Opposing Views On Kant's Perception Of Beauty

To start out with we must look at Hume’s arguments for beauty being both subjective and objective. I think it is fair to say that most people would claim that beauty is subjective, that it is indeed in the eye of the beholder. Certainly what is beautiful to me may not be beautiful to you, and vice-versa. Hume agrees that beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder. It revolves around the idea of sentiments, or a statement based on how one feels rather than facts. Saying I find Jennifer Lawrence to be beautiful is a sentiment. You may not agree with it, and you may seem to think she’s not attractive at all. Neither one of us is wrong, it’s just that we have a different sense of beauty.

However, although he does agree that beauty is in the eye
Kant begins by analyzing the concept of the beautiful. He gives the example of “the green color of the meadows” and states that this is an objective sensation. Everyone will see it as green – but recognizes that the pleasantness induced by this is a subjective sensation. Kant makes the claim that when we call something beautiful, it is because our faculty of Taste produces an “entirely disinterested satisfaction”, and because of this disinterest it “must claim validity for everyone… that is, there must be bound up with it a title to subjective universality”.

The claim for ‘disinterest’ here may need some explanation. If we see a delicious piece of cake in front of us, we may desire to eat the cake. We would not typically in this situation call the cake beautiful. We desire to possess and eat the cake. But when we see a beautiful sunset and find pleasure in it, there is in this no desire to possess the sunset. We take pleasure in its beauty without needing to make it ours. It is this “entirely disinterested satisfaction” which Kant says we do with beautiful things, and notes that it occurs without any specific
Pleasure of this kind, because it comes into the mind through the sense, in respect of which therefore we are passive, we may call the pleasure of enjoyment.

So different people enjoy different things, and they find dependent beauty in different ways, but there remains (Kant claims) some things which afford a universal subjective experience of Beauty, and the pleasure bound up in such an experience is such that we expect and require other people to share that pleasure. Free beauty is universal, and if it is not, then at the very least our experience of such beauty commits us to feeling that it should be universal and that everyone should be able to share in the satisfaction we feel in experiencing a flower, a meadow, or a