A Concept of Contemplation in Kant’s Aesthetics and Its Criticism in Contemporary Aesthetics

Abstract

The author critically deals, first, with a concept of contemplation in Kant's aesthetics, through an analysis of aesthetic and teleological judgments of nature. She argues that Kant was closer to a constitutive idea of nature (of its objective purposiveness) than to a regulative one, but he tried to avoid a danger of affirming it dogmatically. He also succeeded to overcome a narrow Enlightenment’s intention to dominate nature. The very concept of contemplation assumes that, at least in the aesthetic and teleological field, Kant did not intend to interfere with nature, but only to contemplate it for its own sake. When we try to rethink his aesthetics of nature, we are more aware of historical aspects of human relationship towards nature, so there is no danger to relapse into immediacy from which Hegel warned us.

In the second part of the paper, the author examines a critique of Kant’s concept of contemplation and disinterestedness in the aesthetics of engagement (Arnold Berleant) and in the everyday aesthetics (Katya Mandoki). She argues that they address their critique to Kant from an empirical perspective, while Kant tried to explain the conditions under which we could feel and make our (aesthetic) judgments from an epistemological, cognitive basis. Pleasure and displeasure are the general ways of feeling which do not exclude any other particular feelings. On the contrary, all feelings may participate in the aesthetic judgement. It is true that Kant did not expose the body, but he neither did exclude it; contemplation is not disembodied but oriented to the subjective and empirical experience. It is rooted in our faculties (understanding, imagination, perception, sensation). Thus, contemplation inevitably includes a context or situation of the subject who judges a natural object from the aesthetic point of view. It is not enough to say that we are engaged in aesthetic experience: first, philosophy has to understand and to explain, as Kant did, how our cognition comes to it.

Contemplation is a pure and disinterested judgement, due to the playful activity of our faculties - the understanding and the imagination, as a ground of subjective, empirical aesthetic experience. Thus, they are the condition of possibility of perception, (dis)pleasure (a basis of all feelings) and of bodily self-awareness, too, without thereby denying the object’s affection of the subject.