The issue of pursuing beauty through commodities purchased in the marketplace is an issue of enormous complexity. The psychological effects of beauty representations in marketing communications and beauty objects as commodities can be profound and wide ranging in a culture. This article examines typical interpretations of beauty from a philosophical context and suggests that different philosophies of what comprises beauty often yield different psychological and cultural effects. This article offers a preliminary framework for understanding the function of beauty in the market, the physical appearance phenomenon, concern with unnatural perfection, the preoccupation-with-youth culture, and the decontextualization of beauty. © 1993 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Kant's Unified Theory of Beauty

Beauty and the beholder: The pursuit of beauty through commodities

Wittgenstein’s private language argument claims that language and meaning generally are public. It also contends with our appreciation of artworks and reveals the deep connection in our minds between originality and the temptation to think of original meaning as private. This problematic connection of ideas is found in Kant’s theory of fine art. For Kant conceives of the capacity of artistic genius for imaginatively envisioning original content as prior to and independent of finding the artistic means of communicating this content to others. This raises the question of whether we can conceive of art as both original and meaningful without succumbing to privacy.

Additional excerpts

Kant on Fine Art, Genius and the Threat of Private Meaning

Kant claims in the third Critique that one can make about wine the merely subjective judgment that it is agreeable but never the universally valid judgment that it is beautiful. This follows from his views that judgments of beauty can be made only about the formal (spatiotemporal) features of a representation and that aromas and flavors consist of formless sensory matter. However, I argue that Kant's theory permits judgments of beauty about wine because the experience displays a temporal structure: the aromas and flavors evolve over the course of a tasting from the bouquet through the palate to the finish. An analogy with music, which Kant describes as ‘a play of sensations in time’, illuminates how wine qualifies as an object of pure judgments of taste: the ‘structure’ of a wine can be compared to harmonic structure, and its development throughout the taste can be compared to the unfolding of melody and harmonic progression.

/pdf/does-wine-have-a-place-in-kant-s-theory-of-taste-7b19dny0el.pdf

Does Wine Have a Place in Kant's Theory of Taste?

There have been more articles on Kant's aesthetics in the history of the Journal than on the next four leading figures in the history of aesthetics combined. I argue that this is because Kant's aesthetic theory consists of multiple levels of theory that makes it accessible to and important for multiple approaches to the subject itself. Continuing issues for both Kant interpretation and for aesthetics in general arise at each of these levels, including the plausibility of the claim to universal validity in judgments of taste, the nature of the free play of the imagination in aesthetic experience, the character of aesthetic pleasure, the proper objects of aesthetic judgment, and the moral significance of aesthetic experience.

Kant's Unified Theory of Beauty

Citations

Beauty and the beholder: The pursuit of beauty through commodities

Kant on Fine Art, Genius and the Threat of Private Meaning

Does Wine Have a Place in Kant's Theory of Taste?

Seventy-Five Years of Kant … and Counting

The Echo of God's Laughter: Aesthetic Experience and the Virtue of Openness within a Pragmatist Ethics

Related Papers (5)

Kant's Concept of Beauty

Kant's Theory of Form.

Kant’s Theory of Science

Kant’s Theory of Concepts

On Kant's Theory of Concepts