Introduction to Art History
What kind of knowledge do works of art provide? Is this knowledge different from other forms of thought? What kind of knowledge could be provided by constructing a 'history' of such phenomena? What would a history of such objects consist of?. What significance would it have?
Although the notion of sensory knowledge as inferior to rational thinking had a long tradition in European theology, philosophy, and psychology (a tradition which is still alive), in the middle of the eighteenth century the argument began to be made that such knowledge had a perfection of its own, which in its way was analogous to that of logic or reason. It came to be argued that there were in fact two distinct but analogous kinds of knowing, and that in consequence there should be two kinds of theory or 'science' of knowledge corresponding to each: logic and aesthetics.
The first notable appearance of the term aesthetics in its modern sense was as the title of a 600-page book written in Latin and published in 1750 by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, the Aesthetica. 1 It was coined to denote a special cognitive domain, that of sensual thinking, which he argued was distinct from rational or logical thought. Baumgarten's new 'science of sensible knowledge' would deal as fully with truth as did logic, but truth in so far as it is known through the senses. For Baumgarten, sensible knowledge was a faculty of the mind that he termed an analogon rationis—an analogue of reason: in short, a unique mode of reasoning in its own right.
His views departed from those of the philosophers of the previous generation such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) or his disciple, Christian Wolff (1679-1754), who held that the difference between sensation and thought is that the latter is lucid whilst the former is confused, and that sense perception cannot be made lucid without transforming it into thought (and, by implication, into systematic discourse). In other words, as a 'lower' form of cognition, sensation was taken to be but a primitive or preliminary stage of the same knowledge that was imagined to be represented most clearly in rational or logical thought. Baumgarten argued against this hierarchy of modes of thought, and went on to consider what the nature of beauty and of fine art might be within the framework of a non-hierarchized cognition.
Several things were at stake here, not least of which was the canonical idea of art's function being that of 'imitating nature'—a paradigm that underlay attitudes toward art down to and including Baumgarten's contemporary, Winckelmann. To perceive beauty, in Baumgarten's terms, was to perceive perfection both in things and in people (the latter constituting moral perfection). We conceive of this beauty not rationally but by taste—by which was meant extremely clear sense perception. In these terms, the fine arts were analogous to fine sciences: their aim was not to 'imitate' nature (even its most perfect examples) but rather to create perfect wholes out of indistinct images made extremely clear; in short, to create sensory knowledge. One of the results of these innovations was the idea that sense perception could be perfected without turning it into logical or rational thought. The idea that sensual knowledge could have its own perfection—and further, that an aesthetic judgement about beauty or beautiful objects could have a validity for persons other than the individual making it—became the cornerstone of aesthetic philosophy as it was to develop in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and provided the foundation and immediate background for the Critique of Judgement by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), published in 1790.
Below are partner websites:
Seattle Washington for sale real estate - Offers Seattle Washington for sale real estate listings and MLS, as well as information on first time home buyer grants programs.