To use words and terms not in accordance with their meaning in everyday language is problematic, however, it is often necessary. In general there are several different meanings for every word or term. Every specific term may be considered an expression for a complex statement. Any given terminology can be transformed into colloquial language if the meaning of the statement inherent in the term is analyzed. Terms are names for meaningful statements; they can become independent of their original meaning and even differ very much from it.

The term "aesthetics" has undergone such a functional change of meaning over the past 200 years. In the middle of the eighteenth century Alexander Baumgarten, the founder of modern German esthetics, used the term for following statements: though man's physiological structure is the same for everyone, different people pass different judgments about the same objects. Human perception and its transformation into judgments obviously depends on social conditions in man's development. - If our judgment differs from that of others we ask ourselves how we arrived at it. There are two obvious answers to this question:
1.) It is impossible to form the same opinion about something therefore one need not discuss the problem.
2.) Valid rules are necessary to determine possible judgments to prevent too many individual opinions about the same object of perception.
The first argument has been misused for the statement that various diverging opinions about the same objects have to be considered merely as matters of taste and there are as many tastes as men.
The second argument led to the so-called "classical aesthetics" in France. During the rule of Louis XIV Corneille and Racine established a system of rigid rules that had to be considered as binding because the audience was supposed to form a unanimous opinion.

Neither the normative aesthetics of rules nor the arbitrary aesthetics of taste are satisfactory answers to the question of the conditionality of our perceptions and judgments: this is unsatisfactory both in a philosophical sense and in everyday language. What we call "aesthetics" is the theory of the conditionality of our perceptions and judgments and their applicability in our relations to others.

This is what Baumgarten says. - His definition has been lost because the everyday use of the term "aesthetics" has become a mere expression for statements like "aesthetics is a theory of beauty". This use implies that rules can determine what has to be considered beautiful. As this can never be achieved - because any definition will be argued by someone - one decides that beauty is only what one considers it to be. This idea is untenable, of course, as we consider today this and tomorrow that as beautiful, and often we dislike something we liked yesterday.

Actually this is less a controversy about the definition of beauty - the judgment "this is beautiful" would not make sense if it were only an arbitrary opinion - than a question about the reasons for forming opinions. We take for granted that every judgment has been consciously arrived at and that the development of the reasons for it can be recapitulated any time. This means that the acknowledgment of arguments and their explanations are not necessarily linked. In everyday speech aesthetic judgments are generally accepted as binding. However, we should not accept judgments without explanation because we can very well acknowledge the reasons for passing a judgment without supporting the judgment itself. Therefore, the differentiation between the statement "this is beautiful" and the explanation of this opinion has to be learned.

Ever since the Greeks have begun philosophizing about beauty by creating it we have been obliged to consider not only the term "beauty" but the terms "good " and "true" as well. For the Greeks beauty was not the acknowledgment of what was supposed to be beautiful but the relation between the justification of a judgment and the judgment itself. It had to manifest itself as an act, an attitude, or the production of something. People confronted with this creation did not have to ask for an explanation. Accordingly, the Greeks considered everything strange as barbaric, because as long it was unknown it could not be explained and was therefore untrue and ugly as well.

Aesthetics is the theory of the relativity of our perceptions and judgments and their application through communication. It is the theory of neutralizing this relativity and the liberation of mechanic and unfounded judgments. This liberation is successful if a judgment is sufficiently justified. What does this mean? Traditionally aesthetics has been a branch of philosophy because philosophy has always dealt with the justification of judgments. However, it only defines justification theoretically and not with regard to everyday life. The justification of a judgment is acknowledged if it corresponds to some philosophical theory. The classical philosopher can be an expert in aesthetic theory and at the same time be surrounded by objects he would never judge as "beautiful or not beautiful".

In the sense of Baumgarten's aesthetic theory the justification of a judgment is acceptable when the relativity of personal perceptions and judgments is acknowledged. This is the very characteristic of the aesthetics as mediation: to pass judgments beyond personal compulsions and automatic or emotional reactions. Judgments are therefore not normative or theoretical but instruments of action. This is why aesthetics had to abandon philosophy and, accordingly, it is reprimanded of not being scientific. These reprimands became stronger when the reasons why aesthetics achieves mediation were understood: It transfers the results of single scientific disciplines about the relativity of our perceptions and judgments to objects that are not considered objects of research. For instance, it transfers findings from art history to objects that art historians did not have in mind at all when they developed their theories; or it transfers pschylogical findings from gestaltpsychology to works of art that had not been considered objects of research.

Aesthetics is not an independent discipline but the practice of mediation or the practice of appropriation. It is true that there still are aesthetics that can rightly claim to be branches of science, as for instance the aesthetics of information. However, in Baumgarten's sense they are not helpful for people who have to pass meaningful judgments without applying a theory.

Of course aesthetics as mediation can be considered unscientific if the usefulness of science is measured according to the advance of science itself. However, it is a different view of science if it is regarded with respect to man's effort of coping with life. In this sense aesthetics of mediation even is the avantgarde of science inasmuch as it deals with justifying and constituting actions and ways of acting.

This alone is not sufficient to distinguish aesthetics from other instructions of acting. Aesthetics deals with objects or figurations that are materializations of abstract ideas. The question is how to represent them in a context. In medieval aesthetics, for instance, this goal is achieved as every materialization, i.e. every aesthetic object, tries to represent the complete range of associations on several levels of meaning. This representation can also be achieved by establishing standardized criteria for various different materializations. The subject - i.e. the receptive individual - has to mediate a context for every single materialization.

Objects as materializations of abstract statements - i.e. aesthetic objects - obtain their meaning because man is obliged to create equivalents in the world of objects in order to be able to communicate and to establish meaningful relations with himself and others.

This obligation of materialization was criticized by ADORNO, with reference to MARX, as a materialization of consciousness. However, this criticism is ineffective because even the use of language could be criticized as materialization since it visualizes a basic condition of life, of "being in this world", without being able to overcome it. As the obligation of materialization is a basic rule an aesthetic point of view enters every form of human expression. Hence, aesthetics exist everywhere. This creates problems, for instance, when physiologists and sociologists ignore the obligation of materialization. They try to compensate this deficiency by establishing special didactics; however, they cannot replace aesthetics becasue they only integrate objects into a system of facts instead of mediating their unity. Mediation through the subject has not yet been sufficiently defined, though psychologists have acknowledged one aspect of mediation, i.e. obliging the subject to introversion. On the other hand they have hardly considered extroversion, an equally important aspect of mediation. Mediation through the subject becomes efficient by externalization. Appropriation through aesthetic mediation always depends on externalization and internalization as well. Appropriation through mediation is possible if the subject is able to show the inherent material allusion to the totality of the concept. A concept of totality of is necessary to form a meaningful whole of single acts and objects of perception. The term "Weltbild" (conception of the world) is commonly used for this dimension of totality.

Therefore, the differentiation between aesthetic judgment and the justification of the judgment is necessary. An individual aesthetic judgment only expresses a person's ability to become aware of the totality the materialized object refers to. The objects do not contain totality itself. This has to be constituted through the mediation of the subject.

Today, classical aesthetics does not function any more if it is understood as a translation of a concept of life into a uniform design concept. The last representative of such a classicism was the Bauhaus and it is so severely criticized because its concepts seem to be far superior to modern environmental design.

The problem of externalization became the most important topic in art. Aesthetic mediation is related to art only inasmuch as it uses artistic forms of externalization to make these techniques available for non-artists in everyday life. For this reason contemporary arts are often renounced of being used as cultural techniques. Therefore, the arts should be developed as pure arts in order to enable us to take advantage of this utility, regardless of what societies demand as cultural techniques. The diversity of forms of externalization is necessary because totality as uniform object design is not desirable.
(Translated from the German by Margret Berki)