Sigmund Freud and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing both developed their own ideas of emotion within their writings over art and the subject of the pregnant moment. For each philosopher, emotion was more than an abstract experience that people go through, but rather a phenomenon to be understood. Freud writes on this in his collection Writings on Art and Literature, where he analyzes Michelangelo’s Moses. Lessing’s writes on emotion in his writing Laocoon focuses on the statue of Laocoon.
When defining beauty, Freud brings up emotion in the way it relates to the appearance of repressed feelings such as erotic instincts and impulses within the individual. Freud states, "not merely the theory of beauty but theory of the qualities of feeling. He works in other strata of mental life and has little to do with the subdued emotional impulses which, inhibited in their aims and dependent on a host of concurrent factors, usually furnish the material for the study of aesthetics."
Lessing, though does not directly define the beautiful, but describes what it is not in connection to the ancient Greeks and their way of creating art as them being the high standard for aesthetically pleasing, beautiful. For example, the beautiful would not show the disfigured face or posture. He explains, “There are passions and degrees of …show more content…
He states, "What grips us so powerfully can only be the artist’s intention, in so far as he has succeeded in expressing it in his work and in getting us to understand it. I realize that this cannot be merely a matter of intellectual comprehension; what he aims at is to awaken in us the same emotional attitude, the same mental constellation as that which in him produced the impetus to create." He reflects on the importance of reaching the artist’s initial emotion but not in the aesthetics of what is created by the
When defining beauty, Freud brings up emotion in the way it relates to the appearance of repressed feelings such as erotic instincts and impulses within the individual. Freud states, "not merely the theory of beauty but theory of the qualities of feeling. He works in other strata of mental life and has little to do with the subdued emotional impulses which, inhibited in their aims and dependent on a host of concurrent factors, usually furnish the material for the study of aesthetics."
Lessing, though does not directly define the beautiful, but describes what it is not in connection to the ancient Greeks and their way of creating art as them being the high standard for aesthetically pleasing, beautiful. For example, the beautiful would not show the disfigured face or posture. He explains, “There are passions and degrees of …show more content…
He states, "What grips us so powerfully can only be the artist’s intention, in so far as he has succeeded in expressing it in his work and in getting us to understand it. I realize that this cannot be merely a matter of intellectual comprehension; what he aims at is to awaken in us the same emotional attitude, the same mental constellation as that which in him produced the impetus to create." He reflects on the importance of reaching the artist’s initial emotion but not in the aesthetics of what is created by the