Home The Nature and Objective of Aesthetics The Possibility of a Definition of Beauty and Art The Value of a Definition of Beauty What Aesthetics Is The Material For a Definition Art and the Artist The Art Work The Art Work in the Making The Creative Mind Art and the Artist Art and the Layman The Experience of Beauty Beauty in Music Painting Poetry	INTRODUCTORY THE NATURE AND OBJECTIVE OF AESTHETICS Aesthetics is that region in the land of science whose borders of investigation are known as experiences of beauty, and whose soil is particularly favorable for the production of a crop called art works. This land of beauty and art has been visited numerous times by intrepid explorers, the aestheticians, who have given accounts more or less detailed, but always enthusiastic, of their discoveries. In most instances, however, the explorers met a cold reception on their return home, while the reports of their findings were either scorned or severely criticized. Now since we are about to venture into this apparently hazardous region, it will be most advisable that we acquaint ourselves with what has been and is being said about the aestheticians and their findings, examine the charges, and see who is at fault, the explorers or their critics. There must be a misunderstanding somewhere, for among the explorers are some of the greatest minds of the ages, while their critics are men whose serious interest in art is beyond question. We must take this step at the very outset of our own adventure in order to fortify ourselves against several risks and hazards that a mental journey of this sort entails. Our purpose, then, in examining the charges of the critics against the aestheticians is simply to find out the better what the aestheticians are truly trying to do for us. Jackson Pollock What do the critics say? Here are several samples of their complaints: One of them writes that: "It is improbable that more nonsense has been written about aesthetics than about anything else; the literature of the subject is not large enough for that." Another is quite certain that, "any man who declares that he has distilled the essence of the beautiful and formulated a method whereby the work of art may be infallibly analyzed, its appeal explained and catalogued, and its esthetic value appraised and tested, is a self-deceived braggart or a fraud." 1 A third claims that, "if we look shrewdly at the enormous accumulation of so-called criticism during our two thousand five hundred years of culture: this mountain of manuscripts, commentaries, biographies, histories, analyses of 'styles', classifications of art into kinds, attacks on art and defenses of art: we are stupified by the display of so multitudinous and ant-like an energy, but we cannot help also being stupified--may the human race forgive us--by its stupidity."  A fourth writes, "Many attempts have been made by writers of art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find a universal formula for it. . . . Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have." The charges against the aestheticians, as deduced from the above complaints, are twofold: (1) that they attempt the impossible, in that beauty and art are indefinable, as is indicated by the contradictory theories of the aestheticians themselves; (2) that they attempt the futile, in that, even were a definition possible, it would be of no aid to the appreciation of an art work. An examination of these two charges will reveal to us the nature and objectives of aesthetics as a field of study and investigation.