10 Aesthetics The Beautiful and the Sublime he person generally held to be the founder of aesthetics as an independent philosophical discipline is Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–62) Certainly it was he who coined the word ‘aesthetics’, in a short treatise on poetry published in 1735 For Baumgarten, the purpose of art is to produce beauty, defined in terms of the ordered relationship between the parts of a whole The point of beauty is to give pleasure and arouse desire The finest beauty is to be found in nature, and therefore the highest aim of art is to imitate nature Other eighteenth-century philosophers sought to give a more precise analysis of beauty Hume, in the section of his Treatise of Human Nature entitled ‘Of Beauty and Deformity’, offered the following definition: T beauty is such an order and constitution of parts, as either by the primary constitution of our nature, by custom, or by caprice, is fitted to give a pleasure and satisfaction to the soul This is the distinguishing character of beauty, and forms all the difference betwixt it and deformity, whose natural tendency is to produce uneasiness Pleasure and pain, therefore, are not only necessary attendants of beauty and deformity, but constitute their very essence (ii i 8) Later, Hume was dissatisfied with the idea that unexamined custom and uneducated caprice could determine beauty; he sought to make room, in aesthetic judgements, for correctness and incorrectness In The Standard of Taste (1757) he argued that the criteria of judgement should be established by ascertaining which features of works of art were most highly pleasing to qualified and impartial connoisseurs