Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays on Aesthetics and Morality

Paul Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays on Aesthetics and Morality, Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Excerpt:

” In the present work I want to suggest that counts conception of the full range of natural and appropriate responses to at static objects, whether works of art were beauties of nature, does indeed go beyond the narrow formalism which is, to be sure, suggested in certain sections of the opening of the “analytic of the beautiful,” itself the first half of the Critique of Judgement.  I also will want to show that Kant’s attitude toward art, in particular, is much more complicated and, indeed, conflicted than is suggested by the traditional supposition that he was the founding father of the idea of quote art for art’s sake.” But I want to present these complexities not by importing contemporary preconceptions and preoccupations into his work but in cots own terms. Kant cannot be reduced to a merely representative man of his own times, for he often saw far beyond what any of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries had thought.  But neither can he be transformed, without distortion, into a figure of our own times. Kant himself set up the terms with which he wanted to go beyond the simplicities of aesthetic formalism and artistic autonomy, and our 1st task must be to discover what these are.”

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