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What is art, and what does it mean to study art using the tools of philosophy?
Introduction to aesthetics and philosophy of art, exploring definitions, history, and categorization of arts from ancient to 18th century Europe.
Key Takeaways
- Aesthetics as a philosophical discipline originated in 18th-century Europe but draws on much older traditions.
- Art has been variously categorized and understood differently across historical periods and cultures.
- The distinction between arts and sciences emerged strongly during the scientific revolution.
- Beauty was historically linked to moral and religious values, differing from contemporary aesthetic views.
- Modern aesthetics debates remain open regarding the categorization and evaluation of diverse art forms.
Summary
- Aesthetics is the philosophical study of art and beauty, coined in the 18th century from the Greek word for perception.
- Philosophy of art examines questions about the nature of art, beauty, and aesthetic judgment—whether subjective, objective, or otherwise.
- Historically, arts have been categorized mainly into painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and poetry, with other arts debated.
- Ancient Greek and Roman views linked art (techne/ars) to crafts and sciences, emphasizing teachability and moral connotations of beauty.
- In the Middle Ages, arts were linked to liberal and mechanical arts, with music tied to mathematics and visual arts confined to guilds.
- The Renaissance separated visual arts from crafts, elevating painting's prestige alongside poetry, with figures like Michelangelo and Leonardo.
- The 17th-century scientific revolution distinguished arts from sciences, leading to clearer disciplinary boundaries.
- The term 'aesthetics' was coined by Baumgarten in 1735, who founded aesthetics as a philosophical discipline focused on sensuous knowledge.
- Abbé Batteaux later categorized arts into mechanical and fine arts, including poetry, painting, sculpture, dance, and music.
- The video acknowledges the Eurocentric focus of traditional aesthetics and the limitations of this perspective.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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Is aesthetic judgment something subjective, objective, or something else entirely? How do I recognize what makes a work beautiful?
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And how do I judge different kinds of artworks from different media against one another, if at all?
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These types of questions are part of the area of philosophy known as aesthetics or philosophy of art.
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Aesthetics as a term is coined in the 18th century to refer to a theory of beauty, the philosophy of art, and in its most general sense to a study of perception, because aesthetics comes from the ancient Greek word
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aisthesis, which means perception. Usually though, we're not talking about accounts of sensory perception. When we use the term aesthetics, we are talking about philosophy of art and theories of beauty.
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Historically, the arts have been grouped into five major categories. This categorization emerges in the 18th century.
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First is painting, second is sculpture, third is architecture, fourth is music, and fifth is poetry.
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Some categorizations, of course, will include other arts. Even back in the 18th century, some of them included gardening, engraving, decorative arts, theater, which is usually in the first account that I gave grouped under poetry, dance, opera, literature, even
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eloquence, and more recently, film and television and performance art. So categorizing the arts involves quite a good deal of debate.
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There isn't one single fixed categorization mechanism that philosophers agree on. To say that aesthetics was invented in the 18th century is not only to say that the term arose at that time, although that is true.
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But it's also to say that this is the first time philosophers were really attending to the nature of artworks and the nature of beauty on their own terms, and thematizing that in theories.
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Of course, a lot of philosophy of art classes, including my own, don't start with 18th century philosophies, but talk about many theories of art that emerged far earlier than that, for instance, in ancient philosophy. And that I think is fine to do as long as we are a bit careful about anachronistically
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placing categorizations or theories of art that emerge post-18th century invention of aesthetics as a term back onto that previous period of time.
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But if you think about ancient Greece and Rome, for instance, there's a lot that we can learn about the philosophy of art.
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In Greek, the word techne, and in Latin, the word ars, referred not just to the fine arts, but also to all kinds of human activities, including crafts and sciences.
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Greek and Roman cultures understood art to be something that can be taught and learned.
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And so this is really different from some of the more modern theories of genius or inspiration.
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Beauty in the ancient world was not considered quite in the way that we think of now either.
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It wasn't tied to art or necessarily even tied to something as being aesthetically pleasing, but rather beauty was tied to the good.
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It had moral connotations that you don't see in our contemporary conceptions of aesthetics. In the ancient world, poetry was the highest art form, and music was second.
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The visual arts weren't particularly well respected at the time. In fact, and then in the Middle Ages, the notion of the liberal arts that was received from the Latin world, which was comprised of grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, and arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music were
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used by this guy named Hugo of St. Victor to come up with seven mechanical arts that corresponded to each of these liberal arts: fabric making, armament, commerce, agriculture, hunting, medicine, and theatrics.
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So you can see that in that categorization schema that St. Victor, oh, sorry, Hugo of St.
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Victor comes up with, it's a very different schema than one we would use today, like hunting, armament, and medicine.
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We wouldn't really consider art in the contemporary sense in the Middle Ages as well.
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Music was closely linked with mathematics, which originates in the ancient period to Pythagoras, for instance, is an ancient precursor to this.
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And poetry and music were frequently taught in universities. The visual arts in the Middle Ages were confined to artisan's guilds, painters, sometimes linked with druggists who prepared paints, sculptors with goldsmiths, architects with masons and carpenters.
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And beauty was usually considered in light of God and his creation. Now, you may notice already that this ancient to Middle Ages schematization that I'm giving is very Eurocentric, and that I'm afraid to say is totally true.
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I'm using here this book Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology, which I use when I teach philosophy of art, and which is the textbook that I'll be using as the basis for many other videos in this playlist.
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And I am drawing from the first chapter of the book, which is written by Paul Oscar Kristeller.
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I think his schematization is very useful, but of course it is limited to Europe.
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And, um, aesthetics, as you know, a discipline invented in the 18th century also originates in Europe.
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So I just want to mention that, and I recognize that this isn't the only way to think about arts, and this is perhaps specific to Europe.
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And so naming that I think is better than not. So then continuing on in the schematization, Renaissance. Contrary to popular opinion, the Renaissance actually did not formulate a system of the fine arts or a comprehensive theory of aesthetics.
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As Kristeller notes in this introduction that I am drawing from here in Italy in the 16th century, the visual arts, painting, sculpture, and architecture were however separated from crafts very clearly for the first time.
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And Giorgio Vasari writes this book called Arti del Disegno. That is probably the basis for what later becomes the beaux arts or fine arts in France.
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Painting in this period of the Renaissance tries to share in the traditional prestige of poetry.
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And so one thing you do find in the Renaissance is this valorization of painting.
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Think about the most famous artists of the Renaissance that come to mind for you.
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Perhaps it's Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael. All of these artists were working in a variety of media, but are very well known for their paintings.
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And perhaps it's a painting that first came to mind when you thought of them.
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Now after the Renaissance in the 17th century, the cultural helm of Europe moves from Italy to France.
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And the scientific revolution happens. With the scientific revolution, the natural sciences become independent from other forms of inquiry for the first time.
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And this separation of science from other spheres of inquiry and the creation of the scientific method prepares the ground for a clear distinction between the arts and sciences, which previously hadn't been the case.
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Think back to Victor of St. Hugo, who includes medicine as one of the arts.
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Now, the scientific revolution starts to pave the way for a very different conception of the arts, such that they are distinct from the sciences because the sciences are around unto themselves.
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And then we get to the 18th century where the term aesthetics is coined by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in 1735.
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Baumgarten originally meant by aesthetics, the theory of sensuous knowledge as opposed to intellectual knowledge.
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And Baumgarten first conceived of a general theory of the arts as being a separate and legitimate philosophical discipline.
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This makes him the founder of aesthetics. However, Baumgarten did not go on to propose a categorization of the arts.
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According to many, philosophy of art was invented during this period because the theory of art becomes its own branch of philosophy.
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And the arts also come to be compared with one another. Abbé Batteaux, in 1746, for instance, gives a clear division of the arts into mechanical versus fine arts, and considers the fine arts to be poetry, painting, sculpture, and dance.
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Oh, and music. And Abbé Batteaux, in fact, also says there's a third category of mechanical/fine a...
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But really the point is that he distinguishes between the mechanical and fine arts and creates a categorization of fine arts, which has a lot of influence up to the present day.
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It's also in the 18th century that you get the rise of the term beaux-arts in French or fine arts, as well as what we might call a notion of capital-A-art.
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Now after 1760, aesthetics becomes a major discipline with many philosophy courses being taught on the subject.
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Immanuel Kant is the first philosopher to give aesthetics a major role in a system of philosophy.
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Kant writes, a series of three critiques that taken together comprise a masterwork of systematic philosophy and a major part of the third critique, The Critique of Judgment consists in an analysis of art, of questions of the beautiful taste and genius this is quite a watershed moment because previous
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works of systematic philosophy hadn't included an analysis of art within them. Kant also divides the fine arts into the speaking arts of poetry and eloquence, the plastic arts of sculpture, architecture, painting and gardening, and the arts of the beautiful play of sentiments including music and color.
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Another major feature of aesthetics that Kristeller draws our attention to in this introduction in the 18th century is the rise of an amateur public who has for the first time access to exhibitions, concerts, performances, ultimately museums.
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and I would add that this rise of the amateur public also goes along with an idea of art as being an autonomous sphere that is separate from religion in previous centuries.
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Say for instance, the Middle Ages, people's access to art would mostly have been access to religious art.
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And with the rise of the amateur public and with these ex exhibitions, museums and concerts and so forth, there's a new focus on the sphere of art as a secular sphere.
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We also see Kristeller notes, the origins of modern aesthetics in amateur criticism. And this perhaps suggests why so much of aesthetics focuses on the perspective of the viewer or the listener or the reader, rather than on the perspective of the artist.
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In our era, Kristeller notes, traditional systems of the fine arts are showing signs of disintegration.
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For instance, painting has moved ever farther from literature with the rise of modern art, op art, abstract expressionism.
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While music at times has moved closer to literature through the rise of rap as an example, so it becomes harder to hold to the traditional categorizations of the arts, uh, when some of their lines are becoming a bit blurrier,
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whereas others are becoming sharper. Not to mention there's a rise of new art forms, namely film and television, which after some early decades of debate about whether they counted as arts at all now are pretty much seen as art forms.
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In addition, many contemporary thinkers see art and the aesthetic not as a distinct realm, but as a pervasive element of human life.
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I hope this introduction to the philosophy of art and aesthetics has been helpful. Please follow along with this playlist for more videos, because I'm gonna be doing some on specific readings from this text.
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I'd also recommend buying or checking out this text to read along. This is based on my college Philosophy and the Arts course, which I've taught a few times in the past.
Topics:aestheticsphilosophy of artart historybeautyBaumgartenRenaissance artscientific revolutionfine artsEurocentrismart categorization
