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Kant’s Theory of Taste
In the preceding chapters we have been introduced to four classical theories of art. In spite of their mutual differences these theories nevertheless have one characteristic in common. They tell us how we should consider or define art. Time and again they assume that the own point of view reveals the essence of art in an unproblematic way. The theories give us a decisive answer to the fundamental question “what, actually, is art?”. This also explains why they are so exclusive. They identify art respectively with “imitation”, “expression”, and “form” and/or “a synthesis of form and expression”, without leaving any room for nuance or ambiguity. The theories previously discussed can also be considered as providing us with a well-defined norm art should meet. These theories thus have very specific normative implications. We have already seen how each of these theories has served certain artists as a guideline in their artistic quest, but their normative implications, however, reach much further. On close inspection, these theories offer us different criteria for judging individual works of art. In this respect, they are relevant for the critical appraisal of artworks, especially within art criticism.
The idea that the pleasure of beauty is removed from our inclinations in a way that the pleasure of agreeableness is not is a cornerstone of Kantian aesthetics. This chapter begins by assuming that there is at least some plausibility to the general Kantian position on the disinterestedness of the pleasure of beauty. With this assumption in mind, the task is to articulate a version of the position that makes sense of the experience of beauty, including artistic beauty, which many of us have. The underlying aim in doing so is to consider how, given a broadly Kantian conception of the disinterestedness of the pleasure of beauty, the pursuit of this pleasure has the capacity to contribute to our moral development. Kant takes for granted the general points about the way in which the pleasure of beauty stands at a distance from our intellectual desires, and further refines them.
This essay argues that, contrary to the prevailing view according to which reflection in Kant's aesthetic judgment is interpreted as ‘the logical actus of the understanding’, we should pay closer attention to Kant's own formulation of aesthetic reflection as ‘an action of the power of imagination’. Put differently, I contend in this essay that the rule that governs and orders the manifold in aesthetic judgment is imagination's own achievement, the achievement of the productive synthesis of the ‘fictive power’ (Dichtungsvermögen), entirely independent of the understanding. While this view does not entail that the faculty of the understanding is not necessary in aesthetic reflection, a stronger emphasis on the role of imagination in aesthetic reflection allows us to realize that its schematizing and interpretive activity, while consistent with, goes well beyond the discursive demands of the understanding insofar as it intimates the supersensible ground of freedom that manifests itself as ‘the feeling of life’. Therefore, I show in this essay that the imagination's unique interpretive power has a special role in completing Kant's critical system by facilitating the connection of the sensible to the supersensible, which further helps us appreciate imagination's practical as opposed to merely cognitive significance.
The sublime has come under severe criticism in recent years. Jane Forsey, for instance, has argued that all theories of the sublime ?rest on a mistake? (2007, 381). In her article, ?The Pleasures of Contra-purposiveness: Kant, the Sublime, and Being Human,? Katerina Deligiorgi (2014) provides a rejoinder to Forsey. Deligiorgi argues?with the help of Kant?that a coherent theory of the sublime is possible, and she provides a sketch for such a theory. Deligiorgi makes good progress in the debate over the sublime. But here I raise two questions in relation to her account. The aim of these questions is to help clarify and augment her theory and thus extend the discussion about the tenability and relevance of the sublime. The first question is about the pleasure of the sublime. The pleasure, she claims, comes from our catching a glimpse of ourselves as agents in the world. But, I argue, Deligiorgi's conception of agency is insufficient for explaining the pleasure of sublimity, and this is because she does not take into account what I call (echoing Kant) the ?ends of reason,? those ends that matter most to us as agents. The second question pertains to the phenomenology of the sublime. The worry here is that Deligiorgi overcomplicates the subject's experience and, in doing so, greatly restricts the scope of the sublime.
The overall goal of this article is to show that aesthetics plays a major role in a debate at the very center of philosophy. Drawing on the work of David Bell, the article spells out how Kant and Wittgenstein use reflective judgment, epitomized by a judgment of beauty, as a key in their respective solutions to the rule-following problem they share. The more specific goal is to offer a Kantian account of semantic normativity as understood by Wittgenstein. The article argues that Wittgenstein's reason for describing language as a collection of language games is to allow for a perspective that shows those games as internally purposive without any extralinguistic purpose. This perspective also allows for that union of the general rule and its particular application in practice that the original paradox of rule-following is wanting.
The debate about Kantian conceptualism and nonconceptualism has completely overlooked the importance of Kant’s aesthetics. Heidemann shows how this debate can be significantly advanced by exploring Kant’s aesthetics, that is, the theory of judgements of taste and the doctrine of the aesthetic genius in Kant’s Third Critique. The analysis of judgements of taste demonstrates that nonconceptual mental content is a condition of the possibility of aesthetic experience. The subsequent discussion of the doctrine of the aesthetic genius reveals that aesthetic ideas must also be conceived in terms of nonconceptual mental content. Heidemann finally restricts Kant’s aesthetic nonconceptualism to the way aesthetic perceivers cognitively evaluate works of art, while he argues that the doctrine of the genius cannot count as a viable form of aesthetic nonconceptualism.
Feeling, for any animal, is a faculty of comparing objects or representations with regard to whether they promote its vital powers (pleasure) or hinder them (displeasure). But whereas these comparisons presuppose a species-concept in non-rational animals, nature has not equipped the human being with a universal principle or life-form that would determine what agrees or disagrees with it. As humans, we must determine our mode of life for ourselves. Contrary to other interpretations, I argue that this places the human capacity for pleasure and displeasure outside of nature and in a realm of spirit.
I propose in this paper an interpretation of Kant’s fascinating notion of “aesthetic ideas”. I contend that aesthetic ideas, in spite of Kant’s way of explicating them in those terms, are not mirror images, sensible counterparts or translations of intellectual or rational ideas. Rather, they have independent life. They present what cannot be available by any other means and thereby make a poem (or an artwork in general) a unique, singular, insubstitutable individual. This reading of the notion can shed a different light on Kant’s view that a poem should look like nature. If we focus on Kant’s description of “genius” as a source of aesthetic ideas, this seemingly mysterious concept begins to make a nuanced sense: concepts of genius and aesthetic ideas are what I call “medium-centric” notions. To write a poem is to play upon the medium and discover aesthetic ideas; a poet who can achieve this is or has genius.
Noël Carroll proposes a generalist theory of art criticism, which essentially involves evaluations of artworks on the basis of their success value, at the cost of rendering evaluations of reception value irrelevant to criticism. In this article, I argue for a hybrid account of art criticism, which incorporates Carroll's objective model but puts Carroll-type evaluations in the service of evaluations of reception value. I argue that this hybrid model is supported by Kant's theory of taste. Hence, I not only present an alternative theory of metacriticism, which has the merit of reinstating the centrality of reception value in art critics’ evaluations, but also show that, contrary to a common conception, Kant's aesthetic theory can house a fruitful account of art criticism. The benefit of this hybrid account is that, despite being essentially particularist, it should be appealing even to generalists, including Carroll.
Several works published in the last decades defend the claim that the concept of creativity should be demystified. With the aim of showing that creativity is not an obscure power owned by only few individuals and free from constraints, authors working at the intersection field between philosophy and cognitive science have notably focused on the structure and evolution of cognitive mechanisms underlying our creative capacities. While taking up the suggestion that we should try not to mystify creativity, this article argues that what is required for such demystification is primarily a transcendental and phenomenological inquiry. Kant’s and Merleau-Ponty’s works are here discussed in order to develop such a transcendental inquiry into creativity. Both Kant and Merleau-Ponty bring to the fore the conditions of possibility for creative acts, and highlight fundamental role of creativity itself in the formation of meaningfulness. The keystone of both philosophers’ inquiries is the emphasis on the interdependence between creativity and rules. Yet, due to the different approaches to the transcendental, Kant’s and Merleau-Ponty’s accounts do not fully converge, but should rather be considered as complementary.
“I always tell my kids to cut a sandwich in half right when you get it, and the first thought you should have is somebody else. You only ever need half a burger.”1 This line from the popular comedian Louis C. K. reminds us that moral feelings are an ubiquitous feature of life, both in our impulses to act and in our response to moral actions.
Danto and Kant: for anyone who has followed debates in either the theory or the philosophy of art over the last 40 odd years, this has to look like a very odd couple. Indeed, ‘The Odd Couple’ might have served equally well as a title for what follows: an attempt to show how much Danto’s and Kant’s aesthetics have in common, counter-intuitive as that may sound; and, within the context of this broad commonality, to offer a comparative analysis of the merits of their respective accounts of our relation—both cognitive and affective—to works of art. Given that art since the 1960s is widely thought to pose particular problems for aesthetic theories of art (such as Kant’s), to which various forms of cognitivism in the philosophy of art (such as Danto’s) have been offered as solutions, I intend to conduct this comparison on artistic terrain with which Danto (but not Kant) would be naturally associated—to see whether Kant’s aesthetics withstands the challenge. That Danto’s theory speaks to contemporary art hardly bears saying; his ontology was conceived in order to meet the challenges posed by art after modernism— but Kant and contemporary art? According to current consensus, the value of Kant’s aesthetics for the theory of art was tied to the fate of formalism, with which it is widely regarded (at least outside Kant scholarship) to have sunk.
In the previous chapter I discussed the problem of ugliness and different solutions that were proposed in order to solve it. This discussion showed that none of the proposed solutions were successful, mainly due to Kant’s unsatisfactory formulation of the concept of free harmony constitutive of judgments of taste (of the beautiful). Given this, a positive explanation of ugliness and of the notion of free disharmony cannot proceed without first settling on a proper understanding of the notion of free play between cognitive powers. This is a difficult task to begin with, particularly as Kant provides merely a negative definition of free harmony as a harmony between imagination and understanding that is not restricted by the concept of the object. Furthermore, he views the notion of free harmony as intimately connected with the activity of imagination and understanding in ordinary cognition. It is a central tenet of his theory of taste that free harmony depends on the relation between cognitive powers that is universally communicable, and that nothing can be universally communicable but the relation between cognitive powers that is required for cognition.
There is a Latin proverb, which states: “we never really know what a thing is unless we are able to give a sufficient account of its opposite” (cited in Lorand, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52(4): 399–406, 1994). This turns out to be particularly true for beauty and its opposite aesthetic concept, ugliness, in Kantian aesthetics. Since Kant’s explanation of judgments of taste is based exclusively on the notion of free harmony, constitutive of judgments of the beautiful alone, the explanation of ugliness could not begin without a prior analysis of a positive aesthetic concept, beauty. This analysis was made in the previous chapter, where I proposed an interpretation of the notion of free harmony, based on Kant’s general account of a reflective judgment and the subjective a priori principle of purposiveness. I argued that aesthetic reflective judgments or judgments of taste, just like logical reflective judgments, operate by the means of the principle of purposiveness which aims to conceptualize the manifold, that is, to find the appropriate concept. On my view, Kant’s concept of beauty has inherent cognitive ambitions. It belongs to a general plan of our power of judgment to conceptualize every aspect of experience and make it cognizable for us, that is, to organize it in a way that fits with our cognitive abilities. This analysis of the concept of beauty has also anticipated how ugliness can be included in Kantian aesthetics, which I will explain more deeply in the present chapter.
In the previous chapter I examined the main contemporary interpretations of the notion of free harmony and pointed out their inadequacies. My aim in the present chapter is to propose a different interpretation of the concept of free harmony; an interpretation that allows the possibility of free disharmony, without violating Kant’s thesis of the necessity of a harmonious relation between imagination and understanding for cognition. Furthermore, the account I propose is consistent with universal validity, not merely for judgments of beauty, but also for judgments of ugliness. The proposal is that free harmony should be understood as a harmony between free imagination and understanding in reflection upon cognition. I will argue that the distinction between the harmony necessary for determinate judgments, and harmony required for judgments of taste is derived from the distinction between the two different activities performed by the imagination (and which refers to Kant’s distinction between determining and reflective judgments). In determining judgments, the imagination is rule-governed (organizes sensible manifold in order to fit with the existing concept) and therefore not free. However, in judgments of taste it is free imagination that is in harmony with the understanding. Free imagination is constitutive for the kind of judgments that Kant describes as reflective judgments, among which the judgment of taste is a species, but which is also present in empirical concept acquisition.
In this article, I consider whether a suitably stripped-down version of Kant's aesthetic theory could nevertheless provide philosophical foundations for musical formalism. I begin by distinguishing between formalism as a view about the nature of music and formalism as an approach to music criticism, arguing that Kant's aesthetics only rules out the former. Then, using an example from the work of musicologist and composer Edward T. Cone, I isolate the characteristics of formalist music criticism. With this characterization in mind, I conclude by showing that even if Kant's aesthetic theory is reduced to its most fundamental claims, the logic of formalist music criticism precludes its practice within even a kantian perspective.
This second chapter provides a useful backdrop for understanding innovation beyond the conventional focus on mainstream technology and science by detailing the conceptual underpinnings of cultural innovation. First, the challenges of objectively assessing the worth of novel work in the various fields of art and architecture are explored through the philosophical views of beauty. Second, the strategies and models deployed over time by artists, patrons, and experts to characterize the merits of novelty in the creative fields are reviewed. Third, the economic principles that have been used to frame the value propositions associated with cultural innovations as articulated by cultural economists are explored.
Anjan Chatterjee has promoted an analogy between the Bengalese finch and the human artist. With reduced selective pressure from females due to its domestication, the male finch’s song has become more elaborate. Similarly, art’s lack of a practical function facilitates the creative generativity shown by artists. I argue that this analogy is flawed on both sides. Only recently has some art been regarded as non-functional. And the elaboration of the finch’s song is an effect of female selection under the conditions of domestication.
In this article, I first address the ethical considerations about football and show that a meritocratic-fairness view of sports fails to capture the phenomenon of football. Fairness of result is not at centre stage in football. Football is about the drama, about the tension and the emotions it provokes. This moves us to the realm of aesthetics. I reject the idea of the aesthetics of football as the disinterested aesthetic appreciation, which traditionally has been deemed central to aesthetics. Instead, I argue that we should try and develop an agon aesthetics where our aesthetic appreciation is understood as involving and being embedded in our engagement in the game. The drama of football is staged but not scripted. The aesthetics of competitions like football matches - the agon aesthetics - lies in engaging in the conflict that a competition is, while being aware that the conflict is not over ordinary world or everyday life issues, but unnecessary and invented for the very purpose of having a conflict to enjoy.
For Kant, ‘reflection’ (Überlegung, Reflexion) is a technical term with a range of senses. I focus here on the senses of reflection that come to light in Kant's account of logic, and then bring the results to bear on the distinction between ‘logical’ and ‘transcendental’ reflection that surfaces in the Amphiboly chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason. Although recent commentary has followed similar cues, I suggest that it labours under a blind spot, as it neglects Kant's distinction between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ general logic. The foundational text of existing interpretations is a passage in Logik Jäsche that appears to attribute to Kant the view that reflection is a mental operation involved in the generation of concepts from non-conceptual materials. I argue against the received view by attending to Kant's division between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ general logic, identifying senses of reflection proper to each, and showing that none accords well with the received view. Finally, to take account of Kant's notion of transcendental reflection I show that we need to be attentive to the concerns of applied logic and how they inform the domain-relative transcendental logic that Kant presents in the first Critique.
This essay develops an account of the link between Kant's aesthetics and his ethics. It does so by articulating a Kantian account of moral psychology by way of aesthetic reflective judgements of sublimity. Since judgements of sublimity enrich the picture of a Kantian subject by forcefully revealing the unbounded power of the faculty of reason, I investigate the possibility that judgements of this kind could serve as a basis for moral motivation. The paper first shows how judgements of sublimity help a subject recognize reason's unbounded nature, and proceeds to analyse the practical effects of a subject judging itself sublime. When judgements of sublimity have as their object the unbounded and unsythesizable power of reason, they may thereby serve as the basis for both the recognition of our moral vocation, and the grounds for determining the will to act from respect for it. Since a judgement of sublimity produces for Kant the experience of an enlivening emotion and an outflowing of vital forces, the paper then develops Kant's concept of "life"motivated by a recognition of its practical orientation. In this way sublimity rather than beauty can be interpreted as symbolic hypotyposis of morality. The paper then takes up less favourable interpretations of the practical effects of self-predicated judgements of sublimity, and constructs critical responses to such positions. I conclude, following Adorno, by stressing the historical and social dimension of the capacities for both making sublime judgements, and being morally enlivened by them.
This paper examines the political aesthetic of Hannah Arendt and Jacques Ranciere who in their own ways, found resources in an innovative reading of Kant's Critique of Judgment. The paper explores the Kantian legacy in the political understanding of these two thinkers. It then focuses on Ranciere's notion of dissensus and argues that his politics shares the aesthetic features associated with the Kantian sublime.
This article examines discourses of legal and symbolic ownership in Norwegian folk music. The point of departure is a growing tension between different conceptions of musical property rights: one centered on cultivating a shared heritage of musical style (the tradition); the other based on notions of artistic autonomy, individual rights, and legal ownership (copyright). By means of a case study documenting the use of a traditional song in popular music production, the analysis highlights the incompatibility between market and symbolic economies and explores questions of agency and authorship that pertain to the ongoing debate over "unauthorized" usage of traditional materials.
In this article the importance of the representational character of politics is illustrated on the basis of the philosophy of Kant. The vanishing of the noumenal in post-modern thinking seems to imply fundamental changes in the sensitive response – aesthetics of the beautiful and the sublime – to politics. In the Kantian paradigm the meaning of our affective response to the violence of (human) nature is ruled by a moral perspective of practical reason. Although the representation of practical reason in the empirical is only possible in an indirect way by means of a schematism of analogy, the corresponding – subjectively teleological – aesthetic feelings both of harmony in the beautiful and of resistance in the sublime do symbolize in a reflective judgement the morally determined character and the objectively conceived teleology of nature in the system of rights of a single state as well as of the cosmopolitan world order.
The 1936 Surrealist Exhibition of Objects brought together a bewildering range of items including natural objects, interpreted natural objects, incorporated natural objects, found objects, perturbed objects, readymade objects, American objects, Oceanic objects, mathematical objects, and Surrealist objects. Of the nonethnographic types listed, only the readymade and the found object still retain any currency, and the readymade can no longer be subsumed under the Surrealist umbrella. Marcel Duchamp's readymade and André Breton's found object have such different legacies that they now arguably constitute a categorical distinction. This was not so clear in the mid- 1930s when Breton could define readymades as “manufactured objects raised to the dignity of works of art through the choice of the artist.”2 Yet, even now, the terms are still often run together and used interchangeably. What I want to do in this paper is to drive a wedge between them. We will find that their distinctiveness hinges on the kind of subjective relation each assumes. They turn out to embody different aspects of the most influential account of what might be called the subjective dimension of our relation to art—Immanuel Kant's conception of the aesthetic.
A recent debate in Kant scholarship concerns the role of concepts in Kant's theory of perception. Roughly, proponents of a conceptualist interpretation argue that for Kant, the possession of concepts is a prior condition for perception, while nonconceptualist interpreters deny this. The debate has two parts. One part concerns whether possessing empirical concepts is a prior condition for having empirical intuitions. A second part concerns whether Kant allows empirical intuitions without a priori concepts. Outside of Kant interpretation, the contemporary debate about conceptualism concerns whether perception requires empirical concepts. But, as I argue, the debate about whether Kant allows intuitions without empirical concepts does not show whether Kant is a conceptualist. Even if Kant allows intuitions without empirical concepts, it could still be that a priori concepts are required. While the debate could show that Kant is a conceptualist, I argue it does not. Finally, I sketch a novel way that the conceptualist interpreter might win the debate—roughly, by arguing that possessing a priori concepts is a prior condition for having appearances.
It is a common thought that mathematics can be not only true but also beautiful, and many of the greatest mathematicians have attached central importance to the aesthetic merit of their theorems, proofs and theories. But how, exactly, should we conceive of the character of beauty in mathematics? In this paper I suggest that Kant's philosophy provides the resources for a compelling answer to this question. Focusing on §62 of the ‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment’, I argue against the common view that Kant's aesthetics leaves no room for beauty in mathematics. More specifically, I show that on the Kantian account beauty in mathematics is a non-conceptual response felt in light of our own creative activities involved in the process of mathematical reasoning. The Kantian proposal I thus develop provides a promising alternative to Platonist accounts of beauty widespread among mathematicians. While on the Platonist conception the experience of mathematical beauty consists in an intellectual insight into the fundamental structures of the universe, according to the Kantian proposal the experience of beauty in mathematics is grounded in our felt awareness of the imaginative processes that lead to mathematical knowledge. The Kantian account I develop thus offers to elucidate the connection between aesthetic reflection, creative imagination and mathematical cognition.
In his lectures on general logic Kant maintains that the generality of a representation (the form of a concept) arises from the logical acts of comparison, reflection and abstraction. These acts are commonly understood to be identical with the acts that generate reflected schemata. I argue that this is mistaken, and that the generality of concepts, as products of the understanding, should be distinguished from the classificatory generality of schemata, which are products of the imagination. A Kantian concept does not provide mere criteria for noting sameness and difference in things, but instead reflects the inner nature of things. Its form consists in the self-consciousness of a capacity to judge (i.e. the Concept is the ‘I think’).
We often speak about religious experience, and sometimes we speak about metaphysical experience. Yet we seldom hear about philosophical experience. Is philosophy purely a matter of theories and theses, or does it have an experiential aspect? In this article, I argue for the following three claims. First, there is something we might call philosophical experience, and there is nothing mystical about it. Second, philosophical experiences are expressed in something quite similar to what Kant called “aesthetic judgements.” Third, philosophical experiences are expressed by using words in what Wittgenstein called “secondary sense.” Finally, I try to show the educational significance of pursing philosophical experiences. Through articulating them one might find one's ground, and through articulating them in a less private and more universal form one might raise oneself to universality. Thus, in expressing philosophical experiences one aspires to speak in a universal voice.
In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant refers to the pleasure that we feel when judging that an object is beautiful as the pleasure of “mere reflection”. Yet Kant never makes explicit what exactly is the relationship between the activity of “mere reflection” and the feeling of pleasure. I discuss several contemporary accounts of the pleasure of taste and argue that none of them is fully accurate, since, in each case, they leave open the possibility that one can reflect without having a feeling of pleasure, and hence allow a possible skepticism of taste. I then present my own account, which can better explain why Kant thinks that when one reflects one must also have a feeling of pleasure. My view, which emphasizes the role of attention in Kant, depicts well what we do when we judge something to be beautiful. It can also suggest a way to explain the relation between judgments of taste and moral feeling, and begin to show how the faculty of feeling fills a gap in the system of our cognitive faculties.
Can it be consistent to be interested, for moral reasons, in the fact that uninvolved spectators of a regime change are enthusiastic about that change, when the latter is carried out according to means considered immoral or unjust? Yes. In ‘An Old Question Raised Again’ (The Conflict of the Faculties, 1798), Kant demonstrates a morally based interest in disinterested spectators’ expressions (aesthetic judgments) of enthusiasm for the idea of a republican form of government. This interest is puzzling. Kant's universalizability test supposedly forbids the violent revolutionary means taken to establish the republican constitution. How can the Kantian, if consistent, take an interest in expressions of enthusiasm elicited by these immoral events? In addition to endorsing the familiar means/ends distinction, this article provides a new answer to this question by examining the enthusiasm in which Kant takes an interest: it is a pure aesthetic judgment of enthusiasm, made by a disinterested, impartial spectator.
In this article I deal with Kant's concept of reflective judgment, and recover it through its links to the aesthetic dimension as its fundamental scenario. Then I go on to explain why Hannah Arendt understood this important Kantian connection, and why she thought it would allow her to develop it through a political dimension. Last, having reviewed both Kant and Arendt's contributions to the concept of reflective judgment, I recover my own input to the concept by showing its linguistic dimension based on the Heideggerian notion of world-disclosure. With this in mind, I show how the concept of reflective judgment is the most suitable to analyze evil actions.
Hannah Arendt’s conceptualization of judgment may only drive political theorists further from the phenomenon. Throughout her life, Arendt’s work on judgment was guided by Kant’s thought. Arendt’s reading of Kant’s work raises two difficulties to which contemporary political scientists should attend. First, Arendt’s reading of Kant is a systematic misreading of his texts. Second, Arendt’s misreading of Kant pushes her toward a misreading of the phenomenon of judgment. More important, Arendt’s misreading has led political theorists to assume a divide between the points of view of the actor and of the spectator, which cannot be reconciled given the resources of Arendt’s thought.
This article offers a vindication of the indeterminacy of natural beauty, first through a dissolution of the antinomy between a critical and a positive aesthetics of nature, then through a resolution of the frame problem. These arguments are developed, finally, through a defence of the reciprocity thesis prominent in post-Kantian aesthetics, which claims that there is a conceptual connection between the aesthetic appreciation of art and that of nature. I am concerned to defend indeterminacy against objections from environmental aesthetics and aesthetic realism, and to give qualified support to Adorno's historicist position in Aesthetic Theory. Underlying my approach is a Kantian emphasis on the ubiquity of the aesthetic and the democracy of taste.
In 1764, Kant published his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime and in 1790 his influential third Critique, the Critique of the Power of Judgment. The latter contains two parts, the ‘Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment’ and the ‘Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment’. They reveal a new principle, namely the a priori principle of purposiveness (Zweckmäßigkeit) of our power of judgment, and thereby offer new a priori grounds for beauty and biology within the framework of Kant's transcendental philosophy. They also unite the previous two Critiques, the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason. Besides contributing to general and systematic aspects within his transcendental philosophy, Kant's aesthetics also offers new insights into old problems. It deals with feeling versus experience, subjectivity versus objectivity, disinterested pleasure, aesthetic universality, free and adherent beauty, the sensus communis, genius, aesthetic ideas, beauty as the symbol of morality, beauty of nature versus beauty of art, the sublime, and the supersensible. In this article I will limit myself to this critical aesthetics of Kant. But I will also discuss the ugly and the possibility of beauty in mathematics and see whether Kant's theory can successfully explain or deal with them. I will also compare his theory with philosophical ideas from a very different tradition, namely from Confucius, not only as a challenge to Kant's theory, but also because there is a growing interest from the Chinese side in combining ideas from Confucius and Kant, an interest that might well become influential in both East and West during the 21st century.
Kant’s conception of organisms as natural purposes is profoundly amphibious, reflecting the form of teleological judgment in its movement between the terrains of empirical cognition and reason. By comparing teleological and aesthetic judgments as species of the reflecting power of judgment, and comparing reflecting and determining powers of judgment, all judgments, in their synthetic acts, are shown to involve reflection, subjectivity, and wit. The suggestion in the third Critique that a basis for the activity of judgment might be found in the purposiveness of nature for our intellect is confounded by natural purposes, which defy our understanding and the principles of natural science. The Critique of the Power of Judgment thus offers an opening of judgment to further interrogation, rather than a closure of the critical system.
For Kant, the form of a subject's experience of an object provides the normative basis for an aesthetic judgement about it. In other words, if the subject's experience of an object has certain structural properties, then Kant thinks she can legitimately judge that the object is beautiful—and that it is beautiful for everyone. My goal in this paper is to provide a new account of how this ‘subjective universalism’ is supposed to work. In doing so, I appeal to Kant's notions of an aesthetic idea and an aesthetic attribute, and the connection that Kant makes between an object's expression of rational and the normativity of aesthetic judgements about it.
Kant claims that the basis of a judgment of taste is a merely subjective representation and that the only merely subjective representations are feelings of pleasure or displeasure. Commentators disagree over how to interpret this claim. Some take it to mean that judgments about the beauty of an object depend only on the state of the judging subject. Others argue instead that, for Kant, the pleasure we take in a beautiful object is best understood as a response to its qualities, and that, accordingly, feelings of pleasure or displeasure are no different from other representations, such as colors or smells. While I agree that the judgment of taste is best understood as asserting a claim about an object's qualities, I argue that the distinction Kant makes between feelings of pleasure or displeasure and other representations should not be ignored. I show that one's liking or disliking for an object is merely subjective in the sense that its significance depends on what one has made of oneself through one's aesthetic education. The judgment of taste, then, is merely subjective because one must first become the kind of person whose feelings have the right significance at the right time before one can determine whether an object's qualities make it beautiful.
Kant declares the judgment of beauty to be neither ‘objective’ nor ‘merely subjective’. This essay takes up the question of what this might mean and whether it can be taken seriously. It is often supposed that Kant's denials of ‘objectivity’ to the judgment of beauty express a rejection of realism about beauty. I suggest that Kant's thought is not to be understood in these terms—that it does not properly belong in the arena of debates about the constituents of ‘reality’—motivating the suggestion by first considering a pair of opposing views on the question of whether Kant can be understood to develop a real alternative to realism about beauty at all.
Much contemporary theological aesthetics treats beauty as straightforward. This is, however, to neglect tensions in our experience and understanding of beauty. The issue of these tensions arises in the examination of the role of the imagination in the epistemology of beauty, as well as in the examination of the relationships between beauty and truth, and beauty and goodness. The treatment of these relationships in the work of Kant and Maritain is assessed. The aesthetics of Kant and Maritain are classic attempts to address and even overcome the tensions in these relationships, but on close examination fail to do so. That writers whose works are often cited in favour of clear-cut positions do not resolve these tensions, and that questions raised by these issues fail to go away, supports the view that these tensions are inherent in our experience and understanding of beauty. If so, and if beauty is understood as in some way revelatory of the divine, it follows that there are tensions inherent in our experience and understanding of beauty as revelatory. Such tensions need to be incorporated into theological aesthetics.
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