From the philosophy of beauty to the anthropology of aesthetics

Beauty and aesthetics have a thought-provoking course of evolution and development in the history of the world, in such a way that the known cultures before written history such as China, Egypt, Iran, Africa and Europe considered its examples to be human characters, behaviors and virtues, and on the other hand, beauty was constructions, functions, skills, creatures and natural objects; Animals, trees and rock shapes were described. But the history of beauty in the West is full of ups and downs, and from the ancient Greeks, who considered beauty to be the product of the artist's thinking, to Augustine, the western philosopher in the Middle Ages, who described beauty from the innovative doctrine of "Afaza" of absolute existence, the theory of beauty in The aesthetics of the Middle Ages, in a relatively artificial way, served as a substitute for the useful aesthetic interests and the origin of the work.In 1790, the important book of Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher and a leading figure in the modern philosophy of the 18th century, called Critique of the Power of Judgment, was published, which is known as one of the most important sources of aesthetics today. In the pre-critical period of his thinking, he wrote a small treatise entitled Considerations on the Beautiful and the Noble (1764), in which he mainly focused on social and anthropological reflections. Kant denied the principles of taste and believed that the judgments we issue about beauty are only based on pleasure and are completely subjective and only work for empirical studies (anthropology or history). Kant made extensive changes in the subject of aesthetics and made it It became a theory related to art and beauty. (Masika, 2011: 3) In Kant's criticism, sense is lower than knowledge and understanding, and taste is not based on moral foundation, and the judgment of the beauty of something is a judgment of taste, and taste is the power of judgment. knows about beauty. Until the end of the 19th century, as a result of Kant's theories, in Western culture and studies, art and works of art were examples of aesthetics, and the understanding of beauty also depended on the values ​​with the sensory experience of objects or events. At the end of the century, with the spread of the study of anthropology of art, the topics of aesthetics were also raised at the same time, and a new perspective appeared in the topics of aesthetics. Kant's aesthetic theory was systematic and comprehensive, he related experience and judgments about natural beauty and art to the basic concepts of epistemology, metaphysics and ethics. The continuation of this legacy in aesthetics after him is clearly visible, the purpose of this thesis is to analyze the evolution of the philosophy of beauty to the anthropology of aesthetics, and the question is based on what historical developments have occurred in the thought and philosophy of beauty from the ancient period to the anthropology of aesthetics?

The research method of this study is analytical-descriptive with a qualitative approach centered on historical developments based on written sources.

The findings show that the most important developments in the 19th century of anthropology are related to the two attitudes of evolutionism and diffusion (expansion) in the years 1930-1880, so that the evolutionism approach focuses on the growth of the (intrinsic) aesthetic power in humans, and its growth or lack thereof depends on hierarchical principles. And it is a stage, and diffusionism emphasizes on the expansion of the components of beauty in different societies, until with the emergence of aesthetic anthropology in the contemporary era, more attention was paid to the components of native beauty and the creative society in researches, and beauty was criticized from the perspective of the creative society