The insights of the brilliant French philosopher Henri Bergson was that art is based on intuition and upon a direct apprehension of reality unmediated by thought. The Iralian Benedetto Croce believed intuition is the immediate aweareness of an object that gives the object form. For intuition to arise from the object, the intuition must be a response to some quality residing in the object itself. The great American philosopher John Dewey recognized an exception to his view that human experience is disconnected and fragmentary. He treated those experiences that flow from their beginnings to their consummations as aesthetic and that aesthetic experience, contrary to other experiernce, is enjoyment for its own sake. The American philosoper and poet George Santayana believed that pleasure in a thing may be regarded as a quality of the thing itself rather than as a subjective response to the thing. Although in much of their philosophy, their is little agreement among Bergson, Croce, Santayana, and Dewey, their approaches to the aesthetic experience are similar.

Marxism based upon economic and pollitical considerations, and Freudianism based upon psychological considerations, have both rejected the art-for-art principle. Marxism treats art as an expression of the underlying ecomomic bases of a society; and its value lies in its support of the economic progress of society. Freud, in turn, stressed that the value of art is in its therapeutic use, with art allowing the artist and the public to reveal hidden conflicts and to discharge tensions.

Although Aristotle also treated art as an imitation, he did so in a different sense than Plato. He believed that an artist could imitate "things as they ought to be" and that "art partly completes what nature cannot bring to a finish." The artist, for example, takes the form of an object, such as the human body or a tree, and imposes that form on other matter, such as a canvas or marble. He is not merely copying matter; but each work is in itself a representation as the way things are, with its being an imitation of the universal whole. Thus, implicit in Aristotlian thought, is that from the unity of the universe and its cosmic form arises the duality of force and particularization of form. We agree with modifications the Aristotelian approach. What makes a great work of art is not the ability of the artist to imitate the whole but his ability to express the whole.

Aesthetics is concerned with the essence and perception of beauty and ugliness; while art in a narrow sense is a disciplined activity or skill and in a broad sense an imaginative and a creative way of looking at the world. In our view, d art is an expression of the fundamental bases of the unity of the universe underlying manifested phenomena. The practitoner in both areas is enabled to tap into the universal essence underlying manifested phenomena. Because Aristotle believed that happiness is the aim of life, he believed that the major function of art is that of hunan satisfaction. In his Politics, he argued that tragedy stimulated the unhealthy and morbid emotions of pity and fear. At the end of the play, the spectator should be purged of these emotions leading to a catharsis resulting in the spectator`s becoming healthier and more capable of happiness. Since the 17th century, French dramatists, such as Jean Baptiste Racine, Pierre Corneille, and Moliere, advocated the doctrine of the three unities of time, place, and action, which dominated French drama until the 19th century.

The 3rd century philosopher Plotinus gave far more importance to art than did Plato. Plotinus was born in Egypt and trained in philosophy at Alexandria. His approach has many aspects consistent with the Unified Theory. In the view of Plotinus art reveals the form of an object more clearly than ordinary experience does, and art raises the soul to the contemplation of the universal. This explanation is consistent our view own conclusion that art is the means by which the consciousness of the artist is enabled to tap into the universal essence that underlie all patterns of manifestation. Plotinus believed that the highest moments of life are mystical, with the soul united in the world of forms with the devine that Plotinus spoke of as "the One."

In the middle ages art was primarily influenced by religious sentiment and was often dependent upon the church. The aesthetic principle underkying art was that of neoplatonism. During the l5th and 16th centuries,the secular influence upon art became pronounced with its sentiment no longher religious in nature but worldly.

The foundation of modern art and aesthetics developed in Germany during the 18th century. Gotthold Ephram wrote Laokoon(1766) and treated art as self-limiting and arriving at its apogee only when its limitations are recognized. Johann Winckelmann even argued that the best art is impersonal and an expression of ideal proportion and balance and not of the artist`s individuality. We believe in the fundamentsal importance of proportion and balance in art but believe that they are an expression of the artist`s ability to go beyond his personal limitations to the very foundation of the harmony and proportion underlying art and beauty. The philosopher Johann Gottieb Fichte proclaimed that beauty is a moral virtue. The world of the artist is one that treats beauty and truth as the end and which are based upon absolute freedom as the goal of the human will.

Immanuel Kant believed that objects are judged beautiful when they satisfy a desire that does not depend upon personal interest or needs. In this belief he came very close to our own views. For him to become directly aware of the underlying harmony of manifeststion, the artist must be freed from the influence of personal interest or needs. Kant paradoxically believed that beautiful objects necessarily have no specific purpose, evem though beautful objects clearly may have a specific purpose and in fact the beauty of an object might be enhanced as a result of its specific purpose. Even though Kant believed that judgments of beauty are universal in nature, he believed that the underlying basis for one`s awarence of beauty is a product of the structure of that person`s mind. Since the structures of the human ninds might differ, beauty according to Kant is not apparently a direct awareness of the underlying harmony, but is a representation influenced by the human mind of the underlying harmony.

The 19th century philosopher G.W.F. Hegel treated art, religion, and philosophy as the bases for the highest spiritual development. Hegel believed that beauty in nature is that which the human spirit finds pleasing and congenial to the exercise of spiritual and intellectual freedom. Since congenial and pleasing objects might have useful purposes, Hegel would treat as beautiful objects that might have useful purposes but Kant would ordinarily not treat useful objects as beautiful.

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer had views similar to the classical views of aesthetics, with a strong Platonic influencve. Schopenhauer believed that universal forms, as would be the case with eternal Platonic forms, exist beyond the world of experience and that aesthetic appreciarion is achieved in the contemplation of them for their own sake. Thus, his views were in this respect similar to those of Kant treating aesthetic appreciation as independent of personal interests or needs.

Friedrich Nietszche adopted originally the views of Schopenhauer and then discarded these views. Nietszche believed that the acceptance of tragedy of life could exist along with joyous affirmaation of life, with the full realization being art. To accept art one must accept the terrors of the universe, and thereby the appreciation of art is only for the strong.

This essay`s discussion has been in genersal that of art applicable to poets, painters, and scultors. The discussion would be in most cases equally applicable to novelists, dramatists, and performers. English novelists Jane Austen and Charkes Duckins, Italian Novelist Carlo Goldoni, and French novelist Alexandre Dumas, and the Norwegian dramartist Henrik Ibsen laid the foundation for contemporary novels on middle-class life. Likewise,neoclassical painter J.A.D. Imgres, romanric painter Eugene Delacroix, and realist painter Gustave Courbet with their attention to lifelike detail helped to lay the foundation for contemporary art. In the 19th century assumptions underlying traditional aesthetics broke down. French impression painter Claude Monet critized academic painters for painting what they thought they saw and not the surfaces of many colors and wavering forms resulting from the distorting play of light and shadows that they actually did see. Postimpression painters Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin,and Vincent van Gogh abandoned to a great extent the attempt to represent objects at all and became dedicated with the structure of a painting and with their own psyche impression.

In rhe early 20th century, Picasso developed further the structual interest of the postimpressionists in his cubist art. Henri Marisse in his paintings developed further the impressionist and postimpressionist art of the 19th century. In literature expressionisn was developed by the Swedish playright August Strindberg and the German playright Frank Wedekind. Jean-Paul Sartre supports a form of existentialism that treats art as an expression of the freedom of a person to choose and under which responsibility is assumed for choices made. Under the views of the British semanticist I.A. Richards art is a langusage. He sets forth two types of language, which are (1) the synbolic consisting of ideas and information. and (2) the emotive that expresses, evokes, and excites feeling and attitudes. Art is emotive language that gives order and coherence to experience and attitudes but with no symbolic meaning.

In our view, beauty is an expression of the harmony required for the devine oneness to express itself in particulars. Harmony allows particulars to engage in patterns of manifestation. Ugliness and the breakdown of unified patterns of manifestation are results of increasing disharmony or interference with the harmonious descent. The devine oneness leads first to dual aspects, the yin and yang, and thereafter to a diversity of particulars that are expressed in harmonious relationhships. But the devine oneness is not itself an expression of harmony even though it gives rise to harmony and beauty. After the oneness descends into particulars, the particulars return again to the devine oneness, the cradle of their manifestation. The descent or fall is an expression of the need of the wholeness to express itself in particulars, and the ascent back to wholeness a means of how increasing patterns of harmonious relationships lead back to the devine oneness that first gave rise to particularized manifestations. Ugliness and the absence of harmony result from man`s interference with, and ignorsance of, the essential attributes of harmony, art, and beauty. Beauty is inherent in manifestation and ugliness is ignorance of the essential features of manifestations.

� Wilson Ogg