Why we like what we like
As is well known, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. In many cases, however, our sense of aesthetics follows very specific patterns.
Proverbs like "Appearances are deceptive" or "All that glitters is not gold" warn us not to allow ourselves to be guided by aesthetic criteria. But that's exactly what we do every day. Or why did you buy the shoes or pants you are wearing right now? Even when deciding which of the umpteen different types of chocolate biscuit ends up in our shopping trolley in the supermarket, aesthetic perception plays a certain role.
At its core, aesthetics is about beauty. The great philosophers of antiquity Plato, Aristotle and Socrates racked their brains about this. Thousands of years later, the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten (1714–1762) founded aesthetics as a science of sensory knowledge. Today, the Duden defines it as "science, the study of beauty". It is not only paintings, pieces of music or poems that enrapture us - even if many researchers who deal with the subject are primarily interested in our perception of art. We can also perceive the taste of a candy or the feeling of stroking a fluffy teddy bear as beautiful, as studies show…
