Kant on the beautiful and taste: Critique of Judgment — Transcript

Explores Kant's theory of the beautiful and taste from the Critique of Judgment, focusing on aesthetic judgment and disinterested pleasure.

Key Takeaways

Kant's aesthetics centers on disinterested pleasure as the basis for judgments of beauty.
Beauty is subjective yet universally communicable, existing in the subject's feeling rather than the object.
Aesthetic appreciation requires pure contemplation, free from desire or personal interest.
The beautiful is distinct from both the agreeable (sensory pleasure) and the good (moral or rational respect).
Kant's four moments provide a framework to understand what constitutes the beautiful.

Summary

Kant's Critique of Judgment is central to aesthetic theory and places aesthetics at the core of systematic philosophy.
Taste is a human faculty involving disinterested delight or aversion, not based on personal preference or interest.
The beautiful pleases universally and is distinct from conceptual judgments, emphasizing a non-conceptual, universal pleasure.
Aesthetic judgments are subjective but claim universality, existing in the subject rather than the object.
Beauty is related to pleasure and displeasure experienced outside of conceptual thought.
Purposiveness is the third moment, where beauty is perceived as form of finality without external purpose.
The fourth moment states that the beautiful is cognized as an object of necessary delight apart from concepts.
Aesthetic judgments require disinterested contemplation, free from desire or interest in the object's real existence.
Kant distinguishes between the agreeable (pleasing senses), the beautiful (disinterested pleasure), and the good (pleasing reason).
The beautiful lies between the agreeable and the good, differing by not involving desire or conceptual utility.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

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Immanuel Kant's theory 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 them, especially in his Critique of Judgment, known as the third critique.

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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.

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I'm Professor Ellie Anderson, philosopher and co-host of Overthink podcast, and although I am by no means going to do justice to Kant's theory of 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.

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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.

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Now Immanuel Kant says that there are four moments that allow us to derive the notion of the beautiful.

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So he wants to know what is the beautiful like, what do we mean when we call something beautiful?

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And he says that there are four moments that serve as indicators that are gonna help lead us on our way.

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The first moment has to do with the notion of taste. For Kant, taste is 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?

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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.

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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.

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So taste is disinterested according to Kant, even as it provokes pleasure and aversion.

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The second moment, as Kant calls it, has to do with the beautiful. He says that the beautiful is that which pleases universally.

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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.

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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.

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It's not conceptual in nature. So this universally pleasing character is central to the beautiful for Kant. Aesthetic judgments originate in the feeling of the subject, and therefore they are not themselves objective.

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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.

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Kant wants to 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.

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When Kant says that aesthetic judgments are related to the feeling of a subject, what he means is that aesthetic judgments don't exist in the art object itself, right?

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They exist in the subject even as that subject, in principle, in making a claim about the beauty of an artwork is making a universal claim.

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He says that we tend to speak of the beautiful as if beauty were a quality in the object.

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And so even as beauty itself doesn't inhere in an object, we speak of it as if it does, but this pleasing nature that we ascribe to objects, and treat as universal, is separate from concepts.

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It cannot, he says, spring from concepts because from concepts there is no transition to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure.

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This is on page 134. So the character of the beautiful as being deeply related to pleasure and displeasure or aversion is indicative of the fact that our experience of the beautiful is happening outside of a conceptual level.

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The third moment for Kant is what is known as purposiveness. Kant thinks 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.

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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 Kant articulates them in a.

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Okay, enough with the moments! Last time I say moment for a while. Here's the fourth moment.

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Kant says that the beautiful, this is the fourth moment, is that which apart from a concept is cognized as an object of necessary delight.

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So, recall that we have said that the beautiful does not exist within concepts, but is apart from them.

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That was from the second moment. But the beautiful refers to an object of necessary delight.

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Okay, now let's get more deeply into the way that he develops these four moments.

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In the third critique, and again, I'm just focusing on an excerpt of that, which is in this aesthetic reader, Kant says that beauty, and this is developed in his section on the first moment, takes place in the subject.

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An object cannot be beautiful in itself. Kant thinks it's very important to recognize that aesthetic judgments don't happen in the object, right?

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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.

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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.

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But there has to be an unbiased, disinterested nature to this judgment such that we are involved in pure contemplation.

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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.

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Like we don't wish that we were in the movie, we can just appreciate the movie as a movie.

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Interest, on the other hand, has to do with pleasure or displeasure in the real existence of the object.

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For Kant, it's related to the faculty of desire and interest, is partial and impure.

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It's sort of similar to what Hume talks about as being a prejudice. Instead, we need to be disinterested, Kant thinks, in order to appreciate a beautiful work of art.

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Not all things that we like, even in this disinterested or universal sense, however, are going to be beautiful.

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According to Kant he identifies three different relations between representations and feelings of pleasure and displeasure.

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The first is the agreeable. The agreeable is what pleases the senses, and this has to do with inclination.

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So I find the scent of roses agreeable. The beautiful is what we've been talking about.

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This is the second relation between representation and a feeling of pleasure and displeasure. And Kant says that the beautiful lies in between the agreeable, what pleases the senses,

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And this third kind of relation, which is the good. The good is what pleases reason, and it has to do with respect.

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If you want more on that, he has a lot in the second critique on this point of what pleases reason and the notion of respect.

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The agreeable, we sometimes confuse with the beautiful, but the agreeable provokes desire for other similar objects that have the same objective quality or qualities and it seeks gratification.

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So the agreeable is deeply bound up with desire, and actually in a very different way, the good is also bound up with desire.

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Kant says that the good is either good for something, it is useful or it is good in itself.

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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 the good in itself requires a concept.

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And recall that he says a judgment of beauty does not requi...

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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.

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Whereas art has this disinterested character where we are not actually desiring the object's real existence.

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The beautiful, he says, is the only free delight. Here's a little bit more about the section on the second moment.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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In this sense, it is as if beauty were a quality of the object, even though strictly speaking it's not.

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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.

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The, the beautiful work of art involves finality or purposiveness in the form, specifically the form of the work of art.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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Remember that these moments Ellie: are ultimately the moments that allow us to derive the definition of the beautiful.

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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.

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There is this necessity to the feeling of delight. And this relates a lot to this idea of universality.

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This idea that even though, uh, when we judge a work of art, we are doing something subjective.

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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.

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So to say that an artwork is an object of necessary delight is to say that it is beautiful.

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this doesn't mean that people always do think that the artwork is beautiful or an object of necessary delight, right?

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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.

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We need exemplars, Kant thinks, or Ellie: ideals of beauty in order to get a sense of the standard of taste.

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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

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universal sense that we're talking about. But we can't determine that standard of taste in advance.

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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

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recognizing that it is beautiful. Stay tuned for more on Kant's Philosophy Ellie: of Art in this channel.

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I'd also recommend checking out Overthink podcast. We have, uh, some discussions of Kant in various Ellie: episodes.

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Check out the book that I'm using if you wish, and hell, why not The third critique.

Topics:Immanuel KantCritique of Judgmentaestheticsbeautytastedisinterested pleasureaesthetic judgmentphilosophy of artpurposivenessOverthink Podcast

Frequently Asked Questions

What does Kant mean by 'disinterested' taste?

Kant means that taste involves a feeling of delight or aversion that is free from personal interest or desire. It is a pure, unbiased appreciation of an object without any inclination or practical concern.

How can aesthetic judgments be subjective but universal according to Kant?

Although aesthetic judgments arise from the subject's feelings, Kant argues they claim universal validity because they are not based on personal preferences but on a shared human faculty of taste that seeks universal agreement.

What distinguishes the beautiful from the agreeable and the good in Kant's theory?

The agreeable pleases the senses and involves desire, the good pleases reason and involves respect or utility, while the beautiful pleases universally without desire or conceptual interest, existing in disinterested contemplation.

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