Kant For Kids Analysis

S Y M P O S I U M

Arts Education from Past to Present

Kant for Kids

Editor’s note: This article is the ninth in an occasional series on past treatments of major issues in arts education policy from antiquity through the twentieth century. Future essays will appear as occasion arises.

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esthetics, we could say, is the philosophy of art (including poetry and literature), and philosophy can be defined as a way of reflecting and clarifying ordinary, everyday thoughts and feelings that we find hard to put into words. One such ordinary thought is the well-known fact that words have a larger, more expansive meaning in poetry than they do in daily life. When Robert Burns says his “love is like a red, red rose,” we do not imagine that
He is best known in aesthetics for his distinction of “aesthetic experience” from other sorts of human experience as being “disinterested” and for his theory of taste. When we look at or listen to something—not for any practical benefit we may get from it but simply for the sheer delight we take in the experience itself—that experience, Kant said, whether of objects of nature or of works of fine art, is an “aesthetic experience.” In his theory of taste, Kant argues that our judgments of beauty are neither completely subjective nor completely objective, but enjoy a kind of “subjective universality” in which we acknowledge that the way we talk about works of art and objects of natural beauty presupposes a kind of objectivity not found in other sorts of value judgments. Judgments of sensibility, that Pepsi tastes better than Coke for example, on the other hand, are based simply on how the soda strikes one. Furthermore, since such judgments merely record the sensible effect of the soft drink on our respective palates, they are not meant to be value judgments about the soft drink itself but are simply psychological statements about the impression this kind of beverage makes on you or me (for example, if I happen to prefer Pepsi while you prefer Coke). As such, judgments of
. . . If now we place under a concept a representation of the imagination belonging to its presentation, but which occasions in itself more thought than can ever be comprehended in a definite concept and which consequently aesthetically enlarges the concept itself in an unbounded fashion, the imagination is here creative, and it brings the faculty of intellectual ideas (the reason) into movement, i.e., by a representation more thought (which belongs to the concept of the object) is occasioned than can in it be grasped or made