Aesthetics is the study of beauty and taste, whether in the form of the comic, the tragic or the sublime. The word derives from the Greek aisthetikos, meaning 'of sense perception.' Aesthetics has traditionally been part of other philosophical pursuits like the investigation of epistemology or ethics, but it started to come into its own and become a more independent pursuit under Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher who saw aesthetics as a unitary and self-sufficient type of human experience.
Read Article: Aesthetics: The Philosophy of Art, Beauty and Perception
The appreciation of beauty is so great and pleasurable, that it is hard to admit that it is not self-justifying or self-sufficient. Yet, many things considered beautiful in childhood are not beautiful later. Beauty is the spring of a lot of action and much of it is self-destructive and cliche. Flags come to mind.
This time of year is when I think of this subject the most. All of the really lame Christmas decorations are really irritating. My wife sees Christmas lights and says, “Isn’t that beautiful?” I say no it looks like a couple of eight year-olds ran around a tree with a string of lights. And there are other tacky reminders of Christmas decorations.