Delight in the Natural World: Kant on the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature Part I: Natural Beauty
Author(s)
Budd, Malcolm
Abstract
A tripartite examination of Kant’s theory of the aesthetic appreciation of nature. Part I. Beginning with an exposition of Kant’s notion of an aesthetic judgment and his classification of noncompound aesthetic judgments, it expounds his theory of beauty, rejects his identification of the distinctive pleasures of the beautiful, rejects his account of a judgment of dependent beauty about a natural object, identifies a gap in his classification of aesthetic judgments about natural items and faults his thoughts about the possibility or impossibility of an ideal of beauty for things of a particular natural kind. Part II. This part elucidates and defends Kant’s claim that a pure judgment of taste does not, of itself, generate an interest, before considering, and rejecting as unconvincing, Kant’s arguments for his views that (i) someone who takes an immediate interest in natural beauty can do so only in virtue of possessing the basis of a morally good disposition, (ii) someone who reflects on nature’s beauty will inevitably take an immediate interest in natural beauty, and (iii) each person ought to take such an interest. Part III. This part expounds Kant’s conception of a judgment of the sublime in nature, elucidates his accounts of the mathematically and the dynamically sublime, rejects his account of the emotion of the sublime and presents an alternative.
