Delight in the natural world: Kant on the aesthetic appreciation of nature. Part I: Natural beauty

British Journal of Aesthetics

Volumn 38, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 1-18

  Budd, Malcolm ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0007411888     PISSN: 00070904     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/bjaesthetics/38.1.1     Document Type: Article

References (11)

1. At least, it does not constitute aesthetic appreciation of nature as nature in the positive sense of that idea: see my 'The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature', British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 36, no. 3 (July 1996).
2. Immanuel Kant, Logic, trans. Robert S. Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz (New York: Dover, 1988), pp. 38-39.
3. On the conceptual or non-conceptual nature of perception and the question whether perceptual experience has a non-conceptual content, see Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982);
4. Tim Crane, 'The Nonconceptual Content of Experience', in Tim Crane (ed.), The Contents of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1992);
5. Christopher Peacocke, A Study of Concepts (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993);
6. and John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P., 1994).
7. According to Kant, to judge whether an object is beautiful is, in one of his formulations, 'to judge whether freedom in the play of imagination harmonises or clashes with the lawfulness of understanding' (Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Mary J. Gregor [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974], p. 109), the judgement being based on whether the subject experiences pleasure in the contemplation of the object's form, the subject's experience being thought of as exemplary or definitive for human beings.
8. For a fuller account and an evaluation of Kant's attempted deduction of pure judgements of taste, see Paul Guyer's outstanding work, Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P., 1979), especially chs 7-9;
9. Anthony Savile, Aesthetic Reconstructions (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), chs 4 and 5;
10. and Malcolm Budd, Values of Art (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1995), pp. 26-38.
11. This is easy to see from the fact that it is possible that nothing of kind K is, or is experienced by the judging subject as being, beautiful - as, perhaps, with spiders or octopi. (Note that to judge that something is beautiful for a K, or as far as Ks are concerned, is not the same as to judge that it is a beautiful K, i.e beautiful as a K.) Hegel located the distinction between beautiful and ugly animal kinds (not altogether accurately) in their displaying activity and quickness of movement, 'the higher ideality of life', rather than 'drowsy inactivity', or their being of unmixed species, rather than hybrids. (See G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975], vol. I, pp. 130-131.)