The aesthetic category of the uncanny became popular in late romanticism (late 1800s), Gothic fiction, and a variety of art movements including surrealism, dadaism, and symbolism. This category is just as illuminating as the beautiful and the sublime, but it is… Read more ›
Romanticism was a philosophical, literary, and artistic movement that began in the late 1700s and ended at the end of the 1800s.[1] The movement was essentially a reaction to the Enlightenment movement and was therefore essentially a reaction to (1)… Read more ›
In Japanese aesthetics yūgen refers to those moments when we feel as if we have had a partial glimpse into a hidden reality. Such a glimpse is felt to be profoundly mysterious. It is also experienced as beautiful. According to… Read more ›
Plato’s pupil Aristotle claimed that the “chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree”. For many, THE chief form of beauty is the golden ratio. Two quantities are in the… Read more ›
Many of us think that virtue is connected with measure. Vice arises when people are excessive or deficient with regard to their emotions and actions. For example, a character disposition to get excessively angry at the wrong time, toward the… Read more ›
Soren Kierkegaard The Danish existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), via his pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis (a Latin transcription for “the watchman of Copenhagen”), put forth a disturbing and ground-breaking account of demonic evil in chapter four of his 1844 work The Concept… Read more ›
Agnes Martin, Falling Blue (1963) In his book Human, all too Human (Cambridge University Press, 1986), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) wrote: Without Melody: There are people who repose so steadily within themselves and whose capacities are balanced with one another so… Read more ›