My last post today!
Perhaps we too easily think that Greek 'aisthesis' translates as Latin
'sensatio'. Just looking up 'sentio' in Short/Lewis's Latin dictionary (below
*) makes one realise that there is more to Greek aisthesis than meets the
eye,
sentĭo: I Physically. to discern by the senses; to feel, hear, see, etc.;
to perceive, be sensible of. To perceive the effects (esp. the ill effects)
of any thing; to feel, experience, suffer, undergo, endure. Of things, to
be affected or influenced by. To feel, perceive, observe, notice. To feel,
experience. To think, deem, judge, opine, imagine, suppose. To give one's
opinion concerning any thing; to vote, declare, decide. Hence, sensa:
thoughts, notions, ideas, conceptions.
-- and one wonders which of these usages of Latin 'sentio' do correspond to
this famous Greek 'aesthetic' sense that fascinated Kant.
On the other hand, one can then understand Gombrich's evasiveness if that's
what it is about being an 'aesthetician':
On being asked about "how does someone such as yourself, whose expertise
and whose life's work has been in the area of ... aesthetics, find Popper's
work of so much value?": "[A]esthetics is not really one of my main interests
—I see myself much more as a historian than as a critic or aesthetician."
But then he wrote "The Story of Art", which brought him recently to
Lit-Ideas, rather than an "Aesthetics" like Baumgarten.
Baumgarten appropriated the word "Æsthesis", which had always meant
"sensation", to mean taste or "sense" of beauty.
In so doing, Baumgarten gave the word a different significance, thereby
inventing a modern usage.
The word had been used differently since the time of the ancient Greeks and
Romans to mean the ability to receive stimulation from one or more of the
five bodily senses. In his Metaphysic, § 451, Baumgarten defined taste, in
its wider meaning, as the ability to judge according to the senses, instead
of according to the intellect.
Such a judgment of taste he saw as based on feelings of pleasure or
displeasure.
A science of aesthetics, Æsthetica, would be, for Baumgarten, a deduction
of the rules or principles of artistic or natural beauty from individual
"taste".
Baumgarten may have been motivated to respond to Pierre Bonhours' opinion,
published in a pamphlet in the late 17th century, that Germans were
incapable of appreciating art and beauty -- but the fact that Baumgarten
replied
in German (knowing Pierre Bonhours' German was rather poor -- implicating
perhaps 'incapable of appreciating innuendos and such') makes one rather want
to FALSIFY that!
Sibley famously widened the term 'aesthetic' to include the conceptual
analysis of 'ugly'. His example is that of a toad, that, he says, some people
regard as 'ugly'. (While Sibley preferred, unlike Baumgarten, to restrict
'taste' to ONE of the five senses). But then, Sibley belonged to J. L.
Austin's Play Group, based in Oxford (aka Oxford School of Ordinary Language
Philosophy) and surely you need a training in linguistic botany to appreciate
THAT!
Cheers,
Speranza
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