Kant and Beauty Glue

Kant- “Critique of the power of Judgment” 

        Kant believes that Art is an exalted part of human existence that creates new philosophical understanding of what can be considered to be the human experience. To Kant, the aesthetic experience of beauty joins the physical (sensible) and the nonphysical (nonsensible) worlds and thus creates a unity in understanding. Beauty is subjective and thus is based more on personal reflection than a universal validity. Thus, the ability to judge something as beautiful, in light of subjectivity, is one that rests on the notion of taste. Taste is a learned cultural ability which allows the appreciator to distinguish between what is good (reason based on what we should desire), agreeable (senses-physical desire), and the beautiful (a mixture of the sensible and the nonsensible-involves no desire) by way of disinterest. That is to say a judgment of beauty must surpass a personal response (I like this, thus, everyone else will) so as to become an objective response (everyone should like this). For Kant, this can only be done if the appreciator is judging through a lens of cultivated individual disinterest. If personal gratification is involved in the judgment, such as with food, objectivity is impossible due to idiosyncratic and physiological appetites; however, in the case of something such as flowers, disinterested contemplation is possible because the beauty of flowers is in not connected to personal gratification. This is not to say that the ideal of beauty can ever be a universal concept rather it is an ideal of the cultivated imagination.

       In this vein of contemplative disinterest, Art then should not be considered through a vulgar (matter over form) or a utilitarian (useful beyond beauty) mindset, because, an Aesthetic provides a freedom from the physical world and thus allows us to mentally break away from the immersion of self in the everyday. In turn, by creating a freedom that allows one to embrace the abstraction of the mind, beauty creates a unity between the world and the elevated creativity of the mind. Beauty makes everything fit together. In contrast, the sublime creates a disconnect between the mind and the physical world either by presenting us with something to great to comprehend or too powerful to be harnessed. The sublime is an experience in the limitations of that which is sensible. Thus we need beauty to connect the nonsensible with the sensible in order to experience unity.

Personal Response: Once I was able to discern what I believe to be Kant’s intent I found myself rather enjoying his work. While he does go into, at length, what taste is, and what art can be in an abstract moral sense, and even what constitutes as genius on the part of the artist, his overarching theme of beauty as a route to personal unity was in itself poetic and intellectually mature. I agree with him insomuch as he gave clarity to a notion that I had no words in which to voice it. There have been times in my life when the struggle of the everyday has collided with the incomprehensible sublimity of nature and thus left me in a state of personal confliction that even a religious interest could not remedy. However, a painting, a poem, and/or a well executed dance could and has instilled calm in me that I could not properly explain until now. The idea that an objective disinterested appreciation of aesthetics that results in judgments about beauty/art which in turn leads to an experience (the appreciation of art) and thus a connectivity between the sensible and the insensible is, for me, quite real. And this connectivity gives an almost unexplainable imaginative freedom which allows for personal peace in an indefinable world. 

Kant, Immanuel. "Critique of the Power Of Judgement." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism 2nd Ed. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. 406-449. Print.