Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- References to Kant's Works
- Introduction
- 1 The Centrality of the Problem of Formalism
- 2 Formalism and the Circle of Representation
- 3 Formal Idealism and the Aesthetic Condition of Experience
- 4 The Deep Structure of Synthesis
- 5 The Completion of the Subjective Deduction in the Deductions of the Critique of Judgement
- 6 A Priori Knowledge as the Anticipation of a Material Given and the Need for a Spatial Schematism
- 7 Empirical Systematicity and its Relation to Aesthetic Judgement
- 8 Aesthetic Judgement's Exemplary Exhibition of Cognition
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Author/subject index
Afterword
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- References to Kant's Works
- Introduction
- 1 The Centrality of the Problem of Formalism
- 2 Formalism and the Circle of Representation
- 3 Formal Idealism and the Aesthetic Condition of Experience
- 4 The Deep Structure of Synthesis
- 5 The Completion of the Subjective Deduction in the Deductions of the Critique of Judgement
- 6 A Priori Knowledge as the Anticipation of a Material Given and the Need for a Spatial Schematism
- 7 Empirical Systematicity and its Relation to Aesthetic Judgement
- 8 Aesthetic Judgement's Exemplary Exhibition of Cognition
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Author/subject index
Summary
I would like to add a few further comments on the character of harmony in aesthetic and cognitive judgements. I will also tentatively suggest a way in which judgements of the sublime have a significance not only for judgements of beauty, but also for Kant's epistemological project.
It is easy to conclude that Kant's account of aesthetic judgement underestimates the extent to which the disharmonious plays a role in our experience. In twentieth century and contemporary art it would be fair to say that the disharmonious holds priority over the harmonious. This raises questions about the continuing relevance not only of Kant's aesthetics but also of his theory of knowledge. For if I am right in arguing that aesthetic judgement presents an exemplary exhibition of cognition in general, then it might appear that Kant's account of the cognitive relation between mind and world suggests much too unproblematic a ‘fit’ between the subject and the object. The importance of this is that were Kant's position to amount to the view that the mind and world simply stand in harmony with one another, he would be in severe danger of falling back into something approaching a ‘pre-established harmony’. I will leave to one side the question of whether this would amount to the mind imposing order on the world or vice versa. In either case Kant would be guilty of falling back into the sort of metaphysics he was intent on avoiding.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Kant's Aesthetic EpistemologyForm and World, pp. 311 - 315Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2007