Psychology in Emerging Aesthetics

Abstract

Aesthetics as a philosophical discipline was initiated by Alexander G. Baumgarten, who conceived it as a science of the lower faculties of experience or the study of sensual perception in general. This perspective changed, however, just one generation later, when aesthetics was defined in the narrower sense of a theory of beauty and the fine arts. Kant opposed the application of the term “aesthetics” to a critique of taste and suggested giving up this use of the term and applying it solely to transcendental aesthetics, as a true science, or employing it “partly in a transcendental, partly in a psychological signification”. In this sense, it was employed by H.D. Zschokke, still in the eighteenth century, but was systematically developed by G.T. Fechner in his Vorschule der Aesthetik in 1876. Based on Fechner’s concept of aesthetics as an empirical discipline, psychological aesthetics found extensive application in experimental psychology at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, but also strong opposition from the part of traditional philosophical aesthetics. At that time, the theory of Einfühlung (empathy) had been developed as the dominating theoretical fundament of psychological aesthetics. In the course of the twentieth century, different paradigmatic approaches were proposed, which for the most part reflected paradigmatic turns of psychology in general (e.g. phenomenology, Gestalt psychology, cognitive psychology).