Hutcheson on the I dea of B eauty PATRICIA M. MATTHEWS IN "POPPIES ON THE WHEAT," Helen Jackson compares the farmer's experience of "counting the bread and wine by autumn's gain" to the pleasure she feels on her observation of the same farm: A tropic tide of air with ebb and flow Bathes all the fields of wheat until they glow Like flashing seas of green, which toss and beat Around the vines? Although we may express ourselves less poetically, we (...) have all had the experi- ence of being immediately pleased with some complex object: the dramatic view from a mountain peak, a series of movements in dance, a pretty face. In An Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design, 2 Francis Hutcheson ar- gues that this common phenomenon is the key to understanding beauty.3 The kinds of pleasure heretofore recognized by modern philosophers have been limited to sensible pleasures immediately associated with simple sensations like taste and smells, and rational pleasures mediated by a process of reflection on the advantage that objects may bring us. This limited understanding of plea- sure misses the fact that we often take an immediate pleasure in complex objects that is not reducible to either of these two recognized kinds of plea- sure. Based on this insight, Hutcheson argues that beauty is immediately perceived by an internal sense, much in the way that we take an immediate pleasure in individual tastes or colors. Further, he.. (shrink)

Sarah Gibbons's book is part of a growing literature that sees in Kant's third Critique an attempt to humanize and embody the interests of reason. As her title indicates, Gibbons approaches the problem by providing a theory of imagination that bridges gaps, including those "between concepts and intuitions, thought and sensibility, spontaneity and passivity, subject and object, and, somewhat more indirectly, nature and freedom". These gaps stem from the fact that we are finite discursive knowers that construct part, but not (...) all, of our knowledge. This creates a problem, because, as Kant states, "reason can have insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own". How can reason gain insight into the part that it does not contribute? In other words, concepts of reason, or categories, must be applied to intuitions that only contingently harmonize with those concepts. There must be additional subjective conditions for this harmony. These conditions cannot be supplied by further concepts without threatening a vicious regress: there cannot be rules for rule-following, because we would need further rules to apply these rules. The conditions for applying concepts to intuitions in acts of judgment require a nonconceptual order. Imagination expresses this order. However, because reason has insight only into that which it produces, imagination produces this order in cooperation with reason--not with reason's categories, but with indeterminate ideas of reason. (shrink)