Beauty Morality Art Seminar Kant Critique of the

Beauty, Morality, Art Seminar “Kant: Critique of the Power of Judgment” University of Iceland Session 9 4/10/2007 Text: Critique of the Aesthtical Power of Judgment (41 -53) Claus Beisbart References third Critique: Guyer/Matthews

Where are we? Critique of the Power of Judgment First Part. Cri. of the Aesthetic Power of Judgement First Section. Analytic of. . . First Book. Analytic of the Beautiful Second Book. Analytic of the Sublime [Third Book]. Deduction of pure aesthetic judgments sec. 30 – 54 Second Section. Dialectic of. . .

But. . . the deduction itself seems to be done around the end of sec. 38. From sec. 40 – 54 Kant apparently takes up other issues. A sensus communis (40) interest in the beautiful (41 -42) art and genius (43 -53) Two views: I. The deduction is really finished around the end of 38 II. It is not.

sec. 40 Kant asks: Why do we demand taste from each other? Why do we criticize people that do not have taste? Here, taste is the faculty to judge the beautiful (and the sublime). It has the trait of a sensus communis – a disposition/preparedness to share our feelings. Putting this together, one can ask: Is there an interest that we take in sharing feelings with everybody else? Is there an interest in the beautiful?

A contemporary comment on taste and morality (I) “Disinterested taste is a way of apprehending nature that resists the inclination to assign to nature a merely relative value on the basis of its capacity to satisfy human goals; instead, the aesthetic consciousness involves a love of (at least beautiful) objects for their own sake. In other words, the aesthetic regard of the world is a kind of noncovetous vision, a kind of non-appropriative seeing that does not operate in the service of our drive to order the world according to our purposes. ” M. Lucht 2007

A contemporary comment (II) “The aesthetic vision, then, is not a vision that seeks to subjugate, but it is a vision that appreciates, a vision that is receptive and responsive. What is more, Kant thinks that taste involves attending merely to what “manifests itself to the eye, ” thus “we must base our judgment regarding [the object] merely on how we see it. . We must not do so on the basis of how we think it. ” The aesthetic apprehension of beings is independent of our more theoretical modes of thinking— and all the biases that orient such thought. [. . . ] Taste is an alternative way of apprehending the world, and Kant invites us not only to regard the world from the perspectives of scientific understanding and instrumental rationality but also to adopt an attitude of openness to beings as they appear apart from our knowledge about, and designs upon, them. ” M. Lucht 2007

Another voice (I) “Utility is the great idol of our age, to which all powers are in thrall and to which all talent must pay homage. Weighed in this crude balance, the insubstantial merits of Art scarce tip the scale, and, bereft of all encouragement, she shuns the noisy market-place of our century. The spirit of philosophical inquiry itself is wresting from the imagination one province after another, and the frontier of art contract the more the boundaries of science expand. ”

Another voice (II) “Nature deals no better with Man than with the rest of her works: she acts for him as long as he is as yet incapable of acting for himself as a free intelligence. But what makes him Man is precisley this: that he does not stop short at what Nature herself made of hime, but has the power of retracing by means of Reason the steps she took on his befhalf, of transforming the work of blind compulsion into a work of free choice, and of elevating physical necessity into moral necessity. ”

Another voice (III) “All improvement in the political sphere is to proceed from the ennobling character – but how under the influence of a barbarous constitution is character ever to become enobled? To this end we should, presumably, have to seek out some instrument not provided by the State, and to open up living springs which, whatever the political corruption, would remain clear and pure. I have now reached the point to which all my preceeding reflections have been tending. This instrument is Fine Art; such living springs are opened up in its immortal exemplars. ”

Another voice (IV) F. Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man. In a Series of Letters), 1795