Summary |
Kant's major work in aesthetics is the Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment, which comprises roughly the first half of the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790; also known as "the third Critique", after the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787) and Critique of Practical Reason (1788)). The main task of this work is to provide an analysis of aesthetic judgment concerning the beautiful and the sublime, and an account of its epistemic and moral significance. Kant indicates that his analysis of the "judgment of taste" -- which specifically refers to our enjoyment of beauty -- is the "most important" part of the work, apparently because he thinks it promises to reveal something about our cognitive capacities that his previous work in epistemology and philosophy of mind lacked the resources to reveal (see Critique of the Power of Judgment 5:169 and 5:213). Despite considerable interpretive controversy over the systematic ambitions of the analysis of taste, Kant was evidently interested in aesthetics for its own sake as well. At any rate, he made major contributions to what was then a burgeoning area of philosophical inquiry. He had clearly studied closely the developments in aesthetics from Britain from earlier in the 18th century. Kant's Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment contains a principled account of the difference between the sublime and beautiful that marks a clear conceptual alternative to that of his predecessors. He also takes on some of the distinctive issues about beauty and sublimity in art (as opposed to nature), which bear less directly on the systematic ambitions of critical philosophy -- e.g., the role of genius, and the distinct expressive resources of various media. Kant's earlier work in aesthetics, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764) has somewhat more limited ambitions. It is not a systematic work at all, and does not make bold claims about the epistemic and moral significance of aesthetic pleasure. Rather it aims to provide a putatively descriptive catalogue of the "beautiful" and "sublime" qualities of human beings according to sex, nationality, and race; hence it perhaps belongs more to Kant's efforts in anthropology, rather than aesthetics per se. |