Immanuel Kant's theory
Ellie: of aesthetics, and specifically his notion of the beautiful,
have been central to aesthetic theory ever since the late 18th
century when Kant came up with
Ellie: them, especially in his Critique of Judgment, known as the third critique.
Kant is a crucial philosopher in the development of aesthetic theory, also
in part because he was the first to put aesthetics in the center of a whole
systematic philosophy.
Ellie: I'm
Professor Ellie Anderson,
Ellie: philosopher and co-host of Overthink podcast, and although
I am by no means going to do
justice to Kant's theory of
Ellie: aesthetics in such a short lecture, I'm hoping that this will
be an invitation to read him on your own and to think more about his view.
I'm gonna be using here an excerpt from the Aesthetics Comprehensive Anthology
Reader, which is what I have used in the past when teaching philosophy of
art to my college students.
Now Immanuel Kant says that
Ellie: there are four moments that allow us to derive the notion of the beautiful.
So he wants to know what is the beautiful like, what do we mean
when we call something beautiful?
And he says that there are four moments that serve as indicators that
are gonna help lead us on our way.
The first moment has to do with the notion of taste.
for Kant, taste is
Ellie: a faculty that we have by virtue of being human, that allows us to estimate
an object or a representation of an object by means of delight or aversion, right?
We have a positive or a negative response.
We either delight in the object or the representation, or we have an aversion
to it, but in a disinterested way.
So.
Taste is not about just a sheer personal preference based on an inclination or an
interest, but rather it has to do with the delight or aversion that we have outside
of any interest, apart from any interest.
So taste is disinterested
according to Kant, even as
Ellie: it provokes pleasure and aversion.
The second moment ,as Kant calls it, has to do with the beautiful,
he says that the beautiful is that witch pleases universally.
So he does think that whatever is beautiful has a universal character.
I can't just say that's beautiful to me, but it might not be to you.
When I say something is beautiful, I am making a universal judgment.
But that the beautiful pleases apart from any concept, and this is what
distinguishes the beautiful from other things that might be universal or
might even be universally pleasing.
It's not conceptual in nature.
So this universally pleasing character is, is central to the beautiful
for Kant, aesthetic
Ellie: judgments originate in the feeling of the subject, and therefore
they are not themselves objective.
Beauty is not an objective characteristic.
However, he really wants to caution against taking this notion to mean
that there is no universality to
beauty.
Kant wants to
Ellie: say that aesthetic judgments while subjective are nonetheless universal.
A lot of times when we think about the subjective, we actually mean
something like relative by it, and we need to be very careful about that.
When Kant says that aesthetic judgments, uh, are
related to the feeling of a subject, what he means is that aesthetic judgments don't
exist in the art object itself, right?
They exist in the subject even as that subject, in
principle, in making a
Ellie: claim about the beauty of an artwork is making a universal claim.
he says that we tend to speak of the beautiful as if beauty
were a quality in the object.
And
so even as beauty itself doesn't inhere in an object,
Ellie: we speak of it as if it does, but this pleasing nature that we
ascribe to objects, uh, and treat as universal, is separate from concepts.
It cannot, he says spring
from concepts because from
Ellie: concepts there is no transition to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure.
This is on page 1 34.
so the character of the beautiful as being deeply related to pleasure
and, uh, displeasure or aversion, is indicative of the fact that
our experience of the beautiful is happening outside of a conceptual level.
The third
moment for Kant is what
Ellie: is known as
purposiveness.
Kant thinks
Ellie: that beauty is the form of finality in an object
that we perceive without positing, that there is some
external end goal to that beauty.
This is a complicated moment, and I'm not gonna say more about it here,
but I'll go more deeply into the four moments as con articulates them in a.
Okay, enough with the moments!
Last time I say moment for a while.
Here's the
fourth moment.
Kant says that
Ellie: the beautiful, this is the fourth moment, is that which apart from a concept
is cogn as an object of necessary delight.
So, recall that we have said that the beautiful does not exist within
concepts, but is apart from them.
That was from, uh, the second moment.
But the beautiful, refers to an object of necessary delight.
Okay, now let's get more deeply into the way that he develops these four moments.
In the third critique, and again, I'm just focusing on, on an
excerpt of that, which is in this
aesthetic reader, Kant says that
Ellie: beauty, and this is developed in, in his section on the first
moment, takes place in the subject.
An object cannot be beautiful in itself.
Kant thinks it's
Ellie: very important to recognize that aesthetic judgments don't
happen in the object, right?
They happen in a subject, but he also wants to note that that subject is not
just making a claim about a personal preference, such that I can say, well,
this is beautiful for me, but not for you.
Instead, an aesthetic judgment has a subjective ground in the feeling of
pleasure or displeasure, which as we know from the second moment is not conceptual.
But there has to be an unbiased, disinterested nature to this
judgment such that we are involved in pure contemplation.
When we are judging a work of art, the satisfaction that we feel in the
beautiful object does not involve a desire or an interest in its real existence.
Like we don't wish that we were in the movie, we can just
appreciate the movie as a movie.
Interest, on the other hand, has to do with pleasure or displeasure
in the real existence of the
object.
For Kant, it's related
Ellie: to the faculty of desire and interest, uh, is partial and impure.
It's sort of similar to what Hume talks about.
as being a prejudice.
Instead, we need to be
disinterested, Kant thinks, in
Ellie: order to appreciate a beautiful work of art.
Not all things that we like, even in this disinterested or universal sense,
however, are going to be beautiful.
According to Kant he identifies
Ellie: three different relations between representations and feelings
of pleasure and displeasure.
The first is the agreeable.
The agreeable is what pleases the senses, and this has to do with inclination.
So I find the scent of roses agreeable.
The beautiful is what we've been talking about.
This is the second relation between representation and
a feeling of pleasure and
displeasure.
And Kant says that
Ellie: the beautiful lies in between the agreeable, what pleases the senses.
And this third kind of relation, which is the good.
The good is what pleases reason, and it has to do with respect.
If you want more on that, he has a lot in the second critique, uh, on
this, this point of what pleases reason and the notion of respect.
The agreeable, we sometimes confuse with the beautiful, but the agreeable provokes
desire for other similar objects, uh, that have the same objective, quality
or qualities and it seeks gratification.
So the agreeable is deeply bound up with desire for con and actually
in a very different way, the good is also bound up with desire.
Kant says that
Ellie: the good is either good for something, it is useful
or it is good in itself.
Art is obviously not for something.
We don't enjoy the artwork because it is useful, but it's also not good in itself
according to Kant because
Ellie: the good in itself requires a concept.
And recall that he says, uh, a judgment of beauty does not require a concept.
So the beautiful is sort of in between the agreeable and the good, but also quite
different from them because both of them refer to the faculty of desire or uh, a
pleasure in the object's real existence.
Whereas art has this disinterested character where we are not actually
desiring the object's real existence.
The beautiful, he says, is the only free delight.
Here's a little bit more about the section on the
second moment.
Kant says that
Ellie: the feeling of pleasure and the beautiful involves a free play between
two different human faculties, namely the imagination and the understanding.
This is one of the most famous elements of his philosophy of art.
Related to that is this idea of the universality that we've
been talking about a bit.
He thinks that beautiful works of art have universal communicability, such that
everyone in principle would agree that a beautiful object is beautiful if it
weren't that they had other things get in the way, like their own partiality
or inclination getting in the way.
In this sense, it is as if beauty were a quality of the object, even
though strictly speaking it's not.
Little bit more on the third
moment here.
Kant says that
Ellie: the work of art, and I think we need to to develop this one a bit
more cuz I kind of punted it earlier.
The, the beautiful work of art involves finality or purposiveness in the form,
specifically the form of the work of art.
And he defines form as the design, the figure, or the play.
What is beautiful
according to Kant is not the
Ellie: same as the charming.
The charming lacks this quality of purposeness, and by purposeness
he doesn't mean that there is an external purpose to the work of art.
Recall what we said a moment ago, which is that the artwork is not enjoyed
because it is useful for something nor is it an internal purpose or end.
Like it's not striving for a form of perfection.
Instead purposiveness is, and
Ellie: sorry, I had to actually get the third critique out here
because the excerpt I was drawing from wasn't really cutting
it.
Um, the purposiveness here
Ellie: is a formal and
subjective purposiveness,
Ellie: And we're kind of, we'll go with this in the third critique is towards
this idea of purposeness without a purpose about which there is a lot more to say
than I have time for in this video.
I wanna briefly touch on some additional ideas from the fourth moment of,
uh, what Kant calls.
Remember that these moments
Ellie: are ultimately the moments that allow us to derive the
definition of the beautiful.
So in developing the fourth moment, which you might recall, is this idea that
the beautiful is an object of necessary
delight, Kant says that
Ellie: everyone ought to feel pleasure or give approval to an object.
There is this necessity to the feeling of delight.
And this relates a lot to this idea of universality.
This idea that even though, uh, when we judge a work of art, we
are doing something subjective.
We're not talking about an inherent quality within the artwork itself.
We are doing so in a way that we are, uh, engaging with what we perceive
to be a universally valid judgment.
So to say that an artwork is an object of necessary delight
is to say that it is beautiful.
this doesn't mean that people always do think that the artwork is beautiful or
an object of necessary delight, right?
Um, it just means that, that they should,
according to Kant, there
Ellie: is an ideal consensus that we are positing when we say that a work
of art is beautiful, or what he calls
common sense, sensus communis.
We need exemplars, Kant thinks, or
Ellie: ideals of beauty in order to get a sense of the standard of taste.
Similarly to Hume, who's a big
influence on Kant.
Kant thinks
Ellie: that we should have a standard of taste such that we can kind of offer tools
to people for recognizing what it means for something to be beautiful in this
universal sense that we're talking about.
But we can't determine that standard of taste in advance.
We can't have this apriori depiction of what a beautiful object should be.
Rather what we are doing at the very least is positing that everyone ought
to feel pleasure or given approval to an object such that they are
recognizing that it is beautiful.
Stay tuned
for more on Kant's Philosophy
Ellie: of Art in this channel.
I'd also recommend checking out Overthink podcast.
We have, uh, some
discussions of Kant in various
Ellie: episodes.
Check out the book that I'm using if you wish, and hell,
why not The third critique.