Abstract

This dissertation examines three aspects of the significance of art in Kant's Critique of Judgment. First, the official reasons for the Kantian elevation of natural over artistic beauty are undermined using Kant's own notion of abstraction. Kant's theory proves to be better equipped to account for our aesthetic experiences with works of art than Kant himself realized---and than most interpreters think---because the same process of abstraction is possible and necessary for aesthetic objects as for natural beauty. ;Second, through artistic creation human beings transform nature into something that displays some formal properties which induce in us a disinterested pleasure. In Kant's view, we attach value to art and have an interest in pursuing aesthetic experiences due to the analogy between this pleasure and the moral attitude. This interest is, I argue, related to what Kant took to be the third fundamental question of reason, namely, "What may I hope?" Kant's aesthetics, then, presents fine art as forming part of an autonomous sphere without turning it into an isolated or circumscribed domain. Rather it is a theory that shows that art is entangled in a web of analogies to cognitive and moral domains, as well as related to some fundamental human concerns. Rather than advancing the destruction of the concept of the aesthetic, as it has become fashionable to proclaim, this interpretation of Kant's aesthetics shows that what we need to do is to enrich this concept. ;Third, fine art occupies and plays an important role in the Critique of Judgment because as a form of art it is closely related to the notion of purposiveness. Our experience of nature's beauty and of natural organisms is rooted in our experience of purposiveness, and our only way to comprehend such purposiveness is through a teleological-productive model. Given this analogy of nature to art, the role of "art" looms larger than Kant admits. I argue that this analogy contributes to a more unified view of the Critique of Judgment, one that does not see the book as an amalgam of heterogeneous and disconnected topics