Topics Beauty

Question I'd like to ask a question about aesthetics and philosophy in general. As an undergraduate student of philosophy, looking around at different traditions and particular, dominant thinkers, it seems that aesthetics is generally discounted as a strong motivation or deciding force in many facets of our lives. For instance, I think that most people will find it an odd when one suggests that aesthetics is an important part of ethics, economics, politics, science, mathematics, logic, ontology, epistemology, and so on. Yet in each of the disciplines I've just mentioned, it seems that an 'elegant' definition, solution or description is strongly praised by most people over 'messy' ones. For instance, we wonder at the simplicity and power of both Newton's laws and Einstein's e=mc2. An elegantly 'neat' solution to an ethical dilemma between two parties is generally preferred to an obscure, complex one. Plato is praised by many for his elegant use of illustrative metaphors. Elegance is surely an attribute firmly within the domain of aesthetics; and hence, aesthetic concerns do play a part in these disciplines. These examples are minimal: no great labour of thought was required to think them up. I am coming to suspect that (for whatever reason) aesthetic sense (whatever that is) is actually a fundamental part of the human experience; far greater than its proportional representation on library shelves suggests. I notice that on this web site, aesthetics is not even listed as a separate category: inferentially it has to be tacked on as a potential property of art, beauty, justice, medicine, knowledge, sex, sport, suicide, and so on. This contrasts to, say, ethics, which could also be described as a potential property of all the same categories, yet has its own category. My question is: are there philosophers who take aesthetics to be of as fundamental importance in philosophy as, say, ontology or epistemology? Also, is this an area of thought that is mobile in its degree of interest in the general philosophical community? Can we wait with suspenseful breath for a new Heidegger who reshapes our thinking about fundamental issues in terms of aesthetics?

Accepted:
July 11, 2006

Comments

An interesting question, and well-observed. Of course, it might be the case that the term 'elegant', despite appearances, is being used in a non-aesthetic sense. For example, it might mean something like clear, simple or self-contained. In which case the preference for elegance of which you speak would be something more like a preference for things that are easy to understand, in one way or another. Also, one should point out that there is not actually a category on this site for 'ontology' or 'epistemology' either, presumably because of the designers' desire to avoid jargon.

So much for the easy way out! Historically, 'aesthetics' refers to the branch of philosophy that deals with experiences like beauty and phenomena like art. To take your question seriously would mean to ask whether there must be an ineradicably aesthetic element within reasoning or knowledge -- i.e. well outside the presumptive domain of beauty and art. One implication of such a claim would be that the nature of aesthetics changes, too. We are no longer talking about beauty or art, some type of experience that can be isolated from the rest. This means the first priority must be to explain what the differences are between an aesthetic phenomenon and how various epistemologists define the proper object of knowledge. From there one would have to show that any adequate account of the latter would have to assume the involvement of the former in its formation. I would venture to suggest that Nietzsche held this view: one's taste manifests itself in one's basic beliefs about the world. I would also venture to suggest that Kant, in the Critique of Judgement, at least came close to this position. (However, I suspect you are looking for much more recent philosophers.)