• Embed Doc
  • Copy Link
  • Readcast
  • Collections
  • CommentGo Back
Download
Project Gutenberg's The Principles Of Aesthetics, by Dewitt H. Parker

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.

This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the header without written permission.

Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is important information about your specific rights and restrictions in how the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.

**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****

Title: The Principles Of Aesthetics
Author: Dewitt H. Parker
Release Date: August, 2004 [EBook #6366]

[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]

[This file was first posted on December 2, 2002]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PRINCIPLES OF AESTHETICS ***

Produced by Scott Pfenninger, Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

THE PRINCIPLES OF AESTHETICS
BY
DEWITT H. PARKER
PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

PREFACE

This book has grown out of lectures to students at the University of
Michigan and embodies my effort to express to them the nature and
meaning of art. In writing it, I have sought to maintain scientific
accuracy, yet at the same time to preserve freedom of style and
something of the inspiration of the subject. While intended primarily
for students, the book will appeal generally, I hope, to people who
are interested in the intelligent appreciation of art.

My obligations are extensive,--most directly to those whom I have cited
in foot-notes to the text, but also to others whose influence is too
indirect or pervasive to make citation profitable, or too obvious to
make it necessary. For the broader philosophy of art, my debt is
heaviest, I believe, to the artists and philosophers during the period
from Herder to Hegel, who gave to the study its greatest development,
and, among contemporaries, to Croce and Lipps. In addition, I have
drawn freely upon the more special investigations of recent times, but
with the caution desirable in view of the very tentative character of
some of the results. To Mrs. Robert M. Wenley I wish to express my
thanks for her very careful and helpful reading of the page proof.

The appended bibliography is, of course, not intended to be in any
sense adequate, but is offered merely as a guide to further reading;
a complete bibliography would itself demand almost a volume.

CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. Introduction: Purpose and Method
CHAPTER

II. The Definition of Art
CHAPTER III. The Intrinsic Value of Art
CHAPTER

IV. The Analysis of the Aesthetic Experience: The Elements of
the Experience
CHAPTER
V. The Analysis of the Aesthetic Experience: The Structure of
the Experience
CHAPTER
VI. The Problem of Evil in Aesthetics, and Its Solution
through

the Tragic, Pathetic, and Comic
CHAPTER VII. The Standard of Taste
CHAPTER VIII. The Aesthetics of Music
CHAPTER

IX. The Aesthetics of Poetry
CHAPTER
X. Prose Literature
CHAPTER
XI. The Dominion of Art over Nature: Painting

CHAPTER XII. The Dominion of Art over Nature: Sculpture
CHAPTER XIII. Beauty in the Industrial Arts: Architecture
CHAPTER XIV. The Function of Art: Art and Morality
CHAPTER

XV. The Function of Art: Art and Religion
BIBLIOGRAPHY

THE PRINCIPLES OF AESTHETICS
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION: PURPOSE AND METHOD

Although some feeling for beauty is perhaps universal among men, the
same cannot be said of the understanding of beauty. The average man,
who may exercise considerable taste in personal adornment, in the
decoration of the home, or in the choice of poetry and painting, is
at a loss when called upon to tell what art is or to explain why he
calls one thing "beautiful" and another "ugly." Even the artist and
the connoisseur, skilled to produce or accurate in judgment, are often
wanting in clear and consistent ideas about their own works or
appreciations. Here, as elsewhere, we meet the contrast between feeling
and doing, on the one hand, and knowing, on the other. Just as practical
men are frequently unable to describe or justify their most successful
methods or undertakings, just as many people who astonish us with their
fineness and freedom in the art of living are strangely wanting in
clear thoughts about themselves and the life which they lead so
admirably, so in the world of beauty, the men who do and appreciate
are not always the ones who understand.

Very often, moreover, the artist and the art lover justify their
inability to understand beauty on the ground that beauty is too subtle
a thing for thought. How, they say, can one hope to distill into clear
and stable ideas such a vaporous and fleeting matter as Aesthetic
feeling? Such men are not only unable to think about beauty, but
skeptical as to the possibility of doing so,--contented mystics, deeply
feeling, but dumb.

However, there have always been artists and connoisseurs who have
striven to reflect upon their appreciations and acts, unhappy until
they have understood and justified what they were doing; and one meets
with numerous art-loving people whose intellectual curiosity is rather
quickened than put to sleep by just that element of elusiveness in
beauty upon which the mystics dwell. Long acquaintance with any class
of objects leads naturally to the formation of some definition or
general idea of them, and the repeated performance of the same type
of act impels to the search for a principle that can be communicated
to other people in justification of what one is doing and in defense
of the value which one attaches to it. Thoughtful people cannot long
avoid trying to formulate the relation of their interest in beauty,
which absorbs so much energy and devotion, to other human interests,

of 00

Leave a Comment

You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...
You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...