Traditional Aesthetics of Western Traditional Aesthetics

The traditional aesthetics of the West generally refers to the aesthetics from ancient Greece (sixth century BC) until the nineteenth-century German classical aesthetics. It includes:Ancient Greco-Roman aesthetics, medieval mystical aesthetics, Renaissance humanist aesthetics, seventeenth-decade neoclassical aesthetics, eighteenth-century Enlightenment aesthetics, and German classical aesthetics.

Ancient Greco-Roman Era

The Ancient Greco-Roman Era (sixth century B.C.E.-fifth century A.D.) was the formative period of Western aesthetics, and most of the aesthetes of the period dealt with and explored aesthetics while exploring philosophical issues, defining the nature of beauty.

Pythagoras believed that beauty is harmony consisting of certain quantitative relationships, because he believed that the essence of the universe is number. Heraclitus believed that beauty is harmony and emphasized that beauty, like all things, has its harmony determined by the struggle of opposites. Democritus believed that the beginnings of existence are atoms, that the soul of man is also composed of atoms, and that beauty is still accomplished by this atomic composition of divine reason, and that he shifted his gaze from the former beauty of nature to the beauty of man himself and the creation of man's beauty-art, encompassing the idea of the unity of natural and anthroposophical ontology, and implicitly, the school of the Wise Men the tendency of the anthroposophical ontology. Socrates, on the basis of the School of the Wise, highlighted anthropological ontology and epistemology, arguing that beauty and goodness are identical, and that beauty is that which conforms to a certain end. Plato, the founder of ancient Greek aesthetics, criticized and sorted out the previous schools of aesthetics and put forward his idea of "beauty itself" in the Great Hippias. For the first time, he consciously put forward and tried to answer the question of "what is beauty" from a high philosophical level, and thought that the beauty of beauty lies in the beauty itself, that is, the essence of beauty lies in the idea of beauty, but it did not oppose that the beauty lies in the form, and on the contrary, it tended to be more inclined to this point of view in his later works. It is because of the richness of Plato's conception of the essence of beauty that later Western aesthetes, when discussing the essence of beauty, actually interpreted his ideas differently, which had a great historical impact in the history of Western aesthetics. Aristotle, based on the ontology of "four causes" and the epistemology of "theory of mind", believed that beauty and goodness are united, and that the main form of beauty is "order, proportionality, and clarity", that is, "wholeness". The main form of beauty is "order, proportionality and clarity", i.e. "unity". Horace was a stereotypist of Aristotle's aesthetics, and he followed Aristotle's view that the beauty of poetic art (art) lies in its wholeness, believing that the creation of art must conform to the principles of "consistency" and "unity". Plotin, the founder of Neoplatonism, combined Plato's theory of Ideas with Eastern Divine Harmony to form Neoplatonist aesthetics of a theological nature, believing that the Idea, i.e., God, is the unity and source of truth, goodness, and beauty, and that because God constantly "radiates" (overflows) beauty, it is the source of beauty, and that it is the source of beauty, and it is the source of beauty. Because God constantly "radiates" (overflows) beauty, all natural things have beauty; the mind is the closest to God, so the beauty of the mind is higher than the beauty of things; the reason why art is beautiful is also due to the mind to give it to the rationale, the artist in the creation of the artist before entering the heart of the beauty of the heart in his composition of the a priori.

The Medieval Period

The Medieval Period (fifth century-fourteenth century) was a period of stagnation in the development of Western aesthetics, which was based on Greco-Roman aesthetics and became the slave of theology.

St. Augustine's patristic aesthetics, based on Neoplatonism, synthesized the views of Pythagoras, Aristotle, and others. In his view, beauty is the proper proportion of parts, together with a pleasing color; in other words, beauty is wholeness and harmony, though this wholeness and and who has its roots in God. Thomas Aquinas's scholastic aesthetics held that things are beautiful because God dwells in them. According to him, there are three requirements for beauty: first, completeness or perfection, because anything that is mutilated is ugly; second, it should be in proper proportion or harmony; and third, distinctness, so that what is distinct is recognized as beautiful. Therefore, according to him, whatever is pleasant to see at a glance is called beautiful.

The Renaissance

The Renaissance (fourteenth century - sixteenth century) is a transitional period, the humanists' theory of beauty is in opposition to the process of the medieval theological theories of beauty and development, which opposes the God-based theory of beauty, and promote the human-centered theory of beauty.

Shakespeare regarded human beings as the essence of the universe and the spirit of all things, Italian Alberti regarded human beings as composed of components that are not comparable to anything rigid, Leonardo da Vinci recognized that the human face is charming and gentle in the evening or on cloudy days, and Lorenzo Valla believed that beauty is the basic gift to the human body. Humanists generally believe that beauty is found in natural things, and that beauty is closely related to the properties of things such as proportion, harmony, and luster. For example, Alberti believed that there are three elements of architectural beauty, namely, number, completeness, and layout; Da Vinci believed that beauty is a fixed form of harmony; Tasso believed that beauty is a work of nature; and Aniolo Ferenzola believed that beauty is nothing else but natural ordered harmony.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

The neo-classical aesthetics of the seventeenth century and the Enlightenment aesthetics of the eighteenth century, in the process of the development of Western aesthetics of aesthetic thinking in a turning point. Philosophy in this period, the rise of rationalism and empiricism two opposing currents of thought, the center of philosophical research has been shifted from the metaphysical to the study of mankind's own cognitive ability, that is, the history of what is called the epistemological turn.

Descartes, in his "I think, therefore I am," examined the "in" from the perspective of "thinking". The essence of beauty is also moved from the ontological scope to the epistemological scope to be examined. He believed that beauty is not in the objective thing itself, but a relationship between human judgment and the object: since people's judgments differ greatly from each other, we cannot say that there is a definite scale of beauty and pleasure. Bouillot, the French neoclassical legislator, was a great devotee of Descartes. He revered reason and took it as the criterion for everything, believing that beauty can only come from reason and must conform to it.

The eighteenth century was a time when aesthetics grew rapidly and declared its independence. This period was the era of Western Enlightenment. Empiricist aesthetics was formed in England, and rationalist aesthetics was formed in France, Germany, and Italy on the continent, creating a situation in which the empiricists and the rationalists confronted each other in aesthetics.

Francis Bacon laid the foundation of British empiricist aesthetics provided the law of thought and methodological basis for British empiricist aesthetics. Hobbes, on the basis of Bacon's principle that all knowledge is sought in the senses, regarded beauty as an inner sensation, though this sensation is caused by the sum of certain objective characteristics of an object or phenomenon. Locke believed that beauty appeals to the imagination and can be attained without false thinking. Shaftesbury and Hutchison proposed an inner sense theory of beauty. They believe that people have the innate ability to recognize beauty, ugliness, goodness and evil, i.e., the inner senses, the inner eye, the inner sense of beat, people have an innate sense of beauty, i.e., the "sixth sense". Hugh Moore asserts that beauty is not an attribute of the object, but a pleasure caused by the object. Bock, on the other hand, believes that beauty and the sublime are objective attributes, but they are related to the cognitive function and social communication instincts of human beings.

Montesquieu argues that we say something is beautiful when we feel pleasure at the sight of it without realizing that it is of any use in the present, and he insists that reason is the basis of beauty. Voltaire believed that the word "beauty" should be used to call a thing, and he regarded beauty as closely related to human emotion and cognition, and the higher beauty should be in accordance with the rational understanding, while the beauty related to the sensual understanding is lower and indeterminate. The most representative French Enlightenment aesthetician was Diderot. His theory of the nature of beauty is "beauty in relation". He pointed out that what we consider to constitute beauty is relationship.

Baumgarten inherited and utilized the philosophical ideas and aesthetic views of Leibniz and Wolf, founded aesthetics, and put aesthetics formally within the scope of epistemology. He took Leibniz's and Wolf's idea of "beauty in perfection" and further developed it, proposing the first definition of aesthetics: aesthetics (the theory of free art, lower epistemology, the art of thinking in terms of beauty, the art of rationality and similarity) is the science of perceptual cognition. The aim of aesthetics is the perfection of sense perception (perfection of sense perception). Baumgarten formalized aesthetics within the scope of epistemology and explicitly stated that beauty is the perfection of sense perception, which should be considered an epoch-making event in the history of the development of Western aesthetics. In his History of Ancient Art, Winckelmann discusses beauty, arguing that it is formed precisely by the characteristics of harmony, simplicity and unity. The painter Anton Raphael Mensch defined his concept of beauty precisely in terms of the perfection of perception. Johann Georg Suljan, on the other hand, united beauty with aesthetic interest on the basis of cognition. Lessing, too, was always inseparable from human cognition when he spoke of beauty. He argues that whatever we find to be beautiful in a work of art, Fonsi, is found to be beautiful not directly by the eye, but by the imagination through the eye. Herder, on the other hand, called for the study of beauty from the objective side, believing that beauty is really a sensual phenomenon, but he also emphasized the sensory basis of beauty, believing that beauty must be perceived by the human senses, and that such senses are guided and accompanied by thought, and are therefore a kind of "double reflection"

Classical Aesthetics in Germany

Germany Classical aesthetics, starting from Kant, through Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Feuerbach, on the one hand, inherited the Enlightenment aesthetics, in the epistemological scope of the unity of sensibility (British empiricism) and rationality (continental rationalism), and on the other hand, opened up the exploration of beauty with the dominant aspect of the anthroposophical ontology.

Kant sought to synthesize the British empiricists and the Continental rationalists, and further excluded aesthetics from the scope of epistemology, placing it within the scope of the emotions, and also arguing that beauty has nothing to do with concepts, has nothing to do with utilitarian ends, involves only pleasure and displeasure, and that pleasure, and therefore beauty, arises only when the pure form conforms to subjective purposiveness. In Kant, too, beauty does not belong to the moral sphere of practical reason (will), but is merely an intermediary factor and transitional link in the transition from cognition to morality, and beauty is at best a symbol of morality. Schiller defines beauty as "freedom in phenomena" in his "Brief on Beauty" and as "living image" in his "Brief on Aesthetic Education," i.e., the object of playful impulses combining sensual and rational impulses. Hegel took Schiller's aesthetics as the practical starting point of his aesthetics, absorbed the shell of Schelling's aesthetic system, and accomplished his own huge aesthetic system of absolute idealism. Hegel defines beauty as "the sensuous manifestation of the idea". Thus, in Hegel, beauty is not only the unity of sensibility and rationality, form and content, object and subject, objectivity and subjectivity, which fulfills the historical mission of synthesizing the continental rationalism and the British empiricism, but also the beauty becomes the result of the self-contradictory movement of the absolute idea, i.e., the creation of the objectified human spirit and the result of its exteriorization, and the beauty has the nature of liberating human beings.