Russian Formalists and French Structuralists in the same period, the New Critics regarded
what could be gleaned from the work of art alone as relevant to its assessment, but their specific
position received a much-discussed philosophical defence by William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in
1946.
Beardsley saw the position as an extension of The Aesthetic Point of View;

Wimsatt was a practical critic personally engaged in the new line of approach.

In their essay The Intentional Fallacy, Wimsatt and Beardsley claimed

the design or intention of the artist is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the
success of a work of literary art.

It was not always available, since it was often difficult to obtain, but, in any case, it was not
appropriately available, according to them, unless there was evidence for it internal to the finished
work of art.

Wimsatt and Beardsley allowed such forms of evidence for a writers intentions, but would allow
nothing external to the given text.
DEFINITIONS OF ART
Up to the de-definition period, definitions of art fell broadly into three types, relating to representation,
expression, and form.

The dominance of representation as a central concept in art lasted from before Platos time to around the
end of the eighteenth century.

Of course, representational art is still to be found to this day, but it is no longer pre-eminent in the way it
once was.
Plato first formulated the idea by saying that art is mimesis,
and, for instance, Bateaux in the eighteenth century followed
him, when saying: Poetry exists only by imitation.

It is the same thing with painting, dance and music; nothing is

real in their works, everything is imagined, painted, copied,
artificial. It is what makes their essential character as opposed
to nature.
EXPRESSION
Response theories of art were particularly popular during the Logical Positivist period in philosophy,
that is, around the 1920s and 1930s.

Science was then contrasted sharply with Poetry, for instance, the former being supposedly concerned
with our rational mind, the latter with our irrational emotions.

Thus the noted English critic I. A. Richards tested responses to poems scientifically in an attempt to
judge their value, and unsurprisingly found no uniformity.

Out of this kind of study comes the common idea that art is all subjective: if one concentrates on
whether people do or do not like a particular work of art then, naturally, there can easily seem to be no
reason to it.
 REPRESENTATION

Like the concept of Expression, the concept of Representation has been very thoroughly examined since
the professionalization of Philosophy in the twentieth century.

Isnt representation just a matter of copying? If representation could be understood simply in terms of
copying, that would require the innocent eye, that is, one which did not incorporate any interpretation.

E. H. Gombrich was the first to point out that modes of representation are, by contrast, conventional,
and therefore have a cultural, socio-historical base.
Thus perspective, which one might view as merely
mechanical, is only a recent way of representing space, and
many photographs distort what we take to be reality for
instance, those from the ground of tall buildings, which seem
to make them incline inwards at the top.
ART OBJECTS
What kind of thing is a work of art? Goodman, Wollheim, Wolterstorff, and Margolis have been notable
contributors to the contemporary debate.

We must first distinguish the artwork from its notation, and from its various physical realizations.

Examples would be:

some music, its score, and its performances;
a drama, its script, and its performances;
an etching, its plate, and its prints; and
a photograph, its negative, and its positives.

The notations here are digital in the first two cases, and analogue in the second two, since they involve
discrete elements like notes and words in the one case, and continuous elements like lines and colour
patches in the other.
Realizations can also be divided into two broad types, as these same examples illustrate:
there are those that arise in time (performance works) and
those that arise in space (object works).

Realizations are always physical entities. Sometimes there is only one realization, as with architect-
designed houses, designer-designed dresses, and many paintings,

and Wollheim concluded that in these cases the artwork is entirely physical, consisting of that one, unique
realization.

However, a number a copies were commonly made of paintings in the middle ages, and it is theoretically
possible to replicate even expensive clothing and houses.
What Should We Judge When We Judge Art?

Every person might judge art separately on his or her own merits, and each costume
or line is its own work of art (with perhaps the director having the job of unifying
them all).

Similar problems arise for music, film and even in painting. For instance, are we to
judge the painting itself, the work of the painter, or perhaps the painting in its context
of presentation by the museum workers?
Western medieval aesthetics

Surviving medieval art is primarily religious in focus and funded largely by the State, Roman Catholic
or Orthodox church, powerful ecclesiastical individuals, or wealthy secular patrons.

These art pieces often served a liturgical function, whether as chalices or even as church buildings
themselves.

Objects of fine art from this period were frequently made from rare and valuable materials, such as gold
and lapis, the cost of which commonly exceeded the wages of the artist.
Medieval aesthetics in the realm of philosophy built upon Classical thought, continuing the practice
of Plotinus by employing theological terminology in its explications.

St. Bonaventure's "Retracing the Arts to Theology", a primary example of this method, discusses the skills of
the artisan as gifts given by God for the purpose of disclosing God to mankind, which purpose is achieved
through four lights:

the light of skill in mechanical arts which discloses the world of artifacts;

which light is guided by the light of sense perception which discloses the world of natural forms;

which light, consequently, is guided by the light of philosophy which discloses the world of intellectual truth;

finally, this light is guided by the light of divine wisdom which discloses the world of saving truth.
 Indian aesthetics

Indian art evolved with an emphasis on inducing special spiritual or philosophical states in the audience,
or with representing them symbolically.

According to Kapila Vatsyayan,

"Classical Indian architecture, sculpture, painting, literature (kvya), music, and dancing evolved their
own rules conditioned by their respective media, but they shared with one another not only the
underlying spiritual beliefs of the Indian religion-philosophic mind, but also the procedures by which the
relationships of the symbol and the spiritual states were worked out in detail."

In the Pan Indian philosophic thought the term 'Satyam Shivam Sundaram' is another name for the
concept of the Supreme. 'Sat' is the truth value, 'Shiv' is the good value & 'Sundaram' is the beauty value.
 Man through his 'Srabana' or education,
'Manana' or experience and conceptualization and
'Sadhana' or practice, through different stages of life (Ashramas) comes to form and realize the idea of
these three values to develop a value system.

This Value-system helps us to develop two basic ideas

1) that of 'Daksha' or the adept/expert and
2) Mahana/Parama or the Absolute and thus to judge anything in this universe in the light of these two measures,
known as 'Adarsha'.

A person who has mastered great amounts of knowledge of the grammars, rules, & language of an art-form are adepts
(Daksha),
whereas those who have worked through the whole system and journeyed ahead of these to become a law unto
themselves is called a Mahana.

Individuals idea of 'Daksha' and 'Mahana' is relative to one's development of the concept of 'Satyam-Shivam-Sundaram.

For example, Tagore's idea of these two concepts should be way above any common man's and many perceive Tagore as
a 'Mahana' Artist in the realm of literature. This concept of Satyam-Shivam-Sundaram, a kind of Value Theory is the
cornerstone of Indian Aesthetics.
KANT'S THEORY OF AESTHETICS

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)Theory of Aesthetics Kant is an 18th

century German philosopher whose work initiated dramatic changes
in philosophy.

As an Enlightenment thinker, he holds our mental faculty of reason

in high esteem.

He believes that it is our reason that invests the world we

experience with structure.

He believes that it is the faculty of judgment that enables us to

have experience of beauty and grasp those experiences as part of an
ordered, natural world with purpose.
Kant discusses the subjective nature of aesthetic qualities and experiences in Observations on the
Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, (1764).

Kant's contribution to aesthetic theory is developed in the Critique of Judgment (1790) where he
investigates the possibility and logical status of "judgments of taste.

In the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment," the first major division of the Critique of Judgment, Kant used
the term "aesthetic" in a manner that, according to Kant scholar W.H. Walsh, differs from its modern
sense.
Prior to this, in the Critique of Pure Reason,
to note essential differences between
judgments of taste,
moral judgments, and
scientific judgments,

Kant abandoned the term "aesthetic" as "designating the critique of taste," noting that judgments of
taste could never be "directed" by "laws a priori".
Judgments of ta ste
In the chapter "Analytic of the Beautiful" of the Critique of Judgment, Kant states that beauty is not a
property of an artwork or natural phenomenon, but is instead a consciousness of the pleasure that attends
the 'free play' of the imagination and the understanding.

Even though it appears that we are using reason to decide what beautiful, the judgment is not a cognitive
judgment, "and is consequently not logical, but aesthetical".

A pure judgement of taste is in fact subjective insofar as it refers to the emotional response of the subject
and is based upon nothing but esteem for an object itself: it is a disinterested pleasure, and we feel that
pure judgements of taste, i.e. judgements of beauty, lay claim to universal validity.

It is important to note that this universal validity is not derived from a determinate concept of beauty but
from common sense.

Kant also believed that a judgement of taste shares characteristics engaged in a moral judgement: both are
disinterested, and we hold them to be universal.
Moral judgments
S c i e n t i f i c j u d g m e n t s-its usually about an effect ( positive or
negative) its size, the ways in which it can be achieved, for whom, or how long...
In the chapter "Analytic of the Sublime" Kant identifies the sublime as an aesthetic quality that, like beauty,
is subjective, but unlike beauty refers to an indeterminate relationship between the faculties of the
imagination and of reason, and shares the character of moral judgments in the use of reason.

The feeling of the sublime, itself officially divided into two distinct modes (the mathematical and the
dynamical sublime), describes two subjective moments, both of which concern the relationship of the faculty
of the imagination to reason.

Some commentators, however, argue that Kant's critical philosophy contains a third kind of the sublime, the
moral sublime, which is the aesthetic response to the moral law or a representation thereof, and a
development of the "noble" sublime in Kant's theory of 1764.

The mathematical sublime is situated in the failure of the imagination to comprehend natural objects that
appear boundless and formless, or appear "absolutely great.

This imaginative failure is then recuperated through the pleasure taken in reason's assertion of the concept
of infinity. In this move the faculty of reason proves itself superior to our fallible sensible self .
Mathematical sublime
In the dynamical sublime there is the sense of annihilation of the sensible self as the imagination tries to
comprehend a vast might. This power of nature threatens us but through the resistance of reason to such
sensible annihilation, the subject feels a pleasure and a sense of the human moral vocation.

This appreciation of moral feeling through exposure to the sublime helps to develop moral character.

Kant had developed the distinction between an object of art as a material value subject to the conventions
of society and the transcendental condition of the judgment of taste as a "refined" value in the
propositions of his Idea of A Universal History (1784).

In the Fourth and Fifth Theses of that work he identified all art as the "fruits of unsociableness" due to
men's "antagonism in society", and in the Seventh Thesis asserted that while such material property is
indicative of a civilized state, only the ideal of morality and the universalization of refined value through
the improvement of the mind of man "belongs to culture".
Dynamic sublime
A general definition of beauty and aesthetic excellence would be difficult, but fortunately there are a
number of generally accepted principles that can be used to achieve an understanding of the aesthetic
considerations in design.

One must note, however, that such understanding requires exposure and learning; an appreciation of
any form of art needs such a background.

The dictionary offers several senses of the word, but there are only two of interest here:

the everyday sense, for which facts, news, and data may be appropriate synonyms; and
the engineering or information science sense, which roughly comes to a measure of how surprised we
are by the next bit in a sequence.

When we are talking about computers, both senses come into play and are often confused. It is well to keep
them separate.
In reflective judgment we seek to find unknown universals for given particulars;

The four possible "reflective judgments":

the agreeable,

the beautiful,

the sublime,

the good
The agreeable is a purely sensory judgment judgments in the form of "This steak is good," or "This chair
is soft." These are purely subjective judgments, based on inclination alone.

The good is essentially a judgment that something is ethical the judgment that something conforms with
moral law, which, in the Kantian sense, is essentially a claim of modality a coherence with a fixed and
absolute notion of reason.

It is in many ways the absolute opposite of the agreeable, in that it is a purely objective judgment things
are either moral or they are not
The remaining two judgments - the beautiful and the sublime - occupy a space between the agreeable and
the good.

The beautiful and the sublime is frequently read as an attempt to resolve one of the problems left
following his depiction of moral law, namely that it is impossible to prove that we have free will, and thus
impossible to prove that we are bound under moral law.

The beautiful and the sublime both seem to refer to some external noumenal order - and thus to the
possibility of a noumenal self that possesses free will.
 In determinative judgment, we just subsume given particulars under universals that are already known.

It is then one thing to say, the production of certain things of nature or that of collective nature is only
possible through a cause which determines itself to action according to design; and quite another to
say,

I can according to the peculiar constitution of my cognitive faculties judge concerning the possibility of
these things and their production, in no other fashion than by conceiving for this a cause working
according to design, i.e. a Being which is productive in a way analogous to the causality of an
intelligence.

In the former case I wish to establish something concerning the Object, and am bound to establish the
objective reality of an assumed concept;

In the latter, Reason only determines the use of my cognitive faculties, conformably to their
peculiarities and to the essential conditions of their range and their limits.

Thus the former principle is an objective proposition for the determinant Judgment, the latter merely a
subjective proposition for the reflective Judgment