Taste and Purpose: Immanuel Kant

Abstract

Abstract The theory of taste Kant presents in his Critique of Judgment (1790)-known as the third Critique—is notoriously difficult to understand. The exposition of his theory is usually encountered as the so-called four moments from the beginning of the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” in the Critique of Judgment, and in this form it is, I believe, virtually impossible to understand. It is not just that his writing is so bad; he frequently just does not provide the information required for explaining why he draws the conclusions he does. For example, his conclusion that “beauty is an object’s form of purposiveness,” in the third-moment context in which he draws it, is baffling. This conclusion, by introducing the notion of purpose as an integral aspect of beauty, deviates sharply from the kind of conclusions that the other theorists of taste drew about the nature of beauty. (Hume does say that a critic ought to take account of an artist’s purposes, but he does not claim that such purpose is an integral aspect of beauty.) The notion of purpose (as perfection) plays a large role in the theories of Kant’s rationalist German predecessors such as Wolff and Baumgarten, but these theorists were not theorists of taste. The German rationalists were, no doubt, the historical source of Kant’s conception.