Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

For Kant, something is considered to be beautiful if it is dis-interested, universal and non-cognitive. (He used a tulip as an example.) So, beauty has no extrinsic, utility value (thus, dis-interested), it is such that everyone will appreciate it (universal) and the apprehension of beauty does not rely on us having to analyse it in order to decide on its beauty (thus, non-cognitive).

One of the most important ideas of Edmund Burke was a very clear distinction between a potentially more spiritual view of beauty and a more Earth-bound and familiar approach. (See his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful.) Mountains, crashing waves, thunderstorms — such things have a grandeur that humbles us and reminds us of our precarity and impermanence as frail humans. This is the sublime. Beauty, by contrast, seems to Burke to be more about superficial pleasure. He makes some telling comments about the areas of bare flesh that were displayed in women’s fashions of his day. Perhaps these comments now seem more silly than disturbing. Ideas of either profundity or superficial prettiness were out of the window when it came to ladies’ shoulders. Mr. Burke could only swoon!

What to make of all this? For one thing, almost all philosophers who have sought to define aesthetics have tended to do so by means of similar contrasts — sublime, beautiful, pretty, etc. — to Burke (except in the case of the aforementioned shoulders).

But is there something else that we should take note of here? Well, for some reason, people

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