What is aesthetics? What is beauty?

Aesthetics is a subject with the theme of studying the essence and significance of beauty. Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy. The main object of research is art, but it does not study the specific performance in art, but the philosophical problems in art, so it is called "the philosophy of beautiful art" The basic problems of aesthetics include the essence of beauty, the relationship between aesthetic consciousness and aesthetic object, etc. The word source aesthetics in this paragraph comes from the Greek aesthesis. The original meaning is "feeling to the senses". It was first used by the German philosopher Alexander gottlieb Baumgarden. The publication of his book Aesthetics A marks the emergence of aesthetics as an independent discipline. Until the 19th century, aesthetics was usually defined as the study of "beauty" (Sch? The theory of nheit). Modern philosophy defines aesthetics as the theory and philosophy of understanding cognitive feelings in art, science, design and philosophy. The aesthetic value of an object is not simply defined as "beauty" and "ugliness", but to understand the type and essence of the object. The development of historical aesthetics as an independent discipline in this section began in Baumgarden, Germany in the 18th century, but its emergence was based on the theoretical discussion of beauty by thinkers in ancient Greece, which was a systematization and scientification of previous aesthetic theories. The discussion of aesthetic theory since ancient Greece is based on people's aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic creation activities, which is a philosophical reflection on people's aesthetic activities. Therefore, if we want to understand aesthetics, we must go back to its source and start a beautiful journey. Archaeology and art history tell us that human beings have started aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic creation since they left animals. Paleolithic cavemen wore stone beads, animal teeth and sea clam shells dyed with red, yellow and green. Not only the decorations of primitive people can see the early aesthetic activities of human beings, but also the primitive art reflects the early aesthetic activities of human beings. According to the written records and the patterns left behind, it is speculated that the original art includes poetry, dance, music, etc., but now it has disappeared. However, cave murals and pottery are the two earliest original artistic records that we can see today. The former is mainly based on various animals, vivid and meticulous, and colorful. The latter is not only beautiful in shape, rich in patterns, but also bright in color contrast. People always have a certain life and a certain phenomenon before they start to think and discuss, and establish corresponding disciplines on the basis of thinking and discussing. The thinking and discussion of early human aesthetic phenomena began in ancient Greece. At that time, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and other great philosophers all participated in the discussion and debate on beauty. However, their views and opinions on beauty are often mixed with their understanding of truth and goodness, and they become vassals of their philosophical, moral, theological, political and literary thoughts. In addition, there was no aesthetic monograph at that time. The aesthetic views of thinkers are mixed in political, philosophical, religious, moral, artistic and even historical biographies, letters and annotations. People have not found an independent and special research object for aesthetics from those mixed and intertwined ideological systems. This situation continued until the middle of the 18th century. After the 18th century, with the development of industrial revolution in europe, modern disciplines such as natural science, philosophy, ethics, psychology and literature and art entered a period of gradual formation and development. Philosophy, which is closely related to aesthetics, has undergone an epistemological turn since modern times, providing the necessary historical conditions for the establishment of aesthetics. It is under such historical conditions that Baumgarden distinguished aesthetics from logic for the first time in his own philosophical system. While strictly stipulating that the research object of logic is the abstract thinking of forming concepts and reasoning, it also stipulates its own unique research object for aesthetics. And wrote an aesthetic monograph, initially formed the basic framework of aesthetics and discussed some basic problems of aesthetics. Therefore, aesthetics was born, and Baum Garden became the father of aesthetics. Baumgarten (A.G.Baumgarten 1714-1762) is a professor of philosophy at Harry University in Prussia, Germany. His main viewpoints on aesthetics focus on two aspects: First, he defined aesthetics as a subject to study people's perceptual knowledge. Baumgarden believes that people's psychological activities are divided into three aspects: knowledge, emotion and meaning. There is logic in studying knowledge or human rational knowledge, ethics in studying human will, and "Aesthetic" in studying human emotion is equivalent to human perceptual knowledge. The word "Aesthetic" comes from Greek, which means "sensibility", and later translated into Chinese, it becomes "aesthetics". In 175, Baumgarden officially called "Aesthetic" as a monograph on his study of human perceptual knowledge. His book is regarded as the first aesthetic monograph in history. Second, Baum Garden believes that "the aesthetic object is the perfection of perceptual knowledge". Why is aesthetics related to perceptual knowledge? The German philosopher Leibniz, the teacher of Baumgarden's teacher, has a vivid explanation for this. He said: Painters and other artists, although clearly aware of what is good and what is not good, often can't find reasons for their aesthetic interest. If someone asks them, they will reply that the works they are not happy with lack something I can't say. To know whether a work is beautiful or not, but not why, is a vague and chaotic perceptual knowledge in the eyes of Leibniz and Baumgarden. After Baum Garden, the development of aesthetics experienced three important stages: German classical aesthetics, Marxist aesthetics and western modern aesthetics. In the stage of German classical aesthetics, Kant and Hegel made great contributions to aesthetics, forming the first aesthetic discipline since its emergence and the third peak in the history of western aesthetics. Kant is famous for his three major criticisms. In Critique of Judgment, Kant put forward and demonstrated a series of fundamental aesthetic problems and formed a relatively complete aesthetic theoretical system. After Kant, Hegel pushed German classical aesthetics to the peak and became a master of German classical aesthetics and western aesthetic trends before Marxist aesthetics. Although Marx didn't write a special aesthetic work, he talked about a lot of aesthetic problems in many other works, especially he introduced the experimental point of view into aesthetic research, thus establishing the discussion on beauty on the basis of dialectical unity of subject and object, which provided a new way of thinking for aesthetic research. After the mid-19th century, there were various schools of aesthetic development, but in general, there was an important tendency, that is, it gradually broke away from the pure philosophical discussion of "what is beauty" and focused on the description of aesthetic psychology, which gradually turned aesthetics into an empirical descriptive science. This is the historical transformation from "top-down" to "bottom-up" in the history of aesthetics. Aesthetics in the 2th century formed a strong anti-traditional trend. On the one hand, it rebelled against traditional metaphysics and publicized empirical methods, on the other hand, it rebelled against rationalism and publicized human irrationality, and on this basis, it gradually formed two major ideological trends: scientism aesthetics and humanism aesthetics. The main representative figures and aesthetic trends in modern western aesthetics include Fechner's "experimental aesthetics", Bell's "meaningful form", Dewey's "empirical aesthetics", Croce's "image intuition theory", Bloch's "psychological distance theory", Lippes's "empathy theory", Freud's "Libido" theory, and later analytical aesthetics, phenomenological aesthetics, existential aesthetics, and so on.

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