Aesthetics Essay Research Paper A Brief History — страница 2

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Dessoir, professor at the University of Berlin, sought to finish off the hostility of indecision of where to classify the study of . Dessoir sought to enlist the co-operation of many different approaches under the double name “ and general science of art.” This implied that was still to be understood in the early, narrow sense as philosophy of beauty, but that a new, empirical and scientific sense of art was to be recognized as allied and parallel with it. However, it did not find favor outside of Germany, and since then the single term has been applied, however in a very broad sense, which includes all the various schools of thought and lines of research. Contemporary does not expect to discover exact, permanent laws like those of physics, but only approximate accounts of

recurrent types and tendencies, correlations and causal connections. The phenomena of art and taste are obviously among the most variable, complex, and intangible, of those presented to scientific inquiry. is not as cut and dry as the leaves of a tree, or the genetic makeup of humans. It caries from person to person, culture to culture, period to period; their changing and unique aspects are often the most important ones. They cannot be reduced to fixed, numerical formulas, but they are not completely unique or chaotic, and it is the business of to describe both their constant and their variable aspects. Along these lines, contemporary is trying to achieve the status of an experimental science of the serious difficulties involved in interpreting the data. Although is completely

unstable where concrete scientific data is concerned, many writers attempted to make sense off of one theory : art is beauty, and beauty is only art if it contains a purpose. Kant specifically utilized this theme in his Critique of Judgment, the third of his three fundamental works, applied the transcendental method of philosophical analysis to the problem of . He asked which are the conditions implied by the phenomenon of beauty? What gives validity to our aesthetic judgments? The Critique of Practical Reason had granted a glimpse into the realm of freedom where reason holds sway in the role of moral legislator. The dualism of the phenomenal world on the one hand and the noumenal world on the other, required a form of mediation, and beauty as analyzed in the first part of the

Critique of Judgment furnished the connecting link. Through the harmonious design of a shell found at the beach, or a melodious sequence of sounds the effectiveness or reason in the phenomenal world is borne in upon the mind which intuitively recognizes in these forms a “purposeiveness”. This recognition gives a peculiar pleasure at the harmonious interplay of our cognitive faculties and it expresses itself in a judgment which, at the time was incapable of demonstration, but however, claimed universal validity. Friedrich Schiller took up and transformed Kant’s idea of an interplay of faculties in his Letters on the Aesthetical Education of Man. Schiller said that Man’s inner life was composed of two basic drives : “sensuous instinct” and “formal instinct”. Those

two forces can only attain balance through a third force : “the play-impulse” which constitutes beauty and art. Hence art appeared to him an indispensable instrument for fashioning man into the kind of harmonious personality which he admired in Kant. Friedrich Schlegel, one of the representatives of Christian idealism, combined the idea of play with another element of Kant’s , the notion of freedom, interpreting the latter as the freedom of the creative mind to rise by means of play above the limitations imposed by fixed form. Shclegel’s theories were shared by Friedrich von Hardenberg, who then took them a few steps further. He claimed that poetry, philosophy, and life came to be fused in the ecstatic vision of a “magic universe”. A curious reversal of the preceding

development took place. Through , an area of its own had been set aside for man’s artistic creativity. Now independence turned into domination, and the tendency towards differentiation gave way to desire for total inclusiveness. Art, after liberating itself from service under alien powers, (namely the repression of artists and their art, or the lack of education in the arts) aspired in its turn to embrace life in its entirety. In everything, there is art, and in art, there is everything. Or so it was in German romantic thought. Throughout the history of , which is arguably the length of time held within the universe, not much has been distorted. Art, along with is an incredibly difficult subject to comprehend, due to the varying nature of themes, opinions, and judgments. Not to