The Aesthetic Experience
Natural Beauty
I chose a photo of a landsacpe looking over Vancouver, British Columbia for my example of Natural Beauty.
Vancouver is one of my favorite places in the world, mostly because if it's beauty. In this photo there is the mountains, water and cityscape all in one.
There are natural beauties all around this city.
Immanual Kant on Aesthetics:
He says that "we take pleasure in something because we judge it beautiful, rather than judging it beautiful because we find it pleasurable."
I find this theory very interesting because by myself judging this city beautiful, I take pleasure seeing pictures of it.
Fine Arts
I chose a poem from one of my favorite poetry novels, "milk and honey" by Rupi Kaur for my example of Fine Arts beauty.
i do not want to have you
to fill the empty parts of me
i want to be full on my own
i want to be so complete
i could light a whole city
and then
i want to have you
cause the two of us combined
could set it on fire
This poem is so deep and I find the meaning of it so beautiful. She is a strong and independent woman and I strive to be more like this. She is saying how she is beautiful herself, but they could also be beautiful together.
This poem radiates feminism throughout it.
Feminine Aesthetics:
Feminist artists have challenged the ideas that art’s main value is aesthetic, that it is for contemplation rather than use, that it is ideally the vision of a single creator, that it should be interpreted as an object of autonomous value (Devereaux 1998).
This connects to the author Kaur, and her poems because the poems and her, herself, truly serves an epitome towards this theory.
Human Beauty
I chose a photo of my Oma for my Example of Human Beauty.
Looking back at the memories it makes me think of what a beautiful person she was inside and out.
My Oma had the most beautiful heart of anyone I know. She was loving, caring, compassionate, and strong.
Her name, Mary, which I am named as well, radiates beauty and I am so lucky I get to share my name with this incredible woman.
Edmund Burke and the Sublime:
“By beauty I mean,” Burke says, “that quality or those qualities in bodies by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it”. The things that inspire us to love, “we like to have them near us”.
When Burke says beauty is, "things that inspire us to love", that really hit me. This connects so much to human beauty and my Oma, because she inspired everyone with everything she did.
Everyday Object
I chose a wooden spoon as an everyday object I personally feel possesses beauty in my life.
I work as a cook at a restaurant and I love my job. I have a great passion for cooking and baking which is the reason why I find this object beautiful.
Maybe people to not specifically see a wooden spoon as a beautiful object, but this object can make so many unique and different things that are beautiful themselves. Beauty comes from beauty.
Arthur Schopenhauer and Aesthetic Pleasure:
He held that the phenomenon of beauty would only be illuminated through a careful scrutiny of its effects on the subject.
This relates to my feeling of a wooden spoon as beautiful because I feel its beauty by the way it affects me.