Beauty is a difficult concept to describe. Many philosopher’s strive to attain some semblance of what beauty is but by doing so they often times contradict another philosopher’s idea on the matter. Examining two philosophers, or more, side-by-side can provide insight into why beauty is a hard concept to grasp, but it does not examine why the philosophers either agree or disagree with one another. Kant’s Critique of Judgement attempts to specify what makes something beautiful and in doing so exposes himself to other philosophers in a way that questions his ideals. This attempt to define beauty by narrowing it down with different ideas regarding his judgement of taste exposes beauty as a concept that, when applied to an object, starts to break apart its own argument of
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Thus, when the reader is left with the question of why beauty is so hard to define they are answered by the complexity of its concept.
Key to its contradictory nature, Kant first discusses the idea of being disinterested in the object that is being admired. To him, beauty stems from the idea of liking something without having a need for the object in question. It is not that “…we or anyone cares, or so much as might care, in any way, about the thing’s existence, but rather how we judge it in our mere contemplation of it (intuition or reflection),” and therefore taste is a judgement of what disinterests someone unlike the liking for the agreeable and of the good as he discusses in his critique (Kant 247). Kant’s idea of beauty does not warrant the need of the observer to be beautiful, because it exhibits beauty without that need. The disinterest of the beauty becomes what makes it beautiful,
Thus, when the reader is left with the question of why beauty is so hard to define they are answered by the complexity of its concept.
Key to its contradictory nature, Kant first discusses the idea of being disinterested in the object that is being admired. To him, beauty stems from the idea of liking something without having a need for the object in question. It is not that “…we or anyone cares, or so much as might care, in any way, about the thing’s existence, but rather how we judge it in our mere contemplation of it (intuition or reflection),” and therefore taste is a judgement of what disinterests someone unlike the liking for the agreeable and of the good as he discusses in his critique (Kant 247). Kant’s idea of beauty does not warrant the need of the observer to be beautiful, because it exhibits beauty without that need. The disinterest of the beauty becomes what makes it beautiful,