Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Note on citations
- Introduction
- KANT'S AESTHETICS IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT
- Chapter 1 Feeling and freedom: Kant on aesthetics and morality
- Chapter 2 The dialectic of disinterestedness: I. Eighteenth-century aesthetics
- Chapter 3 The dialectic of disinterestedness: II. Kant and Schiller on interest in disinterestedness
- Chapter 4 The perfections of art: Mendelssohn, Moritz, and Kant
- Chapter 5 Hegel on Kant's aesthetics: necessity and contingency in beauty and art
- KANT'S AESTHETICS AND MORALITY: TOPICAL STUDIES
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 4 - The perfections of art: Mendelssohn, Moritz, and Kant
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Note on citations
- Introduction
- KANT'S AESTHETICS IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT
- Chapter 1 Feeling and freedom: Kant on aesthetics and morality
- Chapter 2 The dialectic of disinterestedness: I. Eighteenth-century aesthetics
- Chapter 3 The dialectic of disinterestedness: II. Kant and Schiller on interest in disinterestedness
- Chapter 4 The perfections of art: Mendelssohn, Moritz, and Kant
- Chapter 5 Hegel on Kant's aesthetics: necessity and contingency in beauty and art
- KANT'S AESTHETICS AND MORALITY: TOPICAL STUDIES
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
According to the account that I have been attacking in the preceding two essays, the heart of eighteenth-century aesthetics – indeed, the thesis that defined the independence of this new discipline itself – was the belief that the human experience and judgment of beauty, sublimity, and other of what we now call aesthetic properties must be essentially independent of any other fundamental sources of value connected with the theoretical and practical principles of human life. Such a thesis is supposed to have been introduced under the name of “disinterestedness” by Lord Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson at the start of the century, and to have been made the cornerstone of the analysis and deduction of judgments of taste in Kant's Critique of Judgment at its end. Further, because Kant's notion of disinterestedness has been thought to apply straightforwardly to our judgments about artistic as well as natural beauty, Kant has also been thought to be the father of the subsequent conception of the autonomy of art, the idea of “art for art's sake”: that is, the view that the production of art, and therefore the most appropriate and enlightened response to and criticism of works of art, must be motivated by purely aesthetic concerns intrinsic to art (or specific media of art) rather than by extrinsic moral and political concerns. I have argued in Chapter 2 that the supposition of a uniform adherence to a broad notion of disinterestedness radically falsifies the deeply controversial status of this concept in eighteenth-century aesthetics.
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- Kant and the Experience of FreedomEssays on Aesthetics and Morality, pp. 131 - 160Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993
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