Aesthetics is a philosophy of beauty and expediency

The very concept of aesthetics came to us from ancient Greece. When ancient philosophers first pondered on various categories and definitions of human activity, they gave such a name to reflections about the beautiful and ugly, and also the perception of this phenomenon by feelings. Later they began to believe that aesthetics is a special theory about what beauty is. They also pondered on what forms it can take, whether it exists in nature or only in creativity. It can be said that this teaching as a discipline was born simultaneously with philosophy and is a part of it. Pythagoreans, "combining algebra and harmony," combined the concepts of beauty and numbers. Aesthetics is a value. Representations of the ancient world from myth to categorization

Ancient Greek philosophers attached special importance to the idea of the origin of the world from chaos and the desire for harmony. Therefore, their aesthetics belonged to categories of ontology. So, the macro- and microcosm, that is, man and the universe, should have been similar to each other, including beauty. The mythology of antiquity also corresponded to this picture of the world. Sophists have noticed that aesthetic representations often depend on the person himself and his perception. Therefore, they put aesthetics in a number of value categories that constitute the foundation of the individual. Socrates, on the contrary, suggested that aesthetics is an ethical concept, and immorality is ugly. His ideas were developed in many respects by Plato, who noticed that the ideas of the beautiful we receive "from above, as if recalling". They come from the world of the gods. And, finally, in Aristotle we find the whole theory that beauty and creativity require philosophical comprehension and scientific definition. He first proposed such a term as "categories of aesthetics", and introduced them into the scientific revolution. Aristotle distinguishes the main terms in which one can express the idea of creativity: "beautiful", "sublime", "ugly", "base", "comic", "tragic". He also tried to establish links between these categories and their interdependence.

The development of aesthetic teachings in Europe until modern times

During the Middle Ages, especially the early, the Christianized teaching of Plato dominated that the aesthetics originated from God, and therefore it must be "inscribed" in theology and subordinated to it. Thomas Aquinas develops the theory of beauty and expediency in terms of Aristotle. He reflects on how the categories of aesthetics are called to lead a person to God, and also how they manifest themselves in the created nature. In the Renaissance, the latter theory became very popular, because the search for harmony in nature with the help of mathematics and its expression by means of images and words became the main method of the philosophy of beauty. Thus, the aesthetics of art arose in the definition of the brilliant Leonardo da Vinci. In the 19 th century, three theories dominated, which fought among themselves for their popularity among the then intellectuals. First of all, it is a romantic concept that claimed that aesthetics is a gift of nature to a person, and you just need to be able to hear her voice in order to embody it in your work. Then Hegelian philosophy asserted that the theory of the beautiful is one of the forms of the development of the absolute idea, and it has certain historical stages of becoming, as well as morality. And, finally, Kant's ideas that aesthetics is our conception of nature as something that has an expediency. This picture is formed in our head, and we ourselves bring it into the world around us. In fact, aesthetics come from the "realm of freedom," not nature. At the end of the 19th century, the traditional directions of the theory of beauty come crashing, but this is the subject of a completely different conversation.