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{"id":16894,"date":"2014-12-12T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-12-12T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=1719"},"modified":"2014-12-12T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2014-12-12T00:00:00","slug":"pure-aesthetics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2014\/12\/pure-aesthetics\/","title":{"rendered":"Pure Aesthetics"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n<\/head>

Hugh Grady opens his\u00a0Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics<\/a> (6-10) with a brief and illuminating discussion of Kant\u2019s aesthetics of purity. By \u201cpure\u201d here is meant the freedom of aesthetic experience from cognitive reason and teleological judgments, from practical or moral interests. This disinterested experience of art is an encounter with beauty that is not determined by or subordinate to the good or the true.<\/p>\n

The purity of the experience is in fact the criterion for judging a truly aesthetic experience. It is what distinguishes the beautiful from the merely charming: \u201cKant argues that we have to distinguish between the truly beautiful\u00a0(in principle universal) and the merely attractive (a quality of an object\u00a0that is desirable to us because of some merely subjective interest). This\u00a0argument constitutes Kant\u2019s notorious doctrine of aesthetic disinterest,\u00a0and he soon finds himself disallowing the \u2018lower senses\u2019 of taste, touch,\u00a0and smell; sexual or erotic desire; and any merely subjective associations.\u00a0Furthermore, because the truly aesthetic is non-cognitive for Kant, it\u00a0must exclude any conceptual dimension or \u2018teleological\u2019 pre-conceptions\u00a0(by which he means a judgment that something is a perfect specimen of\u00a0its type \u2013 an excellent horse or human figure, for example). Such judgments,\u00a0he writes, often accompany aesthetic pleasure in the perception of\u00a0some object, but he insists they are logically separate.\u00a0In other words, Kantian aesthetics is \u2018pure.\u2019 Stripped of any erotic\u00a0or personal charm, its content deemed irrelevant to its aesthetic purity,\u00a0Kant\u2019s aesthetic is primarily a formalism (with the understanding that\u00a0form involves a peculiar kind of non-utilitarian \u2018purposiveness\u2019): \u2018A pure\u00a0judgment of taste\u2019, Kant writes, \u2018is one not influenced by charm or\u00a0emotion\u00a0(though these may be connected with a liking for the beautiful),\u00a0and whose determining basis is therefore merely the purposiveness of the\u00a0form.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Aesthetic experience is non-cognitive, though there is room for \u201caesthetic ideas.\u201d Poetry, for instance, \u201cuses language and concepts,\u00a0is essentially aesthetic because such ideas are \u2018inner intuitions to which\u00a0no concept\u00a0can be completely adequate.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Though non-cognitive and non-practical, aesthetic experience is linked to pure and practical reason, in ways that Kant never successfully makes clear. Still, the attempt opens up the possibility of making aesthetics and beauty the master transcendental: \u201caesthetic experience leads,\u00a0crucially for Kant, into a consciousness of our cognitive abilities, a kind of\u00a0awareness of our own powers, and it is pleasurable in itself. This quality\u00a0in turn allows Kant to say that the aesthetic experience thus harmonizes\u00a0the whole person.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s on this basis that Schiller and others formulate a program of humanistic education in which art, beauty,, and aesthetics are central concerns. Kant even enabled \u201cthe young Karl Marx a concept to help define an ideal of all round\u00a0human development.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thus Kant the rationalist becomes the father of Romanticism.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"