Aesthetics is a subject with the theme of studying the essence and significance of beauty. Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy. The main object of research is art, but it does not study the concrete expression in art, but studies the philosophical problems in art, so it is called "artistic philosophy of beauty". The basic problems of aesthetics include the essence of beauty, the relationship between aesthetic consciousness and aesthetic object, etc. The word source aesthetics in this paragraph comes from the Greek aesthesis. The original meaning is "the feeling of the senses". The German philosopher Alexander gottlieb Baumgarden first used this word. The publication of his book Aesthetics A marks the emergence of aesthetics as an independent discipline. Until19th century, aesthetics was usually defined as the study of "beauty" (Sch? The theory of nheit). Modern philosophy defines aesthetics as the theory and philosophy to understand the cognitive feelings in art, science, design and philosophy. The aesthetic value of an object is not simply defined as "beauty" and "ugliness", but to understand the type and essence of the object. The development of this section of historical aesthetics as an independent discipline began in Baumgarden, Germany in the18th century, but its appearance is based on the theoretical discussion of beauty by ancient Greek thinkers, which is a systematization and scientification of previous aesthetic theories. The discussion of aesthetic theory since ancient Greece is based on people's aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic creation activities, and it is a philosophical reflection on people's aesthetic activities. Therefore, if you want to understand aesthetics, you must return to its source and start a beautiful journey. Archaeology and art history tell us that human beings have started aesthetic and aesthetic creation since they left animals. Paleolithic cavemen wore red, yellow and green colored stone beads, animal teeth and mussel shells. Not only the decoration of primitive people can see the early aesthetic activities of human beings, but also the primitive art reflects the early aesthetic activities of human beings. According to written records and patterns, it is speculated that primitive art includes poetry, dance, music and so on. , but now it has disappeared. However, cave paintings and pottery are the two earliest original artistic records that we can see today. The former is mainly composed of various animals, vivid, meticulous and colorful. The latter is not only beautiful in appearance, rich in patterns, but also bright in color contrast. People always have a certain life and a certain phenomenon before they start thinking and discussing, and establish corresponding disciplines on the basis of thinking and discussing. The thinking and discussion on the early aesthetic phenomenon of human beings began in ancient Greece. At that time, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and other great philosophers all participated in the discussion and debate on beauty. However, their views and opinions on beauty are often mixed with their understanding of truth and goodness, and they become vassals of their philosophy, morality, theology, politics and literature. In addition, there was no aesthetic monograph at that time. The aesthetic views of thinkers are mixed in biographies, letters and notes of politics, philosophy, religion, morality, art and even history. People have not found an independent and special research object for aesthetics from those mixed and intertwined ideological systems. This situation continued until the middle of18th century. /kloc-After the 8th century, with the development of industrial revolution in europe, modern disciplines such as natural science, philosophy, ethics, psychology, literature and art entered a period of gradual formation and development. Philosophy closely related to aesthetics has undergone an epistemological turn since modern times, which provides the necessary historical conditions for the establishment of aesthetics. It is under such historical conditions that Baumgarden distinguished aesthetics from logic for the first time in his own philosophical system. While strictly stipulating that the research object of logic is the abstract thinking that forms concepts and reasoning, it also stipulates its own unique research object for aesthetics. He also wrote a monograph on aesthetics, which initially formed the basic framework of aesthetics and discussed some basic problems of aesthetics. Thus, aesthetics was born, and Baum Garden became the father of aesthetics. Baumgarten (A.G. Baumgarten1714-1762) is a professor of philosophy at Harry University in Prussia. His main viewpoints on aesthetics focus on two aspects: first, he defines aesthetics as a subject that studies people's perceptual knowledge. Baumgarden believes that people's psychological activities are divided into three aspects: knowledge, emotion and meaning. Studying knowledge or human rational knowledge is logical, studying human will is ethical, and studying human emotion is "aesthetic", which is equivalent to human perceptual knowledge. The word "aesthetic" comes from Greek, which means "sensibility", and later translated into Chinese, it becomes "aesthetic". 1750, Baum Garden officially called Aesthetics his monograph on human perceptual knowledge. His book is regarded as the first aesthetic monograph in history. Secondly, Baumgarden thinks that "the aesthetic object is the perfection of perceptual knowledge". Why is aesthetics related to perceptual knowledge? Baumgarden's teacher, the German philosopher Leibniz, has a vivid explanation for this. He said: painters and other artists, although clearly aware of what is good and what is not, often can not find their own reasons for aesthetic interest. If someone asks them, they will reply that their dissatisfied works lack something I can't say. In the eyes of Leibniz and Baumgarden, knowing whether a work is beautiful or not, but not knowing why, is a vague and confusing perceptual knowledge. After Baum Garden, the development of aesthetics has gone through three important stages: German classical aesthetics, Marxist aesthetics and western modern aesthetics. In the stage of German classical aesthetics, Kant and Hegel made great contributions to aesthetics, forming the first discipline since aesthetics came into being and the third peak in the history of western aesthetics. Kant is famous for his three criticisms. In Critique of Judgment, Kant put forward and demonstrated a series of basic aesthetic problems, forming a relatively complete aesthetic theoretical system. After Kant, Hegel pushed German classical aesthetics to the peak and became a master of German classical aesthetics and western aesthetic thoughts before Marxist aesthetics. Although Marx didn't write a special aesthetic work, he discussed many aesthetic problems in many other works, especially he introduced the experimental point of view into aesthetic research, thus establishing the discussion of beauty on the basis of dialectical unity of subject and object, which provided a new way of thinking for aesthetic research. /kloc-after the mid-9th century, there have been many schools in the development of aesthetics, but generally speaking, there is an important tendency to gradually break away from the pure philosophical discussion of "what is beauty" and focus on the description of aesthetic psychology of "how our psychological activities are in aesthetic experience", thus gradually turning aesthetics into an experience description science. This is a historic change from "top-down" to "bottom-up" in the history of aesthetics. Aesthetics in the 20th century has formed a strong anti-traditional trend. On the one hand, it rebelled against traditional metaphysics and publicized empirical methods, on the other hand, it rebelled against rationalism and publicized human irrationality, and on this basis, it gradually formed two major ideological trends: scientism aesthetics and humanism aesthetics. The main representatives of modern western aesthetics and aesthetic trends are: Fechner's experimental aesthetics, Bell's meaningful form, Dewey's empirical aesthetics, Croce's image intuition theory, Bloch's psychological distance theory, Lippes' empathy theory, Freud's Libido theory, and later analytical aesthetics, phenomenological aesthetics, existentialism aesthetics and so on.

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