Immanuel Kant - a hearty meal and a real pissant.

We'll be spending the next three weeks on Kant so there should be a number of posts about him, particularly the sublime moment which interests me greatly but we'll return to that in a couple of weeks. For now we'll be looking at just the start of his work on Aesthetics, and to help us understand him a look at how his views differ from Plato the week before.

Kant makes a number of key distinction's from Plato when it comes to the topic of beauty; firstly that it is not directly linked to good as Plato often claimed. This is not to say that beauty cannot be good but it is no longer a direct correlation.

The large difference to note is in the way they approach knowledge. Plato had the view that pure knowledge was granted from the moment of birth and that we were just remembering it as we grew older. Kant however believes our knowledge to be based on experience. We cannot know that which we haven't experienced or tested. Our knowledge comes not from the idea of pure forms inbuilt into out ideas but from our interaction with the physical world. There is one exception to this and that is the notion of beauty, this is the only concept that is based not on cognitive reasoning but on senses and in our own mind. There are a few other aspects of knowledge that can be drawn through reasoning and not from experience; such as mathematical forms that can't be experienced or tested, such as the theory of relativity, that however still comes from a rationality, a cognitive understanding.

We need to look now at the idea of beauty as being inbuilt, or is it a construction or society. The argument of whether our construction of the idea of beauty is created by our society is an oft debated view and I do believe that there is some weight to it. We are told to associate certain qualities as beautiful, but how much of beauty to we have built into us.

I'll have more to say on beauty in art, as it is an issue I have been dwelling on for some years after studying Modernism and Post Modernism in high school. But quickly I shall have a word or two on the notion of beauty as a predetermined notion. I don't think it is the concept of beauty we are born with, I think that, the idea of it is something that is created by society to help explain the emotive response we receive from something 'beautiful'. I personally find the term of beautiful, as used to describe something that draws a wonder or affection from us, very limiting. As a child, we have a moment were we experience an emotive response to things we can't explain and when it is a visual stimuli that has triggered that we are told that we have seen something beautiful. Then as we get older we associate the idea of beauty less with the emotion that is brought out but with a few concepts that are meant to represent beauty.

And now a quick video, showing a young one's first view of 'beauty' and a sublime moment.