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 AESTHETICS, AESTHETIC THEORIES
References and further reading
Burke, D., J. Freedman, A. Frelinghuysen, et al. (Eds.).
In Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic
Movement. New York: Rizzoli in association with the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986, pp. 1–488.
Calloway, S. and L. Federle Orr (Eds.), assisted by E.
Whittaker. The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement
1860-1900. London: V&A Publishing, 2011.
Gere, C. and L. Hoskins The House Beautiful: Oscar Wilde
and the Aesthetic Interior. London: Lund Humphries and
the Geffrye Museum, 2000.
Erica Warren
See also Art Glass; Aubrey Beardsley; Collinson and Lock;
Daniel Cottier; Walter Crane; Lewis F. Day; Christopher
Dresser; Charles Eastlake; Frank Furness; E. W.
Godwin; Herter Bros.; Hukin and Heath; Interior Design;
Japonisme; Jeffrey and Co.; Owen Jones; Liberty and
Co.; Linthorpe Pottery; London 1862; Queen Anne
Revival; Reformed Gothic; John Ruskin; Arthur Silver;
Bruce Talbert; Louis Comfort Tiffany; Candace Wheeler.
AESTHETICS, AESTHETIC THEORIES
History of the term
The term Aesthetic, derived from the ancient Greek
aisthanesthai (to perceive), refers to a dynamic
and complex set of relationships in human sensory
perception. These are the sensory perception of
things like nature or art; the feelings aroused by these
perceptual experiences; the character (or design) of
the experienced things themselves; and the acuity of
subjective judgment associated with perceiving these
things.
The idea of beauty has been profoundly influential in
determining aesthetic value in the West to the current time.
For Plato, “beauty,” like “the good,” is an eternal Idea char-
acterized by mathematical qualities of proportion, harmony
(or “fitness”), and unity, and untouched by the constant
flux of the human world where the Ideas are reflected. In
Aristotelian metaphysics, beauty is experienced as order,
symmetry, and determinateness. Perhaps the most criti-
cally important aesthetic principle emerging from Hellenic
antiquity is that beauty consists in the imaginative or
sensuous expression of unity in variety; the one in the
many (Bosanquet, 1892, p. 32). This idea survives in
the Platonism of design (Verbeek and Kockelkoren,
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1998), where manufactured objects are understood and
promoted as reproductions of the one Idea.
Modern, western understandings of the terms
aesthetic and aesthetics derive from Continental and
British philosophers in the seventeenth and especially
eighteenth centuries, when philosophical endeavor
was reappraising the value of the senses in the acqui-
sition of knowledge. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten
coined the term “aesthetics” in 1735 (in his Reflections
on Poetry) to distinguish philosophical ideas about
what is sensed and imagined from logic, as a legitimate
field of philosophical inquiry related to the judgment of
“taste” (Guyer, 2014). David Hume was concerned with
a particular standard or sensitivity in judgments of taste
and established a seamless connection between moral
and aesthetic value (Guyer, 2014), which continues
to inflect cultural production as the visible expression
of moral ideas (see also the Earl of Shaftesbury). The
division in the study of knowledge between rationalism
and empiricism hinged to some extent on the eye as a
reference point for the sovereign insights of reason, free
of sensory experience (Descartes; Kant), or the explicit
and “perspectival knowing” of a particular sentient
being in the world (Nietzsche; Gadamer; Merleau-
Ponty). The idea of an aesthetic sensibility or attitude
as its own kind of knowing traverses both rational and
empirical thought, with significant transformations in
the importance attributed to the perceiving body.
Aesthetic sensibility
Aesthetic judgment is “a force for making our sensory
reactions more acute, more pointed” (Barilli, 1993,
p. 3). For Emmanuel Kant writing in 1790, concepts
were nothing without percepts. Aesthetic judgment
depends on the form or design of encountered (natural)
objects as they come together as concrete phenom-
enon. The determination of “beauty” is not a matter
of subjective preference, but a universal truth that
reaches consensus in the object with a general power
of affect—we say something is beautiful, and it appears
that beauty belongs to the object. Taste for Kant is “the
ability to judge the pleasure occasioned by a presenta-
tion in terms of its potential universalizability” (Tanke
and McQuillan, 2012, p. 237). The aesthetic encounter
elicits the free play of imagination and reflective contem-
plation. It is not dependent on the interest or desire of
the observer and is therefore non-teleological. This
necessary disinterest is in contrast to the useful quality
of Beauty present in Greek thought. Eyes are the first
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 18
example quoted to prove the usefulness of beauty in
Plato. For Plato, beautiful eyes are those that see best
(Grube, 1927). For Kant, beauty is “useless purposeful-
ness” (see Tonkinwise, 2003); it is only for its own sake.
The disinterested stance of aesthetic judgment
took material form in the designation of the “fine arts”
as a special category of objects that mediate aesthetic
experience. The study of fine arts became synony-
mous with the study of aesthetics through a correlation
between aesthetic perception and aesthetic creation.
As explained by Bosanquet (1892) in A History of
Aesthetic (the first history of aesthetics in English), “the
History of Fine Art is the history of the actual aesthetic
consciousness, as a concrete phenomenon” (p. 2).
This correlation was further realized in the museum
or “white cube” of the art gallery as special housing
wherein such objects could present themselves for
contemplation with the appropriate “breathing space”
(Baudrillard, 1996).
Aesthetic judgment also had ontological implica-
tions. The cultivation of an aesthetic sensibility as an
appropriate manner in which to approach and appre-
ciate the intrinsic perceptual qualities of worldly things,
detached from how these things came into being or
the techniques involved in making them, evolved as
a sign of cultural capital (Bourdieu) and a detachment
from the social, political, and ecological implications of
sensory objects. The figure of the aesthete as a privi-
leged, hedonistic lover of beauty, basking indulgently
in the sensorium (Baudelaire’s “dandy”; the Bloomsbury
group), free from purpose or sociopolitical conse-
quences, can now be linked to that of the cultural
consumer in twenty-first-century capitalism, indulging
in the free play of symbolic exchange (see Sign). This
free play underscored novelty as an important charac-
teristic of aesthetic experience (Barilli, 1993, p. 18). The
refusal to account for the sociopolitical and historical
dimensions of objects was intolerable for some twen-
tieth-century theorists who called for the elimination
of aesthetics as a separate field of study (Bourdieu for
example, and Gadamer who rejected Kantian aesthet-
ics as ahistorical).
Aesthetics and ethics
Other theorists however have sought to foreground
the particular importance of aesthetic experience and
even to argue for a connection between aesthetics
and ethics. Bringing Kantian aesthetics into a relation
with Levinasian ethics, Susan Stewart (2005) argues
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AESTHETICS, AESTHETIC THEORIES
that the disinterested, volitional, non-teleological qual-
ities of the aesthetic encounter prompt an ethics bound
to the contingent particulars of form in time and space.
The sensory particulars of experience situate us in a
world, in a place in time to make sense of. This argu-
ment resonates with the unique quality of “aura” in
Benjamin’s thought and connects with other writers on
aesthetics, for example Elaine Scarry, who links beauty
to justice and an awareness of a reciprocal aliveness
between the perceiver and the perceived. Beauty elic-
its a creative impulse to reproduce, but not, and here
she is also allied with Kant, to capture the thing experi-
enced: the thing is not beautiful by virtue of its ability to
serve self-interest, but because it is in the interests of
everyone. For Scarry, loveliness of aspect (eidos) elic-
its carefulness and a delicate awareness: a capacity to
notice the manner of things. This empathetic impulse in
the aesthetic disposition allows insight into more than
is said, into the unifying design of a work. An ability to
grasp the thread of Scarry’s thought, for example, is
enhanced by sensitivity toward her particular sentient
humanism in its sociopolitical and historical context.
We can also think here of the essay (a form of writing
pioneered by Hume) as an aesthetic mediation by way
of which the reader gets close to both the ideas and the
habitus of the thinker. It is important to note however
that this reading of disinterest in aesthetics does not
make a claim for a necessary link between aesthetics
and an ethics of practice.
Reification
It is a common theme running through the thought
on aesthetics that the senses are malleable and
schooled by social and cultural conditions (e.g., Marx
in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844;
Berleant, 2000). Sense perception mediates experi-
ence, prior to the rationalization of that experience.
However, the designed materiality of culture that forms
the background condition of everyday life is also an
aesthetic production. In his cultural history of water,
Ivan Illich (1985) tells us the time that it took for people
to learn to feel nausea and shame at the smell of their
own bodily waste, depended on their access to the
infrastructure, products, and social practices of modern
sanitation. These seemingly involuntary biological and
sensori-emotional responses are a result of cultural
aesthetic conditioning.
These observations suggest that far from being
universal, aesthetic judgment is a culturally specific
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 AESTHETICS, AESTHETIC THEORIES
attribution of value that brings things into being over
against the environment. In the frame of the World
Heritage List, custodians of contested lands must vie to
merit the attention of the appreciative gaze so that their
lands and cultural practices may be deemed aesthet-
ically important and/or authentic and therefore worthy
of protection from activities such as development or
mining. This reifying characteristic is a central feature
of the ways in which modern aesthetics has evolved.
Aesthetics has been accused of doing violence where
appreciation of beauty becomes an objectifying gaze
(Sartre) and where reification of the senses places
ocular knowledge above all else. For Morton (2007)
“the history of the aesthetic has been the story of how
bodies, and especially non-visual sense organs, have
been relegated and gradually forgotten, if not entirely
erased” (p. 165).
For Heidegger, the discourse of metaphysics is ulti-
mately realized in the technological transformation of
life in the modern age, which operates by way of a
structural reification of figure and ground (enframing).
The authority of representation is brought into being
and continually asserted by technologies of vision that
write over being in the world, being in a particular place
and time, and the value of knowledge that belongs to
the sentient being so situated. In tandem, representa-
tion has brought into being a frontal ontology by which
all that matters is rendered in an opposition between
subject and object. Aesthetic appreciation through
distancing—the attitude of sitting back and watching
something without getting involved—is enhanced by
representation. Ingold (2004) furthers this argument
about the oculocentric progress of modernity by
attending to the aesthetic experiences suppressed by
the design of our built environments. He insists that
human knowledge is not static but perambulatory—
we are meant to be able to walk around things, and
see the shadows pass over things in order to know
them (relative to our own moving body). The screen-
based knowing of the “seated society” that elevates
the plane of social life over and above the ground of
nature takes us further away from forms of knowledge
that situate our being in the world. Screen objects
move on behalf of the body, including the eyes.
Aesthetics as the experience of things (aesthesis) is
replaced by aesthetics as visual representation: “a
symbolic transcription and subtraction of sensory
qualities” (Barilli, 1993, p. 115). In spite of the “full-
ness” of aesthetic effects, this bodily stasis is a form
of anesthetic: sensory deprivation.
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Consumerism and aesthetics
As a legacy of Hellenic thought, the mass-produced
forms of consumer culture reproduce the one Idea.
Guy Debord (1994) remarks “Each individual commod-
ity fights for itself, cannot acknowledge the others and
aspires to impose its presence everywhere as though it
were alone” (p. 43). The commodity form also reproduces
preexisting meanings and sensations. Modernism, the
dominant aesthetic of consumer culture, has become a
universal standard for design. Through design’s mate-
rial reproductions, our modernist aesthetic sensibilities
have been schooled. We have learnt to appreciate
the look, smell, and feel of “box-fresh newness” and
through the presence of certain aesthetic features (that
promote for example conventions of comfort, cleanli-
ness, and convenience [see Shove, 2003]; or “realism”
[Stewart, 2005]) trust is elicited. We know in advance
what to expect of the emerging “good” and know that
once its perfection is tainted by use, it will never again
be the same, or as good.
Augmented by the rhetoric of promotional images,
the designed commodity is the Platonic form made
material. In it, functional and aesthetic perfection coin-
cide. For Michl (1991), functionalism propped up the
Modernist vision that design was a fine rather than
applied art. This idea is borne out by the graphics
tools used to prefigure industrial commodities, which
emphasize spatial, formal objective qualities suspended
in white (“breathing”) space. The visual aesthetic of
modernism is intolerant to any sign of contingent mate-
riality, such as the passage of time, while also being
eminently susceptible to wear and tear (on this point
see Mostafavi and Leatherbarrow’s 1993 environmental
analysis of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye), that is, unless
the ruin of the object’s perfection can also be aesthet-
icized; appreciated as a sign of neoclassical beauty
or as a counterpoint to modern technological society
(Beck [1995] on nature as a cultural model). What is
sustained in the aesthetics of consumerism is the
detached, nonreciprocity of the sign form (see Sign).
Spectacle
The spectacle (Debord) refers to the totalizing power
of commodification under the rule of representation.
The spectacle is not merely an image on a screen, or
a concatenation of imaged events (celebrities, wars,
public humiliations, sporting events, advertisements)
that hold the spectator/consumer in a contemplative
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 20
stance, but an economically motivated societal and
cultural conditioning the result of which is a histori-
cal and political stasis. The spectacle is not “false” or
“illusory” (Descartes) but the false and illusory made
real, material, plural, and social through the autono-
mous power of economic production and exchange
value. The spectacle takes the reifying oculocentric
gaze to a societal level, as an expression of this total-
izing power. The spectacle destroys social time and
social creativity by creating time for the “consumption”
of images and the exchange of commodities. This argu-
ment was advanced in Guy Debord’s 1967 book The
Society of the Spectacle, which can now be understood
as an articulate expression of disgust at the dramatically
depoliticized mood of contemporary society in spite of
its wide socioeconomic disparity. The book was impor-
tant in galvanizing the student and worker insurrections
of May 1968, which mobilized the critical capacity of
avant-garde practice (such as that of the Situationist
International) to effect a genuine disruption (détourne-
ment—see Sign) of the spectacle’s smooth progress.
Debord’s text suggests that it is through such actions
that an aesthetic revolution could redirect historical life.
For Adorno, aesthetic thought could only advance
by confronting the commodification of experience deliv-
ered through the spectacle of images and commodity
forms. But as Debord recognized, analyzing the specta-
cle means talking in its language and with its conceptual
and material tools, to some degree. This explains why
critique of the commodification of culture and experi-
ence emerges largely from the legitimized domains of
aesthetic appreciation (the arts and the humanities),
which know its objects in intimate detail, rather than
from the discourse of for example business, econom-
ics, law, or the sciences. After Debord, the aesthetic
disciplines must find ways to avoid replicating depo-
liticized free play in the practice of critical thought (as
apologia), and determine an appropriate teleology for
aesthetic critique.
The aestheticization of everyday life (Baudrillard,
Jameson, Featherstone) is an idea that offers an
inverse perspective on Debord’s totalizing critique
to consider the semiological mediation of everyday
social experience. Commencing with Marx’s theory of
the fetishism of commodities and developed in vari-
ous ways by Lukács, the Frankfurt School, Benjamin
(particularly his analyses of the materialization of
commodity fetishism in the arcades of mid-nine-
teenth-century Paris), and Jameson (Featherstone,
2007), the aestheticization of everyday life is an
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AESTHETICS, AESTHETIC THEORIES
important concept for understanding the dynamic
relationship between the production of symbolic value
and material production, and the dialectic of crea-
tion and destruction it entails (see Fry, 2009). This
condition can be understood as growing in signifi-
cance with the rise of digital economies and, with
the saturation of information and communications
technology devices, has literally reached into every
pocket of experience. The effective, perceptual sepa-
ration between the means and ends of production
(identified by Debord) is most pronounced in the case
of digitization where exponential ecological impacts
(caused by the siting, construction, and maintenance
of data centers, innovation-driven waste streams,
spread of digital infrastructure, consumption of
human and fossil fuel-derived energy, and so on)
are concealed by the seemingly autonomous flow of
images.
Sustainment and aesthetics
Consumerism has reduced aesthetics to “cosmetic
treatment” (Barilli, 1993). But this does not mean that
aesthetics should be understood as so reduced. It
would be in error to underplay the historical significance
of aesthetics and its critical role in understanding how
perceptual dispositions toward “what is” have been
shaped. This significance is demonstrated for exam-
ple by Denis Cosgrove’s observation that horizontal
fixed-point perspective marked the emergence of capi-
talism, Morton’s insights about the relationship between
romantic literature and the formation of an “ecological
imaginary,” or David Brody’s reflection on the inner
connection between Platonic and Haeckelian aesthet-
ics, which underpins the argument discernable in the
contemporary science of biomimicry, that “beauty is
the proof of natural intelligence” (Brody, 2002, np). The
balance theory of ecology has its roots, therefore, in an
aesthetic argument.
A number of authors have made the point that
aesthetic thought is crucially important if we are to
understand our complex and intensively designed
environments in ways that can help us to live well in
them. Yet, as Beck suggests, we can no longer trust
our senses. Material and semiotic design has actively
suppressed the capacity for aesthetic knowing. And in
addition to this, many of the unintended products of
human making subvert the contemplative stance of
aesthetic regard. Due to the hegemonic status of visual
representation we have not developed multisensory
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 AFFORDANCE
perceptual faculties up to the task of noticing the
manner and design of things such as the oil slick, the
bush fire, radiation, persistent biotoxins, and innumera-
ble other “objects” of human design that exceed human
perception and knowledge (see Morton, 2011). Such
objects resist frontal representation and must be felt
and experienced in new ways, for example, in terms
of their dynamic vitality or contingent biophysical, soci-
opolitical, cultural, and historical impacts. An ethical
aesthetics of sustainment might involve the design of
percepts (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994) that facilitate the
reschooling of sense perception and imagination along
these lines.
References and further reading
Barilli, Renato. A Course on Aesthetics. Trans. Karen E.
Pinkus. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
1993.
Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. Trans. James
Benedict. London/New York: Verso, 1996.
Beck, Ulrich. Ecological Enlightenment: Essays on the
Politics of the Risk Society. Trans. Mark A. Ritter. New
York: Humanity Books, 1995.
Berleant, Arnold. The Aesthetic Field: A Phenomenology
of Aesthetic Experience. Christchurch: Cybereditions
Corporation, 2000.
Bosanquet, Bernard. A History of Aesthetic. London:
George Allen & Unwin, 1892.
Brody, David. “Ernst Haeckel and the Microbial Baroque.”
Cabinet Magazine 7 (Summer 2002). http://cabinetmag-
azine.org/issues/7/ernsthaeckel.php
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald
Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. “Percept, Affect and
Concept”. In Tanke, Joseph and Colin McQuillan (Eds.),
The Bloomsbury Anthology of Aesthetics. New York and
London: Bloomsbury, 2012, pp. 591–601.
Featherstone, Mike. “The Aestheticization of Everyday Life.”
In Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (2nd ed.).
London: Sage, 2007, pp. 64–81.
Fry, Tony. Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New
Practice. New York: Berg, 2009.
Grube, George M. A. “Plato’s Theory of Beauty,” The
Monist, 37.2 (1927): 269–288.
Guyer, Paul. 18th Century German Aesthetics. Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/
entries/aesthetics-18th-german/, 2014.
Illich, Ivan. H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness: Reflections
on the Historicity of Stuff. Dallas, TX: The Dallas Institute
of Humanities and Culture, 1985.
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Ingold, Tim. “Culture on the Ground: The World Perceived
through the Feet,” Journal of Material Culture, 9.3
(2004): 315–340.
Michl, Jan. On the Rumor of Functional Perfection, Pro
Forma 2, Oslo, Norway (1990–1991): 67–81. http://
janmichl.com/eng.rumor.html
Morton, Timothy. Ecology without Nature. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2007.
Morton, Timothy. “The Mesh”. In LeMenager, Stephanie,
Teresa Shewry, and Ken Hiltner (Eds.), Environmental
Criticism for the Twenty-First Century. New York:
Routledge, 2011, pp. 19–30.
Mostafavi, Mosen and David Leatherbarrow. On
Weathering: The Life of Buildings in Time. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1993.
Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1999.
Shove, Elizabeth. Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience:
The Social Organization of Normality. Oxford and New
York: Berg, 2003.
Stewart, Susan. The Open Studio: Essays on Art and
Aesthetics. London: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Tanke, Joseph and Colin McQuillan (Eds.). The Bloomsbury
Anthology of Aesthetics. New York and London:
Bloomsbury, 2012.
Tonkinwise, Cameron. “Beauty-in-Use.” Design Philosophy
Papers 2 (2003). http://www.desphilosophy.com
Verbeek, Peter-Paul and Petran Kockelkoren. “The Things
That Matter,” Design Issues, 14.3 (Autumn 1998): 28–42.
Special thanks to Helen Armstrong for contributing
resources to this entry.
Abby Mellick Lopes
See also Beauty; Consumption; Empiricism; Form;
Functionalism; Heritage; Modernism; Style.
AFFORDANCE
Affordance is the experience of a product or an aspect
of a product as enabling an action. Psychologist of
perception, James Gibson, coined the term affor-
dance, to refer to experiences that exemplified the way
perception is interactionist. Gibson was reacting to a
model of perception that insisted on strict divisions
between the perceiving subject and the perceived
object. In that model, perception is a cognitive activ-
ity in which representations of things in the world are
interpreted in the minds of subjects. Having interpreted
what they perceive to be around them, subjects then
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