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January 19, 2008
Kant on beauty
Kant, as you may remember, believed knowledge is derived from experience and preceded to go on at great length about it.
He also believed that beauty is related to the state of mind of the observer. Or to put it another way beauty is in the eye of the beholder. He put it like this:
“If we wish to discern whether anything is beautiful or not, we do not refer the representation of it to the object by means of understanding with a view to cognition, but by means of the imagination (acting perhaps in conjunction with understanding) we refer the representation to the subject and its feeling of pleasure or displeasure. The judgement of taste, therefore, is not a cognitive judgement, and so not logical, but is aesthetic – which means that it is one whose determining ground cannot be other than subjective. Every reference of representations is capable of being objective, even that of sensations (in which case it signifies the real in an empirical representation). The one exception to this is the feeling of pleasure or displeasure. This denotes nothing in the object, but is a feeling which the subject has of itself and of the manner in which it is affected by the representation.”
Critique of Judgement [1790] Immanuel Kant 1724 – 1805
Kant spent a long time thinking about thinking which, when you come to think about it, is almost as tricky as trying to chew your own teeth.
Posted by john at January 19, 2008 07:02 PM