Detail of a Roman copy (2nd century bce) of a Greek alabaster portrait bust of Aristotle, c. 325 bce; in the collection of the Roman National Museum.A. Dagli Orti/©De Agostini Editore/age fotostockThe two greatest Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, shared a sense of the importance of aesthetics, and both regarded music, poetry, architecture, and drama as fundamental institutions within the body politic. Plato notoriously recommends the banning of poets and painters from his ideal republic and in the course of his argument provides an extended theory of imitation (mimesis), along with spurious reasons for thinking that imitation derogates both from the laws of morality and from the rational cognition of the world. Much of Aristotle’s extended and diverse reply to Plato is concerned with rehabilitating imitation as the foundation of moral education (Ethica Nicomachea), as the origin of a necessary katharsis (Poetica), and as the instrument—through music, dance, and poetry—of character formation (Politica).
Plato’s more mystical writings, notably the Timaeus, contain hints of another approach to aesthetics, one based on the Pythagorean theory of the cosmos that exerted a decisive influence on the Neoplatonists. Through the writings of St. Augustine, Boethius, and Macrobius, the Pythagorean cosmology and its associated aesthetic of harmony were passed on to the thinkers of the Middle Ages. The Aristotelian theory of imitation and the concern with the expressive and emotionally educative aspect of aesthetic experience were not truly influential until the 17th century. At that time much attention was also paid to another classical work, the Hellenistic treatise on the sublime ascribed to Longinus, which is perhaps the most interesting and extended piece of antique literary criticism to have been passed on to the modern world. Medieval aesthetics
St. Thomas Aquinas devoted certain passages of his Summa Theologiae (c. 1266–73) to the study of beauty. To his thinking, humankind’s interest in beauty is of sensuous origin, but it is the prerogative of those senses that are capable of “contemplation”—namely, the eye and the ear. Aquinas defines beauty in Aristotelian terms as that which pleases solely in the contemplation of it and recognizes three prerequisites of beauty: perfection, appropriate proportion, and clarity. Aquinas’ position typifies the approach to aesthetics adopted by the Scholastics. More widely diffused among medieval thinkers was the Neoplatonist theory, in which beauty is seen as a kind of divine order conforming to mathematical laws: the laws of number, which are also the laws of harmony. Music, poetry, and architecture all exhibit the same conformity to a cosmic order, and, in experiencing their beauty, we are really experiencing the same order in ourselves and resonating to it as one string to another. This theory, expounded in treatises on music by St. Augustine and Boethius, is consciously invoked by Dante in his Convivio (c. 1304–07; The Banquet). In this piece, generally considered one of the first sustained works of literary criticism in the modern manner, the poet analyzes the four levels of meaning contained in his own poems.
The Neoplatonist emphasis on number and harmony dominated aesthetics during the early Renaissance as well and was reaffirmed by Leon Alberti in his great treatise on architecture, De Re Aedificatoria (1452; Ten Books on Architecture). Alberti also advanced a definition of beauty, which he called concinnitas, taking his terminology from Cicero. Beauty is for Alberti such an order and arrangement of the parts of an object that nothing can be altered except for the worse. This kind of definition can hardly stand alone as a basis for aesthetics, for what does the word worse mean? The obvious answer, “less beautiful,” at once reduces the definition to circularity. The origins of modern aesthetics
Francis Bacon wrote essays on beauty and deformity, but he confined his remarks to the human figure. René Descartes produced a treatise on music, although it contains little that would be recognized as aesthetics in the modern sense. During the first decades of modern philosophy, aesthetics flourished, not in the works of the great philosophers, but in the writings of such minor figures as Baltasar Gracián, Jean de La Bruyère (who began the study of taste that was to dominate aesthetics for a century), and Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon.
It was not until the end of the 17th century that the distinctive concerns of modern aesthetics were established. At that time, taste, imagination, natural beauty, and imitation came to be recognized as the central topics in aesthetics. In Britain the principal influences were the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury and his disciples Francis Hutcheson and Joseph Addison. Shaftesbury, a follower of the political and educational philosopher John Locke, did more than any of his contemporaries to establish ethics and aesthetics as central areas of philosophical inquiry. As a naturalist, he believed that the fundamental principles of morals and taste could be established by due attention to human nature, our sentiments being so ordered that certain things naturally please us and are naturally conducive to our good (Characteristiks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 1711). Taste is a kind of balanced discernment, whereby a person recognizes that which is congenial to his sentiments and therefore an object of pleasurable contemplation. Following Locke, Shaftesbury laid much emphasis on the association of ideas as a fundamental component in aesthetic experience and the crucial bridge from the sphere of contemplation to the sphere of action. Addison adopted this position in a series of influential essays, “The Pleasures of the Imagination” in The Spectator (1712). He defended the theory that imaginative association is the fundamental component in our experience of art, architecture, and nature, and is the true explanation of their value to us.
Francis Hutcheson was perhaps the first to place the problem of aesthetic judgment among the central questions of epistemology: How can we know that something is beautiful? What guides our judgment and what validates it? His answer was decidedly Empiricist in tone: aesthetic judgments are perceptual and take their authority from a sense that is common to all who make them. In An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), Hutcheson explained: “The origin of our perceptions of beauty and harmony is justly called a ‘sense’ because it involves no intellectual element, no reflection on principles and causes.” The significance of Baumgarten’s work
Such a statement would have been vigorously repudiated by Hutcheson’s contemporary Alexander Baumgarten, who, in his aforementioned Reflections on Poetry, introduced the term aesthetic in its distinctively modern sense. Baumgarten was a pupil of Christian Wolff, the Rationalist philosopher who had created the orthodox philosophy of the German Enlightenment by building the metaphysical ideas of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz into a system. He was thus heir to a tradition that dismissed the senses and the imagination as incapable of providing a genuine cognition of their objects and standing always to be corrected (and replaced) by rational reflection. Baumgarten, however, argued that poetry is surely cognitive: it provides insight into the world of a kind that could be conveyed in no other way. At the same time, poetic insights are perceptual (“aesthetic”) and hence imbued with the distinctive character of sensory and imaginative experience. According to Baumgarten, the ideas conveyed by poetry are “clear and confused,” as opposed to the “clear and distinct” ideas of reason in the sense that they had been described by Descartes and the 17th-century Rationalists. Baumgarten held that the aesthetic value of a poem resides in the relative preponderance of clarity over confusion. Accordingly, his theory of the value of art was ultimately cognitive.