A philosophy of aesthetics can be drawn back to the early work of Plato – in which the classic Greek thinker supposed that all things of sensory beauty are imitations of the perfect form of their objectivity. In this view, each thing that belongs to a category – for example, the category of flower – imitates the most perfect form of flower that exists only in idea, and the closer the object comes to the perfect form, the more aesthetically pleasing it is.
Immanuel Kant summarizes the individual aspect of many aesthetic judgments when he says that a man will not argue if another tells him that something is pleasing to him, rather than pleasing in and of itself. For Kant, aesthetic value, like everything else, does not hold beauty or truth in objects, but rather in definitions. This means that the rose itself is not beautiful – it is beautiful when one decides and views it as such and society in general agrees, making beauty a property, rather than an opinion. From the Kantian perspective, the beauty of the thing is the recognition of a truth that is both universal and subjective.
Other philosophers have tried to create a set of criteria with which to evaluate beauty, including analytical thinkers like Edmund Burke and William Horgarth who suggested that beauty includes six basic principles of design, variety, uniformity, simplicity, intricacy, and magnitude.
The twenty-first century and the advent of post-modern theory have brought new attitudes towards aesthetic interpretation. In this view, theorists confront the assumption that beauty is central to either art or aesthetics. Post modern views of aesthetics are more interested in the raw, emotional experience of art than what it means. In a sense, post modern aesthetics return the word to its sensory roots, interested not in a philosophized understanding of one universal aesthetic and artistic presentation, but invests the depth of the aesthetic experience in the experience itself.
Post modern aesthetics are ultimately interested in the condition or state of being, than in any one privileged master narrative. As a result, post modern art and design use familiar objects in unexpected ways – encouraging the experience of aesthetic interpretation that doesn’t coincide with the narrative of forms. For example, since Plato and his theory of forms would have argued that a chair is a chair because it resembles the form of chair, a post modernist would assert that anything that can be sat on is a chair, thus fulfilling function, and that anything traditionally defined as a chair can be used in a myriad of different ways, for example, as a coat rack, ladder, bookshelf etc… thus complexifying the previous notion of form, and with it singular aesthetic judgment.
Read more: Aesthetics throughout History