Disinterested Pleasure Research Articles

Kant's account of emotive art

ABSTRACT For Kant, experiences of beauty, including experiences of beautiful art, are based on the feeling of disinterested pleasure. At first glance, garden-variety emotions don’t seem to play a constitutive role for beauty in art. In this paper I argue that they can. Drawing on Kant’s notion of aesthetic ideas, I will show that garden-variety emotions can function as a driving force for the free use of the imagination: they can enhance the beholder’s activity of freely associating and thus contribute crucially to the free play of the faculties. In doing so, I will develop a more emotion-oriented view of art than is commonly attributed to Kant. I will also argue that there is a lesson to be learned for contemporary aesthetics: emotions not only help us to understand some works of art and to direct our attention, but they also make us engage imaginatively with artworks and make our experiences of art more vivid.

Adam Smith on Beauty, Utility, and the Problem of Disinterested Pleasure

The large extent to which aesthetic terms pervade Adam Smith’s discussion of ethics would seem to suggest, in the least, that the spheres of aesthetics and ethics are interwoven in a way hardly possible to conceive in the wake of Kant. Despite this recognized closeness between the two areas, one account in the literature has claimed that Smith’s understanding of beauty anticipates Kant’s modern notion of disinterested pleasure. It is claimed that according to Smith, disinterested pleasure is aroused by the harmony of our moral sentiments as well as by the beauty of “productions of art.” By analyzing the relation of beauty to utility in Smith’s aesthetics and ethics, I will be arguing against the attribution to Smith of a specifically disinterested pleasure in our judgments of the beauty of the productions of art, as well as in the beauty of moral objects, such as virtuous character and conduct.

Towards the Aesthetics of Early Friedrich Schlegel

The subject of the study is the aesthetics of early Friedrich Schlegel. In his aesthetics, Schlegel continues the traditions of German classical philosophy, focusing special attention on the principles of the beautiful and sublime in art. Schlegel considers beauty, like morality, to be inherently inherent in a person who, along with the moral, has an "aesthetic imperative". As a "transcendental factor", beauty is based on disinterested pleasure and represents an ideal that ancient Greek art approached at one time, and the aspiration for which modern art lacks so much. The highest beauty is organic ("vegetative") like nature; two main "elements" make up the essence of beauty: "phenomenon" and "good". The beautiful in its broad sense also encompasses the sublime. Schlegel pays special attention to the ugly as an aesthetic category opposed to the beautiful and sublime, and gives an outline of the future theory of the ugly. He connects the ugly with the animal nature of man and shows that it is based on the disgusting, painful, monstrous, "beggarly chaos" of being, manifesting an absolute denial.  The central aesthetic principles – the beautiful and the sublime – are opposed by two types of the ugly: the own ugly and the "sublimely ugly". Schelling considers art to be one of the main components of culture as a humanitarian factor and sees three types of culture: natural, organically growing on the basis of mythology (reached a high level in Antiquity), artificial, created on the basis of reason according to aesthetic laws (New European) and aesthetic, which means a special emphasis in culture on aesthetic essence, on artistry. Schlegel is convinced that further positive development of culture and art is possible only under the guidance of the "correct" aesthetic theory, the beginnings of which he learns from his contemporaries.

Complacência estética e satisfação do querer na metafísica do belo de Schopenhauer

Seguindo os passos de Kant, Schopenhauer erige sua Metafísica do belo a partir da concepção de arte “desinteressada”. O conhecimento determinado por motivos proporciona ao espectador da arte o “excitante” e a mera satisfação empírica, mas não o belo ou o sublime. O gênio, representação mais potente e eficaz da subjetividade pura do conhecimento, é descrito no Livro III de O mundo como vontade e representação de modo aparentemente ambíguo: como o Willenlos (isento de vontade), como aquele “livre da tempestade das paixões” e do “ímpeto dos desejos”. Mas, ao mesmo tempo, como aquele “submetido a afetos veementes e paixões irracionais”. No entanto, trata-se, na vivência estética do gênio ou do contemplador da arte, de um prazer desinteressado, de uma complacência de outra ordem que a do homem do senso comum e de ciência. O artigo procura, então, analisar o conceito de complacência ou satisfação estética em Schopenhauer e seu enraizamento na filosofia de Kant.

The Time of the Beautiful in Kant’s Critique of Judgment

The present article considers the problem of the preservation of pleasure in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The problem stems from the fact that the Critique of Judgment contains not one but two distinct definitions of pleasure. In the definition of pleasure in §10 of the Analytic of the Beautiful Kant emphasizes that all pleasure is characterized by the tendency to preserve itself. On the other hand, in the definition of §VII of the unpublished Introduction Kant makes a sharp distinction between interested and disinterested pleasures, whereby only the former kind is defined by the tendency for self-preservation. Yet, how can the disinterested pleasure of the beautiful preserve itself, given that insofar as it is disinterested it can be based on neither desire for its own preservation nor continued existence of the object? In addressing this issue, most commentators erroneously reintroduce desire (whether explicitly or surreptitiously) in the pleasure of aesthetic reflection. By contrast, I propose to resolve this issue by turning to Kant’s account of lingering in §12 of the Analytic of the Beautiful and, more importantly, §§43-53 of the Deduction, where Kant affords his conception of aesthetic ideas.

An Iroquois in Paris and a Crusoe on a Desert Island: Kant’s Aesthetics and the Process of Civilization

Abstract In section 2 of Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) Immanuel Kant refers to the Iroquois sachem declaring that what pleased him in Paris were cook-shops, not palaces. For Kant the sachem seems to be a barbarian ensnared by his appetite and incapable of disinterested pleasure. This essay, however, argues first that Kant, extracting this episode from “The History of New France” (1744) written by French Jesuit missionary Charlevoix, tacitly advocates the idea of the noble savage, thereby giving the Iroquois sachem the function of criticizing a luxurious civilization. Second, the essay shows that in the “General Remark on the Exposition of Aesthetic Reflective Judgments” Kant evaluates positively a castaway Crusoe as a person who withdraws from civilized society, conscious of the fact that society is far from being a moral ideal. The Iroquois sachem and the castaway Crusoe are examples that anticipate section 83 in the second part of his Critique of the Power of Judgment, which focuses on the role of the faculty of taste in the process of civilization, thereby incorporating into his whole system the theory of taste as expounded in the first part.

Systematicity and Symbolisation in Kant's Deduction of Judgements of Taste

Kant's characterisation of judgements of taste, as expressing a disinterested pleasure and as being independent of concepts, defines the framework in which he attempts to justify or ‘deduce’ their claim to universal and necessary validity. In §38 of the Critique of Judgement, the ‘official’ deduction, the problem is to find a balance between the aim of grounding the judgements' validity on their relation to cognition and the danger of collapsing these aesthetic judgements into cognitive ones. Apparently, Kant's intention is to show that even though judgements of taste are not cognitive judgements, they are close enough to the conditions employed in all cognition to legitimize their claim to universal validity. Yet, in §59 of the Dialectic Kant seems to attempt another justification, this time by relating judgements of taste to morality. The problem now is to specify this relation so as to avoid reducing aesthetic to moral judgements. The justificatory projects in §38 and §59 are usually considered to be quite different. My aim in this paper is to clarify the relation between the two projects on the basis of an interpretation of what the pleasurable state of mind consists in, that is, the free harmonious play of the faculties in which everyone ought to share in the presence of beautiful objects. In the light of this interpretation I shall give a reconstruction of the argument of §38 which reveals its connection and contrast with §59.

Kant's Aesthetics: Overview and Recent Literature

AbstractIn 1764, Kant published his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime and in 1790 his influential third Critique, the Critique of the Power of Judgment. The latter contains two parts, the ‘Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment’ and the ‘Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment’. They reveal a new principle, namely the a priori principle of purposiveness (Zweckmäßigkeit) of our power of judgment, and thereby offer new a priori grounds for beauty and biology within the framework of Kant's transcendental philosophy. They also unite the previous two Critiques, the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason. Besides contributing to general and systematic aspects within his transcendental philosophy, Kant's aesthetics also offers new insights into old problems. It deals with feeling versus experience, subjectivity versus objectivity, disinterested pleasure, aesthetic universality, free and adherent beauty, the sensus communis, genius, aesthetic ideas, beauty as the symbol of morality, beauty of nature versus beauty of art, the sublime, and the supersensible. In this article I will limit myself to this critical aesthetics of Kant. But I will also discuss the ugly and the possibility of beauty in mathematics and see whether Kant's theory can successfully explain or deal with them. I will also compare his theory with philosophical ideas from a very different tradition, namely from Confucius, not only as a challenge to Kant's theory, but also because there is a growing interest from the Chinese side in combining ideas from Confucius and Kant, an interest that might well become influential in both East and West during the 21st century.

I—Richard Glauser

Shaftesbury’s theory of aesthetic experience is based on his conception of a natural disposition to apprehend beauty, a real ‘form’ of things. I examine the implications of the disposition’s naturalness. I argue that the disposition is not an extra faculty or a sixth sense, and attempt to situate Shaftesbury’s position on this issue between those of Locke and Hutcheson. I argue that the natural disposition is to be perfected in many different ways in order to be exercised in the perception of the different degrees of beauty within Shaftesbury’s hierarchy. This leads to the conclusion that the exercise of the disposition depends, from case to case, on many different cognitive and affective conditions, that are realised by the collaborative functionings of our ordinary faculties. Essential to Shaftesbury’s conception of aesthetic experience is a disinterested, contemplative love, that causes (or contains) what we may call a ‘disinterested pleasure’, but also an interested pleasure. I argue that, within any given aesthetic experience, the role of the disinterested pleasure is secondary to that of the disinterested love. However, an important function of the disinterested pleasure is that, in combination with the interested pleasure, it leads one to aspire to pass from the aesthetic experience of lower degrees of beauty to the experience of higher ones in the hierarchy.

Egon Schiele's Treescapes. Work and world: unframing the autonomous landscape

An Austrian Expressionist known primarily for his portraits and self‐portraits, Egon Schiele was also a prolific landscape painter. Focusing on the Kantian notions of autonomy and disinterested pleasure, this article considers a series of treescapes painted between 1911 and 1913 in which Schiele systematically undermines the processes of framing which make possible not only the modern landscape but the work of art as an object of aesthetic contemplation. Challenging the frame's capacity to delineate neatly between work and world, these images refuse the retreat into aestheticization demanded of the independent landscape and insist instead on the fluidity of the relationship between painting and beholder. Conforming therefore to a Nietzschean notion of passionate spectatorship, the treescapes should also be considered in the context of Vienna's notorious Sprachkrisis, which posited the failure of language to express the unsayable. The essay proposes that Schiele's disintegration of the frame's integrity by calling attention to its usually invisible mechanisms may be seen as an attempt to establish an image‐based system of communication when language has become suspect as a viable means of interchange.