Abstract

The dissertation analyzes the relationship between art, nature, and life in the aesthetics, philosophy of biology, and philosophical anthropology of Immanuel Kant. ;At least since the time of Plato, Western philosophies have interrogated art as to its philosophical value: what truth, if any, does art express; what wisdom does it hold for us? Kant's Critique of Judgment explores the foundations of this tradition by investigating the limits, legitimacy, and conditions of possibility of judgments of taste, and by attempting to find in judgment a bridge between the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason, i.e., a bridge between truth and goodness. This dissertation argues that Kant's transcendental critique of judgment is complemented and troubled by genealogical and diagnostic accounts of art. Kant's interpretations are genealogical when they seek the genesis of aesthetic judgments in subjective and pre-subjective states , and diagnostic when they assess the advantages and disadvantages of art for life. ;Kant's genealogical account of judgment and genius discovers a flight of the imagination which, while purposive, points toward the unknown root of all knowing; toward a play of form utterly incommensurable with commentary, exegesis, or interpretation. Kant's diagnostic account suggests that the pleasure to which aesthetic reflection gives rise, and which forms the basis of a judgment of taste, is a name for the feeling of life , and argues that the beautiful carries with it directly a feeling of life's being furthered . The diagnostic account brings to light moments in which the affirmation of life comes into conflict with the critical project--as if we were forced to choose between life, on the one hand, and knowledge and goodness, on the other . ;One finds that for Kant judgment and genius have what Nietzsche will call both Dionysian and Apollonian qualities: a compulsion to intoxication and the dream-like creation or play of form.