Aesthetics

Abstract

The essay presents the formation of aesthetics as a discipline in Europe and the Mediterranean according to two principal paradigms: the implicit paradigm, when aesthetic views are formed inside various disciplines (such as philology, philosophy, rhetoric, theory of art etc.), and the explicit paradigm, when the discipline of aesthetics as such is born that has its own subject and categories. The essay presents the semantic field of aesthetics and its fundamental categories: the aesthetic, taste, the beautiful, the sublime, the tragic, art. It presents a multi-level definition of aesthetics, whose essence consists in the following: aesthetics is a science about non-utilitarian subject-object relationships, as a result of which the subject achieves absolute personal freedom and fullness of being — which are accompanied by spiritual pleasure — in the process of the concrete sensory perception or creation of a specific class of objects. It is a science about the sort of experience of mastering reality that is founded upon the contemplation — or expression in a sensory form — of absolute values, which are not subject to adequate verbal or conceptual expression, but appear to the subject in the process of experiencing participation in the fullness of being.