Title: Aesthetica
First published: 1954
Description: his main work on aesthetics. The fist volume has the title "Aesthetica [I]. Metaphysical observations on beauty" [Aestetica [I]. Metaphysische Beobachtungen am Schönen (1954)]. Max Bense presents there "observations, experiences, considerations and conclusions" in literature and painting. He divides aesthetics in three parts: 1) aesthetical object, 2) aesthetical judgment, and 3) aesthetical existence. The old conception of beauty is now understood as a modality of works of art, technical products and products of industrial design, and he distinguishes also between beauty of art, beauty of technique and beauty of nature. Here, we meet for the first time George David Birkhoff's "aesthetical measure" which is the quotient of "order and complexity".

By all these considerations, Max Bense proceeds from metaphysical aesthetics through mathematical aesthetics to informational or statistical aesthetics. Aesthetic communication is elaborated in Volume 3 of "Aesthetica" (1958) with the subtitle "Theory of aesthetical communication" [Aes<thetische Information]. The general scheme of communication is: sender or emitter -> channel -> receiver. In aesthetics it becomes: sender -> aesthetical object -> observer, and is understood as "play" in the sense of Friedrich Schiller or "play theory" by John von Neumann. 

In "Aesthetica 4", with the subtitles "Programming of Beauty. General Text Theory and Text Aesthetics" [Programmierung des Schönen. Allgemeine Texttheorie und Textästhetik (1960)], Max Bense investigates the works of art as "vehicles of aesthetical information". He determines the aesthetic process as sign process and replaces the concept of literature by the concept of text, because the latter comprises literature, and all other kinds of possible "linear and non-linear texts", he maintains. The discussion of text, metatext, and context leads to the classification of texts of all kinds. His "text theory" consists also of text materiality, text phenomenality, text statistics, text logic, and so on. But only in his book "Theory of Texts" [Theorie der Texte. Eine Einführung in neuere Auffassungen und Methoden (1962)], he develops his methods more exactly and presents them more didactically. He speaks more comprehensively about sign theory, but also about "sign beauty", a term which the German philosopher Johann Augsut Eberhard published in 1806. 

The development of Bense's Aesthetics is shown best in "Aesthetica. Introduction to New Aesthetics" [Aesthetica. Einführuung in die neue Aesthetik (1965)] which comprises the foregoing four volumes together with a new fifth part. He demands here of aesthetical "minimal conditions": extensionality, materiality, realization thematics, process thematics, and communication, and for aesthetical "maximal conditions": triadic sign function, order relation, aesthetical uncertainty relation, and value relation. But only in the paperback "Introduction to Informational Aesthetics" [Einführung in die informationstheoretische Aesthetik (1969)], Max Bense represents the Peircean semiotics in formalizing his only verbal given conceptions. The Peircean triadic sign relation consisting of M or medium relation, O or object relation, and I or interpretant relation, is written down as a function or relation of M, O, I which were divided by Peirce in three parts or trichotomies, so that three subsigns (an expression of Bense) result which were called by Peirce for M: qualisign, sinsign, legisign; for O: icon, index, symbol; and for I: rhema, dicent, argument.
Subjects: Aesthetics, Semiology, Communication Theory
Places: Stuttgart
People: Max Bense
Time periods: The years 60 of the 2oth century