Larissa Berger

The conception of disinterested pleasure is not only central to Kant's theory of beauty but also highly influential in contemporary philosophical discourse about beauty. However, it remains unclear, what exactly disinterested pleasure is and what role it plays in experiences of beauty. This volume sheds new light on the conception of disinterested pleasure from the perspectives of both Kant scholarship and contemporary aesthetics. In the first part, the focus is on Kant's theory of beauty as grounded on the conception of disinterested pleasure. In the second part, disinterested pleasure is investigated in the light of contemporary debates on beauty. The volume clarifies the meaning, role, and implications of one of the most influential conceptions in traditional as well as contemporary approaches to beauty.

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.

This article investigates the notion of sensus communis as being introduced in the Critique of Judgment. I argue that, within the framework of Kant's philo- sophy, the general notion of a sensus communis, that is, a faculty that leads to sensuous and universal results, is paradoxical. An analysis of the theoretical sensus communis, understood as an awareness of the faculties' accord in cases of cognition, reveals that it is unclear why this faculty should amount to a sense. The aesthetic sensus communis is the best candidate for a sensuous and communal faculty. However, I show that the communality of its results, that is, the community of the pleasure in the beautiful as being felt on the occasion of a given object, is insufficiently developed.

Ein Einstiegs- und Nachschlagwerk für das Philosophiestudium: Die Einträge liefern Definitionen und Kurzanalysen zu Kants Schriften, Grundbegriffen und Positionen. Sie können unabhängig voneinander gelesen werden, ergeben zusammengenommen aber auch eine vollständige Einführung. Das Kleine Kant-Lexikon beginnt mit einem Überblick zu Kants Leben und Werk sowie den zentralen Positionen seiner Philosophie. Auf diese Einführung folgen als erster Hauptteil detailliertere Analysen der wichtigsten Werke und Schriften Kants, als zweiter Hauptteil die Grundbegriffe seiner Philosophie zum Nachschlagen. Die Beiträge wurden von renommierten Expertinnen und Experten der Kantforschung verfasst, sind dabei aber knapp und leicht verständlich. Das Lexikon erleichtert so die Lektüre von Kants Werken, Literaturhinweise helfen bei Referaten und Hausarbeiten.

Kant’s thesis of disinterestedness (TD), as put forward in § 2 of the Critique of Judgment, functions as his entry into the realm of beauty. I aim to show that TD has a complex meaning which can be unfolded on several levels. To get a proper theoretical grasp on this thesis one needs to take into account the notions of the free play of the faculties, form and purposiveness without a purpose. But since these notions are only available much later after disinterestedness has been introduced, and moreover, since these notions are only derived from TD, I will argue that there must be a more intuitive grasp on TD. This grasp is phenomenological: the pleasure in the beautiful feels disinterested, that is, detached from any desiring.

In § 60 of theCritique of Judgment, entitled ‘On the doctrine of method of taste,’ Kant suggests that the study of so-calledhumaniora(ancient Roman and Greek literature) will help one to become a good artist. I will argue that a proper, namely emotional, engagement withhumaniorawill further the two components of humanity in ourselves: the feeling of sympathy and the ability to communicate feelings. I will discuss two options of how a strengthening of these two components might contribute to the creation of good artworks: it will help one to create artworks that arouse the universal communicable pleasure in the beautiful, or it will help one to create artworks that arouse sympathetic feelings. Siding with the latter option, I will argue that emotions can contribute to the enlivening of aesthetic ideas and, thus, to good art.

The subjective or phenomenal character of experience has been famously captured by Thomas Nagel’s question “What is it like to be an x?”. At first glance, Kant seems to care little about such ‘what is it like’ questions. His philosophy does not seem to be concerned with phenomenal character. However, I will argue that this picture falls short of Kant’s account of beauty. For Kant, an adequate account of pleasure in general and pleasure in the beautiful in particular must refer to phenomenal character. Pleasure cannot be understood but needs to be felt. Since beauty is constituted by a specific feeling of pleasure, beauty can only be grasped by creatures with the ability to feel. Despite new achievements in affective computing, AI is not able to feel. Hence, the realm of beauty is foreclosed to AI.

In his theory of beauty, Kant introduces the free and harmonious play of the faculties as a kind of judging. This judging should precede the pleasure in the beautiful. But being the determining ground of the judgement of taste, the pleasure should precede the judgement. Regarding this problem, two opposing models have been proposed: Paul Guyer's ‘two-acts model’ and Hannah Ginsborg's ‘one-act model’. I propose a third model that, I argue, resolves the difficulty and does not fall prey to the problems of the other two resolutions: the ‘subsumption model’, according to which the pleasure is followed by a subsumption under the concept ‘beautiful’.