Aesthetics
“Every man is born with aptitudes
which give him access to vital and formative knowledge by one of these roads; either by the road of studying man
and his works, or by the road of studying nature and her works. The business of instruction is to seize and
develop these aptitudes. The great and complete spirits which have all the aptitudes for both roads of
knowledge are rare.”
Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social
Criticism, Matthew Arnold (1869)
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy that
explores the nature of art, beauty, and taste. It is the study of subjective and sensori-emotional values, also
known as judgments of sentiment and taste – “the faculty of discerning and appreciating what is
excellent”.
Does ‘nature and nurture’ play a role in the
development of aesthetic tastes? Are aesthetic tastes fundamentally individual or universal and
teachable? The reasonable reply says that the most famous and enduring works of art appeal to both the innate
aesthetic sense and the acquired taste that comes with education, much like the long poems of Matthew Arnold.
The Aesthetic
Movement
The great promise of the Enlightenment was that social problems would
admit a scientific solution. In the heady days of
the “Age of Reason”, it was genuinely thought that, armed with right methods and tools, societal problems
could be solved. The problem, as recognized by the Romantic Movement, was that science’s
understanding of nature was incomplete – it’s narrow. While providing rich descriptions and
correlations of things, science’s Achilles heel is that it didn’t give the reasons
for things.
The Aesthetic Movement’s thrust was to live
life as a rational being (rather than a life as a reviewer of books), and it’s theme ranged from removing
obstacles to progress; saving people from oppression; to enacting humanitarian reforms to help those in
society who were the least able to care for themselves and who suffered from the heaviest burdens of
discrimination.
A few of the leaders of the Aesthetic Movement
(~1850-1900), a continuum of the Romantic Movement (~1800-1850), include Walter Pater, Matthew Arnold, Anthony Trollope, John Ruskin and Oscar Wilde. All these European writers,
critics and poets held that the possession of an idea of culture, in which the arts had a guaranteed place, was
crucial to the flourishing of the individual and the progress of society.
19th century America’s corollary to the
European Aesthetic Movement, the crucible of its political experiment – the progress of all to achieve wealth and
power – resulted in the heroic rhetoric of the anti-slavery movement. After issuing the Emancipation
Proclamation executive order (January 1, 1863), President Abraham Lincoln’s later remark had a Kantian ring to it, “I am naturally
anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so think and
feel”.
Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative: “Act in such a way
that the maxim of your choices would be instituted as a universal law of nature.”
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