Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations Used in the Text
- I MOSTLY BEFORE KANT
- II MOSTLY KANT
- 3 The Harmony of the Faculties Revisited
- 4 Beauty and Utility in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics
- 5 Free and Adherent Beauty
- 6 Kant on the Purity of the Ugly
- 7 Beauty, Freedom, and Morality
- 8 The Ethical Value of the Aesthetic
- 9 The Symbols of Freedom in Kant's Aesthetics
- 10 Exemplary Originality
- III MOSTLY AFTER KANT
- Bibliography of Works Cited
- Index
5 - Free and Adherent Beauty
A Modest Proposal
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations Used in the Text
- I MOSTLY BEFORE KANT
- II MOSTLY KANT
- 3 The Harmony of the Faculties Revisited
- 4 Beauty and Utility in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics
- 5 Free and Adherent Beauty
- 6 Kant on the Purity of the Ugly
- 7 Beauty, Freedom, and Morality
- 8 The Ethical Value of the Aesthetic
- 9 The Symbols of Freedom in Kant's Aesthetics
- 10 Exemplary Originality
- III MOSTLY AFTER KANT
- Bibliography of Works Cited
- Index
Summary
There have been three different approaches to the interpretation of Kant's concept of adherent beauty. In one, an object's satisfaction of constraints imposed on its form by its intended function is just a necessary condition for our pleasure in its beauty, but makes no direct contribution to our pleasure in it. In the second, our pleasures in an object's function and in its form are thought to be separate pleasures that combine into a compound pleasure greater than either of its parts. In the third, our pleasure in adherent beauty is thought to be a special pleasure in the interaction between an object's function and its form. I argue that each of these interpretations has a basis in Kant's statements, and properly so, because they represent three different ways in which form and function can actually relate in our experience and appreciation of objects that do have intended functions.
Kant opens §16 of the “Analytic of the Beautiful” in the Critique of the Power of Judgment with his famous distinction between “free” and “adherent” beauty:
There are two kinds of beauty: free beauty (pulchritudo vaga) or merely adherent beauty (pulchritudo adhaerens). The first presupposes no concept of what the object ought to be; the second does presuppose a concept and the perfection of the object in accordance with it. The first are called (self-subsisting) beauties of this or that thing; the latter, as adhering to a concept (conditioned beauty), are ascribed to objects that stand under the concept of a particular end.
(CPJ, §16, 5:229)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Values of BeautyHistorical Essays in Aesthetics, pp. 129 - 140Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005