Scene:
Aesthetics, in its inaugural moments, is configured to the extent that capitalism and secularization move away from the criteria of valorization of previous religious and political powers. Aesthetic concepts began to play a central role in the constitution of the dominant ideology, that is, of eighteenth and nineteenth century capitalism. Therefore, the aesthetic is a bourgeois concept, in the historical sense; a forged concept that took shape throughout the Enlightenment[i].
In this sense, the permanence of aesthetics is expressed in various ways: from our way of living, in our language, in our bearing, in the way we dress, eat, worship the divine and personalities; in the way of legitimizing power, showing off triumph or remembering the dead. However, the main role of aesthetics in our common life is through the construction and presentation of social identities[ii].
Aesthetics, since the second half of the 20th century, lacks epistemological consistency and is not located in a cultural theory with a broad consensus. There is a dispersion of senses in it that make it unattainable. It remains, this, as an open area where they are searched for: non-separated forms of the types of function; representations interested in knowledge, even, of what does not exist; experiences unconcerned with transcendence and interested in possibilities in a world without pre-established norms. In this sense, aesthetics is a set of reflections, disseminated, on the so-called artistic practices and not a discipline[iii].
Its use is so extensive that we all know that, in our environment, the term aesthetics is used in the genre of treatments that are dispensed in beauty or aesthetic salons, as they are called. That is why Danto’s anecdote does not seem far-fetched, that a young assistant professor at a Canadian university told him «that whenever she sees an aesthetics position advertised in the philosophy department, she cannot help but think that they are looking for someone who knows how to do the manicure” [iv].
Eagleton points out that the term aesthetic, in Baumgarten’s formulation, does not refer to art, but to the Greek aisthesis, that is, to human sensation and perception. In contrast to the domain of conceptual thinking[v]. According to Baumgarten, «in order to direct the lower cognitive faculties, there can be a science of sensitive knowledge of something»[vi], that is, the aesthetic science of objects of sensitive knowledge.
However, this science that tried to establish itself in the study of human sensitivity ends up being reduced to the description, evaluation and classification of objects called works of art, and ends up justifying what needs it least: beauty. This means that the esthetologists who had to deal with the science of sensitive knowledge forgot about this end and were dazzled by art and beauty. And they searched in the artistic and academic opinion for what is and what is not art[vii].
And in this we are. Perhaps for this reason, Passmore said that aesthetics had become a boring discipline, since the meaning of beauty lies in enjoying it and not in analyzing it[viii].
Aesthetics is a cultural, social, communicative, political, economic, philosophical, historical, anthropological, cognitive, semiotic and even neurological issue, which is why it has become a mixed bag and for which it is often difficult to define. since several disciplines overlap in it. In this context, aesthetics refers to various types of ambiguous and difficult-to-define phenomena, through the procedure of necessary and sufficient reasons.
What to say then:
By its Greek etymology, Αίσθησις, aesthetics refers specifically to the subject of sensation and perception. In Plato’s time, aesthetics only refers to sensation, to the body. For the third century AD. C. the term in addition to sensation also acquires the meaning of perception, a higher degree than sensation. And so it is conceived in the rest of the time. Aesthetics does not describe any particular category of objects, neither of the beautiful nor of the artistic, even though the latter are the meanings established by aesthetic theory and art history.
What is the sensation, the perception, the corporal sensible. It invokes the family of terms derived from sensibility, among these we have: feeling, sensation, sensual, sensitive, sensitive, sentimental, sensory, sensational, common sense, sense of direction, sense or perceived and the felt or affective. And who feels all this is the subject.
In the ancient meaning of the term aesthetics as in the Kantian conception, what is involved is the subject and its relationship with the world through sensitivity and openness to life. What is at stake is the receptivity of the subject, as Kant expressed it.
The subject, agent of sensation and perception, is the starting point of different disciplines, among which aesthetics is one of them. However, the difference lies in the point of arrival. Aesthetics focuses on the attraction or repulsion that the subject has towards an object. And in what does such attraction or repulsion lie? in receptivity or openness to life, that is, in esthesis.
So we have to understand aesthetics as the study of the conditions of esthetics. Understanding by esthesis, the sensitivity or the condition of openness, permeability or receptivity of the subject to the context in which he is immersed. It is that condition of the living being of being open to the world.
Esthesis is the effect of the sensible condition that gives possibility to the opening of the world. Well, the subject opens to the world and becomes alert to its oscillations, or opens to life to nourish itself or closes to protect itself. In this sense, he is an aesthetic subject.
Whoever feels and expresses is the artist subject through a language that we call artistic; who feels and interprets is the spectator subject. It is not the work of art but the subjects that have aesthetics, the work is the means by which it is expressed and interpreted.
The subject that is aesthetic is the one that apprehends through the aesthetic experience. It is he who establishes a relationship with the object, which has made it aesthetic. Why has the object become aesthetic? Because in the subject there has been an opening to sensitivity and experience with that object; later, the rooting takes place, the pledge, as Mandoki says.
Without esthetics, the object does not become aesthetic. When the opening occurs, the object is perceived aesthetically, therefore it acquires a new character that qualitatively alters it for the subject. The object before that opening is not valued aesthetically; it is something alien, indifferent or of any other nature.
In this opening, intellectual, affective and sensory activities come together, it is a complex process. There is no emotional purity in aesthetic appreciation. We have, then, that aesthetics is the search for ways in which esthesis manifests itself, in how it occurs with respect to the world.
[i] Cfr. Eagleton Terry, La estética como ideología. Madrid, Editorial Trotta, 2006, pp. 54-58.
[ii] Mandoki Katya. Prosaica I, Estética cotidiana y juegos de la cultura. México, CONACULTA, 2005, p.4
[iii] Cfr. García Canclini, Nestor. “A qué llamamos estética y de quien necesitamos emanciparnos”. Estética y emancipación, fantasma, fetiche y fantasmagoría. AA. VV., México, Siglo XXI Editores, p. 267.
[iv] Cfr. Danto Arthur. El abuso de la belleza. Barcelona, Editorial Paídos, 2005, p. 127
[v] Cfr. Eagleton Terry, Ob. Cit., p. 65.
[vi] Baumgarten Alexander, Estética Breve, Buenos Aires, Centro de Investigaciones Filosóficas, p. 13.
[vii] Cfr. Mandoki Katya. Ob cit. Pp. 143-144.
[viii] Cfr. Passmore, John. 1951. “The Dreariness of Aesthetics” Mind, 60.
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