/lit/ - Literature

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>>20101425
Edmund Burke and David Hume are good.

>>20101425
Roger Scruton - Beauty
And his documentary Why Beauty Matters, if you haven't already seen it.
Umberto Eco - On Beauty
If you want something more thorough there is a good anthology of writings on Aesthetics called Philosophy of Art and Beauty from Plato to Heidegger.

>>20102822
thanks anon

Bumping with random some thoughts to maybe start more of a conversation. I’ve become curious about aesthetics after reading more by/about Houllebecq and his fixation on aging and becoming uglier. In one book he talks about boomer flower children who live in this free love type commune who descend into despair and suffering once their beauty and desire for one another wane.

Houllebecq’s idea is that all corporeal pleasures are borrowed against death, and deform our bodies in the process. As I get later into my twenties, I’ve watched the disintegration of beauty among people I know who’ve overindulged.

You get this idea in the Bible and a lot of Christian literature as well. There’s always this aesthetic dimension to sin, where temptation is by nature beautiful. But the reality of yielding to it, because of our mortality, always ends up being ugly. Not necessarily coming at this from a Christian perspective, though - Houllebecq recognizes this dynamic as well but obviously isn’t a proponent of Christian asceticism.

These are just sort of showerthoughts I’m interested in exploring more. Figured I would start with Scruton because I already like him and he’s talked about by people I respect and by people in the clergy who are clued into this stuff. Some other anons have posted good recs. I’m also interested in evopsych stuff that gets deeper into why we find disease ugly etc

I also wonder how the dynamic I sort of talked about above is related to advertising and the digital era in general. Coca-Cola and alcohol manufacturers always rely on extremely attractive people in their advertisements, but the most loyal consumers of both products are probably fat, diseased, or both. Obviously it’s because they’re advertisements and we live in a society etc. but I feel like there’s a parallel there that somebody has probably explored.

Bump

>>20103507
You might be interested in Hildebrand's two volumes on Aesthetics. I also believe Scruton wrote an introduction to one of the volumes and gave a talk at the Hildebrand Project in the U.S, it's on YT.

>>20103766
thanks anon

>>20103507
Sin is a lie. Righteousness is truth. Sin imitates righteousness by presenting itself as beautiful. The thing about lies and the truth are that the more you indulge In them the more apparent their nature becomes- true or false.
Pleasure is of course beautiful and righteous in itself, (have to get religious here im sorry) God made pleasure, He invented the orgasm after all. An orgasm between a husband and wife is beautiful, but the orgasm between a man and a 4 year old boy is disgusting.
I think that’s how we get objective aesthetics. When everything is in its place we see beauty. Another example from nature is a wooded area with a stream running down the middle of it. When the river overflows and leaves it’s rightful place the wooded area becomes a nasty swamp.

>>20101425
Ignore all advice in this thread
Scruton is an essentialist - he believes beauty has an inherent property to it.
You should stick to non-essentialists. The correct definition of aesthetics is the philosophy of art critique. All beauty is based on values the onlooker holds.

>>20104360
>All beauty is based on values the onlooker holds.

How does this make any sense? We’re all organisms operating on roughly the same hardware, and so evolution/the reality of being alive exerts at least some influence on the stimuli we perceive as beautiful.

Aristotle just says health is a priori good and beautiful. I think few would contest this. Even people who, on paper, venerate disease and/or death don’t find it aesthetically pleasing, which is obvious from their behavior.

>>20101704
Kant after these two. Critique of Judgement is great and Scruton is pretty Kantian I think

>>20104360
>Ignore all advice in this thread
> All beauty is based on values the onlooker holds.
Like in the Umberto Eco Book and much of the writing in Philosophies of Art and Beauty I mentioned

>>20104360
Isn't that view of aesthetics excessively narrow? Do questions about beauty that do not involve art (for example beauty in nature) not fall under the umbrella of aesthetics?

>>20102822
>documentary Why Beauty Matters
He never defines beauty in it, just that it is important but then you still dont know anything.

>>20106246
I was really frustrated by this documentary as well. It seemed to amount to him saying "this art is good, and this art is bad." I get that it's for mass consumption, but I would have liked it to have a little more philosophical rigor.

>>20101425
If you really want to read aesthetics, you have to understand that aesthetics basically starts with Plato. Platonic aesthetics is very interesting because, unlike modern aesthetics, Plato draws a clear distinction between aesthetics and the philosophy of art, as he completely valorizes beauty as good and art (specifically poetry) as evil (arguable only in the context of education but the connotation of mimesis with lying stuck outside of Plato's own considerations). It's also really important how Aristotle reversed this by valorizing poetry and tragedy, sortof incorporating the philosophy of art with general aesthetics, which is a connection that will continually become stronger as the study continues on into the flourishing of aesthetics in the 18th century and beyond (particularly in Germany). Generally, aestheticians fall into a Platonic line in which beauty (and usually art) takes on a metaphysical significance or an Aristotelian line in which both art and beauty are viewed as being emotionally important. With that said, here are the texts that I've found most engaging from a multitude of different viewpoints:

>Plato: Republic Book X, Ion, Symposium:
Republic X and Ion could be unfairly summarized through the above description of Plato but I find that the Symposium, while not technically an aesthetic text, has immense relevance for aesthetics due to the intimate connection between beauty and love. Plus, I love to analyze Aristophanes' speech and circumstances in the dialogue in the greater context of the meaning of comedy.

>Aristotle: Poetics:
Basically what I've said above, but much of literary criticism and theory is based off the Poetics (at least the theory that isn't based off of Saussure's 19th century linguistics is). I personally find Northrop Frye's revival of Aristotle's emphasis on the position of the hero relative to the reader very important.

>Plotinus: Enneads, Book I, Sixth Tractate:
For me, this is where aesthetics gets really interesting. Plotinus is, of course, working in a Platonic tradition but adds so much more through his moving past the concept of beauty as being a relation of parts to wholes into a conception of unified beauty found in the equally unified soul (another callback to the Republic). Plotinus continues to essentially define the Platonic tradition is aesthetics moving forward.

I'll just go ahead and say that there wasn't much aesthetics theory in the middle ages. A lot of people will disagree with me here, and there certainly wasn't none, but aesthetics as a mode of inquiry will always be attached to the Greek world and the astounding Greek capacity for image-creation, tragedy, performance, and personification.

Johann Gottfried Herder

>>20106471
Moving on to the birth of Aesthetics proper in the 18th century:

>Shaftesbury and Baumgarten:
Incredibly important, especially to someone like Roger Scruton, but I don't really feel comfortable enough to discuss them definitively past recognizing their historical importance.

>Hume: Of the Standard of Taste
This is really the first attempt at creating an objective criteria for judging a work of art, importantly basing it off of common perception from a group of ideal critics. This standard of objectivity will reappear many times albeit in considerable different forms, particularly in Samuel Alexander (Whose work is highly underrated - I recommend his book Beauty and Other Forms of Value).

>Burke: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime
This is incredibly important, as it introduces the concept of the sublime into the discourse of European aesthetics (this can be traced back to Rome in Longinus' essay On the Sublime, which I probably should have included in the last post, if only for his analysis of Sappho 31). Very simply put, the sublime is the feeling evoked from feeling terror from a safe distance. The sublime is large and overbearing, while the beautiful is small, docile, and agreeable. Also, if you like Scruton's political views, you have to read some of Burke's political writings, which are the foundation of modern conservatism and relate in very interesting ways to his aesthetics.

>Kant: Critique of Judgement
Absolutely foundational. I can't even begin to summarize this book as Kant is a synthesizer and takes on basically every question in aesthetics with incredibly rigor and detail.

>Schiller: On the Aesthetic Education of Man
I like it. Schiller is halfway between poet and philosopher. There certainly is a lot to learn from him but I'm mainly mentioning this because it's a comfy read.

>Hegel: Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics
Very important, especially because of Hegel's historical outlook and notion of Spirit in art (this returns in Danto). Hegel also discusses the aesthetic revelations of Romanticism, which for him is spirit freed of form in art in the endless war between spirit and form for Hegel.

>Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy:
I would supplement this with a reading of Walter Kauffman's Tragedy and Philosophy and Nietzsche's own Attempt at Self-Criticism, but I absolutely love this book. Nietzsche comes the closest to overcoming the previously mentioned Platonic Aristotelian distinction through his recognition of their historical development in the Apollonian and Dionysian.

>>20106539
Some more modern texts:

>Clive Bell: Art
This is the most sophisticated articulation of the Platonic view of both beauty and, arguably, art that we have been granted in the modern day. While formalists following Bell have often been characterized as dull and soulless, you can clearly se Bell's passion for the transcendent abilities of beauty conveyed by significant form.

>Ananda Coomaraswamy: Is Art a Superstition, or a Way of Life:
One of the most searing criticisms that I have every read of the modern world and sensibility. Coomaraswamy, proving his superiority over provincially minded postcolonialists, boldly argues for the objective spiritual superiority of early artmaking.

>>20106471
>>20106539
>>20106569
In addition to these (which you can mostly find in the Hofsdtader and Kuhns book "Philosophies of Art and Beauty" that a different anon mentioned), I'd recommend checking out some of Frank Sibley's papers if you're interested in the more contemporary analytic tradition of aesthetics. "Aesthetic Concepts" in particular had a big impact on the field.

>>20106471
>>20106539
>>20106569
>>20106586
fugg thank you so much anon

>>20106486
Expertly executed boob flaunting. Superb aesthetics

>>20104496
>evolution/the reality of being alive exerts at least some influence on the stimuli we perceive as beautiful
This is exactly the reason why aesthetics applies only to ART. Nature is a priori beautiful because our brains are wired into this. It has nothing to do with beauty per se - it's a topic of neurobiology.
Sometimes we find unnatural things beautiful (like Basquiat). Sometimes old and sick people can be beautilful.

>>20104924
Okey, I guess. I just think that Eco is an essentialist. His book is not analytical enough (for me).

>>20105614
See my comment above. Nature is unaesthetic. Woman's breasts are pseudoaesthetic. However, we can judge nature and breasts when we put them into canvas.

>>20107087
>This is exactly the reason why aesthetics applies only to ART.

Does it though? I feel like pre-moderns pretty regularly made aesthetic judgements about what they saw in nature.

>>20107117
whole swathes of aesthetic theory are devoted to the sublime, which generally comes from appreciating nature

>>20101425
>Where do I start with aesthetics?
look at something, touch something, listen to something
enjoy it

>>20107117
>>20107132
>pre-moderns pretty regularly made aesthetic judgements about what they saw in nature
Pre-moderns attributed mythical properties to their psyche.
They thought that "big-booba good" because soul feels the call of the sublime or whatever.
Now we know that "big-booba good" because "pee-pee goes hard". Golden section is wired into our brains. Symmetry appreciation is wired into our brains. Green colour is good for us.

When we put nature into canvas we create a whole new dimension. We can talk about so called "aura" of the art (I took this from Adorno, even thought I don't like him) - author, intent, social curcumstances, values of author, values of onlooker, general zeitgeist. All these things create art.

>>20107250
Sill me.
I generalize pre-moderns too much - certanly not ALL of them are the same. There were different people with different thought. Sorry for being profane. I hope you got my idea.
I suggest you read any modern academical aesthetics book.