On Free Beauty and the Verisimilitude of Mimesis

Abstract

If the verisimilitude of mimesis derives from the creative appropriation of the object, the Kantian judgment of free aesthetic beauty is agnostic to both the form of the object and the congruency of the object to an expected form. The judgment, Kant clearly states, is from the arising of the form, not the shape of the result. Even where the faculty of cognition predominates in the reception of an aesthetic idea, the subjective originality in the representation is dispositive for the judgment. Since the conceptual form of the object does not determine the judgment, an object (such as a mechanical butterfly) might perfectly resemble a natural object and still be subject to the reflective judgment of free aesthetic beauty. Quite simply, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, not in the object. Post-dramatic theatre and other fine art and performance that seeks to reject forms of conventional beauty can then instead be read as sublime, and not only potentially still freely beautiful but perhaps as seemingly counter-purposive in its form from a desire to represent free beauty itself.