Philosophy of Art & Aesthetics: A Historical Introduction

[00:00:00]what is art and what does it mean to study art using the tools of philosophy is aesthetic judgment something subjective objective or something else entirely how do I recognize what makes a work beautiful and how do I judge different kinds of artworks from different media against one another if at all these types of questions are part of the area of philosophy known as Aesthetics or philosophy of Art 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 icethesis 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 historically the Arts have been grouped into five major categories this categorization emerges in the 18th century first is painting second is sculpture third is architecture fourth is music and fifth is poetry some cat organizations 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 uh account that I gave grouped under poetry dance Opera literature even eloquence and more recently film and television and performance art so categorizing the Arts involves quite a good deal of debate 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 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 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 placing categorizations or theories of art that emerge post 18th century invention of Aesthetics as a term back onto that previous period of time but if you think about ancient Greece and Rome for instance there's a lot that we can learn about the philosophy of Art in Greek the word Techni and in Latin the word ours referred not just to the Fine Arts but also to all kinds of human activities including crafts and Sciences Greek and Roman cultures understood art to be something that can be taught and learned and so this is really different from some of the more modern theories of Genius or inspiration Beauty in the ancient world was not considered quite in the way that we think of now either it wasn't tied to art or necessarily even tied to something as being aesthetically pleasing but rather Beauty was tied to the good 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 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 used by this guy named Hugo of Saint 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 so you can see that in that uh categorization schema that Saint Victor oh sorry Hugo of Saint Victor comes up with it's a very different schema than one we would use today like hunting Armament and Medicine we wouldn't really consider art in the Contemporary sense in the Middle Ages as well music was closely linked with mathematics which originates in the ancient period to Pythagoras for instance is an ancient uh precursor to this and poetry and music were frequently taught in universities the visual arts in the Middle Ages were confined to Artisans guilds painters sometimes linked with druggists who prepared paints sculptors with goldsmiths Architects with Masons and carpenters 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 am giving is very eurocentric and that I'm afraid to say is totally true 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 uh many other videos in this playlist and I am drawing from the first chapter of the book which is written by Paul Oscar cristeller I think his schematization is very useful but of course it is limited to Europe and um Aesthetics as you know a discipline invented in the 18th century also originates in Europe 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 and so naming that I think is better than not so then continuing on in this schematization Renaissance contrary to popular opinion the Renaissance actually did not formulate a system of the Fine Arts or a comprehensive theory of Aesthetics as christeller 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 and Giorgio vasari writes this book called arctide that is probably the basis for what later becomes the Boza or Fine Arts in France painting in this period of the Renaissance tries to share in the traditional Prestige of poetry and so one thing you do find in the Renaissance is this valorization of painting think about the most famous artists of the Renaissance that come to mind for you 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 and perhaps it's a painting that first came to mind when you thought of them now after the Renaissance in the 17th century the cultural Helm of Europe moves from Italy to France and the Scientific Revolution happens with a scientific revolution the Natural Sciences become independent from other forms of inquiry for the first time 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 think back to Victor of Saint Hugo who includes medicine as one of the Arts 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 and then we get to the 18th century where the term Aesthetics is coined by Alexander Gottlieb baumgarten in 1735.

[00:07:23]baumgarten originally meant by Aesthetics the theory of sensuous knowledge as opposed to intellectual knowledge and baumgarten first conceived of a general theory of the Arts as being a separate and legitimate philosophical discipline this makes him the founder of Aesthetics however baumgarten did not go on to propose a categorization of the Arts according to many philosophy of art was invented during this period because the theory of art becomes its own branch of philosophy and the Arts also come to be compared with one another 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 oh and music and in fact also says there's a third category of mechanical slash Fine Arts combined including architecture and eloquence 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 it's also in the 18th century that you get the rise of the term Boza in French or Fine Arts as well as what we might call a notion of capital a art now after 1760 Aesthetics becomes a major discipline with many philosophy courses being taught on the subject Emmanuel Kant is the first philosopher to give Aesthetics a major role in a system of philosophy 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 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 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 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 say for instance the Middle Ages people's access to Art would mostly have been accessed to religious art and with the rise of the amateur public and with these exhibitions museums and concerts and so forth there's a new focus on the sphere of art as a secular sphere we also see crystaller 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 in our era crystaler notes traditional systems of the Fine Arts are showing signs of disintegration for instance painting has moved ever farther from literature with the rise of Modern Art op art abstract expressionism well 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 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 in addition many contemporary thinkers See Art and the aesthetic not as a distinct realm but as a pervasive element of human life 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 going to be doing some on specific readings from this text I'd also recommend buying or checking out this text to read along this is based on my college philosophy in the Arts course which I've taught a few times in the past