BIBS Student’s writing

~ Kant’s Philosophy ~

“On the Universality of Artistic Taste in the Critique of Judgment”

-by BCC member, Eric Yuxuan Zhang

Is cast pearls before swine really a cow’s mistake? When discussing an elegant object, is the object’s perception of object natural? Is there a consensus on the aesthetic appreciation of a popular food?

Aesthetic judgment itself has contradictions, between subjective beauty from one’s own perspective and the beauty expected from others’ recognition. Kant pointed out in his book Critique of Judgment that the essence of aesthetic judgment is “disinterested pleasure”, such as appreciation judgment (§ 1). “As for the basis of aesthetic judgment, we believe that it can only be subjective and cannot be anything else. This means that beauty is different from goodness, as it is “not based on any interest relationship” (§ 2) (note: the pleasure of combining it with the appearance of an object’s existence is called interest relationship). Our appreciation of a flower is not based on its purpose, but on its pure form that brings us joy. Therefore, when a cow remains indifferent to the sound of the qin, it is not “wrong”, it is simply that the sound fails to evoke this disinterested pleasure in its subject. When people, generally speaking, appreciate an object solely based on their mental perception of the object, rather than its existence. When a person is mixed with judgment, even a slight sense of “interest” (P41) can only be called favoritism.

However, why are we disappointed by this? To further explain, although aesthetic judgment does not rely on concepts, it “requires a universal validity” (§ 6). When we say ‘this is beautiful’, we ‘are not asking for this pleasure for ourselves, but for everyone’. This universal demand is based on a common assumption, namely “commonality” (§ 20), that appreciation and judgment must have a subjective principle. We assume that humans generally possess similar emotional abilities, in the hope that beauty can be understood among people.