Aesthetics is the study of beauty, and what we find beautiful. Since beauty can have a personal property, many people refer to aesthetics instead as the study of judgments of taste and sentiment. The judgment being studied can be one which occurs based on any of the senses, sight, sound, touch, taste, or smell.

Being able to tell whether something is beautiful is based on us being able to make judgments about what our senses perceive. Aesthetics studies not only what a single person finds beautiful, but whether that sense of beauty is shared with a few people, many people, or almost all people.

Immanuel Kant, writing on aesthetics in 1790 made a distinction between what one finds agreeable, and what one finds beautiful. He stated that beauty required other people to share the sentiment, while simply being fond of something could be based on a personal quirk. In this way being agreeable to something is a personal quality, while beauty, is a quality of the thing being judged.

Later writers such as David Hume linked beauty to personal pleasure, rather than naming it just a judgment of something devoid of interaction. Kant took this idea a step further stating that pleasure may be the result of enjoying something, but for something to be beautiful it must be more than just enjoyable. The pleasure must arrive through our own reflective contemplation. For Kant, beauty has a universal quality, which makes some things beautiful to everyone, regardless of personal taste.

One thing that is important to note is that a judgment of something is based on two values, the philosophical notion of pure beauty, and the cultural values of the time and region you are in. For many philosophers such as Kant, the universal philosophical notion of beauty is the only one that describes real beauty, and taste constitutes personal, cultural fads.

Author: Joey Pebble

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