Delineating beauty: On form and the boundaries of the aesthetic

Abstract

Philosophical aesthetics has recently been expanding its purview—with exciting work on everyday aesthetics, somaesthetics, gustatory aesthetics, and the aesthetics of imperceptibilia like mathematics and human character—reclaiming territory that was lost during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the discipline begun concentrating almost exclusively on the philosophy of art and restricted the aesthetic realm to the distally perceptible. Yet there remains considerable reluctance towards acknowledging the aesthetic character of many of these objects. This raises an important question—partly made salient again by the ongoing expansion of the aesthetic domain, and partly by the fact that many still seem resistant to this aesthetic diversification—which aestheticians seem to avoid: what, if anything, constrains the scope of beauty or the aesthetic? I argue that form, construed as comprising a degree, however minimal, of experienceable complexity, is necessary and sufficient for an object's candidature for the possession of aesthetic properties. Such a condition serves to discriminate between attempts to expand the scope of the aesthetic that are legitimate and those that are not. If correct, my view suggests that the aesthetic realm, though not limitless, is very broad indeed—but this, I think, is as it should be.

The unexplored territory of aesthetic needs and the development of the Aesthetic Needs Scale

“…An aesthetic attitude, at least subjectively, determines what is aesthetic and what is not for each person [ 16 ]. Since nearly every element of reality has the potential to be perceived in an aesthetic manner [ 17 ], the question arises whether aesthetic needs are a homogeneous construct, a continuum of a general demand for beauty and other aesthetic qualities, or whether aesthetic needs are best divided into semi-discrete domains. Machniewicz [ 18 ] deliberated on the aesthetics of everyday life, assuming that every object can be seen as aesthetic, and every work of art is an aesthetic object, but not every aesthetic object is art.…”