Aesthetics

Qualitative Research on Aesthetics

Margaret Eaton traced research on aesthetic concepts to the 18th-century philosophers Edmund Burke and David Hume, who attempted to explain empirically aesthetic concepts such as beauty by connecting them with physical and psychological responses that typify individuals’ experiences of different kinds of objects and events. These philosophers sought an objective [Page 12]basis for personal reactions. Immanuel Kant argued that aesthetic concepts are essentially rooted in personal feelings of pleasure and pain and, therefore, are subjective, but he suggested that they have a kind of objectivity on the grounds that, at the purely aesthetic level, feelings of pleasure and pain are universal responses. During the 20th century, philosophers sometimes returned to a Humean analysis of aesthetic concepts via the human faculty of taste and extended this psychological account to try to establish an epistemological or logical uniqueness for aesthetic concepts.

As a result of both philosophical writings and extensive empirical work in psychology and biology, we are now wiser and more sophisticated about the cognitive dimensions of aesthetics, dimensions that can be applied to the aesthetic dimensions of scientific inquiry. Age-old questions, raised by scholars from Pythagoras and Aristotle to Hegel and Nietzsche and later to the cognitive revolution of the late 1950s concerning the type of cognition involved in the arts, are now reemerging within the context of the social sciences and the humanities, discussing the contributions of aesthetics to scholarship. Following John Dewey's work during the early 20th century and scholars such as Suzanne Langer, Nelson Goodman, and Harry Broudy, who contributed to the cognitive revolution of the late 1950s and the 1960s, aesthetics pointed to the interconnectedness of perception, thinking, and feeling.

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