In his book Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, Roger Scruton notes at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the philosophy of art became aware of itself and named itself ‘aesthetics’ after the Greek term aisthesis for sensation. This was in keeping with a much older view that beauty is the object of a sensory delight rather than an intellectual delight, and that appreciating beauty must always involve the senses. Nevertheless, the philosophers Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant placed less emphasis on the sensory impact of beauty and more emphasis on the intellectual importance of beauty. Most thinkers today understand that aesthetics does not denote a purely sensory frame of mind. These thinkers understand beauty as something presented through the senses and then to the mind.
Today, these same thinkers might argue that aesthetics is not the same as philosophy of art. In his book Aesthetics: A Very Short Introduction, Bence Nanay states, “Philosophy of art is about art. Aesthetics is about many things – including art. But it is also about our experience of breathtaking landscapes or the pattern of shadows on the wall opposite your office.” Whereas philosophy of art asks ethical, metaphysical, and linguistic questions about art, aesthetics engages with art. And the aesthetic engagement with art is something that is done, while the aesthetic experience of art is what is felt while engaging aesthetically.
It seems appropriate at this point to ponder whether art is primarily imitative or expressive. In his book Beauty & Imitation: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts, Daniel McInerny takes an Aristotelian-Thomistic approach to art based upon Aristotle’s Poetics and works from Thomas Aquinas including Summa theologiae. The center of the Aristotelian-Thomistic approach to art is this: that art is a picturing or mimesis of reality. The Greek term mimesis can be translated as ‘imitation’ or ‘representation’ and left untranslated is the English word mimesis.
It was during the Romantic Period of the aforementioned eighteenth century that the shift from a mimetic to an expressive model of art occurred. This is why McInerny uses the term ‘art’ in the sense of ‘mimetic art’ since the phrase ‘fine art’ and the term ‘aesthetics’ derive from a modern tradition that is antithetical to the Aristotelian-Thomistic one. McInerny states, “Art is imitation, the making of a picture of some feature of the world; art thus images, or re-presents, for our delighted contemplation, one or more formal aspects of its source or origin.”
~ Boethius ~
For more information, you are encouraged to read the article “On Beauty and Imitation” by Daniel McInerny.