Aesthetic history

The aesthetic, understood in its traditional (Kantian) sense as the philosophical study of perceptions, emotions, beauty and art, covers a field of research as old as philosophy itself, but the discipline is modern, for the Greeks did not distinguish anything such as aesthetics in philosophy. It is thus retrospectively that we can speak of an ancient aesthetics as a science of the beautiful or science of the sensible. The history of aesthetics develops in parallel with the history of rationalism. It must date the ‘invention’ of aesthetics than half of the 18th century and if we consider the philosophy of century (Hegel).

Antiquity
In ancient Greece, the question of beauty is a central question, but it is not necessarily related to the question of art. It is both a question that touches on morality and politics in Plato. The beacon period of aesthetic extends primarily to v e and 4th centuries BC. BC, at the time of the democracy of the Greek cities, although notions and aesthetic designations were stated in older times:

Homer (the late 8th century) speaks in particular of “beauty”, “harmony”, etc., but without set theory. By artistic work he understood the production of manual labor, through which a deity acted. Heraclitus of Ephesus explains the beautiful as the material quality of the true. Art would then be the manifestation of an agreement opposed by an imitation of nature. Democritus sees the nature of beauty in the sensible order of symmetry and harmony of parts, towards a whole. In the cosmological and aesthetic representations of the Pythagoreans, numeric and proportional principles play a great role for Harmony and Beauty.

Plato
For Socrates, beauty and good are mixed together. Representative art consists mainly of representing a beautiful person of body and spirit. Plato does not conceive the beautiful as something only sensible, but as an idea: beauty has an unnatural character, it is something intelligible, which is addressed to thought. It belongs to a sphere which is higher than that of the senses and the intellect. Things are only reflections of ideas, and art only copies these reflections. And he evaluates particularly negatively the art, as an unfaithful copy, since imperfectly done by the man. However, he differentiates two imitation techniques: “copy” (eikastikè) such as painting or poetry, and “illusion” (phantastikè) such as monumental architectural works. If Plato is favorable to the beautiful, he remains hostile to art and particularly to poetry and painting. His work nevertheless remains as the first ideological and political codification of art.

Aristotle
Aristotle treated neither beauty nor art in general. His Poetics is a fragment on the dramatic art and understands only the rules of the tragedy. His point of view is more experimental than theoretical. It infers rules from masterpieces of Greek theater. He nevertheless develops a general theory of imitationwhich can be applied to different arts: “The epic, the tragic poetry, the comedy, the dithyrambic poetry, the play of the flute, the game of the zither, are all, in general, imitations” (ch. 1). For Aristotle, the arts are differentiated by the objects they imitate and by the artistic means used to achieve this imitation. Art imitates nature or completes things that nature is unable to achieve. The thought of Aristotle thus becomes a basis for later “theories of art” (in the modern sense), through its dialectic of knowledge and its evaluation of the role of nature and appearance in artistic beauty. He puts into place the concepts of imitation (mimesis introduced by Plato), emotion,the viewer (katharsis), the figures of style or the role of the work of art. These theories will be taken to the classical aesthetic by Boileau (17th century) as well as in aesthetics Marxist.

Neoplatonism
In late antiquity, the theory of the beautiful is particularly systematized around the Neoplatonic concepts of Plotinus (204-270). In the Enneads, this one takes up and goes beyond the distinctions of Plato. The essence of the Beau lies in the intelligible and more precisely in the idea. Then beauty is identified with “Unity”, on which all beings depend. The beautiful is thus of spiritual nature (connected to the soul) and its contemplation is a guide to approach the Intelligible. Similarly beauty lies in the formof the work, and not in its subject matter. Thus for Plotinus, true art does not simply copy nature, but rather seeks to rise. Plotinus and founded the aesthetics of Symbolist works and unrealistic, examples of which are the icons Byzantine or the paintings and sculptures of the Romanesque. The Roman aesthetic takes up the concepts of Greece, as reflections on the relationship between nature and beauty, for example in the poetic art of Horace, or the theories of Seneca on the beautiful.

Middle Ages
The aesthetics of the Middle Ages take up the principles of Neoplatonism by relating them to the theological model of Christianity. It is considered then that in artistic creation a creative dignity, comparable to the divine creation, is distilled. Art is a means of transcendence towards the intelligible. To Plotin ‘s symbolism is added allegorism, which is no longer regarded as a simple figure of speech (rhetoric), but as a privileged means of correspondence with ideas. Because of its highly symbolic character, medieval aesthetics is difficult to adapt to the modern divide between abstraction and figuration.. Indeed, the same symbol can be indifferently represented using a geometric or human figure. For example, there are representations of the Trinity as well as three circles, three circles, triangle or three human people face identical. In the Romanesque period, sacred art is the object of an opposition between partisans of an aesthetics of stripping in accordance with the contemplative ideals (Saint Bernard and the Cistercians, the Carthusians) and proponents of a more ornamental aesthetic. of which Cluny is the fruit and of which Suger seems the emulator. Suger is not only the “creator of Gothic art”, he developed an aesthetic of light in close relation with the liturgy. The church is considered a prefiguration of the heavenly Jerusalem, the city promised to the elect. None of the architectural, liturgical, decorative or iconographic elements are free. Everything is there to manifest and celebrate the divine glory whose light is the best symbol.

In music Hildegard von Bingen conceives music as a reminiscence of paradise. Here too, aesthetics is inseparable from metaphysics and spirituality. The music is of Trinitarian essence, its laws derive from the Word as well as their mathematical properties: intervals, modes, rhythms, etc.. Generally, Pythagorean speculations on numbers play an important role not only to measure the musical rhythms, but also and especially to define the architectural proportions. Philosophers: Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Augustine of Hippo, Boethius, Thomas Aquinas.

Byzantine Theory of Image
In questioning and questioning of the status of religious images (the icons), Pagan (the idols) and commercial (coins, jars) conducted by Christianity during the quarrel images or iconoclast crisis of the 7th and 8th century, in addition to the question of Beau, the status of the icon, the distinction between the image and the painting, the truth of an image (what is a true or false), the relation of the Logos (verb, word) to the image, the notion of the imprint, the relation of the image to the presence,finally signs and hieroglyphics. Developed by Greek neoplatonic and aristotelian philosophers and theologians in particular: Jean Damascene and Pseudo-Denys the Areopagite, the Byzantine image theory constructs the image as a language of signs and codes.

Renaissance
The Aesthetics of the Renaissance is consistent with the interpretation of the era that relegates the Middle Ages on the side of dark times and turns to Greco-Roman antiquity. Historians and humanists praise the artistic movement that since Giotto has managed to bring art to the resemblance of nature. Alberti credits Brunelleschi, Donatello and Ghiberti with the renaissance of the visual arts and Vasaridivides into three periods the progress which leads from the imitation of the ancients to the imitation of nature. If antiquity has never been totally forgotten, the humanists try to find its authenticity: the Latin translations are abandoned in favor of the original Greek texts, the first archaeological excavations are organized, the first museums appear.

The rediscovery of Plato by Gémiste Pléthon and Marsile Ficin is not without consequence on the conception of arts and architecture. In the Compendium in Timaeum, Ficino elaborates the standard of aesthetic pythagorism and platonism: the participation of the sensitive in the reign of pure forms is done through geometric figures and proportions. The physical reality of being mathematical essence, the goal of aesthetics is to define the mathematical laws of beauty (speculation on the golden number, Pythagoreans volumes, musical harmony triangle, etc.). Alberti will be the prime contractor for this program. In theFrom re aedificatoria, he is inspired by Timée to establish the principles of construction. In the De pictura, he approaches the notions of legitimate perspective that makes painting an extension of reality and pictorial beauty in the right composition by the drawing of contours (constituency line) which conditions the order of color and color. the light (chiaroscuro). If in his Notebooks, Leonardo da Vincialso conceives of painting as the imitation of nature, this mimesis involves a complex conceptual analysis of the ten attributes of sight followed by a pictorial and plastic synthesis of elements as diverse as the study of human proportions and attitudes, movement and rest, form and position, matter and colors, linear or atmospheric perspective, the distribution of shadow and light whose laws of optics and mathematics are the privileged instruments of study. In his architectural treatise inspired by Vitruvius, Serlio defends the ideals of regularity and symmetry that prefigure classical aesthetics.

However, by applying Alberti’s theories and perspective or the mathematics of Manetti and Pacioli to create a rationally constructed illusionist space, Renaissance artists are conscious of innovating and developing artistic techniques that did not exist. in ancient times.

The role of the image is challenged by reforming theologians who read a contradiction between aesthetic pleasure and the divine order, the Catholic Jerome Savonarola in Florence who organizes the destruction of mirrors and paintings by the pyre of vanities, Protestant Luther who banned the images in the temples and John Calvin, who added the chromoclasty, the prohibition of colors. In response the role of the image as literature and speech is affirmed by the Council of Trent and the Catholic Church.

17th  -  18th centuries
The classic aesthetic inspired by the Symposium of Plato and finding one of his most accomplished expressions in the Poetic Art of Boileau, conceived not only aesthetic, the beautiful, and the negative, the ugly. The beautiful was conceived in terms of harmony, symmetry, order and measure. The empiricist aesthetic will add a second positive aesthetic value, the sublime. The sublime is a value characterized by disharmony, dissonance, disproportion, disorder, dissymmetry. Where the beautiful produced the feeling of serenity in the soul, the sublime produces feelings such as terror and violent passion (without pouring into horror). The sublime will find its most absolute artistic application in romanticism, which will exalt passion and excess in the human soul (artistic genius, passionate love, the solitary self or even the political revolution). For classical aesthetics, beauty was a concept. One can speak about it as “intellectual art” or “aesthetic intellectualism”. For example, in ancient times music was among the four quadrivium sciences. It was a science of harmony and measure, as St. Augustine describes it in its treatise on music. For Descartes, the questions which preoccupy Cartesianism are foreign to beauty and art; in this school, some minds are content to reproduce the traditions of antiquity, especially the ideas of Plato and St. Augustine (eg treaties Beau Crouzaz or Father André).

On the contrary, the empiricist aesthetic conceives the beautiful and the sublime as inner feelings. These are representations that the soul makes during the aesthetic experience. The beautiful refers to a feeling of pleasure and calm, while the sublime refers to a feeling of pleasure mixed with pain, or a contradictory alternation of feelings. Taste is then no longer an intellectual notion, but concerns the sensible impression and sentiment, defined by the empiricists as the most true and lively ideas of the mind. The book Philosophical research on the origin of our ideas of the sublime and the beautiful (1757) of the Irish philosopher Burke (1729-1797) can be considered as the empiricist manifesto of theaesthetic philosophy. We can add the aesthetic Trials of Hume and the writings of Shaftsesbury and Hutcheson. In France, Diderot and the Encyclopedists take similar ideas. Charles Batteux comments on Aristotle and reduces all the arts to the principle of the imitation of the beautiful nature. Father Jean-Baptiste Dubos and Voltaire contribute to the characterization of aesthetics as a literary critic. In Germany, the disciples of Wolff and Leibnizfound the new science of aesthetics. Baumgarten is followed by Mendelssohn, Sulzer and Eberhard.

18th  -  19th centuries

Kant
Kant is said to have given to the aesthetic autonomy as own domain in art, but in reality autonomy concerns only the “subject aesthetic” and is related to knowledge and morality. The transcendental aesthetic in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) refers to the science of intuition, concepts a priori of space and time from the perspective of knowledge. Aesthetics is the science of “sensible” as opposed to logic, which is the science of “the intelligible”. Kant notes that only the Germans use the term aesthetics in the critical sense of taste which he did not matter to him. Criticism of the faculty of judging (1790), Kant analyzes the question of the judgment of taste in relation to the beautiful and the sublime, but also the question of teleology in nature. He distinguishes the faculty of judging as a faculty independent of the understanding or the reason and integrates aesthetics in the sense of theory of taste, beauty and art in the field of transcendental philosophy.

Questioning the nature of the aesthetic feeling, Kant observes that for the perception of pleasure, each person recognizes that this feeling has value only for his own person, and that it is not possible to contest the pleasure felt by the other: “when I say that the wine of the Canaries is agreeable, I gladly suffer to be reprimanded and reminded that I must say only that it is agreeable to me. By this, he comes to think that “everyone has his particular taste”. The case of beauty, however, would be different, since if it judges a thing as beautiful “I attribute to others the same satisfaction” and “I do not judge only for myself, but for everyone, and I speak of beauty as if it were a quality of things (…)”. He demonstrates that beauty is not pleasant. The judgment of the beautiful is not made according to a personal taste: “It can not be said here that everyone has his particular taste”.

Hegel
In Hegel ‘s philosophical system, aesthetics is defined as a philosophy of art, and the purpose of art is to express the truth. The beautiful is the Idea in a sensible form, it is the Absolute given to intuition. Art is an objectification of the consciousness by which it manifests itself. It is therefore an important moment in its history. The reflection on art is linked to the end of art, in the sense that this end is a transcendence of the sensory element towards pure and free thought. This overtaking is done in religion and philosophy. For Hegel, the worst of man’s productions will always be superior to the most beautiful of landscapes, because the work of art is the privileged means by which the human spirit is realized.

For Hegel, the history of art is divided into three, according to the form and content of art:

symbolic, oriental, sublime art, in which the form exceeds the content;
classical, Greek, beautiful art, which is the balance of form and content;
romantic, Christian art, true, where the content is withdrawn from the form.
Hegel also develops a system of the fine arts, which is divided into five main arts following the space (architecture, sculpture, painting) and time (music, poetry).

In France (19th century)
The aesthetic term, which is absent from Diderot’s Encyclopédie, finds its first occurrence in French in 1743. But it did not set up in France until around 1850, when the great texts of Kant, Hegel and Schelling were translated or translated into French. transposed by Jules Barni and Charles Magloire Bénard. In 1845, Benard remarks that aesthetics is ardently cultivated in Germany, but that it is not known in France. The delay is due to national issues. The science of aesthetics is perceived as German and finds philosophical recognition only belatedly. Many books are published, of course, throughout the 19th century, which belong to aesthetics as the science of beauty. Aesthetics is also taught by Victor Cousin’s disciples such as Théodore Simon Jouffroy or Charles Lévêque (1861) in a Platonic and Spiritualist perspective. But the first university chair devoted to the teaching of aesthetics was created at the Sorbonne for Victor Basch in 1921 only.

Aesthetics is also developing outside the philosophical institution in the field of art criticism. In 1856, Charles Baudelaire entitled Bric-à-Brac Esthetic his study dedicated to the Salons of 1845 and 1846. He gave him his final title of Curiosités Esthétique in 1868. In his article on the Exposition Universelle of 1855, he criticizes the “professors aesthetic “, the” doctrinaires of the beautiful “locked in their system and who do not know how to seize the correspondences. He theorizes the advent of modernity in his capital article The Painter of Modern Life (1863).

In Germany (19th century)
In the 19th century formalizes Kunstwissenschaft 30 or “science of art” around a historical approach to art, called historicism (around the principles of individuality and development), particularly through the work of the historian Jacob Burckhardt. The ambition is that of a study science, far from the idealistic philosophical and literary criticism. The “art science” is not clearly distinguished from the history of art. TheWinckelmann (1717-1768), who determined art through a historical approach, and likened the history of art to the history of civilization. The aesthetic lessons of Hegel justified so the importance of the historical first, and the systematization of knowledge.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was directly influenced by Kant, but he returned to the thoughts of Plato and Plotinus. For Schopenhauer, art is a direct knowledge of Ideas (beyond reason), which themselves refer to an ultimate aspect: the will. It also presents the archetype of genius, able to overcome human subjectivity and access ultimate knowledge (and reveal it to men). He sets up a classification of the arts, which refers to Platonism (or medieval thought). He has a profound influence on Richard Wagner’s dramas and theoretical writings. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is opposed to Schopenhauer ‘s pessimism, with an aesthetic attitude, the Dionysian, which he opposes to the Apollonian. Inverting the platonic hierarchy, the sensitive becomes a fundamental reality: “art has more value than truth”. Criticizing the principle of objective values as the fruit of decadence, Nietzsche places the artist as creator of his own singular values, offered to other men, to stimulate their “will to power”, that is, their life force. and joy. “Art is the big stimulant.” According to Nietzsche, the function of art is not to create works of art, but to “beautify life”. “The essential thing in art is celebration, blessing, the deification of existence”.

Contemporary Aesthetics (20th and 211th century)
Appearing in 20th century, are the main movements contemporary aesthetic. They fit particularly in the context of concerns about the language (central question of the philosophy of the 20th century) in connection with the emergence of new sciences (linguistics, neuroscience).

Phenomenology
Heidegger defines aesthetics as “the science of man’s sensitive and emotional behavior and what determines it. ” It was after 1933, in the lectures on “The origin of the work of art”, his studies of Hölderlin’s poetry and Van Gogh’s painting, that Heidegger tackled the question of art. It moves the whole ontological question (“What is it?”) On the arts. In his phenomenological approach, he designates the work of art as an implementation of an unveiling (alètheia) of the Being.of being. Opposing the objectivist current (which establishes the truth by a relation to the idea of reality), Heidegger defines art as the privileged means of an “implementation of truth” by the mind:

This approach is later developed by philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Mikel Dufrenne and Jean-François Lyotard.

Frankfurt School
The philosophers of the Frankfurt School are strongly marked by a materialistic thinking, inspired by Marxism and the study of crises 20th century. Their aesthetics is based on a critical analysis of the social sciences, and a study of mass culture. For Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969), especially in his Théorie esthétique (1970), art remains an area of freedom, contestation and creativity in a technocratic world. Art has a critical role vis-à-vis society, and remains a place of utopia, as long as it rejects its own past (conservatism, dogmatism, serialism). Adorno will also oppose the facilities of mass culture (cultural industry), condemning the passage jazz.

“Postmodernism” French
Between the 1960s and the 1980s, several French philosophers impelled new approaches to aesthetics. Their disparate theories have a strong influence in the United States on literary and artistic criticism, where they are referred to as ” French Theory “. These authors, sometimes attached to a postmodern or post-structuralist philosophy, pursue a critique of the subject, of representation and of historical continuity, under the influence of Freud, Nietzsche and Heidegger.

Analytical aesthetics
Appeared in the 1950s, the analytical aesthetic is the current of thought dominant in the Anglo – Saxon world. Resulting from empiricism and pragmatism, this aesthetic is based on a search by logico – philosophical instruments and analyzes of language, in the extension of analytic philosophy. This aesthetic is constituted by a set of homogeneous theories, essentially related to the analysis of the questions and definitions of art. These theories assert themselves independent of the “traditional” aesthetics, as much by the restriction of its objects (are excluded: the question of the beautiful, the history of the esthetics) that by the analytical specificityof his research methods (referring to logic and not speculative). The metaphysical approach follows this trend, especially on the “truth of forms”.

New sciences of art
The objects of aesthetics are also addressed by certain new disciplines of the human and social sciences, enriching the search for new theoretical and methodological approaches.

Aesthetic sociology
In continuation of the cultural history of the 19th, the social history of art studies the collective forces working in the art. Opposing philosophical idealism, this sociology is initially influenced by Marxist thought (historical materialism); it highlights mainly the socio-economic context 40 and seeks to link artistic evolution to struggles and social classes. Opposing Marxist determinism, different approaches to the study of the social contexts of art, more attentive to internalthe “world of art”: a study of the contextual inscription of works in the cultural milieu, notably through cultural history and the anthropology of art (Lévi-Strauss, Boas); a sociological study of the habitus of art (Bourdieu); a sociology of action and contextual interactions (Becker).

These new approaches to art are confronted for example by the common idea of a work, born of a “free” inspiration of the artist, or of an aesthetic logic intrinsic to art and independent of the social environment.. In the same way, social mechanisms of reception of works (distinction, codes…) are revealed. Nevertheless, these social sciences evade the study of the works themselves, conferring perhaps a “social” reductionism on art; it is the reason for new approaches not only addressing the environment, but the practice, see the work itself.

Psychology of art
The psychology of art aims at the study of the states of consciousness and unconscious phenomena at work in the artistic creation or the reception of the work. The analysis of artistic creation takes up the idea of a primacy of the artist himself in the interpretation of art; idea developed since the Renaissance and Romanticism, and already included in the biographical approaches to some art historians of the 19th (see Kunstwissenschaft). From 1905, with Freud’s drafting of the theory of drives, art becomes an object ofpsychoanalysis. This approach is not aimed at evaluating the value of the work, but at explaining the psychic processes intrinsic to its development.

Semiology of art
Following the theories of Ferdinand de Saussure and structuralism, a semiology of art is slowly taking shape. This “science of the signs” studies not the motives or the meanings of the works, but the mechanisms of signifiance (how the work means); the work is considered here as a space of signs and symbols whose articulation is to be deciphered. The language of works (eg pictorial language) is not considered as a system identical to languages: indeed, this “language” is not composed of units devoid of meaning (such aslinguistic phonemes), or by signs of pure convention. This language exists mainly through analogical relations. If some codes specific to the language of art can be determined (role of form, orientation, scale…), the implication of strictly material elements (related to the object: pigments, light…) However, it does not completely reduce art to language systems.

Non-Western aesthetic

Aesthetic Chinese
Chinese art has a long history of changing styles and designs. In ancient times, philosophers were already discussing aesthetics. Confucius (551-478 BCE) emphasized the role of the arts and letters (especially music and poetry) in the development of virtues and the strengthening of the li (etiquette, rites), in order to get closer to the essence human. Opposing these arguments, Mo Zi argued, however, that music and the fine arts were expensive and inefficient, benefiting the richest, but not ordinary people.

In the writings of the 4th century BC, artists debate the own goals in art. For example, three works by Gu Kaizhi about theories of painting are known. Several later works, written by literary artists, also deal with artistic creation. The influence between religion and philosophy, on the one hand, and art, on the other hand, was common, but not omnipresent; so in every period of Chinese history, it is possible to find arts that largely ignore philosophy and religion.

Around 300 BCE, Lao Tzu formulates materialistic and aesthetic conceptions related to Taoism and the laws of nature. These conceptions are clearly in contradiction with the interests of the ruling minority.

The most important representative of the transition to medieval Chinese aesthetics is the philosopher Wang Chong, the i st century. It adopts a purely material substance, qi, as a principle of a natural evolution and as a fundamental characteristic of human perception. He thus considers the material world as the source of all beauty and ugliness; the artistic truth is about conformity with the facts.

Cao Pi (187-226) followed these previous considerations, however it does not only include the beauty criteria, but also the artistic forms. Xie He (479-502) concretizes these ideas in the Six Principles of Painting: the expression of the essence of the manifestations of life; the art of brush painting; the use of colors in accordance with the nature of the subject; the composition; the concordance of the form with the real thing; the imitation of the best examples of the past.

In the 11th century, the writer Su Shi drew attention to the role of inspiration and talent.

Despite the multiplicity of reflections, the evolution of Chinese aesthetics in the period that followed was strongly hampered by the weak development of the productive forces and the rigidity of social relations, in feudal or later forms.

Japanese aesthetics
Japanese aesthetics is the approach of aesthetic concepts close to beauty or good taste in traditional and modern Japanese culture. Although this approach is considered in Western society essentially as a philosophical study, it is considered in Japan as an inseparable part of everyday and spiritual life. By its religious aspects, Japanese aesthetics is strongly influenced by Buddhism. It is particularly developed in Zen Buddhism and chanoyu. The chanoyu has many aspects: building, garden and use of plant tissues,kimono, pottery, bamboo crafts, calligraphy, foundry, cooking… The aesthetics is also evaluated through ideals, traditional such as wabi-sabi, mono no aware, iki, or modern such as kawaii.

Arab-Islamic aesthetics
The Arab-Islamic aesthetic, or Islamic aesthetic, does not relate exclusively to religion, but to all the thought of Islamic culture and context, and to religious and secular practices. For lack of texts, it is not possible to know the aesthetic theories of the pre-Islamic period. Islamic philosophers have not written works strictly related to aesthetics, but in their discussions about God, they address different debates whose themes (arts, beauty, imagination…) are studied today in this discipline.

The ideas of beauty are inspired from the 9th century, by the doctrines Neoplatonic, including those of Plotinus, with Arabic text released under the name Theology of Aristotle, who influenced the philosophers Al-Kindi (801-873) Al-Farabi (872-950) and Avicenna (980-1037). These philosophers include the distinction between sensible beauty and intelligible beauty, and the links with perception, love and pleasure. In The Righteous City, Al-Farabi introduces the idea of intelligible beauty into discussions about the names of God. He invokes the beauty and perfection of God, to justify the relationship of transcendence between perfection, beauty and pleasure. Human works are thus intrinsically imperfect (compared to those of God); Over the centuries, Islamic society will establish debates on the relevance of figurative representation in art. In his Treatise on LoveAvicenna further describes the distinctions between intelligible and sensible beauty and forms of pleasure or attraction, also considering psychological and spiritual elements. Avicenna asserts, for example, that the desire for sensible beauty can be a noble thing, as long as its purely animal aspects are subordinate, and that the intelligible retains the faculty of influencing the sensible.

An important part of philosophical discussions regarding the arts, especially the rhetoric and the Arabic poetry and Persian. Inspired by the Greek commentators of Aristotle, this approach to the arts is less aesthetic, than linguistic and logical. Philosophers question the effectiveness of language, its linguistic mechanisms, its uses (religious, political), its cognitive abilities (to persuade, to imagine). The existence of rhetoric and poetry is also essential for philosophers, in their explanations of the complementary links between religion and philosophy (Al-Farabi, Averroes 1126-1198).

The music is the object of several interpretations according to the schools: if the ulema consider it with a certain mistrust, the Sufis grant him an important spiritual role. Al-Ghazali (1058-1111) devotes many pages on the effects of hearing music, poetry and prayer on the soul, and philosophers such as Avicenna develop mathematical theories about sounds, related with the music of the spheres.

Source from Wikipedia