Aesthetics

For Kant, the organization of random stimuli into perceived objects is the work of the imagination, and the production of conceptual organizations of those objects is the work of the understanding.

Aesthetic is a source of a certain sort of delight to the individual. The questions then become what the mind must be like to make that sort of delight possible and why that pleasure and delight is important to us.

The origin of aesthetics delight is a free play between imagination, which organizes the randomly bombarding stimuli,  and understanding, which imposes conceptual understanding on that organization.

The words of a poem or the sounds of music constrain and shape our imaginings. The "play" to which Kant refers occurs because in imagination we push the limits of those constraints. But the understanding lodged in those words and sounds pushes back. The "purposeless purposiveness" of the beauty of natural things, as when we marvel at the way a snowflake seems to be wrought like a jewel. The imagination plays with finding a purposefulness where the understanding knows there is none.

An interest in the aesthetic is "disinterested", meaning not interested in the real existence of the object contemplated. An example of a personal judgement is "I like it". Here one expresses one's purely private interest. But for Kant, the example of an aesthetic judgement would be "this is beautiful". The claim that a thing is beautiful does appear to assert that others should like it too. Our interest in art would not be practical or utilitarian.

On Kant's account, whenever imagination fuses the bombardments received by the senses into the perceived object it does so by forming a representation. It helps to think of representing something in this way as like creating a representational picture. Consider Turner painting a sunset. The sensory input he receives from the sunset is fused by him into his picture. Or consider looking at a flower. The imagination creates the representation of a flower. Then either we can take an interest in whether there is some such flower, or alternatively we can just enjoy the representation as we may enjoy any representational picture, that is, without asking whether what it represents really exists. We simply attend to the look of a flower.So what makes a disinterested response possible is the power to form representations and the possibility of ignoring questions about the real existence of what is represented. One may be interested in the real existence of something because we want it, or we have hopes and fears that would be affected by real existence. These binds an interest in real existence to something that is not disinterested but partial.

If we could show that our attention to the aesthetics was interested, in some way impersonal, then we would have some right to expect more agreement. The aesthetic judgement, though rooted in my subjective likings, there is more hope of agreement because no partiality gets in the way.