Aesthetics in Europe and the Americas

A striking development in aesthetics after the eighteenth century was a gradual shift of interest from inquiries into beauty per se and "judgments of taste" to specifically the philosophy of art. Nineteenth-(and late-eighteenth-) century aesthetics was largely dominated by German philosophers, including Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805), Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854), and Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). A way of writing about art developed that was distinctively philosophical and that contrasted with explorations of art, however theoretical, by artists themselves. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the magisterial Lectures on Fine Art, given in the 1820s by the paramount German aesthetician Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel (1770–1831), a work comparable in importance and influence to Kant's Critique of Judgment. Hegel afforded art a central place in his metaphysical system of absolute idealism, locating it, along with religion and philosophy, as one of the modes of "absolute spirit" whereby the mind comes to know itself. Hegel retold the history of art in terms of changing relations between spiritual content (idea) and sensuous medium: in symbolic art, characterized by Egyptian and Indian art, the medium dominates the idea; in classical art, from ancient Greece, idea and medium are in perfect balance; in romantic art, from Christian art onward, the idea reaches its ascendancy, manifesting "infinite subjectivity." Hegel proposed a hierarchy of individual arts, from architecture to poetry, and suggested, somewhat obscurely, that the capacity for further development had been exhausted (the "death of art").

Hegel showed par excellence how a philosophy of art could be fully integrated into wider philosophical speculation, and increasingly in the history of aesthetics theories of the arts (or of beauty more generally) would come to be discriminated in terms of the philosophical frameworks within which they are couched. Idealism, either Kantian or Hegelian, had a major impact well into the twentieth century, notably in works like the Italian Benedetto Croce's Estetica come scienze dell' espressione e linguistica generale (1902; Aesthetics as science of expression and general linguistics) and the English Robin George Collingwood's Principles of Art (1937). Both Collingwood and Croce identified the true work of art not with its physical manifestation but with an inner state of mind seeking expression. Other philosophical outlooks produced their own distinctive aesthetic theories. Phenomenologists, such as Roman Ingarden (1893–1970) and Mikel Dufrenne (1910–1995), give attention to the properties of an "aesthetic object" in relation to the acts of consciousness of artist and audience. John Dewey (1859–1952), the American pragmatist philosopher, in one of the most important contributions to twentieth-century aesthetics, Art As Experience (1934), stresses the origin of art in the everyday world of human action. For Marxist aestheticians, the context in which art must be explained is social and economic, a complete rejection of the premises of the idealist. Contemporary analytical aesthetics, that is, aesthetics influenced by the developments of logic and conceptual analysis in the early to middle parts of the twentieth century, gives less focus to the social or psychological aspects of art as to questions about what kind of entities art works are and what kinds of properties they possess.