Kant's Aesthetics Research Articles

The Sacred in Thinging: Heidegger’s “Design” in the Light of Kantian Aesthetics and the Telos of Nature

This article offers a fresh exegesis of Heidegger’s philosophy of art, focusing on his conceptualization of artwork as the reproduction of the thing’s general essence. Grounding the analysis in Heidegger’s revisit of Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic, this study explores Heidegger’s interpretation of a thing as a “composed homogeneity” that reveals inherent determinations of temporality and spatiality in the self-presence of beings as a phenomenon grasped within finite human cognition. This is inextricably linked to the ecstatic temporality of Dasein, elucidating a cyclical human–thing dynamic integral to Heidegger’s ontology. Going deeper, I draw parallels between Kant’s “supersensible” realm and Heidegger’s “earth”, revealing a teleological (ethical) design manifested in art that captures the dual essence of Nature—using Kantian terminology, its purposiveness and contrapurposiveness—intersecting with Heidegger’s notion of the counter-essence of ἀλήθεια in relation to freedom. Finally, I show how the manifold aesthetic metamorphoses of this existential scheme within the existentiell ordinariness through nonradiant φαίνεσθαι, such as equipmentality, emerge as the everyday incarnation of this design.

Collecting for Closure

Abstract In this paper, I consider a peculiar feature of the aesthetics of collecting comics: collecting to complete a narrative. Unlike other forms of narrative engagement, comics are often read out of narrative sequence, and so collectors hunt for missing issues to fill in an incomplete story, leading to a “gappy” experience of the narrative. This “gappy” experience, I argue, has its own aesthetic quality and value, and I connect my analysis of the experience to both classical Kantian aesthetics and contemporary neuropsychology.

Commentary and Reflection on Contemporary Graphic Architecture through Kant's Aesthetic Critique Theory

Since the beginning of the 21st century, a wave of innovative graphic architecture has emerged. However, these architectural works seem to have failed to inherit the profound aesthetics and sense of beauty associated with classical graphic architecture from history. Instead, they often exhibit superficial and exaggerated qualities, sparking widespread debate and criticism. This paper aims to integrate Immanuel Kant's aesthetic critique perspective, as presented in his work "Critique of Judgment," into the discourse on contemporary graphic architecture. By incorporating Kant's analyses and arguments regarding "agreeable," "beauty," and the "sublime" into discussions of contemporary architectural aesthetics, we seek to analyze and compare the similarities and differences between these new graphic architectural works and their classical predecessors. Ultimately, we arrive at the conclusion that these contemporary graphic architectural works, which often appear superficial and clichéd, are not deserving of admiration. At the same time, we propose recommendations for the design of future graphic architecture based on these insights.

Des images attaquées : la soupe sur les tableaux et le déclin de la contemplation

"In 2022, two cans of tomato soup were thrown over Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London by two climate activists. The aim of this paper is not to explain the motives behind the protest in terms of environmental activism, but to address the implications of this phenomenon for the status of artistic images in our time. The protest in question is one of the many symptoms of the fact that images associated with a pure state of gaze have become morally dubious due to a certain moralistic turn in contemporary discourses on art. Consequently, what seems to be lost in today’s movements of moralizing aesthetics, whether in art or in environmental activism, is not only the “aura” of an artwork, but also the idea that the contemplation of beauty in and for itself would provide a foundation for humans’ moral vocation. In a gaseous state of art (Y. Michaud) in which the transient effects of things are more important than their essence, the moralistic tendencies combined with the lack of moral foundations can no longer conceive of the ethical effects of images without explicit moral content, thus calling for a new form of heteronomy in art. Keywords: Kantian aesthetics, ethics, contemplation, natural beauty, autonomy of art, environmental activism. "

Aesthetic Attitude Based on Kant's Aesthetics of Caring Relationships in Nursing.

(1) Background: Although aesthetic attitude has been comprehended as one of the fundamental traits in nursing, there is a lack of discussion considering Kant's aesthetics of caring relationships. The purpose of this study was to illuminate aesthetic and moral characteristics of caring expressed in the caring relationship between a nurse and patient and suggest a new perspective of aesthetic attitude based on Kant's aesthetics of care ethics. (2) Methods: A theoretical reflection was contemplated regarding notions of aesthetic attitude in the caring relationship between a nurse and patient. (3) Results: human faculty of reflective aesthetic judgment to feel the beautiful and the sublime through imagination and free play in Kant's aesthetics could be applied to the aesthetic attitude in the field of nursing. (4) Conclusions: A nurse who has trained with this aesthetic attitude can act as a moral agent and contribute to the protection and promotion of human dignity in a caring relationship.

“The Most Profound Confirmation of the Existence of a Dissonance”: Émile Boutroux, Georg Simmel, and Lukács’s Theory of the Novel, with an Outlook to History and Class Consciousness

Georg Lukács’s argument of form and formation is traced from The Theory of the Novel to History and Class Consciousness, especially “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.” The concept of form in The Theory of the Novel is compared to the contemporary philosophy of science by Émile Boutroux’s and Georg Simmel’s lectures on Kant and, in particular, Kantian aesthetics. Form and formation are in the scientific and in the aesthetic context developed against the backdrop of the deficit or even lack of formal organization and, consequently, as a necessary yet contingent intervention. This understanding of form characterizes, for Lukács, the modern novel as well as the capitalist economic and social system. Against Hegel’s teleology of the spirit but consistent with Marx, the modernity of the novel and of capitalism, respectively, appears in Lukács thus as structurally defining in and of history.

Aporias of Habermas’s Political Philosophy

The aim of this essay is to critically examine the aporias in Jürgen Habermas’s concept of “universal consensus,” which has played a central role in the discussion of deliberative democracy. The first section analyzes the constitutive lacuna and exception, the fundamental dilemma in political ontology that impede the realization of practical universal consensus due to the enduring and irreconcilable political conflicts embedded in democratic conditions and contexts. The second section delves into the fallacy of universal consensus and its psychoanalytic significance, illuminating how Lacanian notion of fantasy constructs illusory plenitude, manipulates causality, and validates the substantive pursuit of elusive substance. Drawing upon Immanuel Kant’s notion of aesthetic consensus and common sense, which posit an imaginary common consensus shaped by affective reactions, the following section serves to examine an intersection between Kantian aesthetics and the conceptual and practical aporias of Habermas’s philosophical and political notion. Lastly, this essay concludes by suggesting affective hegemony as a new framework for comprehending the intricate dynamics of modern affective politics.

The dissimilar in the similar: mimesis and reading in Walter Benjamin

In this paper, we delimit the moments in which, in “Doctrine of the Similar” and in “On the Mimetic Faculty”, reading and Sprache (speech, language, language) are inseparably linked to the category of “non-sensuous similarities.” In this conception, the analogical-proportional representation of traditional mimesis is dislocated by a rhetorical conception of symbolic experiences given by different semiotic forms. Moreover, the idealist ground of the symbolic is relocated in the specific area of language, in which the perception of similarities is mediated by the instance of reading under the predominance of the dissimilar. Our fundamental purpose resides in exposing how this production of similarities, in contrast to those of the relational schematism of classical logicism and with the ground of idealistic determination of Kantian aesthetics, shows its paradoxical grounds in the mimetic reading.

Beyond Mundane

When the studio of South African jazz saxophonist Zim Nqawana was destroyed by copper thieves, he responded by improvising with the wreckage. In ‘Beyond Mundane: Zim Nqawana’s environmental improvisation’, Joanna Ruth Evans studies this performance through the film ‘The Exhibition of Vandalizm’ (2010), which documents the full day and night that Nqawana spent drawing sound from the detritus, and meditating on the psychic effects of South Africa’s colonial past. Nqawana’s creative response to an experience that is at once extreme and commonplace puts pressure on the concept of ‘the mundane’ and its racialized connection to the fantasy of aesthetic transcendence. Evans argues that the shifting connotation of ‘mundane’ (from a sense of worldly belonging to one of dull, repetitive ordinariness) is coterminous with the emergence of the liberal subject as a figure who is in but not of the world. This shift in the word’s association corresponded with a racialized denigration of material embeddedness, and followed upon Kantian aesthetics, which secures the liberal subject’s universality through the transcendence of aesthetic experience. Through a black studies critique of Kantian aesthetics, this discussion tracks connections between material vulnerability, mundanity and art (including the embrace of ‘the mundane’ by twentieth century performance artists and scholars). Ultimately, Nqawana’s experience pushes both ‘the mundane’ and aesthetics to a conceptual breaking point. It begs the question: without access to the regulative framework that secures environmental autonomy and stability, what becomes of art? Faced with this crisis, Nqawana turns to improvisation. Refusing cynicism and reactionary closure, he enters the reality of the destruction with a creativity that does not transcend the material conditions of its emergence, but rather engages the already given creativity of his material environment in all its instability.

플라톤 『향연』에서 미적 의사소통의 가능성에 관한 연구

This study tried to analyze Plato’s 『Symposium』 as ‘aesthetic communication’. In fact, it goes without saying that most of Plato’s writings consist of dialogue, and that the form of discussion itself is communication. In communication studies, there is an example where Plato was studied as a pioneer of communication. Michael Deuce, Mary Brown, 『Plato’s Shadow』, Communication Books, 2012. However, the research is a communication study from the level of rhetoric. However, there are few examples of philosophical analysis of the dialogue form and content of texts in Plato’s studies so far. Not all Plato’s texts have a correlation between dialogue form and content. However, at least as far as 『Symposium』, dialogue and content have a close correlation. The author tried to approach it with the concept of ‘aesthetic communication’. The idea of aesthetic communication, which started from Kant’s aesthetics, is based on ‘common sense’. All human beings feel and admire beauty through the operation of reason and imagination in front of a beautiful object. However, the wonder and wonder of this beauty wants to share it with the people around it through the medium of ‘common sense’, and they actually do share to form a community. Hannah Arendt, who inherited this common sense of Kant as her own philosophy, develops Kantian aesthetics into a political philosophy. The author tried to read Kant's mechanism of aesthetic communication in Plato’s 『Symposium』. Plato cannot be Kant. However, in Plato’s 『Symposium』, both the personal eros of ancient Greek society, aphrodisia (sexual pleasure), and the political life, the eros of truth, are embodied. According to the author’s analysis, the communication of 『Symposium』 has the same historical tradition as Kant’s aesthetic communication about beauty. Therefore, in this study, I tried to analyze what conditions Plato’s 『Symposium』 have as an aesthetic communication and to reveal the possible reasons.

Watching the City with Pleasure

The essay examines the intersection between aesthetic the-ory and representations of the city in the periodical essay The Spectator (1711-1714). Focusing on this intersection allows for an analysis of the cultural work aesthetic pleasure is supposed to do according to The Spectator, and also shows key differenc-es between “spectatorial” and later, Kantian aesthetics. In The Spectator aesthetic pleasure has to do with producing a model for how one should relate to the realm of politics—rather than disin-terest, the precondition of aesthetic pleasure turns out to be disengagement. Read through the lens of the city, aesthetic pleasure turns out to be a key component in The Spectator’s vision of how to live a good life as a privileged subject of a modern state.

Kant, the Canon, and Pleasure's Transcendental Sociability

For much of the late twentieth century pleasure was marginalized as an object of study in literary criticism. Recent attempts (Timothy Aubry, Robert S. Lehman et al.) at redressing this have often appealed to Kant's aesthetics with its open avowal of pleasure as the basis of judgement. Kant's universalism, however, has been largely held at arm's length out of a worry that it underwrote hegemonic canons. Yet Kant himself disputes the claims of external authorities in matters of taste and his account of the universal voice of aesthetic judgements underwrites no rules or models that would give objective form to a canon. To enjoy—in Kantian terms—a canonical work is to enjoy sociably, but without any objective marker of unity to that sociability. I follow Lyotard and de Duve in arguing for the relevance to democratic politics of the transcendental community of Kant's aesthetics. The task Kant has bequeathed literary critics is not the establishment or defence of a canon, but rather the interrogation of how the pleasure in texts is both a mode of sociability and a means of engaging with phenomena in their singularity.

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: Aesthetics Inside and Outside of Transcendental Aesthetics

The subject of the research is the features of Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason", which contribute to the methodological acquisition of aesthetic identity, they are generated through the transition to harmony of higher cognitive abilities, set the prospect of revealing how art is possible, and declare themselves in a specific experience of color and ideality of perfection and other concepts significant for aesthetics. Transcendental aesthetics, within which the first semantic images of aesthetics as a science and cultural form are formed, as a singular a priori of the history of art, as well as the structure of the coloristic discourse of criticism, reduces any objectivity of color and reveals the essential structures of its subjective experience. Kant, with one purely transcendental rhythm of reflection in the first Critique, revealed the conditions for the possibility of the aesthetic, raised the question of what makes all art possible; the transcendental undertaking itself manifested both timelessness and temporality behind their work in art.In the Critique of Pure Reason, the concept of perfection is analyzed outside of transcendental aesthetics, where a more or less definite description of perfection is given, which is directly related to the aesthetic facet of the transcendental meaning of the world. Its exceptional importance for understanding Kantian aesthetics is due to the fact that the metaphysics of perfection in late Kant allows us to rethink the critical approach to identifying the structures of aesthetic judgment in the third "Critique".

A Promise of Happiness? Nietzsche on Beauty

Abstract Nietzsche presents a challenging conception of aesthetics. One of the most well-known discussions on this issue is presented by Heidegger in Der Wille zur Macht als Kunst (1936/37). In discussing Nietzsche’s aesthetic theory, Heidegger argues that Nietzsche’s reception of Kantian aesthetics is only ever indirect and necessarily mediated by Schopenhauer. His conclusion hinges on what he considers to be a widespread misinterpretation of Kant’s theory of the beautiful, a misinterpretation that begins with Schopenhauer but characterizes all of Kant’s followers, especially Nietzsche. In this paper, I will consider Nietzsche’s position toward aesthetics from a different perspective, namely in the space between Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s position. The argumentation departs from Nietzsche’s early critique of teleology; his first approaches to aesthetics in Die Geburt der Tragödie (1872); and his position on the concept of causality and morality. As a careful interpretation of GM III 6 will make clear, Heidegger’s claim that Nietzsche misinterprets Kant is made questionable by the fact that Nietzsche here distinguishes Kant (especially his emphasis on universalism and impersonality as central features of aesthetic judgments) from Schopenhauer’s approach and proposes an artist-based aesthetics in which it is rather Stendhal’s idea of beauty as “une promesse de bonheur” which expresses the human need for illusions in Nietzsche’s conception of aesthetics.

“Common Informality”

AbstractThis article explores how two key problems of philosophical aesthetics, temporality and form, are rethought in Fred Moten's consent not to be a single being trilogy. The article proposes that Moten's work is notable for its refusal to affirm a link between aesthetic experience, or aesthesis, and the future-bound possibility of political community. This refusal distinguishes Moten's work both from the political philosophy underlying Immanuel Kant's aesthetics and from the dialectical critique of Kant found in contemporary theoretical work prioritizing formal experimentation. The article contends instead that Moten's work is shaped by a sustained attention to “informal” patterns of aesthetic experience, for which the graphic materiality of writing functions as a privileged index. The article then explores the political and temporal implications of writing's materiality in two essays from Moten's Black and Blur. To pursue this task, it draws on Walter Benjamin's understanding of philological interpolation and argues that Moten's work, particularly in its insistence on “renomination” rather than conceptual creation, can likewise be understood as philological. The article concludes, however, by showing how the idea of linguistic freedom advanced in recent philological work is complicated by Moten's recognition of a link between predication and blackness.

Kantian Aesthetics: Free Beauty in Fine Arts

A rose is beautiful. The Mona Lisa is beautiful. What is the difference between these two objects in being beautiful? In Critique of Judgment, Kant famously answers this question with a demarcation between two kinds of beauty: free beauty (pulchritudo vaga) and adherent beauty (pulchritudo adhaerens). Natural objects, e.g., a rose, fall into the realm of free beauty while works of fine arts, e.g., the Mona Lisa, adherent beauty. Objects of free beauty do not presuppose conceptual understanding while that of adherent beauty do. We do not regard some objective rules, if any, for the beauty of a rose while some rules seem necessary for properly judging fine arts. However, Kant’s free–adherent beauty distinction is much more nuanced than what he makes explicit in Critique. The theoretical distinction is not as clear-cut as it appears, and this paper shows that a work of fine art as an object of adherent beauty is no more than a special form of free beauty. While taste - the faculty necessary for aesthetic judgments - may be restricted by, be a parergon to, or interact with our conceptual understanding, it necessarily remains free and uncontaminated. Genius - the naturally endowed ability to create fine arts - makes the corporeal existence of a work of fine art possible but is necessarily guided by taste. Furthermore, taste can be conditioned by our understanding but it necessarily guides and makes our understanding possible, i.e., any concepts presupposed for fine arts are aesthetic in origin. This paper concludes that the possibility of free beauty entailed by taste, therefore, is necessarily compatible with the adherent beauty of fine arts.

“Sinister Exile”: Dionysus and the Aesthetics of Race in Walter Pater and Vernon Lee

The aestheticism of Walter Pater and Vernon Lee participated in a late-nineteenth-century discourse devoted to exploring the aesthetic's role in producing and sustaining, as well as undermining, notions of racial difference. Pater's "A Study of Dionysus: The Spiritual Form of Fire and Dew" (1876) and Lee's "Dionea" (1890) partake of Immanuel Kant's understanding of race as a matter of aesthetic perception, yet call into question his attempt to maintain distinct and essential racial categories. By affirming the universality of anti-rationalistic Dionysian experiences, Pater and Lee interrogate the racial logic of Kantian aesthetics on primarily aestheticist grounds, as part of their commitment to dismantling rationalistic intellectual frameworks that place unnecessary limits upon our perceptions of the world and of each other.

A Differential Theory of Cinematic Affect

This essay offers a critical rejoinder to affect theories prevalent in the humanities since the 1990s. In film and media studies, affect theories display an opposition to ‘screen’ and apparatus theory of the 1970s and 1980s alleged to have marginalised the spectator's body and affects and privileged cognition over affection. Yet film and media studies’ turn to affect came with its own set of problems: in emphasising the affective over the cognitive aspects of cinematic experience, theories of the affective turn invert and reproduce the dichotomies (e.g. body/mind, affect/thought) they seek to contest. Critically reconsidering the turn to affect and its place within film and media studies, this article challenges the relation of affect theories to Gilles Deleuze's concept of affect, highlighting these theories’ failure to account for Deleuze's indebtedness to Immanuel Kant's aesthetics and his theory of the faculties. Suggesting a conception of cinematic affect beyond dichotomies of body and mind, affect and thought, this essay instead shows how cinematic experience instigates transformations in spectators that are simultaneously affective and cognitive.

Theory and convictions of practice: Agamben on Kant and contemporary art

ABSTRACT The article explores the implications of Giorgio Agamben’s The Man Without Content for beliefs necessary to visual art practice. It examines in particular Agamben’s critique of Kantian aesthetics and the use he makes of ideas of historicity. While Agamben has controversial but sometimes insightful and persuasive things to say about the modern art world, specifically aspects of making, spectating and exhibiting, his reading of Kant is distorted by his adoption of a technique of neutralising dialectical oppositions, and then his determination to find in key texts the grounds for this operation. At times Agamben’s critical judgements, uncorrected by the perspective of practice, are indiscriminate and insensitive, and it is difficult to see how his politics escapes quietism or apathy on the one hand or an unwitting convergence with Kantian notions of moral providence on the other.

The Parallels between Kantian Aesthetics and the Presence of Tibetan Art in the Yuan-Ming Era (1279\u20131644)

This paper will look at Kant’s views of the aesthetic experience, in relationship to Buddhist philosophical and political discussions of art and social organization. The primary focus in Kantian literature explores the relationship between free and dependent beauty, as well as Kant’s paradox of taste. The central argument of the Kantian portion is going to navigate the paradox of taste via Graham Priest’s epistemic and conceptual distinction pertaining to the limits of thought. Secondly, I shall contextualize the debate with similar argumentation found in medieval Tibetan literature, by thinkers such as Tsongkhapa and Drakpa Gyaltsen. Lastly, I shall look at the political and artistic state of affairs in Yuan and Ming Dynasties and assert the applicability of both Kantian and Tibetan discussions of effibility in the context of Tibetan poetry and Thangkas.