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consequently carries essentially the property and demand to pass also as universally valid. In this sense, too, the beautiful ought to be universally recognized, although the mere concepts of the understanding are compatible with no judgment thereupon. The good—the right which enters into particular actions, for example—is subsumed under universal concepts, and the action is accepted as good, if it is conformable to such concepts. The beautiful, on the contrary, ought, according to this view, to arouse a universal satisfaction without any such mediation of concept. This simply means that in the contemplation of the beautiful we are not conscious of the notional concept or any subsumption under it, and do not permit the independent passage of the separation between the particular object and the universal concept, which is present in all other cases of the judgment.

      (d) Fourthly and finally the view of Kant posits the beautiful under the mode that it is recognized without a universal concept as object of a necessary feeling of satisfaction. Necessity is an abstract category, and indicates an ideal and essential relation between two aspects or sides: if the one is, and because the one is, then, and for that reason, the other is also. The one likewise includes the other within its determinate nature. Cause is meaningless without effect. The pleasure which we obtain from beauty is necessary in this sense, and it is so wholly without a relation to conceptions, that is to say the categories of the understanding. Thus, no doubt, we derive pleasure from what is symmetrical, for this is constructed in accord with an idea of the understanding. Kant, however, demands more as a definition of delight in art than the unity and uniformity of such an idea as this.

      These may, I think, be taken to be the main results of the Critique of Kant so far as they affect our present inquiry. It constitutes the starting-point for the true conception of the beauty of art. Such a conception could, however, only make itself effective as the higher comprehension of the true union of necessity and freedom, particular and universal, sensuous and rational, by its overcoming the defects still latent in the previous standpoint.

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