What is art? It is an all encompassing question that many people have tried to approach in the past two thousand or so years but no one has managed to answer it, not for the want of trying though.
One of the most famous theories of art is that of Immanuel Kant a German philosopher from the eighteenth century. Kant had a very unique view of the aesthetic judgement in that a true aesthetic judgement gives us an extreme qualitative feeling of unity and universality with the world. This feeling of being at one with nature and understanding reality makes us universalise our judgements and believe that everyone should feel the same way about them. Kant would then say this is the modality of the aesthetic judgement brought about by us cognizing the non-cognitive judgement.
This centres on Kant’s view of ‘purposive without a purpose’ where we believe with aesthetic judgements of the beautiful and sublime that whatever we perceive must have a purpose. This can apply to nature or art in itself as with art we do not necessarily know what the artist intended as the introspections they have are private, this is why it takes the disinterested approach in order for us to be captivated by the piece of work to give us that qualitative feeling.
Kant says we can contrast the quality we get between the non-cognitive disinterested judgement and the cognized judgement where unless we have this disinterested judgement on a piece of art, no matter how much it can be explained to us or us analyse a piece of work, we will never have that same unique qualitative feeling that the disinterested judgement will give us.
Kant then goes onto use fine art as the example of the highest form of art. This is because it requires the work of genius to actually manage to create a piece of art that not only has the creative flow of nature, but is also able to cause a disinterested judgement in the individual which then causes a free play of the persons faculties.
Once we have had this disinterested judgement is when we have the secondary feeling that this feeling should be universal to everyone. This is the modality after we have cognised the aesthetic feeling according to Kant, where non-cognition moves over to cognition and the attention moves from disinterested to interested.
Does this really sound convincing enough though to us all that all of our aesthetic judgements have to be of a disinterested nature? I don’t know about all you other shoutwirers out there but whenever I have perceived something as beautiful it has never always been because it just caught my eye.
There is undoubtedly part of Kant’s theory that makes sense in that sometimes we do have this unbelievably unique qualitative feeling that captures us when we see something out of the corner of our eye that captivates us. We can in no way ever say though that this must be true for every single aesthetic judgement. If you take the format of novels and prose there is in no way a possibility that you could have a disinterested judgement of this form of art.
I think the best way we can sum up art is to say that it is a category that has many different interpretations of what a piece of art can be. There are certain works of art that you have to analyse in order to get anything at all from them (like a David Lynch film) or some that you really just have to be captivated by in order to truly ‘get’ what it is trying to communicate.
Either way I hope I have communicated a little culture to all you fellow readers, if not then I apologise for wasting your time with this article, but art is truly a genre that has a mystery to it that none of us will be able to fully understand.