Abstract

One of the less comprehensible passages in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment is paragraph 9 (KU, AA 5: 216 – 219) where the author rhetorically asks: when we perform a pure judgment of taste, does taking pleasure in a beautiful object come first and only then does (any) aesthetic judgment follow or is it the other way around? The partial conclusions from elaborating this question will then be used to support my assumption that art can be used as a revolutionary and empowering force, much in the way Walter Benjamin hoped the cinema could be used.