Form And Purpose

’Form’ and ’Purpose’, which are close related with each other, were focused in this thesis. The principle of purposiveness in Kantian Aesthetics was discussed in a close analysis of the text of Critique of Judgment and in term of the practice of aesthetic judgment and art. In Kantian philosophy form/material are a pair of reflexive concepts. The form of the presentation of an object, as the object of the judgment of taste, was attributed to the form of intuition; while the form of purposiveness, as the determining ground of the judgment of taste, to the form of thoughts. The material of the arts, such as the arrangement of colors in art, which can be ordered by understanding and regarded as the form of the compounding of materials, ought not to be excluded from the objects of the judgment of taste. As the result of Kantian ’Copernican Revolution’ in epistemology, the power of reflexive judgment was discovered, with which the agreement of an object and the others can be reflected in the form of the object. This agreement is called purposiveness. But it assist little in studying the nature. The objective purposiveness is the synchronic statement of the process of seeking for the purpose of the object according to its form and finding that purpose. And the formal purposiveness is an analogy of the real one. It is the synchronic statement of the process of seeking for the purpose of the object according to its form and achieving harmony of the cognitive faculties inside the subject without any objective purpose. In perspective of the relation between beauty of morality, the subjective finality is mixed with the objective in dependent beauty (including the ideal of beauty), the subjective purposiveness transit into the objective in sublime, while ’Beauty as symbol of morality’ suggests the static analogy between them. In art theory, the imagination of genius can work freely and normally and present the idea sensibly, which can be compared with’seeking the Tao out of technique’, the spirit of Chinese art in Zhuangzi’s eyes. In Kantian theory of art, genius can be viewed as the synchronic statement of taste. At the same time, genius also restricts the taste, and promotes the development of judgment.