Outer Sense, Inner Sense, and Feeling

Abstract

British philosophy was influential in Germany during the eighteenth century, but there was also an independent German philosophical tradition that emphasized the senses. There were, however, exceptions to the sensibilism of the critique of taste in Britain and in German aesthetics during the eighteenth century. Francis Hutcheson and Immanuel Kant are perhaps the most important of these exceptions. In Kant's critical aesthetics, aesthetic pleasure is a matter of feeling, rather than sense, so it is as far removed from internal sense as it is from external sense. Kant's criticism of Hutcheson's principle in the Elucidations should not obscure the similarities between his pre-critical aesthetics and the position Hutcheson defends in his first Inquiry. Kant begins to articulate his new conception of aesthetic pleasure in the first moment of the Analytic of the Beautiful, which is devoted to the quality of judgments of taste.