What Is Aesthetics? Beauty, Art, Taste and the Sublime

Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy that studies beauty, art and taste. It asks what beauty is, what makes something a work of art, whether judgements of taste can be right or wrong, and why experiences such as a sad song, a frightening storm or a quiet garden move us the way they do.

On The Coordinates, aesthetics is Root V: 11 question cards, from “Is beauty in the object or in the eye?” to “How can a piece of music be sad?” Each card sets out the rival answers and names who gave them, from Plato and Kant to Abhinavagupta, Zeami and Sen no Rikyū.

What is aesthetics in philosophy?

The word comes from the Greek aisthēsis, perception or sensation. Alexander Baumgarten gave it its modern sense in the mid-eighteenth century, and Kant and Hegel made it a central part of philosophy. Today the word also has a looser everyday use, as in “an aesthetic” for a visual style, but in philosophy aesthetics means sustained argument about beauty, art and judgement.

It is a clear case of what makes a question philosophical. Two people can stand before the same painting, know every fact about how it was made, and still disagree about whether it is beautiful or good. No further observation settles the dispute, because the disagreement is about what the observations mean.

The field divides into two large questions, beauty and art, which overlap less than you might expect: much art is not beautiful, and much beauty, in faces, mountains or a mathematical proof, is not art. Around them sit questions about taste, the sublime, aesthetic experience, art and morality, beauty in nature and everyday life, and the particular puzzles of music and literature. Here is every card. The 131 cards across all six roots come from The Coordinates of Thought by Syed Raheel Shahzad.

What is beauty?

The Theories of Beauty card asks the oldest question in aesthetics: is beauty in the object or in the eye? The answers fall along a line:

• Objectivism: beauty is a real property of things, independent of anyone’s response.
• Proportion theories: beauty consists in measurable relations such as ratio, symmetry and harmony, a view with deep roots in Greek thought.
• Neoplatonism: for Plotinus, beauty is the appearance of a higher order in the world of the senses. Al-Ghazali and Aquinas each connected the beauty of created things to the divine.
• Response-dependence: beauty is a power to produce a certain response in suitable observers, much as colour is a power to look a certain way.
• Kant’s view: a judgement of beauty rests on feeling rather than on concepts, yet it claims everyone’s agreement.
• Relativism and subjectivism: standards vary by culture with none privileged, or beauty is simply the response, with nothing behind it.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” sounds like the obvious answer until you notice how confidently people argue about it. That gap, between feeling that beauty is personal and talking as if it were not, is what most theories try to explain.

What is art? The philosophy of art

The Philosophy of Art card asks what art is, what it does and why it matters. The oldest answer, from Plato and Aristotle, is that art imitates or represents. Expressivists, Tolstoy among them, held that art transmits feeling from artist to audience. Formalists such as Clive Bell held that what matters is form, which Bell called “significant form”. Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin asked what art does in society, and how mechanical reproduction changes it.

The twentieth century made the question of definition urgent. Once Marcel Duchamp submitted a mass-produced urinal to an exhibition as Fountain, and Andy Warhol exhibited replicas of supermarket Brillo boxes, nothing visible seemed to separate art from ordinary objects. The Definition and Boundaries card sets out the responses. Morris Weitz, drawing on Wittgenstein, argued that art cannot be defined because it is a family-resemblance concept. Arthur Danto and George Dickie answered that what makes something art is its relation to an artworld of theories, institutions and practices. Historical theories tie art status to a relation with earlier art; cluster accounts list typical features, none of them required. So: can anything be art if someone says it is?

Two further cards follow. Artistic Intention asks whether the artist gets to say what the work means: Wimsatt and Beardsley’s “intentional fallacy” says no, while intentionalists such as E. D. Hirsch say yes. Interpretation asks whether you can misread a poem, with answers ranging from one correct reading to the hermeneutics of Gadamer and Ricoeur, for whom understanding fuses the horizon of the work with the reader’s.

Taste and aesthetic judgement

The Taste and Judgement card puts the issue bluntly: is someone who prefers worse art making a mistake? Hume’s answer, in his essay on the standard of taste, was that the joint verdict of qualified critics, people of practised, unprejudiced and delicate judgement, sets the standard, confirmed over time. Kant held that a judgement of taste is subjective yet demands agreement from everyone. Pierre Bourdieu, a sociologist, argued that taste tracks social class and education more than any quality in the work. Frank Sibley argued that aesthetic concepts such as graceful, garish or delicate cannot be applied by rule from a work’s other features; applying them takes taste.

The sublime

Why do we seek out what frightens us? The Sublime names the response to what is vast, overwhelming or terrifying, a pleasure distinct from beauty and bound up with fear. Longinus, in antiquity, wrote of the elevation of the soul by greatness in expression. Edmund Burke explained the sublime as delight in terror experienced from safety: the storm watched from shelter. Kant distinguished a mathematical sublime, in which imagination fails to grasp sheer magnitude and so reveals the reach of reason, from a dynamical sublime, in which we recognise that nature’s power cannot touch our moral vocation. The card also names Zeami, the playwright and theorist of Japanese Noh, whose ideal of yūgen, a subtle and mysterious depth, offers a quieter counterpart to the European accounts.

Aesthetic experience: why is a sad song enjoyable?

Aesthetic Experience asks what happens in us when a work moves us, and its test case is a real puzzle: why is the sadness of a sad song enjoyable? Kant’s idea of disinterested attention, detached from practical concern and desire, and Edward Bullough’s “psychical distance” suggest that we enjoy emotion held at a remove from our own stakes. Empathy theories say we project feeling into the object. Cognitive accounts deny that aesthetic experience is a distinct state at all, and deflationary views doubt that the term names one phenomenon.

One of the most developed answers comes from India: rasa theory. Bharata’s Nāṭyaśāstra, a treatise on drama, analysed how emotions represented on stage become a savoured aesthetic flavour, rasa, for the audience. It lists eight rasas, among them the erotic, the comic, the compassionate and the heroic; later writers argued for a ninth, peace (śānta). Commentators including Bhatta Lollata, Sankuka, Bhatta Nayaka and, above all, the Kashmiri philosopher Abhinavagupta argued over how the transformation happens. On the developed account, the spectator does not simply feel grief; they savour it in a non-ordinary, generalised form that belongs to no one in particular. It is a direct answer to the sad-song puzzle.

Art and morality

Can a beautiful work be evil, and still beautiful? The Art and Morality card sets out the range. Radical autonomists hold that moral features are irrelevant to artistic value; Oscar Wilde put the view memorably when he wrote that there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book, only books well or badly written. Moralists hold that a moral defect is always an aesthetic defect, a view with roots in Plato’s worries about poetry and in Confucius’s concern with music that corrupts. Between them, ethicists such as Berys Gaut argue that moral merit counts towards aesthetic merit, other things being equal, while moderate positions, including Noël Carroll’s, hold that it depends on what the work asks of its audience. The question is live wherever a film, novel or song is admired by some and condemned by others.

Aesthetics beyond the gallery: nature, everyday life and music

Is a mountain beautiful in the same way a painting is? Everyday and Natural Aesthetics covers aesthetic response outside art: to landscapes, weather, food, tools and rooms. Allen Carlson argues that appreciating nature properly requires knowing what you are looking at; Arnold Berleant stresses engagement, with the observer inside the environment rather than standing before an object; Yuriko Saito defends the aesthetic character of ordinary objects and routines.

Japanese aesthetics has given this field some of its central ideas. Wabi-sabi finds beauty in impermanence, imperfection and incompleteness, as in the rustic tea ceremony associated with Sen no Rikyū. A related ideal, mono no aware, a gentle sadness at the passing of things, was set out by the eighteenth-century scholar Motoori Norinaga in his reading of The Tale of Genji. Islamic art offers another model: on one influential reading, geometric pattern and calligraphy are reflections of divine unity.

Music poses the hardest version of the puzzle. Philosophy of Music and Literature asks how a piece of music, which depicts nothing, can be sad. Arousal theorists say it makes listeners sad; resemblance theorists such as Peter Kivy say its contours resemble the bearing of a sad person; persona theorists hear an imagined subject expressing itself; formalists, following Eduard Hanslick, say music expresses nothing beyond its own forms. Confucius and al-Farabi both treated music as more than entertainment, with real effects on character, and Martha Nussbaum argues that literature can do moral work that philosophy alone cannot.

Aesthetics across traditions, and where to begin

The cards draw on Greek, Indian, Islamic, Chinese and Japanese sources alongside the modern European and analytic debates that dominate most introductions. Explore by tradition: Indian for rasa, Japanese and Korean for wabi-sabi and Noh, Islamic for al-Farabi and al-Ghazali, Chinese for Confucius on music, and Continental for Adorno, Benjamin and Gadamer. These are the philosophers most often named on the aesthetics cards:

A good first question is the one closest to your own experience. If you have ever enjoyed a tragedy, start here:

For reading, the Book corner lists books on beauty and art with the most approachable first:

These are the latest conversations in the site’s Meaning, Art & the Good Life category and its neighbours:

Where do you stand?

Every question here has serious answers on more than one side. Pick a card, read the rival answers, then say which you find strongest and why. Members ask, reply and take sides; reading is free for everyone.

Join free Open The Coordinates

The Weekly Coordinate

One big question a week, the best reply from the conversations, a debate and a book. Free; stop any time.

Leave this empty

Your email addressGet it weekly

We email you a link to confirm. Your address is used for this email only. Privacy

Next guideFields of Philosophy: The Philosophy of Science, Mind, Religion, Law and Art