What does Aesthetics mean to us?

“We are slaves of our will: a blind desire, an impulse devoid of foundation and motives. But there is a way to free ourselves from this.” Arthur Schoppenheur

Photo by Blake Verdoorn on Unsplash

Questions of what reality consists of -and how we know it- have been the subject of philosophical debates since antiquity, when the so-called Pre-Socratic philosophers described their theories on this matter. For the purpose that concerns us on this occasion, we will refer to the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), who started from Kant’s theory to develop his philosophical model. In it, the definition of our understanding of art is considered one of the deepest in the history of the great thinkers of the West.

Schopenhauer starts from the Kantian model of our thinking within a pre-existing framework. All our interpretation of reality goes through a structure of space and time. To explain the phenomena, a cause-effect relationship is used. Within this mental structure, our world of things is learned through our senses. Schopenhauer will add that the engine of our lives is not rational but consists of a “will” and that human beings will always be slaves to it and its insatiable thirst: “a blind desire, an impulse devoid of foundation and motives.”

But there is a way to free ourselves from this slavery to which our will continually submits us: aesthetic contemplation. Here, the mind is dissociated from the space-time structure and its cause-effect relationships to contemplate a world apart. Here, individuality and its egoism disappear, and our material desire yields to the experience of appreciation of what stimulates our thought: our self moves from a reality in which we are subject to the daily pressures and torments to a timeless experience. In it, our mind contemplates and reflects on our interpretation of beauty.

Another characteristic of art is that it is available to everyone, regardless of race, social status, or religion: the innocent smile of a child can be equally appreciated by a king, a high executive of a company, or a beggar. Like everything else, it requires a space where we are ready to contemplate instead of judging or dealing with our concerns.

Art and nature, including human nature, speak to us through a universal language: a musical expression, a look, a gesture; they can express a feeling in a way that a sentence, in any language, spoken or written, can never match.