IV.

Modern Aesthetics

The 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant was concerned with judgements of taste. Objects can be judged beautiful, he proposed, when they satisfy a disinterested desire: one that does not involve personal interests or needs. It follows from this that beautiful objects have no specific purpose and that judgements of beauty are not expressions of mere personal preference but are universal. Although one cannot be certain that others will be satisfied by objects he or she judges to be beautiful, one can at least say that others ought to be satisfied. The basis for one’s response to beauty, therefore, exists in the structure of one’s mind. Kant’s theory suggests how judgements might be reconciled—or aesthetic valuations harmonized—through the appeal to a realm of shared appreciation beyond the mere vagaries of individual taste. Art should give the same disinterested satisfaction as natural beauty. Paradoxically, art can accomplish one thing nature cannot: it can offer ugliness and beauty in one object. A fine painting of an ugly face is still beautiful.

According to the 19th-century German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, art, religion, and philosophy are the bases of the highest spiritual development. Beauty in nature is everything that the human spirit finds pleasing and congenial to the exercise of spiritual and intellectual freedom. Certain things in nature can be made more congenial and pleasing, and it is these natural objects that are reorganized by art to satisfy aesthetic demands.

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer believed that the forms of the universe, like the eternal Platonic forms, exist beyond the worlds of experience, and that aesthetic satisfaction is achieved by contemplating them for their own sakes, as a means of escaping the painful world of daily experience.

Fichte, Kant, and Hegel are in a direct line of development. Schopenhauer attacked Hegel but was influenced by Kant’s view of disinterested contemplation. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche followed Schopenhauer at first, then disagreed with him. Nietzsche concurred that life is tragic, but thought that this should not preclude acceptance of the tragic with joyous affirmation, the full realization of which is art. Art confronts the terrors of the universe and is therefore only for the strong. Art can transform any experience into beauty, and by so doing transforms its horrors in such a way that they may be contemplated with enjoyment.

Although much of modern aesthetics is rooted in German thought, German thinking was subject to other Western influences. Lessing, a founder of German Romanticism, was affected by the aesthetic writings of the British statesman and aesthetic theorist Edmund Burke.