CONCLUSION

CONCLUSION

At the close of this work, it is important that we look at all we have done from a different light, helping us to put into proper perspectives the ensuing discusses, drawing the necessary lines of connection and thus forming our entire endeavour here into a corpus of presentation. In the first place we realised from the last chapter that the British aestheticians presented their views in divergent traditions. Whereas Addison, Hutcheson, Hume, Edmund Burke and Archibald Alison worked within the empiricist tradition of Locke, Shaftesbury was an anti-empiricist who wrote of the appreciation of beauty in platonic or neo-platonic terms. And this as always will prove to give different conceptions to beauty – usually subjective and objective conceptions of beauty. And this was our point of departure at the introduction of this work.

To recall what we said earlier at the introduction, imagine three people standing in front of a painting or admiring the sun setting over the sea. Suppose that one of them finds pleasure in looking at what he or she sees and even calls it beautiful, whereas the second feels nothing special and says so, and the third even says that the painting, or the sunset, is downright ugly (which in the case of the sunset might be more difficult to imagine). Given this situation, is it possible that all three of them have taste? Can they all be justified in what they are saying? Can they all make “true” judgments of taste, judgments that are correct or true in some sense? Or is it the case that at most one of them can be right and the others must be wrong? Can we even find out who is right and who is wrong, either by examining the object or by engaging all three judges of beauty in a discussion of some kind? If beauty is not an objective matter and also not merely subjective and a matter of personal opinion, then there may be room for some kind of “I don’t know what it is,” – the feeling that there is something objective about what one finds beautiful, or ugly, although one cannot spell out what it is.

Let us make two suppositions about taste, first: that taste is not merely a subjective, personal matter, and second: that taste is something that can be subjected to objective criteria, in the sense that there could be rules for what should count as beautiful and what should not. If we impose these two requirements and decline to reduce taste to either of the two extremes, the merely subjective and the purely objective, what then could taste possibly be? What could it be based upon? All of this is what the first chapter grappled with as we tried to understand the nature of the Beautiful.

The task Kant sets for himself is to explain taste in a way that takes into account the intuition that some aesthetic judgments are right and others wrong, although no rules for assigning aesthetic values can be given. The task is thus to avoid the two extremes. Taste and beauty should be understood as being neither subjective nor objective, neither a mere matter of personal opinion or feeling, nor something that can be subjected to rules and objective criteria. Kant’s aesthetics, as we have seen, is written in such a way that it can accomplish this task. We have studied Kant’s aesthetics in this light, and we have focused on his critical aesthetics, which is given in his book: Critique of Judgment, 1790.

It is striking that Kant’s aesthetics is not introduced under the heading “Aesthetics,” or “Critique of Beauty,” but appears under the title “Critique of Judgment.” Compared with previous aesthetic theories, Kant’s approach is marked by a certain shift of focus, a shift from the object to the judgment about the object. Instead of giving an account of the nature and quality of certain kinds of objects (the objects that we find beautiful), Kant analyzes a certain kind of judgment, namely the judgment of taste. This shift should not come as a surprise if we think of the central role the notion of judgment plays in Kant’s first Critique, the Critique of Pure Reason. Furthermore, this shift is a fortunate one, especially in his aesthetics, because it enabled him, as we saw, to be in a better position to avoid both the subjective and the objective extremes described above. And the second chapter brought this understanding to fore.

If we concentrate on the act of judgment, instead of trying to figure out what it is about the object that makes us call it beautiful (or ugly), we have a wider perspective: we then have to take into account both the object and the subject, and we can study the relation between the object and the judging subject as a relation that is reflected in the judgment of taste itself, or in some act that underlies that judgment. In this way we will be able to avoid the two extremes, namely the subjective one, which construes taste as being mere feeling and personal opinion, and the objective one, which considers aesthetics to be a matter of rules and proofs.

We can say that, according to Kant, beauty is neither to be found in the object nor in the eye of the beholder. Contrary to what one might suppose, it is not just a relationship between the beholder and the object either. Rather, beauty has its roots in an act of contemplation that takes into account that relationship. The judgment of taste, as Kant develops it, is a sophisticated and reflecting judgment about our relationship to the object. This gives Kant a certain distance from the judging subject and the judged object, which allows him to take both of them into account and to keep a balance between two extreme perspectives.

Furthermore, Kant argues that what on the part of the object is allowed to play a role in the judgment of taste is merely the “form” of the object, that is, its spatiotemporal structures. But these objective structures alone, without the judging subject, are never sufficient to determine whether we should call the object beautiful or not. And so, Kant sets out to discover new a priori justifying grounds for judgments of taste. These grounds are what we understood as disinterestedness and “subjective purposiveness”, and the contemplation of an object with respect to this principle is the “free harmonious play” of our cognitive powers. The four moments in the judgment of taste which is Kant’s Analytic of the Beautiful that we discussed in the third chapter embodies all of these.

It follows then that Kant wants to show us that judgments of taste are something special due to these (new) grounds, and he thinks that neither judgments of taste nor these grounds have been properly understood so far by any of his predecessors or contemporaries. Kant tries to make room for an aesthetics that can stand on its own feet, an aesthetics that has an equal status with moral and theoretical philosophy. This new inquiry, an aesthetic theory in the form of a critique of the power of aesthetic judgment, should reveal something new and essential about us as human beings. A better understanding of these a priori grounds of judgments of taste will enable us to explain the phenomenon of the “I don’t know what it is.”

Explaining this phenomenon of the “I don’t know what it is,” which as it were consists in first, the cultivation of the aesthetic faculties which involve the cultivation of sentience, imagination and understanding (mental power) as well as the cultivation of the aesthetic skill (the abilities of conveying and creating); second, the cultivation of aesthetic taste which is the cultivation of refined interest and feeling; and third, the cultivation of the aesthetic ideal which is the cultivation of the spirit, personality and life philosophy, forms the tail end – chapter four – of  our appraisal of Kant’s Analytic of the Beautiful, which we titled: the Value of the Beautiful to Life.