Rachel Zuckert

The Purposiveness of Form: A Reading of Kant's Aesthetic Formalism

in the “critique of aesthetic judgment,” Kant claims that when we find an object beautiful, we are appreciating its “purposive form.” Many of Kant’s readers have found this claim one of his least interesting and most easily criticized claims about aesthetic experience. Detractors hold up his aesthetics as a paradigmatic case of narrow formalism;1 and even many admirers of Kant’s aesthetics take Kant’s claims about form to be problematic, but argue that they are inessential to his aesthetics (which includes more interesting, defensible claims).2 Though these critics come to differing evaluations of Kant’s aesthetics as a whole, they agree on two points. First, interpretively: that when Kant claims that it is the “form” of an object we find beautiful, he means that in aesthetic appreciation, we find certain spatial and/or temporal properties (such as proportion, line, shape) aesthetically pleasing—and that such properties are exclusively responsible for an object’s beauty. Second, evaluatively: that Kant is wrong, at least about this. In this paper, I shall propose that we need not endorse either claim. I shall argue that one may interpret Kant’s formalism as a claim that in aesthetic experience3

Kant's Rationalist Aesthetics

Abstract It is quite standard, even banal, to describe Kants project in the Critique of Pure Reason [KrV] as a critical reconciliation of rationalism and empiricism, most directly expressed in Kants claim that intuitions and concepts are two distinct, yet equally necessary, and necessarily interdependent sources of cognition. Similarly, though Kant rejects both the rationalist foundation of morality in the concept of perfection and that of the empiricists in feeling or in the moral sense, one might broadly characterize Kants moral philosophy as an attempt to reconcile the apriori universality and necessity of rationalist ethics with empiricist (Humean) or sentimentalist (Rousseauean) strictures concerning the distinction between the ‘ought’ and the ‘is’, between third personal knowledge of the good and first personal motivation.

Boring Beauty and Universal Morality: Kant on the Ideal of Beauty1

This paper argues that Kants account of the “ideal of beauty” in paragraph 17 of the Critique of Judgment is not only a plausible account of one kind of beauty (“boring” beauty), but also that it can address some of our moral qualms concerning the aesthetic evaluation of persons, including our psychological propensity to take a persons beauty to represent her moral character.

Kant's account of practical fanaticism

Recent interpreters of Kants moral philosophy and contemporary advocates of neo-Kantian moral theories generally minimize the importance of Kants metaphysical beliefs. This volume re-evaluates these minimizing approaches, exploring Kantian positions on such topics as sin, the relation between God and ethics, the metaphysics of human freedom and the possibility of knowledge of God. This volume is the first to examine all of these topics within the context of Kants ethical writings. New approach to Kants moral philosophy International renowned authorship

Hegel on Philosophy in History

ing from the concrete qualities of objects and attending solely to their causal powers and then treating those causal powers in generalized form to the point where concepts designating the properties of objects are taken as condensed causal laws are the essential gestures for attending to objects in ways sufficient for routine activities of hunting, growing, harvesting, heating, clothing, transporting, building, housing, mending, and so on. The original formation of reason in its subsumingdeductive orientation is thus a product of the drive for self-preservation, or, to give the thesis its full Adornoian statement, ideal-type determinative judgment and scientific reason are forms of instrumental reason because they are that formation of human cognition necessary for individual and collective self-preservation, making them the expression of the drive for self-preservation in rational form. Hence for Adorno, the authority of ideal-type scientific reason is in fact the authority of nature once removed (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, pp. 1–34; Bernstein 2001, ch. 2). Hence, in so far as this form of reason becomes dominant, human rational spiritual relations remain under the authority of nature, under the authority of a reason that is designed narrowly and reductively to satisfy the ends of individual and species survival in utter indifference to other features of human lives – everything we might say that makes them distinctly human and not merely animal lives. Adorno’s genealogical gesture is not intended as a critique of instrumental reason as such – in its appropriate place it comprises a cornerstone of spiritual life; only its hegemony requires challenge, the claim of ideal-type determinative judgment and scientific reason to exhaust the possibility of cognitive encounter. In fact, this way of setting up the problem is not unique to Adorno; he was anticipated, powerfully, by both Schiller and, in a different register, Hegel. Although he does not conceive the drive of theoretical reason as a historical formation of the drive to self-preservation, Schiller does analyze Kantian reason as producing a fragmentation of the human subject in which rational freedom (form) and determined nature (sense) are taken as incommensurable with each other. Schiller equally anticipates Adorno’s dialectic of enlightenment in arguing that in repudiating and subordinating our encounters with qualitatively effulgent nature, we make a principle of nature into the principle of reason, roughly, construing Kantian moral reason – as the site of human rational independence from nature – as the force of nature (the drive to self-preservation) in rational form: “We disown Nature in her rightful sphere only to submit to her tyranny in themoral, andwhile resisting the impact shemakes upon our senses are content to take over her principles” (Schiller 1967: Fifth Letter, p. 27). Robert Hullot-Kentor comments on this passage: “Reason, the “Our Amphibian Problem” 199