AESTHETICS

AESTHETICS, AmE also esthetics. A branch of philosophy concerned with the understanding of beauty and taste and the appreciation of art, LITERATURE, and STYLE. It seeks to answer the question: is beauty or ugliness inherent in the object in question, or is it ‘in the eye of the beholder’? The term aesthetic often refers to responses, judgements, and statements that are subjective and emotive rather than objective, clinical, and detached. These have social power, and serve a variety of rhetorical ends, such as asserting a point of view (What thrilling words!; That accent is ugly), presenting opinion as fact (Shakespeare is the greatest writer in the world), seeking to persuade (Don't you think he speaks very coarsely? Doesn't she have a delightful voice!), seeking to coerce (You really must learn to appreciate the classics), dismissing the unacceptable (Can't they write better than that?), and asserting or maintaining stock responses, especially of a social, ethnic, or linguistic kind (BBC English is the best English; I really like her soft Irish lilt; I don't like her Irish brogue).

The ability to appreciate and produce language that is considered aesthetically pleasing (or at least adequate) has been associated with such concepts as ‘refinement’, ‘culture’, and ‘cultivation’. A refined or cultured person is widely taken to be able to distinguish the good from the bad, the beautiful from the ugly, and to know when it is not right to make such judgements at all; it is also often considered that the less cultured or the uncultured should learn, gladly or grudgingly, from such a person. Ability with language has been ascribed to divine inspiration or grace, to good breeding or the right social background, to the right kind of teacher, to proper observance of the rulings of a group with privilege and authority, or to a mix of these. By and large, good taste has traditionally been considered to have an absolute form: some people have it or approximate to it; others do not have it or are deficient in it. Sometimes, creative speakers and writers may be seen as having great skill but deplorable taste in how they use that skill.

Sociologists of language generally consider that a sense of the correctness, goodness, or beauty of something results from exposure to the norms and expectations of a community: the individual learns or fails to learn how to respond in terms of the values of the group. Aesthetics, from this point of view, is relative, and good taste varies from community to community. A sense of the acceptable may be more fully reinforced in the centre or heartland of a society than at its periphery, where other societies may exert an influence. When distinct groups (tribes, nations, classes, religions, and speakers of certain languages or varieties of a language) are neighbours, become mixed, or are in competition, uncertainties about aesthetic and other values arise, along with problems of choice. These may lead to a search for security in terms of fundamentals (good religion, good grammar), may prompt an eclectic pragmatism (a certain thing is good in one place but not in another; is sometimes good and sometimes not), or may offer greater or less confusion (with no clear conception of what is good or bad, or with uneasily shifting conceptions). Whatever the case, however, people constantly make aesthetic judgements and often institutionalize them in terms of praise or abuse, compliments or insults, affectionate or dismissive names, and a wide range of judgemental expressions such as (for language) the adjectives bad, good, harsh, lovely, PLAIN, and PURE. See ACCENT, DESCRIPTIVISM AND PRESCRIPTIVISM, EDUCATED AND UNEDUCATED, HARD AND SOFT, STYLE, USAGE.