Aesthetics, Vol. I

Written in the early 1970s during the last years of his life, as if harvesting a lifetime of reflection, Aesthetics is Dietrich von Hildebrand’s comprehensive two-volume study and defense of beauty and art.

Dietrich von Hildebrand understood the centrality of beauty not merely to art but to philosophy, theology, and ethics. In his ambitious and comprehensive Aesthetics, now translated into English for the first time, Hildebrand rehabilitates the concept of beauty as an objective rather and purely subjective phenomenon. His systematic account renews the Classical and Christian vision of beauty as a reliable mode of perception that leads humanity toward the true, the good, and ultimately the divine. There is no more important issue in our culture—sacred or secular—than the restoration of beauty. And there is no better place to start this urgent enterprise than Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Aesthetics.
Dana Gioia | From the Foreword

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The Objectivity of Beauty

By friend and student of Dietrich von Hildebrand, Fritz Wenisch, at the 2017 Summer Seminar: Retrieving Beauty

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Dr. Fritz Wenisch on The Objectivity of Beauty, a foundational theme in Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Aesthetics

Reviews & Commentary

From scholars, students, and readers

Aesthetics not only inspires and instructs us on how to look and listen to beautiful things, it also provides us with fruitful conceptual distinctions for understanding and articulating the aesthetic values and disvalues we experience in nature and art.

Daniel De Haan

in New Blackfriars

Von Hildebrand’s Aesthetics, recently translated into English and published by the Hildebrand Project, is a monumental work applying the phenomenological approach and a Christian and classical focus to the field of aesthetics.

Lawrence Feingold

in Review of Metaphysics

Hildebrand’s Aesthetics is a work that deserves intensive and extended examination. It is a major contribution to the Catholic philosophical tradition and should be of interest to philosophers of all sorts, not just those working in aesthetics.

Mark K. Spencer

in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

Hildebrand offers a passionate and original analysis of art and various aesthetic questions. He contemplates beauty in nature, in human life, and in every kind of artwork. The range of his discussion is impressive, especially in light of the seriousness and detail with which he treats his topics. His pages brim with unexpected insights into things most people don’t think twice about, such as the beauty of a blue sky.

C.S. Morrissey

in B.C. Catholic

Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Aesthetics is not only an important work in aesthetic theory but also a seminal phenomenological treatise. It beautifully captures the importance of value and disvalue and their meaning for our lives as human persons

Antonio Calcagno

in Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy

This text is essential to a modern engagement with aesthetics, and von Hildebrand’s value response method breathes new life into this philosophical discipline.