The Possibility of Culture: Pleasure and Moral Development in Kant’s Aesthetics

Abstract

Recent interpretations of Kant’s ethics have tended to foreground its more humane characteristics, stressing the prominence of emotion, habituation and virtue, distancing us from the harsh and mechanical Kant of legend.1 At the same time there has been increasing interest among aestheticians in the moral significance of the aesthetic and in the role it may play in moral development. The Possibility of Culture, a study of the role Kant ascribed to aesthetic experience in fostering the development of moral character, is thus timely and welcome. Murray draws upon texts not traditionally considered in studies of Kant’s aesthetics, especially the Anthropology and the Doctrine of Virtue, while placing relatively little emphasis on the well-worked questions surrounding the justification of judgements of taste. Although his book does not always live up to its high promise, it represents nonetheless an important contribution to scholarship on Kant’s aesthetics and its place in his wider philosophy.