Aesthetics Philosophers

Hegel
Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel (1770-1831), early 19th century German philosopher who had a profound influence on the course of western philosophy and on many other aspects of modern western culture. Hegel was perhaps the first western philosopher to take time, change and history seriously, in the sense that he took them to be essential to what philosophy studies, rather than a distractionfrom the realm of the ideal, the essential and the rational. In that respect he was the very opposite of Plato. At the same time he was an idealist, which means (in his case) that he thought that all that truly existed was rationality. In his famous words, "the real is the rational and the rational is the real.

Hegel was an art lover and a student of the arts, and developed a more completephilosophy of art than most philosophers before him. In keeping with his emphasis on the historical development of ideas and of consciousness, he claimed that:
1) Art expresses the spirit of particular cultures, as well as that of individual artists and the general human spirit.
2) There is progress in art (no surprise here, as Hegel thought that history in general was moving forward to a climax).He was inclined to think that artistic expression and artistic consciousness were a kind of climax of the history of the human spirit, and that art reveals truth in a direct, intuitive way.

The three main stages of art history recognized by Hegel in his lectures on Aesthetics are symbolic, classical, and romantic art. Each of these is defined by the relationship beween idea and form that iscommon within it.

Perhaps the most famous of Hegel's claims about art is that art comes to an end. As Spirit reaches its full self-realization, the need for images and symbols withers away, and with it goes the need for any art that uses physical means to express itself. This "end of art" thesis is puzzling in somewhat the same way that his "end of history" thesis itself is puzzling. AlthoughHegel does not seem to have meant by it that art would stop altogether; but rather that the need for it, and its role in the development of spirit would be fulfilled.

Hutcheson
Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746) (8 August 1694 – 8 August 1746) was a philosopher born in Ireland to a family of Scottish Presbyterians who became one of the founding fathers of the Scottish Enlightenment. helped moveaesthetics from theories about Beauty and Harmony, as characteristics of the world, to theories about the experience of the viewer. This eighteenth century shift is the source of all the theories about "the aesthetic sense" that have developed since the beginning of the eighteenth century. Hutcheson's philosophy was based on the empiricist thinking of John Locke, from whom he got the notion that allof our ideas come from experience. The idea of Beauty, according to Hutcheson, is actually the idea of a certain experience of pleasure that we have when we look at or listen to certain things. In other words, Beauty is in the Eye (or at least, in the Mind) of the beholder. The sense of beauty Hutcheson and his contemporaries called Taste. That which arouses the pleasurable experience we callBeauty, according to Hutcheson, is the perception of "unity in difference".

Hutcheson distinguished between absolute Beauty, the kind of beauty to be found in nature, and relative Beauty, the beauty that characterizes art. The difference between the two is that art is imitative, and its beauty is produced by the similarity and contrast between the imitation and its original.

Hutcheson's theoryraises a number of questions. Two of them are:

- How can your taste be better or worse, more or less "fine"? Isn't it just your taste, and you like whatever you like? Yet Hutcheson did think that taste could be more or less fine.

- Hutcheson needs some way to distinguish nature from art; otherwise, using his approach, there will be no difference between them. (You can appreciate a...