Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘A philosophy that is not a philosophy’
- 2 Contrary states
- 3 ‘… you hear the grating roar’
- 4 The energy for war
- 5 The division of the soul
- 6 ‘Wandering between two worlds …’
- 7 Kant's aesthetic ideas
- 8 … And his rational ones
- 9 Arnold's recast religion
- 10 Theism, non-theism and Haldane's Fork
- 11 Erotic reformations
- 12 A language of grasping and non-grasping
- 13 ‘… sinne/ like clouds ecclips'd my mind’
- 14 Concentration, continence and arousal
- 15 Uneasily, he retraces his steps …
- References
- Index
7 - Kant's aesthetic ideas
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘A philosophy that is not a philosophy’
- 2 Contrary states
- 3 ‘… you hear the grating roar’
- 4 The energy for war
- 5 The division of the soul
- 6 ‘Wandering between two worlds …’
- 7 Kant's aesthetic ideas
- 8 … And his rational ones
- 9 Arnold's recast religion
- 10 Theism, non-theism and Haldane's Fork
- 11 Erotic reformations
- 12 A language of grasping and non-grasping
- 13 ‘… sinne/ like clouds ecclips'd my mind’
- 14 Concentration, continence and arousal
- 15 Uneasily, he retraces his steps …
- References
- Index
Summary
In his Critique of Judgment Kant makes powerful use of the notion of an ‘aesthetic idea’. This notion seems to me to be instructive, not just for the discipline of aesthetics, but for the way to proceed in philosophy more generally, since it gives us a hint about how to delineate meaning, about the limits and form of any attempt to do so.
Kant's notion seeks to capture a dynamic state of mind, such as is to be found in aesthetic experience, to capture not only its form, but also, and, in a way, much more interestingly, its dynamism. Philosophers usually do not see that meaning is really a dynamic structure of mind, and that it is revealed in a peculiarly intense way within aesthetic experience. In my view Kant makes a unique contribution to our understanding of both through his hesitant, exploratory account of ‘genius’, the faculty of producing ‘aesthetic ideas’, and its relation to aesthetic experience. R. K. Elliott (1973) describes it as ‘a state of intense psychic vitality’ and talks about how Kant effectively makes poetic evocativeness a criterion of success in art. (Indeed, for Kant, the expression of aesthetic ideas is, surprisingly, a criterion of natural beauty as well.) Again, the notion of poetic evocativeness can instruct us in how to deal philosophically with meaning. Meaning is not to be defined but evoked.
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- Information
- Transformations of MindPhilosophy as Spiritual Practice, pp. 101 - 115Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000