Kantian aesthetics

Adorno neatly sums up the intention and result of Kant’s aesthetics in a cople of lines: “the significance of Kantian subjectivism as a whole lies in its objective intention, its attempt to salvage objectivity by means of an analysis of subjective moments.”

And, noting that Kant “posits something as form as aesthetic satisfaction as the defining characteristic of art,” concludes that Kant offers “a castrated hedonism . . . a theory of pleasure without pleasure.”

For all Kant’s formalism, though, he may be onto something.  He describes the aesthetic experience in terms of the play of faculties, of understanding and imagination.  That’s a pretty bloodless, bodiless way of describing our experience of beauty.  Still, we shouldn’t simply dismiss this: Aesthetic experience is not simply the free play of imagination (“romanticism”), nor the result of intellectual rigor (“modernism”?) or formal clarity (“classicism”).  Aesthetic experience is a response both to the import/content and form.  Insofar as Kant was reaching for that kind of synthesis, he got something basically right.