Kant: Aesthetics, Misc

As one would expect, Kant believes that there is a tension, and even a conflict, between our bodily humanity and its ethical counterpart: ‘Inclination to pleasurable living and inclination to virtue are in conflict with each other’ (Anthropology, 185-86 [7:277]). What is more unexpected, however, is that he further claims that this tension can be resolved in what he calls an example of ‘civilised bliss’, namely dinner parties. Dinner parties are, for Kant, part of the ‘highest ethicophysical good’, the ultimate (...) resolution of the conflict between our physical body and our moral powers, which consists in finding the right proportions for the ‘mixture’ between our partly ‘sensuous’ and partly ‘ethicointellectual’ nature. The aim of this paper is not only to explain Kant’s account of the ideal proportions of ethicophysical good in dinner parties, but also, and more importantly, to argue that dinner parties are in fact the ultimate experience for us, human beings. (shrink)

Many strategies for incorporating poetry into non-poetry classes, especially outside of English and associated disciplines, appear to make poetry subservient and secondary in relation to the prose content of the course. The poet under consideration becomes a kind of involuntary servant to one or more prose authors, forced to “speak only when spoken to,” and effectively prevented from challenging the ideas of the course’s prose writers, and thereby the instructor. Fortunately, this is not the only strategy for incorporating poetry into (...) prose-dominated courses. In this chapter, I will suggest an alternate approach which recognizes and facilitates the agency of poets and poetry per se, which I term “empowering poetic defiance.” In brief, this approach consists of the following four steps: (1) challenge one’s own poetic self-loathing (2) position the course’s poetry’s content to challenge the course’s non-poetic contents (3) position the course’s poetry’s forms to challenge your class’s non-poetic forms (4) comport oneself as interlocutor toward the poets featured in the course as the intellectual equals of oneself and the course’s prose writers. My first section will elaborate on these four steps, and my second section will flesh out the method further with a new reading of one of the most powerfully defiant poets in the Western canon, the nineteenth-century French Symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire, in dialogue with one of the most formidable challengers to the power of poetry, the eighteenth-century Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a solution to a notorious puzzle that lies at the heart of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The puzzle arises because Kant asserts two apparently conflicting claims: (1) F→J: A judgment of beauty is aesthetic, i.e., grounded in feeling. (2) J→F: A judgment of beauty could not be based on and must ground the feeling of pleasure in the beautiful. I argue that (1) and (2) are consistent. Kant’s text indicates that he distinguishes two feelings: the (...) feeling of the harmony of the cognitive faculties that is the ground of judgments of beauty (F1 → J), and the feeling of pleasure that is its consequence (J → F2). I develop and defend a view of Kant’s account of the structure of judgments of beauty that incorporates this crucial distinction. Next, I argue that my view resolves another long-standing problem for Kant’s “Deduction” of judgments of beauty: it allows him to claim that the harmony of the faculties is a condition of judgment in general without implying, absurdly, that all judgments are pleasurable. (shrink)

Our engagements with poetry often leave us with a sense of having been not only aesthetically pleased and emotionally aroused but intellectually stimulated and cognitively rewarded.1 However, explicating the nature of such intellectual stimulus and accounting for poetry’s cognitive values are not easy tasks, given that poetry does not stand in the same relation to truth and knowledge as do science and philosophy. How then to account for the undeniable experience of having undergone a profound cognitive change after engaging with (...) poetry?Turning to the work of Immanuel Kant, who praised poetry above all other forms of art,2 I explore how his account of poetry might help us understand poetry’s cognitive influence on... (shrink)

Can a basic sensory property like a bare colour or tone be beautiful? Some, like Kant, say no. But Heidegger suggests, plausibly, that colours ‘glow’ and tones ‘sing’ in artworks. These claims can be productively synthesized: ‘glowing’ colours are not beautiful; but they are sensory forces—not mere ‘matter’, contra Kant—with real aesthetic impact. To the extent that it inheres in sensible properties, beauty is plausibly restricted to structures of sensory force. Kant correspondingly misrepresents the relation of beautiful wholes to their (...) parts. Beautiful form is not extrinsic to sensory force. Sensible beauty is just the holistic impact of agonistically-interacting sensory forces. When sensory forces interact hierarchically, their collective impact is closer to the sublime, in quality if not degree. The simplest sensory experience of sublimity is just the impact of radically intensified sensory forces, similar in kind if not degree to the individual ‘singing’ tones in a beautiful melody. (shrink)

This paper explores the nature of mathematical beauty from a Kantian perspective. According to Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, satisfaction in beauty is subjective and non-conceptual, yet a proof can be beautiful even though it relies on concepts. I propose that, much like art creation, the formulation and study of a complex demonstration involves multiple and progressive interactions between the freely original imagination and taste. Such a proof is artistic insofar as it is guided by beauty, namely, the (...) mere feeling about the imagination’s free lawfulness. The beauty in a proof’s process and the perfection in its completion together facilitate a transition from subjective to objective purposiveness, a transition that Kant himself does not address in the third Critique. (shrink)

Kant’s theory of taste supports his political theory by providing the judgment of beauty as a symbol of the good and example of teleological experience, allowing us to imagine the otherwise obscure movement of nature and history toward the ideal human community. If interpreters are correct in believing that Kant should make room for pure judgments of ugliness in his theory of taste, we will have to consider the implications of such judgments for Kant’s political theory. It is here proposed (...) that pure, formal ugliness symbolizes regressive, counter-teleological trends in nature and history. Kant’s paradoxical stance on the right to rebellion, both condemning and supporting the French Revolution, is interpreted as failing to take into account negative social forces signified by ugliness, and therefore neglecting the role of moral agency in social change. (shrink)

Hughes has recently argued that there is to be found in Kant's epistemology an aesthetic constraint that makes for an objectivity of empirical knowledge-claims. The reading that she defends leads to a rejection of an imposition-view of empirical concepts and the categories and to an affirmation of a realism in Kant's theory of empirical knowledge. I am in broad agreement with her thesis but disagree with her ultimate explanation of the ontology of Kant's objects of empirical knowledge. Hughes' exposition and (...) my reading wind their way through both Kant's epistemology and his theory of free beauty and of pure judgments of taste. (shrink)

The literary scene of Kant’s day goes unmentioned by philosophical commentators. Yet some of its salient features have a clear relation to his problems and positions, not demonstrably causal in every detail, but too close overall to be coincidence in the random sense. Kant’s critical view of society and his establishing of an independent aesthetic realm parallel the themes, and the arguments in self-defence, of contemporaneous radical writing; his discussion of how to exemplify ethical arguments bears on the general Enlightenment (...) problem of how to embody abstractions persuasively, while his theoretical and practical difficulties over written style have consequences for the reception of his own work, and were responsible for divisions among writers of the day who might otherwise have made common cause. All this adds a valuable dimension to our understanding of both Kant’s aesthetics and his time. (shrink)

Contrary to both his own intentions and the views of both older and more recent commentators, I argue that Kant’s aesthetics remains within the confines of eighteenth-century aesthetics as a branch of empirical psychology, as it was then practiced. Kant established a plausible connection between aesthetic experience and judgment on the one hand and cognition in general on the other, through his explanatory concept of the free play of our cognitive powers. However, there is nothing distinctly ‘a priori’ or ‘transcendental’ (...) in his claim that this state of mind is what causes our pleasure in beauty or other aesthetic properties. Nor did Kant establish a genuinely a priori or transcendental principle that all human beings have the same disposition to experience a free play of their cognitive powers, let alone in response to the same objects. This failure, however, in no way limits the continuing significance of Kant’s aesthetic theory.Keywords: Alexander Gerard; Henry Home, Lord Kames; Immanuel Kant; Beauty; Taste; Free play of the cognitive powers. (shrink)

It is quite standard, even banal, to describe Kant's project in the Critique of Pure Reason [KrV] as a critical reconciliation of rationalism and empiricism, most directly expressed in Kant's claim that intuitions and concepts are two distinct, yet equally necessary, and necessarily interdependent sources of cognition. Similarly, though Kant rejects both the rationalist foundation of morality in the concept of perfection and that of the empiricists in feeling or in the moral sense, one might broadly characterize Kant's moral philosophy (...) as an attempt to reconcile the apriori universality and necessity of rationalist ethics with empiricist or sentimentalist strictures concerning the distinction between the ‘ought’ and the ‘is’, between third personal knowledge of the good and first personal motivation. (shrink)

This collection of essays by eminent scholars on the reconstruction and critique of Kant's transcendental philosophy in the Indian context specifically discusses moral philosophy, philosophical psychology, religion, and aesthetics.

Au § 45 de la Critique de la facultè de juger, Kant écrit: «La nature était belle lorsqu'elle avait incontinent l'apparence de l'art; et l'art ne peut être appelé beau que lorsque nous sommes conscients qu'il s'agit bien d'art, mais qu'il prend pour nous l'apparence de la nature». Ce qui semble à première vue n'être qu'un simple «paradoxes Gedankenspiel» nous convie au contraire à l'un des problèmes les plus intéressants de la troisième Critique: celui du rapport entre la beauté de (...) l'art et celle de la nature. L'intention de la présente analyse est de préciser l'importance de ce rapport dans l'économie et dans l'articulation générale de cette œuvre. Comment devons-nous comprendre cette sorte de «chassé-croisé» entre l'art et la nature? Est-ce que, par exemple, l'affirmation qui déclare que l'art ne peut être beau que s'il apparaît comme nature possède, aux yeux de Kant, le même statut philosophique que celle qui dit que la nature pour être belle doit apparaître comme art? En somme, est-ce que d'après Kant la relation entre les belles formes naturelles et les beaux produits de l'art en est une de réciprocité? (shrink)

Kant and the Experience of Freedom rassemble les articles de Paul Guyer consacrés à l'esthétique de Kant depuis 1982 et un certain nombre de textes inédits qui vont jusqu'à 1991. Il s'agira certainement d'un jalon important dans l'interprétation de l'esthétique de Kant et des questions philosophiques qui y sont apparentées. Le virage qu'y prend l'auteur par rapport à son livre célèbre de 1979, Kant and the Claims of Taste, est également impressionnant. Moins dépendant des débats qui prédominaient dans l'esthétique de (...) l'époque, il ne s'agit plus tant pour Guyer d'essayer de dégager le noyau normatif de la théorie kantienne du goût et d'en faire valoir la cohérence et la légitimité, que d'interroger les rapports multiples et complexes qu'entretiennent l'esthétique et la moralité chez Kant, dans la Critique de la faculté de juger et au-delà. (shrink)

“That the imagination should be both free and yet of itself conformable to law, that is, that it should carry autonomy with it, is a contradiction.” So Kant writes to express as a paradox the epistemological problem that the feeling on which an aesthetic judgment is based must be free of the constraint provided by determinate concepts, for otherwise there will be no reason why it should be pleasurable, yet must also be subject to some kind of rule, for otherwise (...) the claim of universal validity which this judgment asserts will be irrational. And so understood, the remark is entirely rhetorical, for it is the express purpose of Kant’s main argument in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment to show that this conception of the judgment of taste is coherent rather than contradictory. But taken from its intended context, the remark need not be rhetorical, for it can be seen as an expression of competing demands for aesthetic integrity, or demands for individual freedom and social agreement in the creation and reception of art which, unlike the two epistemological constraints on aesthetic judgment, cannot be simultaneously satisfied but which instead introduce a permanent source of instability into the history of art and taste. Indeed, it is even fitting that Kant’s remark has to be taken out of context to be given this interpretation, for although Kant lays the theoretical basis for such a picture of art history he also tries to suppress its consequence and to avert the destruction of the eighteenth-century ideal of aesthetic stability which is its inevitable outcome. (shrink)

Unlike most collections of essays by various writers, Essays in Kant's Aesthetics is unified by considerations not restricted merely to the subject denoted by the title of the book. Cohen and Guyer's Preface and Introduction make it clear that the essays have been chosen with some care and with an eye to certain thematic structures established by the editors. In consonance with this, the book falls into four parts. The first part, "Pleasure, Beauty, and Judgment," contains essays by Guyer, R. (...) Meerbote, R. E. Aquila, and A. Savile, all on Kant's theory of aesthetic judgment. The second, "Art and Genius," contains essays by D. W. Crawford, T. Gould, and I. Stadler, on the implications of Kant's notion of artistic genius. The third part, "Beauty, Freedom, and Morality," with essays by Cohen and D. Henrich, explores the connection of the beautiful and the good in Kant. Part four, "Beauty and the World," containing essays by S. Cavell and J. E. Sobel, treats of ontological themes suggested by Kant's aesthetics. (shrink)

The treatise is engaged in kant's too little noticed aesthetic doctrine of symbolic representation. It furthermore is occupied with the relevance which this doctrine has to enlighten the self-Estimation of literary criticism (theory of literature). The treatise results that kant's doctrine is to be considered as an offer to solve many problems in actually literary criticism (theory of literature).

In this paper, however, I will argue that Kant’s restriction of interest to natural rather than artistic beauty should not be taken as a basic aspect of his aesthetic theory, and thus need not affect our assessment of that theory’s more basic claims. First, I will suggest that Kant’s theory of intellectual interest is not really necessary to explain what we ordinarily mean by an interest in beautiful objects—a desire to preserve them for repeated experience, a motivation for our efforts (...) to see them and our willingness to pay for them, and the like—and that the exclusion of art from a special moral interest thus does not leave our general interest in its objects unexplained. But, I will also argue, Kant’s own theory of art and our response to it actually allows beauties of art to have just as much claim to this intellectual interest as do objects of natural beauty. Kant’s differentiation of natural and artistic beauty with regard to moral interest turns on an ambiguity in the concept of nature itself, as well as on Kant’s assumptions that art, unlike nature, is a product of an intention to produce pleasure through determinately conceived objects, and that our response to art, again unlike that to nature, must be connected to a recognition of its intentionality. But Kant’s own theory of artistic creation—his theory of genius—undermines the force of the first of these assumptions, for it teaches us that art, while indeed the product of intentional activity, also calls upon the use of a natural talent that deserves our admiration as much as any other gift of nature. In other words, Kant’s own view of the complexity of artistic intentions forbids the simple differentiation of art and nature that he employs in §42, and while Kant’s theory of aesthetic response does not clearly preclude the view that our response to art must take into account the intentions with which art is produced, it also hardly entails this view. This may have been obscured from Kant by the indeterminacy of his own key concept of the freedom of the imagination, but, I will suggest, this freedom might actually have to be extended to the case of art if it is to work even in Kant’s paradigmatic case of natural beauty. Thus, on Kant’s own account the beauties of nature and of art are far more intimately connected, both in their own ontological status and in our response to them, than his theory of intellectual interest concedes. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy, political philosophy, and philosophy of judgement have been and continue to be widely discussed among many scholars. The impact of his thinking is beyond doubt and his ideas continue to inspire and encourage an on-going dialogue among many people in our world today. Given the historical and philosophical significance of Kant’s moral, political, and aesthetic theory, and the connection he draws between these theories and the appropriate function and methodology of education, it is surprising that relatively (...) little has been written on Kant’s contribution to education theory. Recently, however, internationally recognized Kant scholars such as Paul Guyer, Manfred Kuehn, Richard Velkley, Robert Louden, Susan Shell, and others have begun to turn their attention to Kant’s writings on education and the role of education in cultivating moral character. _Kant and Education: Interpretations and Commentary_ has gathered these scholars together with the aim of filling this perceived void in Kant scholarship. All of the essays contained within this volume will examine either Kant’s ideas on education through an historical analysis of his texts; or the importance and relevance of his moral philosophy, political philosophy, and/or aesthetics in contemporary education theory. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 109 Heft: 3 Seiten: 395-418.

In the article, I engage with H.G.Gadamer’s reading of Kant’s aesthetic theory. Gadamer accused Kant of subjectivizing the aesthetic experience so that it would be reduced to the free play of the cognitive faculties of the subject. Consequently, the ethical dimension of aesthetic experience that played such an important role in the preceding tradition of European humanism has been lost. Yet, this charge of Gadamer is not quite right. The connection between the experience of beauty and ethics has been maintained (...) by Kant, but it has assumed a different form. The free, disinterested beauty of the objects of nature, on his account, harmonizes with the disinterested experience of the moral law. Similarly, the dependent beauty of the work of art appeals to the ethical dimension of the human being. As a result of this, the connection between aesthetics and ethics not only has not been severed by Kant, but it has also assumed an entirely new, radical form. (shrink)

An abbreviated version of my paper "Can Kants Deduction of Judgments of Taste Be Saved?" Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 84.1 (2002): 20-45.

To elaborate the intention of previous contribution, this paper opens again the problem of reception of Kant's definition of the category sublime. Variations which perform Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Adorno represent some innovative approaches. Bridging the history of this aesthetic category in the 20th century in theirs thinking, represents functionality of the sublime, which we observe through the transformations in artistic and aesthetic discourse and which encourages us to an contemporary revaluation of this concept.

This is a book review of David Berger's "Kant's Aesthetic Theory: The Beautiful and the Agreeable.".

In Kant’s aesthetic theory, the association of ugliness with aesthetic ideas is not immediately apparent. Even more, it has been argued by most of Kant’s commentators that ugliness cannot express aesthetic ideas. In short, they claim that accordance with taste (i.e. free harmony between imagination and understanding) is a necessary condition for an aesthetic idea to be expressed in a way that makes sense to others. But if production of aesthetic ideas must be restrained by taste in order to have (...) meaning and if ugliness consists in a disharmony between imagination and understanding (i.e. discordance with taste), then it follows that ugliness must essentially be nonsensical. My aim in this paper is to propose a different interpretation of the relation between Kant’s notions of aesthetic ideas and taste such that it can accommodate an ugly aesthetic idea into the overall aesthetic picture. I will argue that even though ugliness does not conform to taste it is nevertheless related to taste and thus it remains consistent with Kant’s view that taste is required for the communication of aesthetic ideas. (shrink)

In § 49 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment Kant puts forward a view that the feeling of pleasure in the experience of the beautiful can be stimulated not merely by perceptual properties, but by ideas and thoughts as well. The aim of this paper is to argue that aesthetic ideas fill in the emptiness that abstract and emotion concepts on their own would have without empirical intuitions. That is, aesthetic ideas make these concepts more accessible to us, (...) by creating image schemas that allow us to think about these abstract concepts in a way linked to sensory experience, thereby imbuing them with a more substantive meaning and understanding. (shrink)

© British Society of Aesthetics 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comWhat does it mean for a thing to be ugly, or perhaps better, for something to be judged as such? We should admit that the matter is not transparent. Maybe that seems odd, since we find things ugly all the time; should not this be plain as day, then? But usually, it is what seems (...) plainest that, in the end, is most obscure.So what, then, is ugliness? What does it mean to find something ugly? Looking to cast some light on the matter, we might consider using Kant’s well-known account of beauty as our starting point, since Kant—apparently following ‘common sense’ —says that ugliness is ‘contrary to beauty’.2 Assuming the adequacy... (shrink)

There have been more articles on Kant's aesthetics in the history of the Journal than on the next four leading figures in the history of aesthetics combined. I argue that this is because Kant's aesthetic theory consists of multiple levels of theory that makes it accessible to and important for multiple approaches to the subject itself. Continuing issues for both Kant interpretation and for aesthetics in general arise at each of these levels, including the plausibility of the claim to universal (...) validity in judgments of taste, the nature of the free play of the imagination in aesthetic experience, the character of aesthetic pleasure, the proper objects of aesthetic judgment, and the moral significance of aesthetic experience. (shrink)

Kant, Art, and Art History is the first systematic study of Kant's reception of and influence on the visual arts and art history. Arguing against Kant's transcendental approach to aesthetic judgment, Cheetham examines five 'moments' of his influence, including the use of Kant's political writings among German-speaking artists and critics in Rome around 1800; the canonized patterns of Kant's reception in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art history, particularly in the work of Wölfflin and Panofsky; and the Kantian language in (...) the criticism of Cubism. He also reassesses Clement Greenberg's famous reliance on Kant. The final chapter focuses on Kant's 'image', both in contemporary and posthumous portraits, with respect to his status as the image of philosophy within a disciplinary hierarchy. In Cheetham's reading, Kant emerges as a figure who has constantly erected and crossed the borders among art, its history, and philosophy. (shrink)

In ‘Aesthetics Problems of Modern Philosophy’ Stanley Cavell proposes, first, that Kant's characterization of judgments of beauty may be read as a Wittgensteinian grammatical characterization, and, second, that the philosophical appeal to ‘what we say and mean’ partakes of the grammar of judgment of beauty. I argue first that the expression of the dawning of an aspect partakes of the grammar of judgments of beauty as characterized by Kant, and may also be seen—on a prevailing way of thinking about concepts (...) and how they relate to their instances—to have the same kind of significance that judgments of beauty have according to Kant. And then I argue that there are good reasons for being suspicious of the prevailing conception of concepts, and therefore good reasons for being suspicious of the proposed understanding of the significance of aspect perception—an understanding that has attracted many readers of Wittgenstein's remarks on aspects. This leads me to suggest that it is actually the philosophical appeal to ordinary language that has the kind of significance that the Kantian picture attributes to judgments of beauty and to the seeing of aspects. In this way, I offer a way to vindicate Cavell's second proposal. (shrink)

This book, first published in 2002, is a systematic critical overview of German aesthetics from 1750 to the present. It begins with the work of Baumgarten and covers all the major writers on German aesthetics that follow, including Kant, Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer and Adorno. The book offers a clear and non-technical exposition of ideas, placing these in a wider philosophical context where necessary. Such is the importance of German aesthetics that the market for this book will extend (...) far beyond the domain of philosophy to such fields as literary studies, fine art and music. (shrink)

This book constitutes one of the most important contributions to recent Kant scholarship. In it, one of the pre-eminent interpreters of Kant, Henry Allison, offers a comprehensive, systematic, and philosophically astute account of all aspects of Kant's views on aesthetics. The first part of the book analyses Kant's conception of reflective judgment and its connections with both empirical knowledge and judgments of taste. The second and third parts treat two questions that Allison insists must be kept distinct: the normativity of (...) pure judgments of taste, and the moral and systematic significance of taste. The fourth part considers two important topics often neglected in the study of Kant's aesthetics: his conceptions of fine art, and the sublime. (shrink)