Kant, aesthetics, objectivity repost requested

[Saina Nieminen]

Interesting reading so far, thanks! So the aesthetic part of Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft basically tries to resolve Hume's paradox of taste: how an idea of beauty can be communal though it is based on feeling? And in the Kritik Kant doesn't write so much of beauty as of judgement in a wider sense, but the judgement goes from particular to universal - so just the opposite as in the First Critique? Is this what VLM was going on about in his first post? So what this means is that though we might agree on some sensory feelings, the liking or disliking of them is purely subjective?

 

[VLM]

originally posted by Otto Nieminen:
Interesting reading so far, thanks! So the aesthetic part of Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft basically tries to resolve Hume's paradox of taste: how an idea of beauty can be communal though it is based on feeling? And in the Kritik Kant doesn't write so much of beauty as of judgement in a wider sense, but the judgement goes from particular to universal - so just the opposite as in the First Critique? Is this what VLM was going on about in his first post? So what this means is that though we might agree on some sensory feelings, the liking or disliking of them is purely subjective?

Actually, I think narrow content, through sensory neural states, is exactly what Kant had in mind with his arguments towards what could be considered knowledge.

That puts judgment a way off, but if you can bridge the gap from narrow to wide content, you're there. And probably tenured.

 

[Jonathan Loesberg]

originally posted by Otto Nieminen:
Interesting reading so far, thanks! So the aesthetic part of Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft basically tries to resolve Hume's paradox of taste: how an idea of beauty can be communal though it is based on feeling? And in the Kritik Kant doesn't write so much of beauty as of judgement in a wider sense, but the judgement goes from particular to universal - so just the opposite as in the First Critique? Is this what VLM was going on about in his first post? So what this means is that though we might agree on some sensory feelings, the liking or disliking of them is purely subjective?

It isn't just Hume's paradox. It is the paradox of aesthetics since the word was invented by Alexander Baumgarten in a book trying to define art in relation to Leibniz's contention that we could only have knowledge of intelligible things.

In the introduction to the Third Critique, Kant defines judgment as the extrapolation of a general principle that groups together various material apprehensions. The teleological judgment demands the general principle that nature operates as if according to a purpose. Kant thinks that that principle, while unproveable, is necessary for making sense of how to live as conscious agents in the material world. The aesthetic judgment occurs when we construe some material object as meaningful, thus declaring it beautiful, without caring whether the meaning we perceive is in fact part of the object. That is what we do when we apprehend purposiveness without purpose. The fact that we coherently make such judgments shows that it is coherent to say about an object that it can be perceived as operating purposively without declaring that it was made by a designer with a purpose. This coherence shows that our teleological judgment is also coherent and thus that the general principle it extrapolates about nature, although not shown to be true, has been shown to be one we can meaningfully live in accord with.

 

[Jeff Grossman]

originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
The aesthetic judgment occurs when we construe some material object as meaningful, thus declaring it beautiful, without caring whether the meaning we perceive is in fact part of the object.

That is nicely said.

 

[Saina Nieminen]

It isn't just Hume's paradox. It is the paradox of aesthetics since the word was invented by Alexander Baumgarten in a book trying to define art in relation to Leibniz's contention that we could only have knowledge of intelligible things.

Illiterate peasant that I am, I haven't been acquainted with aesthetics post-Kant, so would anyone be willing to summarize how the conflict has been further developed?

 

[SFJoe]

In 20 words or fewer?

 

[Jonathan Loesberg]

There have always been two basic branches of aesthetics. One defines beauty in terms of our response either to certain sensations or certain formal arrangements of objects that evoke those sensations. For the most part, this has been the prominent strand in Anglo-American aesthetics. Since the 20th century, one outreach of this tradition has been to try to explain the reaction to beauty as a neuronic response and to stop worrying about whether it is communal accept to the extent that it can show a commonality--which there certainly is--to how our brains work. It usually also accepts ground level differences, for instance, that in fact we don't all have exactly equal taste sensations for the same objects evoking them. This branch of aesthetics can be extended into wine criticism I suppose, but it's consequence is that it can't be objective at the most basic level.

The second branch defines beauty as occurring with the adequate embodiment of thought in sensuous presentation. For various reasons, this tradition after Hegel, and even with him, has mostly given up the idea of communal definitions in terms of defining objects and seen aesthetics as a matter of apprehension. There has been, in the work of Arthur Danto in response to postmodern art, been an attempt to turn this tradition back to object definition. But its greatest contemporary inheritance is in various strands of poststructural thinking. There will be a test on Monday morning Otto.

 

[Florida Jim]

originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
But its greatest contemporary inheritance is in various strands of poststructural thinking.

Real beauty ends where intellectual expression begins. Oscar Wilde
Best, Jim