Aesthetics, History of [addendum]
Twentieth-Century Aesthetics
Aesthetics continued to be intensively cultivated in all the main schools of twentieth-century philosophy. The following survey emphasizes work that continues to be of interest at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It will focus first on the Anglo-American tradition, including continental work that has fed into it, and then will consider other work in the continental tradition.
Anglo-American Aesthetics
Naturalism, Organicism, Pragmatism
One main line of twentieth-century aesthetics begins with George Santayana's The Sense of Beauty of 1896. Santayana's book was a renewal of the empiricism and naturalism of the eighteenth century undertaken in opposition to the incorporation of aesthetics into speculative metaphysics by philosophers such as Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Hegel. Santayana held that beauty is "value positive, intrinsic, and objectified": a pleasurable emotion that is "pure gain" and that we regard as if it were a property of its object even though it depends upon our own response. The idea that beauty is objectified pleasure is found in writers from Hutcheson to Kant, but Santayana departed from the reductionism characteristic of many eighteenth-century authors by refusing to restrict the sources of such pleasure to a single category. He instead showed how such pleasure can arise from the materials of works of art, from their forms, and from their expression, which he defined broadly to include our emotional associations with objects.
