The Beauty of Kant*

Kant distinguishes between three modes of satisfaction which are linked to three kinds of pleasures (they should not be confused, even if they are sometimes in the same subject):
• The useful: is The pleasure connected with the satisfaction of a need.
• The good: is The pleasure that refers to a judgment of esteem, an objective value
• Pleasure: is personal pleasure, connected to the senses; It is sensitive and intellectual, and is based on a personal feeling.
The three modes of satisfaction are detached from the « beautiful » insofar as the latter is not a concept but a personal and subjective judgment.
Human beings are the only ones capable of judging what is « beautiful, » because the « beautiful » reference to the mind (an animal is incapable of experiencing such a sensation of pleasure before a beautiful thing).
The judgment that refers to the beautiful is contemplative and is indifferent to the existence of the subject (for example: it is possible to find very beautiful Picasso‘s Guernica masterpiece, which represents the masks of the bombing of the city of Guernica , April 26, 1937 -they were, the extreme ugliness-).

The beautiful thus refers not only to the physical, nor to the object in itself; When one says of a person or of a thing that it is beautiful, one speaks of the « interior beauty », and of the beauty which is, in truth, in the relation that one maintains with it.
But the mysterious side of aesthetic pleasure lies in the fact that we do not consider our judgment as subjective. We will look for it in everybody. Our aesthetic pleasure (as a personal judgment peculiar to each one) is not selfish; We seek at all costs to share it. Therefore, « The beautiful is what pleases universally and without concept » as Kant said.

*Emmanuel Kant: A German philosopher, born on April 22, 1724 in Konigsberg, the capital of East Prussia, he died there on February 12, 1804. Kant greatly influenced German idealism, analytical philosophy, phenomenology, Postmodern philosophy, and critical thinking in general.                                                                            [wikipedia.org]

Photo of Kant: User:Ecummenic . Source: commons.wikimedia.org . United States public domain tag