Kant's "The Critique of Judgment" has its introduction dedicated to beauty. We may and may not agree with his understanding of aesthetics, but at least it is something to discuss and something to learn from. What causes us to perceive something as beauty? Kant disagrees with the idea that the perception of beauty should be undiscussable and intuitive; bringing in an intellectual context. When one says that something is beautiful - be it a picture or a scene of nature - it is an aesthetic judgment (or ‘judgments of taste’) that must have four key distinguishing features:
- Disinterested: beauty is the cause of pleasure, not pleasure - the cause of beauty. You find something beautiful, and it pleases you, not you find something beautiful because it pleases you. Beauty breeds pleasure; not pleasure breeds beauty.
- Universal: when one makes an aesthetic judgement, it is expected that others would agree with it - the judgement and the criteria may be applied not to one person, but to many. How it applies to different people is the source for the criteria of taste. So it contradicts to the saying "beauty lies in the eye of the beholder" - beauty is universal, not personal.
- Necessary: an aesthetic statement and debates are necessary to transcend beauty from its source. Not define, but transcend, and the deeper the discussion, the deeper the understanding of beauty. According to Kant, these last two features - universality and necessity - are in fact a product of features of the human mind, that Kant calls 'common sense'. Objective reality contains no beauty. Adding the universality - we find that Kant's beauty lives in the people's shared subjective reality (Bayandur Pogosyan calls it "the psychosphere" or "the domain of Gods").
- Purposive without purpose ('final without end'): an object’s purpose is the concept according to which it was made.
So, how do you define beauty? Or do you need to define beauty to know what it is?
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