Notes By Ayush Nanda

19 C Kant and Hegel

Short Points for Kant :

1. He links between feelings and reasoning
2. Adopted - Principles of judgment.
3. Beauty lies in the eyes, the form and the design…. not color
4. Nature provokes our inner feelings
5. Beauty is judged through mind

● KANT : Baumgarten sought to extend the new rationalist science into the specifi cally humanist
areas of poetic value and sentiment that Enlightenment figures had already adopted. His use of
the term did not win immediate acceptance, however. Even after Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)
adopted it in his Critique of Judgment (1790) and extended it to cover taste and beauty, it
continued to be contested. In any event, to restrict aesthetics to Baumgarten’s use of the term
would be unrealistic. Clearly, 17th- and 18th-century aesthetics included more than the limited
theory of feeling and sense that concerned early modern rationalism.

● The real revolution in aesthetics takes place when Immanuel Kant transforms taste into a
specifically aesthetic form of intuition. Kant’s whole philosophical project is too complex to be
easily summarized. He takes over from Baumgarten the term ‘aesthetic’ and gives it its modern
formulation. Aesthetic intuition remains a subjective intuition. It is more than the 18th-century
British sentimental feeling. It is the preconceptual order of consciousness upon which the intrinsic
categories of thought operate. After his analysis of pure and practical reason, Kant locates
aesthetic intuition at the pre-conceptual level of experience. It is a transcendental foundation that
Kant himself claimed to have discovered only after the completion of the earlier projects.

● Aesthetic intuition can lead to both theoretical formulations and to moral action, but in and of itself
it is pure subjectivity that nevertheless is content-filled, and it finds its expression in the judgments
of taste and the experience of beauty. Kant accepts that taste is purely subjective, but its
judgments are universal. The paradox that David Hume had formulated there is no disputing
about taste (because it is subjective) but some judgments of taste are so obviously right that it is
absurd to not hold them—becomes a true antinomy for Kant. Taste must be both universal and
subjective at once. That is only possible because judgments of taste are free of interest and free
of constraints upon the imagination. They have the formal properties of purposiveness but are
free of the constraints of actual ends. They find expression not in individual preferences but in a
sensus communis arising from their universality. Beauty is a disinterested pleasure that has no
need for the existence of its objects. It is distinct from the merely desirable and agreeable.

● It would be hard to overestimate the importance of Kant’s Critique of Judgment for aesthetics.
After Kant, aesthetic experience became for the next two hundred years the focus of aesthetics. It
is reformulated again and again from different points of view and on different ontological and
epistemological grounds, but all come back to the basic Kantian claim that aesthetic experience is
unique, necessary to perception, and the object of its own ends. Aesthetic experience and the
pleasures that it brings are ends in themselves.
 ● The lines from Kantian aesthetics to the present are complex and confused. Almost immediately,
Kant’s analysis was challenged by G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) and Friedrich Schiller (1759–
1805) because it was essentially ahistorical. The sense of history as a science and as a
progressive movement of human culture toward a goal had been developing throughout the 18th
century alongside other new human sciences, such as economics. Kant’s transcendental idealism
does not deny that history, but its analysis is directed at universal conditions of thought. To those
for whom history was the supreme reality, Kant’s idealism was too unreal.

Short Points for Hegel :

1. Say - Arit is not a mirror of nature but something above it.
2. Syntheses - combination of elements
3. Believed in absolute content - process

● HEGEL : G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817)

Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (delivered between 1818 and 1829; collected and published
posthumously in 1835) After Kant, the historicism of his followers and opponents took various
forms. As history became a factual discipline, it became a problem for aesthetics. Aesthetic
feeling is an historical phenomenon. Different cultures react differently and develop different
aesthetic sensibilities. If history has a purpose, then how does aesthetic sentiment fit into that
movement? Hegelians and Romantics looked for the direction of history in their own cultural
aspirations. Anti-Hegelians looked for the same progress in existential or material conditions of
production.

● Hegel made aesthetics a distinct stage in history, but it must ultimately be transcended. Karl Marx
(1818–1883) inverted the Hegelian movement on economic and material grounds. The German
Romantics relocated the historical movement of spirit in the artist and in the culture that artists
create. All of the terms of modern aesthetics belong to this post-Kantian movement. Art must be
original, sincere, and culturally formative. Artists are creators, geniuses, a cultural avant-garde.

● There is no need to trace all of the details of this movement. Its three main lines run through
Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). For Hegel and
his followers, aesthetics is a form of metaphysical movement that individuals must either advance
or oppose. For Schopenhauer, the arts are an expression of ideas freed from the will by genius
and imagination. Aesthetic pleasure must be disinterested if it is not to be subject to the power of
the will. And for Nietzsche the pre-modern dialectic reasserts itself in the historical tension
between the classical art of Apollo and the ecstatic vision of Dionysius. All three accept that
aesthetic experience is phenomenologically much as Kant describes it, however. It is
disinterested in the strong sense that it lacks any existential interest or application, and it requires
a different mode of perception if it is to be experienced independently of its subsequent uses.

● The archaic dialectic contrasts with the early modern dialectic, which is more historical and
progressive. In the work of G. W. F. Hegel and his successors, especially the Romantic theorists
and poets, the dialectic operates between what is and what will be, a movement of spirit that is
seeking ever more idealized versions of its own essence. This movement manifests itself through
art and religion and is realized in history, which is sometimes identified with the history of a
particular folk. The aesthetics of this dialectic views art as one of the primary means by which one
is enabled to experience the workings of spirit itself. Artists are the unacknowledged creators
through whom the dialectic is working itself out.
1.Plato (427–347 BCE) Platonic dialogues Republic, Ion, Symposium, and Phaedrus

How is Art Defined?

● He believed that images were deviations from the truth, and that all forms of art were capable of
causing destructive passions.
● "For Plato, art derives from an ideal, but its distance from that ideal makes it useless at best and
possibly dangerous." (that reading we did)
● believed art was merely imitating appearances and as arousing excessive and unnatural
emotions and appetites
● " A good imitation can undermine the stability of even the best humans by making us feel sad,
depressed, and sorrowful about life itself.
● because he looked at it through the eyes of education. He did not understand what was gained by
looking at art.
● He believed that art was twice times removed from universal form (there was the universal form
then the physical form which exists in reality and it's the art form - so it deviates from the truth.)
How is beauty defined?
● He believed that art could obtain the state of eternal beauty, although it was merely an imitation.
● He determined art as an eternal form that was gathered through our senses
● Art was good to him if and only if it embodied a form of beauty.
“For Plato, these Forms are perfect Ideals, but they are also more real than physical objects. He
called them "the Really Real"

2.Aristotle (?–323 BCE) Poetics, Rhetoric

● Object’s form is the cause of its beauty. The main difference between Aristotle’s notion of form
and Plato’s notion of the Forms is that Aristotle thought the form of the object was constituted by
the essential properties inhering in the object.
● Another concept relevant for medieval aesthetics is found in the Metaphysics (see III.3), where
Aristotle presented the foundation for the medieval notion of transcendentals. He specifically
highlighted the interchangeable relationship between being and one. Though Aristotle never
called them transcendentals, he prompted this conception by claiming that the notions “being”
and “one” are the same. “[Being and unity] are implied in one another as principle and cause are.”
● First, consider Aristotle’s notion of imitation. He writes, “A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an
action that is serious and also, having magnitude, complete in itself; in language with pleasurable
accessories, each kind brought in separately in the parts of the work; in a dramatic, not in
narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such
emotions” (Aristotle, Poetics, 1449 b 25).
● Second, consider the notion of catharsis, developed in connection to Aristotle’s definition of
tragedy. Aristotle uses this word twice in the Poetics (1449 b 7; 1455 b 15); it seems that he
believed a tragedy could cleanse negative emotions such as fear and pity.
● Finally, Aristotle emphasized some characteristics that art requires in order to be good. “Beauty
is a matter of size and order” (Aristotle, Poetics, 1450b37). Size is important because something
too small or too large is beyond one’s capacity to perceive the whole, which specifically related to
the length of plays. Order concerns the relationship of the parts with each other and with the
whole, which was also very important to medieval philosophers and artisans.
3.Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) The Aesthetic as the Science of the Expression and the Linguistic in
General (1902)

● With such an account of ‘the aesthetic’ in view, one might think that Croce intends to cover
roughly the same ground as Kant's Transcendental Aesthetic, and like Kant will think of art as a
comparatively narrow if profound region of experience. But Croce takes the opposite line (and
finds Kant theory of beauty and art to have failed at precisely this point): art is everywhere, and
the difference between ordinary intuition and that of ‘works of art’ is only a quantitative difference
(Aes.13). This principle has for Croce a profound significance:

● We must hold firmly to our identification, because among the principal reasons which have
prevented Aesthetic, the science of art, from revealing the true nature of art, its real roots in
human nature, has been its separation from the general spiritual life, the having made of it a sort
of special function or aristocratic club…. There is not … a special chemical theory of stones as
distinct from mountains. In the same way, there is not a science of lesser intuition as distinct from
a science of greater intuition, nor one of ordinary intuition as distinct from artistic intuition. (Aes.
14)

● But the point is not that every object is to some degree a work of art. The point is that every
intuition has to some degree the qualities of the intuition of a work of art; it's just that the intuition
of a work of art has them in much greater degree.