Aesthetics is both the study of beauty and the properties of a system that appeal to the senses, as opposed to the content, structures, and utility of the system itself.
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Look up aesthetics in Wiktionary, the free dictionaryAesthetics is also the domain of philosophy that ponders art and such qualities as beauty, sublimity, and even ugliness and dissonance. An aesthetic (also esthetic or æsthetic) is the concept of a particular school of philosophy that appraises art, beauty, and associated concepts by certain standards (e.g. the aesthetic of minimalism). |
The word aesthetics was not widely used in English until the beginning of the 19th Century, as referenced by J. H. Bernard's 1892 translation of Immanuel Kant's the Critique of the Power of Judgment. The term entered the German lexicon with the philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten.
