The Inquiry Of Aesthetics On Francis Hutcheson

Hutcheson advanced his own aesthetic ideas on the basis of many famous theologians and philosophers,and proposed such as the perception of beauty,the classifications of beauty and the evaluation method,the value of beauty and so on.In his work An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue,a chapter of the relationship about the feelings of the people' s power and emotion,he believed they were not only exist in our heart,but also exist in the objective world,it should be referred to as sensation.He thought the man's sensation was passive,namely,these passive notion received and processed the intrinsic or extrinsic information,and these sensations would not be affected by any change of people's inner world unless suffering from illness.He went on to highlight three characteristics of beauty:Firstly,beauty had nothing to do with the obvious benefits or results.Secondly,beauty was produced because of uniformity amidst variety.Thirdly,beauty was able to make humans happy.Hutcheson developed his theory of philosophy about the aesthetics and aesthetic points from the Stoics,Locke,the representative of empiricism of the United Kingdom and Shaftesbury,his premier teacher of philosophy.He attempted internal sense theory as a bridge to his aesthetic theory,one can perceive the beauty of object by this power.He thought the sense of beauty was existed inside,an abstract and universal understanding scale which had congenital,materiality,universality,non-utilitarian features.For Hutcheson,discussing ultimate goal of the root of beauty was to meet people,in order to maximize the greatest happiness of the majority,this thought also inspired the birth of moral emotional ethics.Therefore,in terms of his aesthetic ideas in systemic,Hutcheson expounded his ideas of existence of beauty from the hedonism,utilitarianism and deontological perspectives.Hutcheson is considered the first person who puts forward modern aesthetic ideas by Harold Newton Lee.Of course,his theories have some flaws because of the development of history and theory reasons,such as confused the subjectivity and objectivity of beauty,his aesthetic thoughts had theological teleology and classified beauty in a sufficient basis,because of these important reasons just affected Hutcheson' s position in history,so many scholars at home and abroad avoid him.In my opinion,his aesthetic theory had a profound impact on Christian aesthetics theory,aesthetic theory of utilitarianism,empiricism and rationalism aesthetic theory,which had important value of reference and guidance to solve extreme development of contemporary aesthetic theory.