Aesthetic (pronounced es-thet-ik or ees-thet-ik (mostly non-US))
(1) Relating to the philosophy of aesthetics; concerned
with what is regarded as attractive and what is not.
(2) Relating to the science of aesthetics; concerned with
the study of the mind and emotions in relation to the sense of beauty.
(3) Having a sense of the beautiful; characterized by a
love of beauty (and, used loosely: “good taste”).
(4) Relating to, involving, or concerned with pure
emotion and sensation as opposed to pure intellectuality.
(5) The philosophical theory or set of principles
governing the idea of beauty at a given time and place.
(6) A particular individual’s set of ideas about style
and taste, along with its expression:
(7) An individual’s (or a collective’s) set of principles
or worldview as expressed through outward appearance, behavior, or actions.
1798: From the mid-eighteenth century German Ästhetisch or the German-derived French esthétique, from the New Latin, ultimately
from the Ancient Greek aisthetikos (pertaining
to sense perception, perceptible, sensitive perceptive and (of things) perceptible),
the construct being aisthēt(ḗs) (aesthete) + -ikos (-ic), from aisthanesthai (to perceive (by the senses or by the mind), to feel,
from the primitive Indo-European awis-dh-yo-,
from the root au- (to perceive). The ikos suffix
was from κός (kós) with an added i, from i-stems such as φυσι-κός (phusi-kós) (natural), through the same
process by which ῑ́της (ī́tēs)
developed from της (tēs), occurring
in some original case and later used freely.
It was cognate with the Latin icus
and the Proto-Germanic igaz, from which
came Old English iġ (which in Modern
English ultimately was resolved as y),
the Old High German ig and the Gothic
eigs.
The historic alternative
spelling is æsthetics, still see in the odd literary novel. Derived forms include the adjectives nonaesthetic
(which if hyphenated seems to be used as a neutral descriptive and if not, as a
critique) & pseudoaesthetic (which is always in criticism). Aesthetic is a noun & adjective, aesthete
& aestheticism are nouns and aesthetically is an adverb; the noun plural is
aesthetics.
The noun aesthete (person of advanced and fine artistic
sensibilities) dates from the early 1880s and was from Ancient Greek αἰσθητής (aisthētḗs) (one who perceives), the
construct being aisthē- (variant stem
of aisthánesthai (to perceive)) + -tēs (the Greek noun suffix denoting agent). It was a Victorian back-formation from
aesthetics and there no exact synonym, the closet being “connoisseur” but it
conveys a slightly different implication and the derived noun hyperaesthete is
used sometimes as a term of derision directed at the “excessively civilized”. The
rarely used alternative spellings esthete & æsthete are now used only as
literary devices and are otherwise obsolete.
Aesthete is a noun and aesthetic is a noun & adjective; the noun
plural is aesthetes and the idea long predates the word, descriptions of such
figures appearing (sometimes as slurs hinting at a lack of manliness) in texts
from Antiquity and aesthetician (professor of taste) was in use by 1829, aestheticist
by 1868. The original edition (1911) of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (COD) noted that in English
university slang the opposite of an aesthete was a “hearty”, the former tribe devotes of John Ruskin (1819–1900), the
latter lot lusting after a rugby blue.
For specific purposes, estheticians can induce localized instances of angioedema (in pathology, a swelling that occurs just beneath the surface of the skin or mucous membranes). Ms Andrea Ivanova (b 1998), a student from the Bulgarian capital Sofia, has had over twenty injections of hyaluronic acid in her quest to have the world’s plumpest lips but, seeking additional fullness, indicated recently she intends to pursue another course of injections. Ms Ivanova is also a collector of Barbie dolls, the aesthetic of which she admires, and these are said to provide the inspiration for some of the other body modifications and adjustments she's undertaken. Like the lips, other bits remain a work-in-progress, Ms Ivanova documenting things on Instagram where she enjoys some 32K followers.
The alternative spelling esthetic began life as one of those Americanisms which annoy some but it reflected simply the wholly sensible approach in US English that it’s helpful if spelling follows pronunciation. However, in the early twentieth century the US cosmetic surgery industry (even then inventive and profitable), re-purposed the word; linguistic differentiation to create product differentiation: “esthetic surgery”, the business of performing surgery for aesthetic purposes rather than reasons strictly medical or reconstructive and the most significant figure in this was the German-Jewish cosmetic physician Jacques Joseph (1865–1934), now remembered as the “father of modern cosmetic surgery”. Under the auspices of first the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS, 1931) and the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS, 1967), the business of esthetic surgery has since boomed and related (even if remotely) professions such as nail technicians, the lip-plumpers and the body-piercers also append “esthetic” to their advertising; the first “estheticians” were the skin care specialists (exfoliation, massage, aromatherapy, facials and such) but the title soon proliferated.
JA Cuddon (1928-1996) was a writer
of extraordinary range and one of the great characters of twentieth century
literary life in England and while some of his works sold more, none have been
of more enduring than his typically comprehensive and amusing Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory, first published
in 1977 by Penguin and the entry on aestheticism is typical of his style,
beginning with the observation the term was “'pregnant' with many connotations”
before exploring the history. In English, “aesthetic” first came into wider use after
appearing in translations of the work of the German philosopher of the
Enlightenment Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) although the original use was in the classically
correct sense “science
which treats of the conditions of sensuous perception” and Kant’s
use had been an attempt at reclamation on behalf of academic philosophy in
reaction to his fellow German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten (1714–1762)
heretically using it in his Aesthetica
(1750) to mean “criticism
of taste”, something which so appealed to English speakers it became
(despite the doughty scholarly rearguard) after the 1830s (in the wake of the
Romantic poets) the dominant meaning, freeing the word from the jealous grasp
of the philosophers. This was cemented
by the literary critic Walter Pater (1839–1894 and one of the century’s most
exquisite stylists of language) who in 1868 applied it to the l'art pour l'art (art for art's sake)
movement, a place which proved its natural home. The English academic polymath William Whewell
(1794–1866) had suggested callesthetics
for “the
science of the perception of the beautiful” but that never caught
on. The shift is illustrated by the
track of the adjective which was in 1798 was recorded to mean “of or pertaining
to sensual perception” while by 1821 there was the parallel “of or pertaining
to appreciation of the beautiful.”
Cuddon defined an aesthete as “one who pursues
and is devoted to the 'beautiful' in art, music and literature”
while aestheticisrn was the “term given to a movement, a cult, a mode of sensibility (a
way of looking at and feeling about things) in the nineteenth century
[which] fundamentally…
entailed the point of view that art is self-sufficient and need fulfil no other
purpose than its own ends. In other words, art is an end in itself and need not
be (or should not be) didactic, politically committed, propagandist, moral - or
anything else but itself; and it should not be judged by any non-aesthetic
criteria such as whether or not it is useful).” Cuddon reminded his readers that Kant as well
as Goethe (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749–1832), Friedrich Schelling
(1775–1854) & Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805) were all in the vanguard
of the l'art pour l'art “movement or cult”, arguing “art must be
autonomous”, the political implication being “the artist should not be beholden to anyone.
From this, in turn, it followed that the
artist was someone special, apart, from others and from this came the post-Romantic
idea of the artist as superior to ordinary mortals”, a view which
infected many who concluded they deserved to be judged on the basis of being
artists, rather than by virtue of the art they produced. In the dark mist of late Romanticism, this
had a certain appeal but it cumulated in post-modernism and while it’s true
that even in the nineteenth century high art there really wasn’t one agreed
construct of the aesthetic, by the late
twentieth century there were so many that Cuddon was probably right in
suggesting it was the “long-term result
of Romantic subjectivism and self-culture; of the cult of the individual ego
and sensibility.”
Cuddon detected “a widespread
disenchantment in the literature of the aesthetes, and especially in their
poetry” which he contrasted with the popular novelists of the era
such as early realists like Charles Dickens (1812–1870) or Émile Zola
(1840–1902). The poets showed a “tendency to
withdrawal or aversion”, aspiring to “sensuousness and to what has become known as
‘pure poetry'” and while that was criticized by figures as diverse
as Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881, UK prime-minister 1868 & 1874-1880) and
Karl Marx (1818-1883), at “its best, aestheticism was a revitalizing influence in an
age of ugliness, brutality dreadful inequality & oppression, complacency,
hypocrisy and Philistinism. It was a
genuine search for beauty and a realization that the beautiful has an
independent value. At its worst it
deteriorated into posturing affectation and mannerism, to vapid idealism and
indeed to a kind of silliness which is not wholly dead.” Cuddon was writing in the mid-1970s and it’s
doubtful anything he saw in the last decades of his life much changed his mind.
Deconstructing the Lindsay Lohan aesthetic
PinkMirror is a web app which helps users optimize their facial aesthetics, using an artificial intelligence (AI) engine to deconstruct the individual components an observer’s brain interprets as a whole. Because a face is for these purposes a collection of dimensions & curves with certain critical angles determined by describing an arc between two points, it means things can be reduced to metrics, and the interaction of these numbers can used to create a measure of attractiveness. Pinkmirror cites academic research which confirms a positive canthal tilt is a “power cue” for female facial attractiveness and while it’s speculative, a possible explanation for this offered by the researchers was linked to (1) palpebral (of, pertaining to, or located on or near the eyelids.) fissure inclination being steeper in children than adults (classifying it thus a neonatal feature) and (2) it developing into something steeper still in females than males after puberty (thus becoming a sexually dimorphic feature). Pinkmirror notes also that natural selection seems to be operating to support the idea, data from Johns Hopkins Hospital finding that in women, the intercanthal axis averages +4.1 mm (.16 of an inch) or +4o, the supposition being that women with the advantage of a positive medial canthus tilt are found more attractive so attract more mates, leading to a higher degree of procreation, this fecundity meaning the genetic trait producing the characteristic feature is more frequently seen in the population. Cosmetic surgeons add another layer to the understanding, explaining the canthal tilt is one of the marker’s of aging, a positive tilt exuding youth, health, and exuberance where as a line tending beyond the negative is associated with aging, this actually literally product of natural processes, the soft tissue gradually descending under the effect of gravity, as aspect of Vogue magazine’s definition of the aging process: “Everything gets bigger, hairier & lower”.
The Pinkmirror app exists to quantify one’s degree of attractiveness. It’s wholly based on specific dimension and thus as piece of math, is not influenced by skin tone although presumably, its parameters are defined by the (white) western model of what constitutes attractiveness. Users should therefore work within those limitations but the model would be adaptable, presumably not to the point of being truly cross-cultural but specifics forks could certainly be created to suit any dimensional differences between ethnicities. Using an industry standard known as the Photographic Canthal Index (PCI), one’s place on Pinkmirror’s index of attractiveness is determined by the interplay of (1) Nose width, (2) Bi-temporal to bi-zygomatic ratio, (3) chin length, (4) chin angle, (5) lower-lip height & (6) eye height.
Lindsay Lohan scored an 8.5 (out of 10), was rated as “beautiful” and found to be “very feminine, with great features of sexual dimorphism”, scoring highly in all facets except lower lip height and eye height. Her face shape is the heart, distinguished by a broad forehead and cheekbones, narrowing in the lines of down to the jaw-line, culminating in a cute pointy chin. Pinkmirror say the most attractive face shape for women has been found to be the triangle, scoring about the same as the oval while the heart, round, diamond, rectangle and square are also attractive to a lesser degree. Within the app, pears and oblongs are described as “not typically seen as attractive” and while the word “ugly” isn’t used, for the unfortunate pears and oblongs, that would seem the implication.
Other aesthethetics
The mysterious “experimental aesthetics” is a discipline
in psychology taking “a subject-based, inductive approach to aesthetics”; it
was founded by German physicist and experimental psychologist Gustav Fechner
(1801–1887) who had a background in psychophysics before changing direction so experimental
aesthetics is the second oldest research area in psychology. It is a field of study which investigates how
individuals perceive and evaluate aesthetic experiences using empirical methods,
merging principles and techniques from psychology, neuroscience and the arts to
understand the underlying mechanisms of aesthetic appreciation and creativity. Essentially, it was the examination of the
way people perceive beauty, art and design, and how they form aesthetic
judgments, the resulting metrics gleaned from measuring sensory processes,
cognitive mechanisms and emotional responses.
Given these things are inherently hard to quantify in a way which is both
statistically sound and has some meaning, what Fechner was attempting was
really quite adventurous and those who have continued his work have produced
something sprawlingly interdisciplinary, involving collaborations between
psychologists, neuroscientists, artists, designers, and philosophers, all with
their own traditions of measurement. From this interplay emerged the sub-field
of neuroaesthetics which focuses on the neural basis of aesthetic experiences,
something made possible by the development of various brain imaging techniques
like Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and the electroencephalogram
(EEG). Being academics who publish, experimental
aesthetics has also yielded theoretical models, the most pleasing of which is
the “processing fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure” which explores what
contributes to the ease with which information is processed in the human mind,
a significant factor in the way people experience beauty.
In the same vein as ethnomusicology (the study of non-Western musical forms), ethnoaesthetics is the study or description of “the aesthetics specific to or adopted by a particular culture”. Perhaps surprisingly, both continue to be used although some might consider them at least microaggressions which can be read as implying a cultural hierarchy and even if not, it certainly suggests “separate but equal”, a concept with its own troubled history. Phonoaesthetics is the study of the aesthetic properties of sounds, particularly in the context of language. The phono- prefix (relating to sound) was from the Ancient Greek φωνή (phōnḗ) (voice, sound). The word φωνή primarily referred to articulated human or animal sounds in contrast to ἠχή (from which is derived “echo”) which referred to sounds in general. Phonoaesthetics involves the analysis of how certain sounds, words, or phonetic patterns are perceived as pleasing or displeasing to the ear, the field combining elements of linguistics, psychology, and aesthetics to explore the sensory and emotional responses elicited by different sounds. If ever you’ve wondered why a word like “succulent” is so “delicious” to say, phonoaesthetics has the answer. The inherent beauty or appeal of sounds exists both in isolation and within linguistic structures, most obviously in the phonemes, syllables & prosody but there are also associative factors; a word with a positive association can impart pleasure and that experience can exist across a culture or be specific to one individual. Somaesthetics is an interdisciplinary field that studies the body (soma, from the New Latin, from the Ancient Greek σῶμα (sôma) (body) as both a site of sensory appreciation (aesthesis) and creative self-fashioning. Not taken seriously by all critics, it’s seems essentially the “New Age” with an academic gloss.
