This paper argues that Kant presents two different accounts of beauty, one that applies properly to art and one that applies properly to nature. The judgment of beauty that applies properly to nature can be free and thus judged without concepts. The work of art, however, is judged beautiful when it expresses aesthetic ideas. This distinction then enables me to explain several problematic passages in Kant's text: those that serve to distinguish these two conceptions of beauty from one another as (...) well as those passages in which Kant views them as overlapping. With respect to the latter, I argue that Kant lays especial significance on cases where we apply the conception of artistic beauty to natural objects, as in doing so we view nature as expressing ideas that step beyond nature. (shrink)

The elevation of aesthetic experience in the Enlightenment, most extensively developed in Kant's analysis of disinterested contemplation, to compensate for the loss of putatively objective standards of beauty had several problematic implications. One was the privileging of the subject who had the experience over the object that stimulated it. Another was the potential extension of that experience to objects that were never intended to be works of art, not merely to ones given in nature, but also to political, social and (...) cultural phenomena whose ethical or cognitive dimensions were concomitantly suppressed or marginalized. The aestheticization of the commonplace could thus countenance an inappropriate imperialism of the aesthetic sub-system of modernity over alternative sub-systems. Although the pragmatist aesthetics of John Dewey, recently revived in the work of Richard Shusterman, has acknowledged a need to revitalize the role of the art object, it may too quickly postulate a notion of aesthetic experience in which the equiprimordiality of subject and object is assumed. It is perhaps better to hold on to a tense constellation between art objects and the experience they generate in subjects in order to avoid a premature sublation of what remains still unreconciled in the larger culture. (shrink)