Kant's Definition Of Beauty

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Beauty is difficult to describe. Many philosopher’s strive to attain some semblance of what beauty is but by doing so they often times contradict another philosopher’s idea on the matter. Examining two philosophers, or more, side-by-side can provide insight into why beauty is a hard concept to grasp, but it does not potentially provide the answer of why the two philosophers either agreed, disagreed, or both. Kant attempts to define beauty by narrowing it down with different ideas regarding his judgement of taste.
The first of these things is the contradictory idea of being disinterested in the object that is being admired. To him, beauty stems from the idea of liking something without having a need for the object in question. It is not that …show more content…
For instance, when taken from an individual object and applied to the whole idea of that object the “…judgement is no longer merely aesthetic, but is a logical judgment based on an aesthetic one.” (252) Kant’s logic here being that once the object’s beauty can be applied to all of the same objects it becomes universally accepted as beautiful. This universality is an important aspect to Kant’s idea of beauty. If an object is truly beautiful then everyone else will consider it to be beautiful. However, this is not to say that there is a rule that defines the object as beautiful. Kant states that “If we judge objects merely in terms of concepts, then we lose all presentation of beauty,” and therefore applying rules to this object depletes it of its beauty (252). Therefore, beauty must be universally accepted but without adhering to a specific rule that qualifies it as beautiful. As with one and three, moment two has a moment that goes with it. Moment four states that the “Beautiful is what without a concept is cognized as the object of a necessary liking,” which means that all objects like the one talked about should be judged as beautiful (264). Again, this does not mean that there are rules for the beautiful but it means that by finding the many individuals beautiful the whole must be …show more content…
The four moments that deal with taste exhibits the difficulties in defining beauty. It is a thing that relies on contradictions and imagination to come into fruition. Once it arrives there, the object still resides in the subjective nature of the person who is looking at it. By narrowing down a way to view beauty, Kant has exposed the problem that beauty brings about itself: Beauty is a concept being applied to a specific
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