The question “what is art?” sounds simple. It has occupied some of the sharpest minds in Western history for over two thousand years without producing consensus. What philosophers have produced instead is a series of genuinely different answers — each revealing something true about art, each incompatible with the others, and each shaped by what the philosopher in question thought human beings were fundamentally for.
Here is what the major thinkers actually said, and why it matters.
Plato: Art Is Dangerous Imitation
Plato was the first major philosopher to take art seriously enough to argue that it should be censored — which is a backhanded form of respect. His central claim was that art is imitation (mimesis): painters paint appearances of things, not the things themselves, and the things themselves are already copies of the eternal Forms that constitute true reality. A painting of a bed is therefore three steps removed from truth — the Form of the Bed is reality, the physical bed is a copy of it, and the painting is a copy of that copy.
This makes art not just philosophically low-grade but actively dangerous. Plato was particularly worried about poetry and drama, which imitated human emotions convincingly enough to stir them in audiences. A tragedy that made you weep was, in his view, exercising and strengthening the weaker, emotional parts of the soul at the expense of reason. He proposed, in the Republic, that poets and dramatists be expelled from the ideal city — not out of hostility to beauty, but because he thought uncontrolled emotional experience undermined the rational self-governance that philosophy was trying to cultivate.
His one concession was that art could serve the state if it depicted virtuous subjects and promoted civic values. Art as propaganda he could tolerate. Art as emotional liberation he could not.
Aristotle: Art Is Therapeutic Imitation
Aristotle studied under Plato and disagreed with him about almost everything regarding art. Where Plato saw imitation as a deficiency, Aristotle saw it as a natural human pleasure — we enjoy recognizing represented things even when the original would be unpleasant to look at. A painting of a corpse can be beautiful. This is not dangerous; it is evidence of our cognitive delight in representation itself.
His more important disagreement was about emotional experience. Plato thought tragedy strengthened dangerous emotions. Aristotle thought it purged them. His concept of catharsis — still debated among classicists — describes how pity and fear aroused by a tragedy are discharged through the theatrical experience, leaving the audience emotionally clarified rather than destabilized. Art was not a threat to rational self-governance. It was a tool for emotional health.
Aristotle also argued that art — specifically poetry — was more philosophical than history, because history records what happened while poetry represents what could happen, dealing in universals rather than particulars. Art, properly understood, was closer to truth than Plato allowed.
Kant: Disinterested Pleasure and the Sublime
Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) is the foundational text of modern aesthetics. His central contribution was the concept of disinterested pleasure: the aesthetic experience of beauty is distinguished from other pleasures by the fact that it does not involve desire, utility, or personal interest. When you find a landscape beautiful, you are not wanting to own it or use it — you are simply experiencing a free play of imagination and understanding that produces pleasure without any stake in the object’s existence.
This sounds like a fine distinction, but it has enormous consequences. It means aesthetic judgment is neither purely subjective (just personal preference) nor purely objective (a property of the object measurable by science). It occupies a distinctive middle territory — universal without being conceptually provable. When you say something is beautiful, you are implicitly claiming everyone should agree with you, even though you cannot give a knockdown argument for why they must.
Kant also developed the concept of the sublime — the experience of something so vast, powerful, or formless (a storm, a mountain, the night sky) that it defeats our capacity to represent it. The sublime is not beautiful but in some ways more powerful — it confronts us with the limits of human cognition and in doing so reveals our rational faculties as something that transcends mere nature.
Hegel: Art as the Sensuous Appearance of Truth
Hegel defined beauty as the sensuous or perceptual appearance or expression of absolute truth. The best artworks convey, by sensory and perceptual means, the deepest metaphysical truth.
For Hegel, art was one of three ways — alongside religion and philosophy — in which the Absolute Spirit (his term for the totality of reality understanding itself through human consciousness) came to know itself. Art expressed this self-knowledge through sensory form: sculpture in ancient Greece embodied the Greek Spirit at its most perfect, because the clarity of marble form matched perfectly the stage of historical consciousness the Greeks had reached. As history developed and human consciousness became more complex and inward, art could no longer fully express it — which is the basis of Hegel’s claim that art had reached its historical end, superseded by religion and then philosophy as vehicles for Absolute self-knowledge.
This is not a claim that people stopped making art. It is a claim that art ceased to be the primary vehicle of a civilization’s deepest self-understanding — which is arguably true, and controversial.
Schopenhauer: Art as Escape from the Will
Arthur Schopenhauer, writing in the shadow of Kant and in explicit disagreement with Hegel, argued that human suffering originates in the Will — a blind, insatiable drive that underlies all of reality and perpetually pushes us toward desires we cannot satisfy. The only escape from the tyranny of the Will, he argued, was aesthetic experience: in the moment of genuine aesthetic contemplation, we lose ourselves in the object of perception and temporarily cease to be desiring, striving subjects. We become pure subjects of knowing.
Music was the highest art form for Schopenhauer — not because it represented anything, but because it was a direct expression of the Will itself, bypassing representation entirely. This elevation of music above the visual arts was unconventional and enormously influential, shaping Wagner’s theoretical writings and, through them, half of late 19th-century European culture.
Nietzsche: Art as Life-Affirmation Against Truth
Nietzsche agreed with Plato that art was not primarily about truth — but drew the opposite conclusion. Where Plato condemned art for being false, Nietzsche did not typically deny that art is false; he instead questioned the value Plato placed on truth.
In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche argued that Greek tragedy was the product of two competing impulses: the Apollonian — the drive toward order, clarity, and beautiful form — and the Dionysian — the drive toward chaos, excess, and dissolution of individual boundaries. The greatest art held both in tension. When the Apollonian alone dominates, art becomes cold and lifeless. When the Dionysian alone dominates, it becomes formless frenzy. The collision of the two produced the tragic form that Nietzsche considered the highest human achievement.
His deeper claim was that art, not science or philosophy, was the properly human response to a world without inherent meaning. Art does not pretend to reveal truth — it creates value, affirms life, and makes existence bearable by making it beautiful.
Tolstoy: Art as Emotional Communication
The Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, in What Is Art? (1897), made the most democratically radical argument of any major thinker on the subject. Art, he argued, is the transmission of feeling from one person to others — the artist experiences an emotion, embodies it in a work, and the work then infects the audience with the same feeling. The test of art is not beauty or formal quality but the sincerity and universality of the emotional communication.
By this standard, Tolstoy found almost all of the prestigious art of his day worthless — too complex, too elitist, too concerned with technique. A simple folk song that genuinely moved a peasant was more truly art than an opera that impressed only educated Parisians. He considered much of his own earlier literary work to be false art on these terms.
Danto: Art Is Whatever the Artworld Says It Is
The American philosopher Arthur Danto visited Andy Warhol’s exhibition of Brillo Boxes at the Stable Gallery in New York in 1964 and came away with a philosophical problem that consumed the rest of his career: what in the end makes the difference between a Brillo box and a work of art consisting of a Brillo Box is a certain theory of art.
Warhol’s boxes were perceptually indistinguishable from the cardboard Brillo boxes in a supermarket stockroom. No formal quality — color, shape, texture, composition — separated them. What made one art and the other not was the institutional context: the gallery, the art historical moment, the theoretical framework that the artworld brought to bear. Danto’s conclusion — that art is constituted by theory, not by perceptual properties — was the most radical answer to the question since Plato, and the most unsettling, because it made art’s identity dependent on social agreement rather than anything intrinsic to the object.
The Pattern
What these positions share is not agreement but a common seriousness. Every major philosopher who engaged with art recognized that it was doing something that could not be reduced to entertainment or decoration — something that touched questions about truth, emotion, meaning, and the human capacity for experience. They disagreed violently about what that something was. That disagreement is itself the best evidence that the question is real.