After Plotinus, says Schassler, fifteen centuries passed without the slightest scientific interest for the world of beauty and art. ...In reality, nothing of the kind happened. The science of aesthetics... neither did nor could vanish, because it never existed. ...the Greeks were so little developed that goodness and beauty seemed to coincide. On that obsolete Greek view of life the science of aesthetics was invented by men of the eighteenth century, and especially shaped and mounted in Baumgarten's theory. The Greeks (as anyone may read in Benard's book on Aristotle and Walter's work on Plato) never had a science of aesthetics.
About this quote
- What does it mean?
- Tolstoy refutes the idea that aesthetics vanished after Plotinus, arguing it never existed as a science since Greeks didn't separate goodness and beauty.
- In plain terms
- Tolstoy says aesthetics never really existed as a science because Greeks didn't distinguish between goodness and beauty until much later.
- What can you take from it?
- Aesthetics as a science is a modern invention based on obsolete Greek views.
Where it applies
Putting it to work
Questions to consider
- Is art criticism a science?
- How do we define aesthetics?
Another view
Claiming aesthetics never existed ignores centuries of philosophical debate on art.
More from Leo Tolstoy
The partisans of aesthetic theory denied that it was their own invention, and professed that it existed in the nature of things and even that it was recognized…
Permalink to quote #71 Aesthetic theories arose one hundred fifty years ago among the wealthy classes of the Christian European world. ...And notwithstanding its obvious insolidity, …
Permalink to quote #73 ...having acknowledged the measure of the good to be pleasure, i.e., beauty, the European upper classes went back in their comprehension of art to the gross co…
Permalink to quote #70
Related quotes
In contrast to the asexual chasteness of official communist art, Nazi art is both prurient and idealizing. A utopian aesthetics (physical perfection; identity …
Susan SontagSusan Sontag quote #6 Ethics and Aesthetics are one.
Ludwig WittgensteinLudwig Wittgenstein quote #10 The effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the e…
Arthur SchopenhauerArthur Schopenhauer quote #11