To me, beauty has always seemed simple and straight forward. When I looked at, tasted, smelled, heard, or touched something that appeared pleasing, I simply thought of it as beautiful. However, beauty is quite a bit more complicated than just initial sensations. Kant delves into this complex notion of “the beautiful” in his Critique of Judgment.
For Kant, the idea of beauty goes beyond cognition. One can not simply think something is beautiful. He writes, “The judgment of taste is therefore not a judgment of cognition, and is consequently not logical but aesthetical, by which we understand that whose determining ground can be no other than subjective” (98). As soon as you become personally interested in something, your prejudice immediately nullifies your ability to accurately and universally determine if that thing is in fact beautiful. Kant supports this statement when he says, “Everyone must admit that a judgment about beauty, in which the least interest mingles, is very partial and is not a pure judgment of taste” (99). However just smelling a fragrant rose from the unbiased position of a first timer, still does not equip you with everything necessary to determine beauty. The senses can only tell you what is pleasant or gratifying to you. They can’t tell if something is universally beautiful. Pleasant sensation can however provide a person with a representation of the object simply in relation to sense; something Kant would argue is a piece of the whole puzzle. The other, more important aspect to an object’s beauty is the concept of the good.
For Kant, the idea of beauty goes beyond cognition. One can not simply think something is beautiful. He writes, “The judgment of taste is therefore not a judgment of cognition, and is consequently not logical but aesthetical, by which we understand that whose determining ground can be no other than subjective” (98). As soon as you become personally interested in something, your prejudice immediately nullifies your ability to accurately and universally determine if that thing is in fact beautiful. Kant supports this statement when he says, “Everyone must admit that a judgment about beauty, in which the least interest mingles, is very partial and is not a pure judgment of taste” (99). However just smelling a fragrant rose from the unbiased position of a first timer, still does not equip you with everything necessary to determine beauty. The senses can only tell you what is pleasant or gratifying to you. They can’t tell if something is universally beautiful. Pleasant sensation can however provide a person with a representation of the object simply in relation to sense; something Kant would argue is a piece of the whole puzzle. The other, more important aspect to an object’s beauty is the concept of the good.
Kant believes that it is not just the representation of the truly beautiful object that pleases, but also its existence. This is manifested in “the good”. “Whatever by means of reason pleases through the mere concept is good. That which pleases only as a means we call good for something (the useful), but that which pleases for itself is good in itself” (100). It is only through judgment about this concept of the good that has “logical and not merely aesthetical universality, for they are valid of the object as cognitive of it, and thus are valid for everyone” (106). This idea is interesting though because Kant then goes on to say, “If we judge objects merely according to concepts, then all representation of beauty is lost” (106). That seems a little contradictory to me. He spent all this time developing a structure for how beauty is defined and then he throws it all out the window. Kant writes, “Thus there can be no rule according to which anyone is to be forced to recognize anything as beautiful” (106). Maybe truly beautiful objects can never really be defined, kind of like a caged animal. When you go to a zoo, there is something about the cage around the tiger that detracts from its beauty. Attempting to define a beautiful object is like putting a cage around it. You simply can’t pull it off without altering what’s inside. Consequently, people can never really know what is beautiful. However, through the use of our senses and our recognition of other’s opinions, we can get a pretty “good” idea.
I like your analogy of beauty and a caged animal. To me, that makes more sense than most of what Kant said. So would you argue that a wild animal is more beautiful than a caged one because it is more "pure"?
ReplyDeleteIs the cage to the tiger what the concept is to beauty?
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