Disclaimer: I've heard from all over the place that Kant is a very difficult philosopher to understand. Therefore, not being a student of philosophy myself, my best shot will probably completely miss his point. Hey, it's all good.
On page 104, Kant makes the argument that although "pleasant" must be followed by "to me," the word "beautiful" does not need such a qualification. I'm not sure if I agree with that--for this to be true, then people have to make a distinction between those two words. I would be just as likely to say that I consider dark green to be a beautiful color as I am to say that dark green is pleasant, and in neither case do I mean that everyone else must think dark green is the best color ever.
So Kant's statement that judging objects according to concepts loses all representation of beauty is an iffy one, in my opinion. I think what Kant is saying is something like an opposition to Plato. Instead of every physical manifestation being removed from the original and imperfect, and works of art being removed over again, Kant might be saying that judging a physical object on the basis of some concept of what it should be defeats the purpose of beauty altogether. This is interesting when taken in the context of how Kant defines "beautiful;" universal appreciation loses representation, but personal appreciation does not? Interesting.
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I had the same thought when I read the passage where Kant said that something can be "pleasant" to one person and not to another, but that a thing is "beautiful" universally. I think the fact that we do not see a distinction between "pleasant" and "beautiful" is what makes reading and understanding Kant so hard. Our use of words is always evolving, and when such a dense passage is written without a clear definition of these vague words, 200 years later it is that much harder to comprehend.
ReplyDeleteI like the reference to Plato; do you think he values only the "purpose" of an artistic work, instead of the "purposiveness without a purpose" that Kant refers to? I think so!
ReplyDeleteYou bring up an interesting point in the distinction between “beautiful” and “pleasant”. I wonder how much the two words have evolved in meaning since Kant’s time. Great critique.
ReplyDeleteP.S. I enjoy the creativity of your title.
"I think what Kant is saying is something like an opposition to Plato." - yet - his notion of 'universal satisfaction' seems to indicate something 'removed' from the personal, subjective aesthetic experience - in a Platonic sense -!?
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