Homework for class on Tues. 10/6
1. Listen to Miles Davis, Kind of Blue. Record your thoughts/feelings about in your journal.
2. Read this overview of Immanuel Kant's Theory of Beauty
A VERY QUICK INTRODUCTION TO
IMMANUEL KANT'S THEORY OF BEAUTY AND ART
What does it mean to call something ‘beautiful’?
§1. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is one of the greatest modern philosophers and his aesthetic theory underlies many modernist views about art and beauty. His theory attempts to answer the question: what do we mean when we call something ‘beautiful’? Kant's initial focus is on judgments about beauty in nature, as when we call a flower, a sunset, or an animal 'beautiful'. What, at bottom, does such a judgment mean, and how does it take place as a mental act?
§2. In his masterwork on beauty called the "Critique of Judgment" (1790), Kant claims that, if you carefully examine them, aesthetic judgments have four distinctive characteristics that reveal something very interesting and mysterious about aesthetic experiences.
1. DISINTERESTED • Aesthetic judgments are disinterested. There are two types of interest: by way of sensations in the agreeable, and by way of concepts in the good. Only aesthetic judgment is free or pure of any such interests. Interest is defined as a link to real desire and action, and thus also to a determining connection to the real existence of the object. In the aesthetic judgment per se, the real existence of the beautiful object is quite irrelevant. Certainly, I may wish to own the beautiful painting, or at least a copy of it, because I derive pleasure from it - but that pleasure, and thus that desire, is distinct from and parasitic upon the aesthetic judgment. The judgment results in pleasure, rather than pleasure resulting in judgment.
2. FORMALISM • Aesthetic judgment must concern itself only with form (shape, arrangement, rhythm, etc.) in the object presented, not sensible content (color, tone, etc.), since the latter has a deep connection to the agreeable, and thus to interest. Kant is thus the founder of all formalism in aesthetics in modern philosophy. This claim of the disinterestedness of all aesthetic judgments is perhaps the most often attacked by subsequent philosophy, especially as it is extended to include fine art as well as nature. To pick three examples, Kant's argument is rejected by those (Nietzsche, Freud) for whom all art must always be understood as related to will; by those for whom all art (as a cultural production) must be political in some sense (Marxism); by those for whom all art is a question of affective response (expressionists).
3. UNIVERSALITY or INTERSUBJECTIVE VALIDITY • Aesthetic judgments behave universally, that is, involve an expectation or claim on the agreement of others - just 'as if' beauty were a real property of the object judged. If I judge a certain landscape to be beautiful then, although I may be perfectly aware that all kinds of other factors might enter in to make particular people in fact disagree with me, nevertheless I at least implicitly demand universality in the name of taste. I tend to see disagreement as involving error somewhere, rather than agreement as involving mere coincidence. This universality is distinguished first from the mere subjectivity of judgments such as 'I like honey' - that is not at all universal, nor do we expect it to be - and second from the strict objectivity of judgments such as 'honey contains sugar and is sweet'. The belief that 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder' cannot account for our experience of beauty itself, insofar as the tendency is always to see 'beauty' as if it were somehow in the object or the immediate experience of the object. Second, such a relativist view cannot account for the social 'behavior' of our claims about what we find beautiful. In order to explore the implications of 'apart from a concept', Kant introduces the idea of the 'free play' of the cognitive faculties (here: understanding and imagination). In the case of the judgment of the beautiful, these faculties no longer simply work together (as they do in ordinary sensible cognition) but rather each 'furthers' or 'quickens' the other in a kind of self-contained and self-perpetuating cascade of thought and feeling. Beauty is more or less universal since every mind is more or less identical biologically, and therefore similarly affected similarly by similar forms. The integration of cognitive processes in viewing beautiful objects is what induces wholeness or self-presence in the soul of the viewer.
§1. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is one of the greatest modern philosophers and his aesthetic theory underlies many modernist views about art and beauty. His theory attempts to answer the question: what do we mean when we call something ‘beautiful’? Kant's initial focus is on judgments about beauty in nature, as when we call a flower, a sunset, or an animal 'beautiful'. What, at bottom, does such a judgment mean, and how does it take place as a mental act?
§2. In his masterwork on beauty called the "Critique of Judgment" (1790), Kant claims that, if you carefully examine them, aesthetic judgments have four distinctive characteristics that reveal something very interesting and mysterious about aesthetic experiences.
1. DISINTERESTED • Aesthetic judgments are disinterested. There are two types of interest: by way of sensations in the agreeable, and by way of concepts in the good. Only aesthetic judgment is free or pure of any such interests. Interest is defined as a link to real desire and action, and thus also to a determining connection to the real existence of the object. In the aesthetic judgment per se, the real existence of the beautiful object is quite irrelevant. Certainly, I may wish to own the beautiful painting, or at least a copy of it, because I derive pleasure from it - but that pleasure, and thus that desire, is distinct from and parasitic upon the aesthetic judgment. The judgment results in pleasure, rather than pleasure resulting in judgment.
2. FORMALISM • Aesthetic judgment must concern itself only with form (shape, arrangement, rhythm, etc.) in the object presented, not sensible content (color, tone, etc.), since the latter has a deep connection to the agreeable, and thus to interest. Kant is thus the founder of all formalism in aesthetics in modern philosophy. This claim of the disinterestedness of all aesthetic judgments is perhaps the most often attacked by subsequent philosophy, especially as it is extended to include fine art as well as nature. To pick three examples, Kant's argument is rejected by those (Nietzsche, Freud) for whom all art must always be understood as related to will; by those for whom all art (as a cultural production) must be political in some sense (Marxism); by those for whom all art is a question of affective response (expressionists).
3. UNIVERSALITY or INTERSUBJECTIVE VALIDITY • Aesthetic judgments behave universally, that is, involve an expectation or claim on the agreement of others - just 'as if' beauty were a real property of the object judged. If I judge a certain landscape to be beautiful then, although I may be perfectly aware that all kinds of other factors might enter in to make particular people in fact disagree with me, nevertheless I at least implicitly demand universality in the name of taste. I tend to see disagreement as involving error somewhere, rather than agreement as involving mere coincidence. This universality is distinguished first from the mere subjectivity of judgments such as 'I like honey' - that is not at all universal, nor do we expect it to be - and second from the strict objectivity of judgments such as 'honey contains sugar and is sweet'. The belief that 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder' cannot account for our experience of beauty itself, insofar as the tendency is always to see 'beauty' as if it were somehow in the object or the immediate experience of the object. Second, such a relativist view cannot account for the social 'behavior' of our claims about what we find beautiful. In order to explore the implications of 'apart from a concept', Kant introduces the idea of the 'free play' of the cognitive faculties (here: understanding and imagination). In the case of the judgment of the beautiful, these faculties no longer simply work together (as they do in ordinary sensible cognition) but rather each 'furthers' or 'quickens' the other in a kind of self-contained and self-perpetuating cascade of thought and feeling. Beauty is more or less universal since every mind is more or less identical biologically, and therefore similarly affected similarly by similar forms. The integration of cognitive processes in viewing beautiful objects is what induces wholeness or self-presence in the soul of the viewer.
4. PURPOSIVENESS WITHOUT A PURPOSE • An object's purpose is the concept according to which it was manufactured; purposiveness, then, is the property of at least appearing to have been manufactured or designed. Kant claims that the beautiful has to be understood as purposive, but without any definite purpose. A 'definite purpose' would be either the set of external purposes (what the thing was meant to do or accomplish), or the internal purpose (what the thing was simply meant to be like). In the former case, the success of the process of making is judged according to utility; in the latter, according to perfection. Kant argues that beauty is equivalent neither to utility nor perfection, but is still purposive. Beauty in nature, then, will appear as purposive with respect to our faculty of judgment, but its beauty will have no ascertainable purpose - that is, it is not purposive with respect to determinate cognition. Indeed, this is why beauty is pleasurable since, Kant argues, pleasure is defined as a feeling that arises on the achievement of a purpose, or at least the recognition of a purposiveness.
For Kant, the other basic type of aesthetic experience is THE SUBLIME. The sublime names experiences like violent storms or huge buildings which seem to overwhelm us; that is, we feel we 'cannot get our head around them'. This is either mainly 'mathematical' - if our ability to intuit is overwhelmed by size (the huge building) - or 'dynamical' - if our ability to will or resist is overwhelmed by force (e.g. the storm). The problem for Kant here is that this experience seems to directly contradict the principle of the purposiveness of nature for our judgment. And yet, Kant notes, one would expect the feeling of being overwhelmed to also be accompanied by a feeling of fear or at least discomfort. Whereas, the sublime can be a pleasurable experience. All this raises the question of what is going on in the sublime
§3. Kant's solution is that, in fact, the storm or the building is not the real object of the sublime at all. Instead, what is properly sublime are ideas of reason: namely, the ideas of absolute totality or absolute freedom. However huge the building, we know it is puny compared to absolute totality; however powerful the storm, it is nothing compared to absolute freedom. The sublime feeling is therefore a kind of 'rapid alternation' between the fear of the overwhelming and the peculiar pleasure of seeing that overwhelming overwhelmed. Thus, it turns out that the sublime experience is purposive after all - that we can, in some way, 'get our head around it'.
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