Aesthetics: Philosophy of Art & Beauty
Core Philosophical Problems
Course 3 · Chapter 9 · Aesthetics: Philosophy of Art & Beauty
Kant's Third Critique
Kant's real 1790 Critique of Judgment is his third and final major critical work, completing a project Course 2, Chapter 4 already covered two-thirds of — the first critique addressed knowledge, the second addressed morality, and this one addresses aesthetic and teleological judgment. Kant draws a real, precise distinction between two aesthetic experiences: the beautiful, a harmonious "free play" between imagination and understanding when an object seems purposefully designed without serving any actual practical purpose — real "purposiveness without purpose" — and the sublime, the genuinely different feeling of awe or even fear provoked by something that overwhelms comprehension, without the object itself needing to pose any real danger.
Central to both is disinterested pleasure: a genuine aesthetic judgment doesn't depend on wanting or needing the object to actually exist — you can find a sunset beautiful without wanting to own it. This, Kant argues, is what makes a judgment of beauty genuinely different from either simple sensory pleasure or moral approval.
Hume and the Standard of Taste
David Hume's real 1757 essay "Of the Standard of Taste" tackles a real, genuine puzzle: taste seems entirely subjective — beauty isn't a property sitting in the object itself, but a response the object provokes — yet we still, in practice, judge some aesthetic opinions better than others. Hume's own real solution isn't to locate beauty objectively in the artwork (as some of his French contemporaries tried), but to identify what makes some judges more reliable than others: a genuine "ideal critic" combines delicacy of taste, extensive practice, the ability to compare across many works, freedom from personal prejudice, and good sense.
Is Beauty Subjective or Objective?
Kant and Hume represent two genuinely different real ways of avoiding pure relativism without claiming beauty is simply an objective, mind-independent fact. Kant grounds it in a shared structure of human cognition — the same free play of imagination and understanding everyone, in principle, shares. Hume grounds it in the real, cultivatable qualities of a good judge. Neither says "anything goes," but neither locates beauty purely in the object either.
What Makes Something Art? The Institutional Theory
Marcel Duchamp's 1917 Fountain — a mass-produced urinal, signed and submitted to an exhibition — poses a genuine, sharp real puzzle: what makes this object art, when an identical urinal sitting in a hardware store isn't? Neither Kant's nor Hume's own theory was built with this case in mind, since neither depends on the object's own beauty at all here.
Arthur Danto's real 1964 concept of the "artworld" proposed an answer: seeing something as art requires "an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art" — context the eye alone can't supply. George Dickie's real institutional theory formalized this further: an artwork is "an artifact on which some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld) has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation." On this view, what makes Fountain art isn't any property of the urinal itself, but its real, conferred status within a real social and institutional context — galleries, critics, art history.
| Theory | What grounds aesthetic value/status |
|---|---|
| Kant | Shared structure of human cognition — the free play of imagination and understanding |
| Hume | The real, cultivatable judgment of an ideal critic |
| Institutional theory (Danto/Dickie) | Status conferred by the artworld's own institutions — galleries, critics, history |
Questions to Sit With
Kant's "disinterested pleasure" says genuine aesthetic judgment doesn't depend on wanting the object. Can you think of a case where your own aesthetic judgment and your desire to own or possess something were genuinely entangled?
Hume's ideal critic requires practice, comparison, and freedom from prejudice. Does that framework actually solve the subjectivity problem, or does it just relocate the disagreement to who counts as an "ideal" critic in the first place?
If the institutional theory is right and art status is conferred by the artworld rather than any property of the object, could literally anything become art given the right institutional context? Is that a genuine insight or a real weakness of the theory?
Quick Reference — Chapter 9
- Kant — Critique of Judgment (1790); the beautiful (purposiveness without purpose) vs. the sublime; disinterested pleasure; his third critical work, completing Course 2's own Kant coverage
- Hume — "Of the Standard of Taste" (1757); the ideal critic (delicacy, practice, comparison, freedom from prejudice, good sense)
- Institutional theory of art — Danto's "artworld" (1964) and Dickie's formal definition; motivated by Duchamp's Fountain (1917)