Entertaining And Virtue

There is a long-run misunderstanding which prevails in the field of domestic studies of Kant's aesthetics. Scholars insist that Kant either be a pure formalist or be a moral reductionist. Indeed, we can see how Kant endeavored to differentiate the beautiful from cognition and morality in Critique of Judgment, at least in "The Analysis of the Beautiful" and "The Deduction of The Pure Judgment of Taste". This job of "abstraction" is very difficult, which impresses readers most. It is this respect that makes the reader misunderstanding Kant as a formalist. However, in "The Dialectics of Aesthetic Judgment", Kant suddenly puts forward that "the beautiful is the symbol of morally-good" and it seems that it is only due to this, can aesthetic judgment has the "right" to demand the consent of others, or others "have the duty" to consent to the judgment of taste. Thus, Kant seems to become a moral reductionist now. Chinese scholars tend to believe that Kant regards the beautiful as form in one place yet as morally-good in another place, which is seemingly self-contradictory.For this reason, the dissertation will ask questions as these: What exactly did Kant say about the relationship between taste and morality? Is Kant a moral reductionist? Did he really suggest that morality construct the eternal basis of the beautiful? If he is not a moral reductionist, are we compelled to contend that he is definitely a formalist? If these two aspects are indeed uncompromised, then what is the essential quality of Kant's discourse on the relationship between the beautiful and morality?Based on the extensive literatures on Kant's aesthetics, this dissertation will answer these questions. Generally speaking, there are quite opposite opinions concerning the central propositions of Kant's aesthetics among the Western Kant scholars, which construct two different camps. They have been quarreling for a long time. The solution of this problem, as far as I can see, lies in the possibility of not only close-reading of Kant's text, but surveys of the context of the eighteenth century's aesthetic theories as well.The essay maintains that the ground of pure judgment of taste is totally independent of its relationship with morality. Indeed, the problem of the ground of judgment of taste has already been solved in the "Deduction of Pure Judgment of Taste", which reveals to some extent the double aims of the third Critique-abstraction and relation. Abstraction means that Kant wants to differentiate taste from sensation, cognition and morality, and presents his most ambitious argument of the autonomy of taste, while relation means that Kant aims to put the autonomous taste, now been strongly argued, once again back into the context of enlightenment, especially that of Kant's moral concerns.There are two main subjects in the 18th century aesthetic theories. One is the discourse of the essence of the beautiful and the other is the justification of the judgment of taste. While the empiricists reduce the beautiful into the daily delight, they nevertheless deduce the claims of universal validity of judgment of taste from "common humanity". On the contrary, the rationalists define the beautiful as indistinct cognition and reduce the inter-subjective validity of judgment of taste into the inter-subjectivity of cognition. However, neither the empiricism nor the rationalism of the 18th century agrees with the British aesthetician Hutcheson's idea that the value of beauty can be abstracted from the more fundamental human values.Kant was neither satisfied the justifications of the judgment of taste with the empiricists and the rationalists, nor was he consented to his predecessors about their discourse on the uniqueness of aesthetic activity and its relationship with cognition and practice. He solved the problem of the universal communicability of the aesthetic pleasure in the idea of reflective judgment on the one hand, and replaced the simple moral-reductionism and the artistic autonomy with a complicated picture of more subtle, more dialectic relationship between the autonomy of taste and the autonomy of morality on the other hand. Through the logic of the autonomy of taste, Kant had in theory fulfilled the higher destination of morals and politics which the enlightenment demanded.In a word, the problem of "self-contradictory" which is held by the domestic and foreign Kant studies is, as a matter of fact, a false one. Kant didn't insist that beauty is based on form in one place and on morality in another place. He strongly confirms that the beautiful lies in the forms, which does not necessarily mean that it be cut off all the possible relationships with morality. On the contrary, Kant's basic idea is: The beautiful lies in the forms, which is the precondition under which it can be in the service to the moral or political concerns.Indeed, Kant deals with the most difficult question of the 18th century aesthetics accompanied by the notion of "disinterested pleasure". That is: how to differentiate taste from cognition and morality and make it an autonomous value, in order to response to the transformation of artistic institution. This transformation consists in two main trends. One is that art has been independent from the Vatican sponsors and court sponsors since the Renaissance and the classical time and has become more and more autonomous. The other is that art has been getting more and more isolated from enlightenment. In the light of enlightenment, there is nothing more important than moral and political interests. Thus it became a compelling task for the aestheticians and art philosophers to insist that art should be related with the fundamental human concerns rather than toward totally autonomous and "art for art's sake".All in all, Kant responds to and foresees such a situation of problem: it is a necessary tendency for taste and art to go to autonomous, yet it could be a crisis for art to be autonomous. Hegel makes known this crisis. He insists that once art be divorced from truth and morality, it would come to an end. From the retrospective view of point, we may say that Kant is the prophet of Hegel's claim. However, in Kant's time, the problem was still so complicated that the seeming self-contradictory could only be understood as a symptom of that problematic situation.Kant was the first who realized two almost contradictory directions of this problem: that is abstraction and relation. And his resolution casts a clear light for us to rethink the problem of the autonomy of art. In our understanding of modern and contemporary arts, art either be bound to shortsighted service to the political, or be sunk into art for art's sake and all kinds of exaggerated yet meaningless and non-referential so-called "avant-garde". Only in this context can we understand the contemporary significance of Kant's discourse on the relationship of taste and morality.