AESTHETICS Edmund Burke (1729–97) introduced into aesthetics, alongside the concept of beauty, that of sublimity The sublime, as well as the beautiful, can be the aim of art: a feeling of beauty is a form of love without desire, and to feel something as sublime is to feel astonishment without fear In A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful Burke sought to explain by what qualities objects inspire these feelings in us He traced the feeling for the sublime to the fears and horrors implicit in the original instinct for self-preservation The feeling for beauty, whose paradigm is a chaste appreciation of female perfection, derives, he maintained, from the need for social contact and ultimately from the instinct to propagate the race The treatise that dominated aesthetics in the nineteenth century was Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790) In his ‘Analytic of the Beautiful’ and ‘Analytic of the Sublime’ Kant sought to for aesthetics what his earlier Critiques had done for epistemology and ethics Human beings possess, in addition to theoretical understanding and practical reason, a third faculty, the capacity for judgement (Urteilskraft), the judgement of taste, which is the basis of aesthetic experience Agreeing with Burke, and disagreeing with Baumgarten, Kant sees disinterestedness as fundamental to the aesthetic response ‘Taste’, he says, ‘is the faculty of judging of an object or a method of representing it by an entirely disinterested satisfaction or dissatisfaction The object of such satisfaction is called beautiful’ (M 45) Kant makes a distinction between two kinds of satisfaction: he calls sensual delight ‘gratification’ and reserves the notion of ‘pleasingness’ for the disinterested enjoyment of beauty He writes, ‘What gratifies a person is called pleasurable; what merely pleases him is called beautiful; what he values is called good.’ Animals enjoy pleasure, but only humans appreciate beauty Only the taste for beauty is completely disinterested, because the practical reason that determines goodness has reference to our own wellbeing To point the difference, Kant remarks that while we can distinguish between what is good in itself and what is good only as a means, we not make any parallel distinction between what is beautiful as a means and what is beautiful as an end (M 42) A judgement of taste, Kant tells us, does not bring an experience under a concept, in the way that an ordinary judgement does; it relates the experience directly to the disinterested pleasure Unlike an expression of 251