11. History of Aesthetics - Augustine

As a teenager, St. Augustine hung around with some miscreants. One day this group turned their attention toward a pear tree that belonged to none of them. They stole a large amount of pears. Was it because they were hungry? No, they simply wanted to steal them for sport and toss them in with some hogs, having barely taken a few bites themselves. Augustine talks about this incident later in his famous work Confessions. This senseless act haunted him for years after.

We associate the expression “a beautiful person” with someone’s character. While we tend to think that the opposite of beauty is ugliness, it also has to do with lacking something essential or not being well-formed. Augustine frames the pear incident more in ethical terms. However, we might wonder if it is also because the action was ugly, disordered, and deformed. These negative aesthetic concepts are opposite to his key characteristics of beauty as we’ll discuss below.

As we progress in this history of aesthetics, the number of philosophers per time period will increase, especially in the modern period. They bring their own blend of ideas into the greater conversations surrounding art, aesthetics, and philosophy in general. While the Middle Ages contained many different thinkers, spanning about a thousand years, we will only devote time to a few of the key people. And we begin with Augustine’s thoughts about beauty.