An Interpretation Of "the Critique Of Aesthetic Judgment" In Keeping The Consistency Of Kant’s Critical Project

The object of this thesis is confined to Kantian aesthetics in the critical period of the whole academic career of Kant. In detail, it is a critical interpretation of the first part,"The Critique of Aesthetic Judgment", of The Critique of Judgment. Methodologically, this paper is based on the context of the works of Kant but not bound by it. Then it takes the consistency between Kantian aesthetics and Kant’s critique project as its prerequisite, and takes the apparent or latent questions as the focus of horizon, to analyze and research the aesthetic viewpoint of Kant deeply from a philosophical standpoint.In the process of the critique of aesthetic judgment, Kant, from the four moments of quality, quantity, relation and modality, respectively illuminates the characters of beauty, namely, disinterestedness, universality without concept, purposiveness without any purpose and necessity without concept. For Kant, though taste is connected to aesthetic object, it is of pure subjective which is intensively reflected by the first and third characters. The connotation of the word "subjectivity" in Kantian philosophy, is neither as the same as that in British empiricism, nor in the continental rationalism, for it is characterized by Kant with new significance, that is, universal subjectivity, opposing to private subjectivity. In the concept of’universal subjectivity’, though it contains internal contradiction in itself, it also represents the complexity and meaningfulness of Kantian aesthetics. Even more important, from the aspect of metaphysical logical thinking, Kant connects taste and the freedom of human directly, which profoundly embodies the universal anthropological value of beauty for it has surpassed the limit of human finitude.Kantian aesthetics, is continuous to thinking about the question,’what is human’, that has proceeded from the first two Critiques, namely, The Critique of Pure Reason and The Critique of Practical Reason, which forms the foundation of inherent consistency of Kant’s critical project. In the first two Critiques, the concept of nature, Kant uses it as an opposition to the concept of freedom, for its necessity and inevitability always acts as a kind of restriction on freedom. However, the reason of human not only has a claim to knowledge of nature, but also claims to surpass the necessity and inevitability and eventually reach to the noumenal human nature. Therefore, freedom, is not only the transcendental principle of practical reason of human, but also is prior to the nature. The nature, should be the nature of human. In the process of taste, though an aesthetic judgment is a kind of evaluation "about an object or an appearance of an object’", the character of disinterestedness of it can help the humankind to transcend the restriction of the nature and realize that they should be free. In this sense, Kantian aesthetics, is a kind of deepening of the idea,"the nature of human", and profoundly present the inherent consistency between the nature and human. The concept of freedom, is not only the most important category of the philosophy of Kant, but also the inner core of his aesthetics.Undoubtedly, Kantian aesthetics, for its metaphysical logical thinking, has been misinterpreted as "formalistic aesthetics" frequently, which correspondingly induce to ignoring the realistic virtue of it. Kant, on the one hand, by metaphysical analysis, verifies the freedom as the noumenal human nature, on the other hand, makes us realize that, by actual aesthetic judgment, it could help us to surpass the interests of our everyday-life and re-examine the nature with a sight of disinterestedness, which would finally purify our emotion and perfect our lives.Kantian aesthetics, is viewed as’a bridge’that cannot be neglected in the history of western aesthetics, for it makes a start to western contemporary aesthetics. While we give a positive evaluation to Kantian aesthetics, we also must be conscious that, being a pioneer of creating an independent academic discipline of aesthetics, the viewpoint of Kant is inevitably of somewhat immature or even self-contradictory somewhere. In our studying of Kantian aesthetics, it is imperative to take a standpoint based on deliberate and critical thinking.