(1) Judgments of the beautiful must be disinterested Once we do we can link his insights to freedom. How can he do this? To see how, we need to consider the four things Kant thinks go into every judgment of the beautiful. In short, he wants to make judgments of the beautiful subjective and universal. But, on the other hand, he tries to avoid relativism. This is what makes Kant so interesting: he tries, on the one hand, to remove aesthetics from some kind of science that could discover the necessary and sufficient conditions for beauty and conceptualize and categorize them into a science. Does this mean that aesthetics is totally subjective and therefore relative? Kant says no. When we make judgments of taste, which are judgments that something is beautiful, we are really expressing something subjective-something about us, our feelings. In his book Critique of Judgment he argued that aesthetics is not a mater of conceptual knowledge. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) disagreed with all these thinkers. Nonetheless, despite these limitations Baumgarten coined the term ‘aesthetics’ and envisioned it as a science of sensory perception and cognition. This fusion of elements in the process of perception means that there is something in sensation that cannot rise to distinct thoughts. After all, all perceptions are fused with many other elements in the continuity of experience. But this implies that the perception must be indistinct or confused. The standard of perfection should be richness and vividness of detail in the perception. This standard should be one that emphasizes what individuality and singularity sensations have. However, Alexander Baumgarten (1714-62) claimed that sense perception can have a standard of perfection all its own. The task in approaching aesthetic experience rationally is to take a confused sensation, sort out its parts, and transform it into a clear thought or set of thoughts. In order to make something distinct, we need to distinguish all its parts through a process of abstraction and definition. They argued that the sole difference between sensation and thought is that thought is distinct and sensation is confused. Many enlightenment philosophers, such as Leibniz (1646-1716) and Wolff (1679-1754), had argued aesthetic experience was potentially intellectual. In this essay I want to show how, given Kant’s analysis, we can discern some interesting connections between beauty and freedom. Is there a relationship between beauty and freedom? If we accept some central ideas about beauty from Immanuel Kant we can say that there is.
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