Beauty: Pleasures and Principles

The aim of this course is to identify the aspect of experience meant to be captured by the concept of beauty and explain why it led to the apparent contradictions that have occupied philosophers in various cultural traditions, particularly in the West since the ancient Greeks. One of the objectives is to develop the conceptual apparatus to explain why and how beauty was rejected as a goal of the Arts by both intellectual and popular culture in the twentieth-century. This course presents a conception of beauty grounded in the work of the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant was interested in how we ascribed meaning to experience and he thought pleasure played a part in this. According to Kant, the kind of pleasure which is like a kind of cognition represents one of the highest values; he called this beauty. Unlike pleasure which is a mere sensation, pleasure which is a kind of cognition is valued because such pleasures respond to rationality, and hence objective ends. It is in the confusion between pleasure as a kind of cognition and pleasure as a mere sensation that the apparent contradictions around the concept of beauty have arisen. The aim of this course is to outline and resolve these apparent contradictions, in order to single out the conception of beauty which attaches to a concept of ourselves as free, rational agents. In this light we will also consider the Kantian notion of the sublime. Key terms in the course will be beauty, the sublime, pleasure and imagination.