Abstract
At the beginning of modern times, taste was seen as a sort of sense of sociability, indistinctly moral and aesthetic. Why, during the eighteenth century did it become exclusively the sense of beauty? To understand this change, this article maintains that we must consider the great revolution, which affected the idea of beauty between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, that is to say the end of the metaphysical conception of beauty. We must analyse the phenomenon of beauty aestheticisation produced by the modern subjectivist, psychological and empirical perspective. The aestheticisation of taste is one of the consequences of the underground ontological revolution, which led to a transformation of the transcendental essences in human values. When beauty is nothing more than beauty, and does not exist without a sensitive experience, one needs a sensitive faculty which enables one to grasp beauty, or more precisely, which gives birth to beauty, seeing beauty as no longer having a proper ontological consistency.
Highlights
At the beginning of modern times, taste was seen as a sort of sense of sociability, indistinctly moral and aesthetic
In 1711, Shaftesbury still wrote in Characteristics: “what is beautiful is harmonious and well-proportioned; what is harmonious and well-proportioned is true; what is at the same time beautiful and true is pleasant and good.”[6]. In 1715, Crouzat in his Traité du beau, or, in 1719, Dubos in his Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture, still combined beauty and good in the same original nature; but the separation became even more distinct during the eighteenth century
Much so that the new discipline we call “aesthetics” is designed by Kant by the expression of “critique of taste”. This aestheticisation of taste is one of the consequences of the underground ontological revolution, which led to transform the transcendental essences into human values, and to the unbinding of beauty, truth and good which followed
Summary
At the beginning of modern times, taste was seen as a sort of sense of sociability, indistinctly moral and aesthetic. Taste as a sense of beauty was the subject of a great number of essays.
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